It was thirteen years ago this month that Moroccan author Mohamed Zafzaf — the “godfather” of Moroccan literature – died in Casablanca. Although the French translation of his The Cockerel Egg received the Grand Atlas Prize in 1998, and the Spanish translation of his acclaimed The Woman and the Rose occasioned a letter from Spain’s king, he has been nearly absent from English translation:

Translator and scholar Mohammed Albakry writes that he published an English-language collection of Zafzaf’s short stories — A Night in Casablanca — in 1999. But this was  brought out by the Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs, which means it’s unlikely more than a few copies made their way to readers outside Morocco.

Now, Albakry’s translation of the Zafzaf story “A Night in Casablanca” is available online at The Missing Slate. This joins a chapter from Zafzaf’s novel The Cockerel’s Egg, which is available online at Banipal, trans. Fiona Collins, as the sole works from Zafzaf’s ouvre easily available in English. There are a few others pieces that have been translated into English, including one short story in Modern Arabic Short Stories, a Bilingual Reader.

Since the Moroccan author is thirteen years gone, it’s unlikely his work will appear in wider translation now — although this, too, is possible. After all, Zafzaf has received significant posthumous attention. In 2002, a pan-Arab literature award, the Mohamed Zafzaf Prize for Arabic Literature, was created in his honor. Grantees have included Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh and Syrian writer Hanna Mina.

From a Zafzaf obituary that ran in Al-Ahram Weekly:

Born in Kantira, Zafzaf started writing in 1962. Working as a journalist, he experimented with poetry and published his first short story, Thalathat Asabie’ (Three Weeks) in the Atlas literary magazine in 1963. His first book, a short story collection entitled Al-Maraa wal Warda (The Woman and the Rose), appeared in 1970.

He continued to publish novels and short stories, translating or cotranslating Arabic books into French and vice versa. His work stood out for its range of subject matter as well as its literary prowess. In his short story collections, intimate evocations of Moroccan rural life are often juxtaposed with existential narratives of the search for personal and moral freedom in a taboo-laden society.

“I am not a professional writer,” Zafzaf said in 1999. “I have no reading and writing rituals as such… I chose to read and write without selling myself to any cause or marketing my writing… I will die with a clear conscience and that is very comforting.”

Read more:

“A Night in Casablanca”

Breaking the Canon: Zafzaf, Laroui and the Moroccan novel, by Gonzalo Fernandez Parrilla.

World literary awards are plentiful, although credible, transparent, and interesting ones less so. The Mohamed Choukri Foundation, named for the celebrated Moroccan author, recently announced the establishment of one in Choukri’s name:

The award is unusual in that Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim — who’s more famous for rejecting literary awards than receiving them — is on the awards steering committee.  The prize will apparently be awarded annually to authors both from Morocco and from “other countries from all over the world.“

The award is set to be granted each August at the Twiza Festival, held in Tangier. According to president of the Mohamed Choukri Foundation Abdellatif Benyahya, the prize jury will made be up of renowned “Moroccan and foreign writers.“

It was Choukri’s For Bread Alone that sent shockwaves through the literary scene and made its author a famous writer. He wrote it in Arabic in 1972 and worked with Paul Bowles, in various bridge languages, to create an English version in 1973. It was translated into French in 1981 by Moroccan writer Taher Ben Jelloun, but wasn’t published in Arabic until 1982.

By now, the book has made its way into nearly 40 languages, although disputes over the author’s will tied up further translations after his death. Hopefully this literary prize signals that the Mohamed Choukri Foundation has come to an agreement with the writer’s family.

An excerpt from For Bread Alone, trans. Bowles and Choukri.

Yesterday, ArabLit posted about a new Mohamed Choukri International Award while making only slight mention of the circumstances under which Choukri’s internationally acclaimed al-Khubz al-Hafi was translated into English. Indeed, calling it a translation is perhaps inaccurate: 

Addressing this issue is Nirvana Tanoukhi’s “Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon: Paul Bowles’s For Bread Alone as Translation of Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi” (2003).

Any translation will differ from its original, absolutely. And any translator and author may well differ in how they read the book and how they understand what makes a (good) literary work. But the Choukri-Bowles collaboration is an extreme case for several reasons. First, Bowles didn’t read classical Arabic (fos7a) at all, and had only a limited knowledge of Moroccan colloquial Arabic (darija). The translation thus took place verbally, by way of Spanish, some French, and a bit of darija.

But this is perhaps not the central issue. The central issue, as Tanoukhi posits it, is that Bowles’s translation rewrites — or attempts to rewrite — Choukri’s original as a “third world” text (oral, pre-literate, pre-nationalist, apolitical) for inclusion into a Western-centered world literature canon.

Bowles — perhaps like other writers gathered in Tangier in the early 1970s — saw illiteracy and “primitivism” as a privileged state. Although Tanoukhi notes that Bowles’s interest in oral culture has been praised as an attempt to decenter the Western canon, she paints it as more akin to an interest in the “noble savage.” Bowles’s focus on the “preliterate imagination” was central. Indeed, all the other Moroccan writers who Bowles “translated” — all except Choukri — were illiterate storytellers. Bowles also envisioned Choukri as somehow more-or-less illiterate, since he hadn’t learned to read and write as a child, but as an adult.

Tanoukhi writes: “Bowles’s collaboration with Moroccan storytellers has been seen by his admirers to exemplify an equal partnership by which a sympathetic interlocutor gives voice to an illiterate native.” We won’t go into the fraught territory of “giving voice,” but you can well imagine that these writers already had their own voices, thank you very much.

Five years after For Bread Alone‘s English-language publication, Tanoukhi writes, Bowles wrote about the tension behind their collaboration. Why tension? Tanoukhi writes that:

…a careful examination of the Bowles translation, For Bread Alone (1973), and the Arabic text, Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (1982), shows that there are significant differences between the two versions that recur in recognizable patterns and point to diverging horizons of expectations.

In the end, Tanoukhi argues, the two works were no longer sisters, but perhaps cousins separated at birth and raised on separate continents. Cousins who might not much like each other if they met at a party.

Bowles wrote, five years after the publication of For Bread Alone:

Had I known how difficult it would be to make English translations of Mohamed Choukri’s texts I doubt that I should have undertaken the work [. . .]. When we were translating his autobiography For Bread Alone, he sat beside me, in order to see that I was making a word-for-word translation of his text. If he noticed an extra comma he demanded an explanation. I was driven to reiterating: but English is not Arabic!

It sounds fair enough. English isn’t Arabic, and comma patterns vary. But Tanoukhi suggests not an overprotective author and reasonable translator, but instead that, “After having had the freedom to ‘translate, edit, and to cut’ other storytellers’ material, Bowles was impatient with Choukri’s desire to control the textual integrity of the work.”

This is all relatively well-known. But it’s the details that are not just eye-opening, but open a lens through which to look at other translations. Tanoukhi writes that one text addresses a “politically committed social realist paradigm” (the Arabic) while the other was “unconcerned with politics” (the English).

Whole passages are missing, Tanoukhi writes. For instance: “They spent many days without food. They did not want to beg their neighbors for food. So they built a door on the inside of their house from rocks and clay, locking themselves in until they died.”*  This passage, which establishes a causal, political link between hunger and later actions, is erased.

Also, sexuality is positioned very differently in the two texts. When Mohamed’s aunt demands an explanation of why he had sex with a boy, in English, his response is, “I don’t understand myself.” In the Arabic: “In Tetuan, the thighs of prostitutes were available to me in the Saniya Bordello. But here, who can I desire? Am I supposed to desire your thighs? Monique’s thighs are her husband’s. Yours are your own husband’s. And what about me?”

Another pair of passages on sexuality:

From the Arabic: “I felt his teeth on me. What if he bites it? To speed my ejaculation, I imagined raping Asiya in Tetuan.”

From Bowles’s English: “The idea cooled my enthusiasm. To bring it back, I began to imagine that I was deflowering Asiya in Tetuan”

Next, in the Arabic, after the above encounter: “I was overcome by the desire to cry. What do I do with this old man who just sucked me?”

And the English: “Are all the maricones as nice as he was?”

In one version, as Tanoukhi writes, economic need pushes Mohamed toward illicit sex — with a young boy and an older man. In the other, it’s the confused search for erotic pleasure.

Economic need is erased elsewhere as well. The explanation for why Mohamed wasn’t brought to school as a young boy in the Arabic: “It’s just that we’re too poor, and learning costs a lot [in Tetuan].” And in the English: “I don’t know. But he didn’t ever take me to any school.”

The Arabic was published nearly a decade after the English, and while Choukri said he made only minor edits, it’s possible some of them are found here. In any case, the differences between these two versions are extreme, and most contemporary translators wouldn’t go quite so far in re-crafting a book. But pointing toward a different horizon of expecations is important, as even much smaller changes in tone and wording can have a broad effect.

Also, if the issues with Choukri’s estate are now cleared up, it’s time for a new translation.

*All re-translations by Tanoukhi.

Moroccan novelist, essayist, and critic Abdelfattah Kilito has a new book out in English translation this fall: Arabs and the Art of Storytelling: A Strange Familiarity, co-translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin. Kilito recently exchanged emails with translator and critic Robyn Creswell, who shared the exchange on Aesop:

Coming soon from Syracuse University Press.

The exchange is wonderfully charming, and ranges from Kilito’s youthful reading to his studies in France to Kilito’s relationship to Borges.

On his own reading:

RC: You haven’t mentioned any Arabic works, but I suppose you read some?   

AK: I read just about everything Egyptian and Lebanese writers published. I’m not bragging: there wasn’t much of it. I had a weakness for Taha Husayn. It was thanks to him I discovered that everything was up for grabs and subject to debate—even the great dead authors. Taha Husayn had no mercy, worshipped no one. Even myths weren’t safe. In one sense, it was disillusioning: after Husayn, there was nothing to admire, there were no more heroes. But at the same time I had the impression, while reading him, of becoming intelligent.  

I also liked Tawfiq al-Hakim, though for a different reason. His novel, A Bird of the East, made a deep impression on me. I needed to travel to Paris like him, go to the theaters, visit the museums, fall in love with a French woman. Only in this way, I thought, could I also become a writer.

And on the classics:

RC: Classical Arabic literature is as rich a literary corpus as those of classical Greece or China, yet it’s almost entirely unknown in this country (it might be slightly better known in France). As a lover of this literature, and an expert, what does it have to offer those who have never read it? What do you tell your students (there must be a few skeptics)?   

AK: As for the skeptics, I resist the temptation to tell them they don’t know what they’re missing. If people turn up their noses at classical literature, I suppose there are reasons—in the first place, because it’s so strange. Classical literature has its own codes, a particular set of norms. One has to make an effort to read it.

What can it offer us? In the most general terms, reading writers like Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, al-Jahiz, Tawhidi, and Ibn Tufayl, one imbibes a certain kind of wisdom. Through their open-mindedness, they give us a lesson in tolerance—a tolerance of others’ ideas. Unfortunately, these authors are not well studied, nor are they well translated. It all really comes back to the question of translation. This is also true of Arabic poetry—which is often thought to be unreadable except in Arabic, though few people would say so openly. Aside from specialists, no one in America or in Europe is likely to be able to name a single Arab poet. There are translations, though they’ve rarely had much success. Certainly nothing to compare with the success of Edward FitzGerald’s version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (translated from the Persian). But I would point to the beautiful French translations of André Miquel, who has given us versions of Majnun (lover of Layla), Abu al-Atahiya, Abu Firas, and Ibn Zaydun. The maqamat of Hamadhani and Hariri still await their FitzGerald—or, even better, their Antoine Galland, who translated The Thousand and One Nights at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Since then, the book has never been out of style, and its influence is felt everywhere, even among those who’ve never read it. This was the real miracle.

Read the full exchange:

On Aesop

Also, speaking of Moroccan literature:

Prix Littéraire de la Mamounia : “Le Job” de Réda Dalil consacré

Mbarek Syrfi, who co-translated The Monarch of the Square (2014) with Roger Allen, answers questions about Zafzaf’s importance to Moroccan literature, his style, and why he hasn’t been translated into English — but should be: 

ArabLit: How would you describe Zafzaf to someone who’d never read his work (without resorting to “godfather of Moroccan lit” or “Moroccan Tolstoy”)?

Mbarek Syrfi: How about Morocco’s elusive author? Or, “our great author,” as he is known among his peers. A disturbing, intriguing, shocking, innovative, challenging, amusing, and prominent pioneer of the Moroccan short story.

AL: Why has Zafzaf’s work not reached English? Is there a novel or novels you think particularly would be successful in English or “should” be translated?

MS: I would say this has to do with lack of interest in the region of the Maghrib in general and its literature in particular. This region was believed to be the domain of French and Spanish until recently. But there has been a shift in focus, and we have seen a lot works in translation, thanks to the tremendous efforts of Dr. Roger Allen*.

Zafzaf’s work has a social and intellectual value to it, and I believe that the following novels — al-Thaʻlab alladhī ya ṭharu wa-yakhtafī (The Elusive Fox, which is under review), Muḥāwalat ʻAysh (An Attempt to Live)، Baydat Addīk (The Rooster’s Egg), and his famous novel Al-Mar’ah wal-Wardah (The Woman and the Rose) — could be successful in English due to the poetic and aesthetic style and realism he uses in depicting Moroccan society.

AL: How did you decide on this particular short-story project?

MS: I was translating three short stories from English into Arabic, two by Steinbeck, “The Pearl” and “Breakfast,” and the third by Poe, “The Telltale Heart.” Towards the end, I stopped to think about the reason(s) why I needed to add more stories to Arabic and the benefit(s) of translating these great authors already known to the Moroccan readership either through Arabic, French, Spanish, and English.

You would think you’re listening to him in an old medina square and watching his gestures as he narrates his stories, confidently striding between words, sentences, expressions and meanings.

In one of my visits to Rabat, I had to stop by a library downtown, and there were two new collections of Zafzaf’s short stories the Ministry of Culture in Morocco had just published. (It was the first time the Ministry decided on such an initiative.) It was a treat! As I was leafing through collection two, I came across “Antonio” again — one of Zafzaf’s most striking short stories — and I decided I had to translate it.

Zafzaf’s slippery storytelling style — as-sahl al-mumtaniʿ — tempted me as I re-read him. You would think you’re listening to him in an old medina square and watching his gestures as he narrates his stories, confidently striding between words, sentences, expressions and meanings.

He teases, challenges and provokes the reader, and I decided to take him up on that challenge and get to know him as a writer.

I called him up and shared with him my intention of translating a few of his short stories in a small collection. He nicely and gently wished me good luck and offered to help in any way he could. (He was a translator himself.)

AL: How did the collaboration with Roger come about, and how did it work? What do you think are the upsides & downs to partner-translating a short-story collection?

MS: When I finished the first draft, I needed someone to look at it. I reached out to Roger from Morocco. He gently (as is his nature) told me that he was busy with other projects. However, later when I came to the US and started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I approached Roger again with the project, and this time he promised he would just glance at it. But the spell of Muhammad Zafzaf was so powerful that Roger never put the collection down until we finished the review, rewriting, and submission to Syracuse University Press.

Collaboration in translation is like painting a canvas. It is a three-way process – communication, negotiation and engagement with the original text.

The collaboration with Dr. Roger Allen has been the experience of a lifetime. A course. A workshop. The beginning of great friendship. We have worked on the anthology for two years, going back and forth, writing and rewriting.

There were no downsides to my collaboration with Roger. On the contrary, I had a chance to know him closely on a different level and of course learned a great deal from him. We are now working on other projects together.

Collaboration in translation is like painting a canvas. It is a three-way process – communication, negotiation and engagement with the original text.

Collaborating with another translator, author or poet requires open mindedness, flexibility and a set goal. I have had another such great experience with Eric Sellin, American poet and writer, working on different projects such as Kilito’s Arabs and the Art of Storytelling, Aicha Bassry, Hassan Najmi and other Moroccan poets.

AL:  As you selected from different eras of his work, how did you decide which stories to translate and which to leave behind? Did you try to be representative, focus on aesthetic criteria, or on how it would translate? Max Shmookler (and others) have noted that sometimes stories that are acclaimed and successful in the Arabic fall flat in translation. Did you feel that with any of Zafzaf’s stories?

MS: In this anthology, the choice of short stories was very subjective. As I was reading the short stories, I started jotting down titles of the ones I enjoyed more and thought might interest English readers. I tried them on my (American) wife first.

It’s true that not all stories have the intended impact in translation, often due to a loss of cultural context. And while that did put a few Zafzaf stories on the back burner, for others there were some pleasant surprises. Much of his work could be considered cutting edge for his time even among peers; but for Western readers, whose understanding of any Arabic culture typically involves visions of burqas everywhere, Zafzaf’s themes are shocking and eye-opening.

AL: What are the particular challenges of translating “Zafzafian style”?

MS: As you know, Zafzaf’s style is easy, and it is the underlying meanings and culture that was hard to convey into another language, as is the case with every translation. Culture can’t be translated but paralleled with a similar example. Still, it never conveys the original meaning. Zafzaf’s stories are very simple snapshots of life — banal to some, but Roger and I were more concerned with how to make them more interesting, attractive, and engaging to an English readership, as it happened to you with the short story, “The Baby Carriage.”

AL: These are often very short, snapshots of life rather than structured short stories. Do you think this shows their connection to oral tales, to hadoutas? Did he ever use this form as testing grounds for his novels, as character sketches? Or were they meant entirely to stand on their own?

MS: Indeed, they are short, yet very well structured. Of course, there’s a strong link with the Moroccan oral tradition, halqa and storytelling (called hadouta in Egypt). Zafzaf, like all Moroccans, grew up listening to the grandmother’s oral stories (Koudia’s is a good example).

AL: What sort of readership did Zafzaf have in his lifetime? Who do you imagine will read his stories in English translation?

MS: To begin with, most Moroccan writers have read Zafzaf, and a lot of them learned from him, imitated him and/or copied his style. Many Moroccan students and intellectuals of the time have read Zafzaf. One of his novels, Muhawalat ʿAysh (An Attempt to Live) has been taught a school.

I would imagine students of Arabic, scholars, interested and curious readers.

AL: Many of the stories are tremendously detailed, leaving the reader feeling that she has smelled the sour air, put her hand on the gritty table, leaned her shoulder against a cold wall, felt the ticks sucking blood from a dog’s ear. They also fearlessly move through social and economic strata. You suggest in the afterword that these stories could be of interest to a social historian. In a way do you see them as documentary work?

MS: Zafzaf charts various themes and topics that are commonly thought of as taboos, untouchable, or simply not of any interest to the Moroccan “intellectuals” at the time.

I don’t know how an historian or a sociologist or an anthropologist might use the information contained in each one of Zafzaf’s short stories, but I believe that a great deal of material is available and can be dug up with a little bit of effort.

AL: Zafzaf doesn’t really paint a postcard-PR-friendly picture of Morocco. Did this make it difficult for some to embrace his work? Isn’t that the function of literature?

MS: I believe that postcard-PR-friendly pictures of Morocco are to be left to folklorists, but a true writer with grit is the one who depicts his society’s illnesses, defects and problems and brings out the uncanny, grotesque and sinister in search of more committed literature and readership. He bears witness to the society of his time, condemns it and criticizes it. Hypocrite readers found that his work was too shocking and projects a bad image of Morocco, as was the case of Muhammad Shukri. Hasn’t such literature been refused, persecuted, and burned throughout history?

AL: As you know, one of the stories I found particularly striking was “The Baby Carriage,” which has a great dramatic tension between legless Ibrahim’s helplessness and his self-sufficiency, his humiliation and yet how he manages to hold onto dignity. There is no resolution, no epiphany. At the end, the tension remains – he takes us into Ibrahim’s world and then cuts us off. This is true in a lot of stories – “The Street Sweeper” is a wonderful portrait, but there’s no epiphany, no climax, no moral, no lesson. Is there a particular “Zafzafian ending”?

MS: Zafzaf’s choice is to let the reader take charge of ending the story she is reading. Identification with the characters is what I have found fascinating in his work. Not the ending that comes full circle but rather the open-ended one that creates discomfort in the reader and pushes her to take sides and engage in the issues. I am sure that your experience with the mentioned short stories has led you to stop and contemplate the situation in a deeper moment of reflection.

AL: Yes, definitely. He also seems to have a recurring interest in disabled characters – “Shamharush, King of the Jinn” and “The Baby Carriage.” It feels symbolic, but not quite. He, like Yusuf Idris, was greatly interested in the marginalized?

MS: Many of the characters Zafzaf has depicted in his work represent the abject. The uncanny feeling (to borrow the Freudian term) is what results from reading such works by Zafzaf. He takes the concealed misfortunes and shoves them in the readers’ faces to make us ill at ease, feeling guilty and forced to empathize.

AL: Do you remember when you first read Zafzaf? How has your relationship with his work changed? How do you see him differently now from when you first came in contact with him? Was there anything you learned about his style through this translation?

MS: I read Zafzaf and other Moroccan and Arab authors at a very young age, then left them to focus on French, English and (translated) Russian literature in high school and during my studies at the University. I majored in English language and literature, which endowed me with important theoretical and practical tools and skills, and I returned to reread and take in the Moroccan short story in general and Zafzaf’s in particular. Thus began this endeavor. The more I read Zafzaf’s work and worked on it, the more I realized how important his simple, close-to-real-life style has been in paving the way for future generations of writers, how great his contributions are and that it has been a great privilege to have met – and read, enjoyed and translated the works of – Muhammad Zafzaf.

Mbarek Sryfi is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His translations have appeared in CELAAN (2008 & 2013), Metamorphoses (2011), meadmagazine.org (2012), World Literature Today (2012) and Banipal (Fall 2013 & Spring 2014).

*For instance, Bensalem Himmich’s The Polymath and The Theocrat and Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude, among others.

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. announced the 2014 recipients of the Hemingway Grant last month, and among the grant-ees were translations of works by two great Morrocan authors, Abdellatif Laâbi and Mohamed Nedali:

The Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, to be published by Archipelago in March 2016, promises to be “the first comprehensive selection from each one of Laâbi’s volumes to appear in English. It will include poems that span every poetry volume of Laâbi’s fifty-year career, chosen and with an afterword by the author himself.”

The collection, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, follows a chapbook of Laâbi’s poems edited and translated by André Naffis-Sahely and published by the Poetry Translation Centre in 2013. Many of those translations can be found online. A more wide-ranging Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi, edited and translated by Naffis-Sahely, who has previously translated Laâbi’s The Rule of Barbarism and The Bottom of the Jar, will also come out from Carcanet next year.

The grant-winning Nedali work is Morceaux de choix: les amours d’un apprenti boucher, to be translated by Naffis-Sahely and published by Ohio University Press in April 2016.

The first of Mohamed Nedali’s works to be translated into English, Morceaux de choix won the French Embassy’s Grand Atlas Prize and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, as well as the International Diversity Prize at Cartagena in 2009.

Naffis-Sahely wrote in email that “I chose Prime Cuts because I want to translate all of his books (if I can) and so wanted to start with his debut. Also, as you know, publishers tend to prefer books that have won prizes, and Prime Cuts won two, so that helped. His sixth novel, The Garden of Tears, has just been published in France (I talk about it in my ‘Letter from Morocco‘) I think that would make a splash, but I have to convince someone to take it.”

Read the first chapter of Prime Cuts on Banipal:

Time to Accept the Unacceptable 

Letter from Morocco:

The Sceptre and the Pen: A Novelist Writes On The Country’s Present Trials

The Dubai International Writers’ Centre recently held a two-part session about Ibn Battuta’s extensive travels, led by their Writer-in-Residence Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Participants were treated to a modern-day adventure as Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraced his footsteps across the globe, using Ibn Battuta’s writings as a guide and sharing his own photos from each destination.

By Sawad Hussain

Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s two sessions — one delivered in Arabic, the other in English — detailed his life’s work and travels. These were spurred on by the writings of, in his words, “not only the greatest Arab traveller of all time, but perhaps the greatest of all time” — Ibn Battuta (1304-1377).  A true testament to the centre’s outreach capabilities was the diversity of those in attendance: Not only did the ages vary from teenage to adult, but more importantly there was balanced representation of native and non-native speakers of Arabic.

Mackintosh-Smith began his lecture as he did his book Travels with a Tangerine, with the words of a seventeenth-century blurb:

All master-works of travel, if you will but look,

Are merely tails that drag at Ibn Battuta’s heel.

Even though Mackintosh-Smith’s works have received widespread critical acclaim, he was insistent throughout the session that, despite the success he has achieved, all he has written is a dhayl: a tail, or a mere addition to what the Moroccan traveller had written during his fourteenth-century travels. He also said that he felt he had “committed a crime” against Battuta’s exploits by pursuing an abridged version of his legendary adventures.

Mackintosh-Smith set off with the audience from Kilwa in Tanzania, where he showed a now-ruined palace detailed by Ibn Battuta. However, the infinity pool that once existed is still very visible today. He also displayed a Chinese vase from the palace as proof of the vibrant trade occurring at that time.

Next, Mackintosh-Smith took the audience to India, Amjhera to be precise, where he recollected how he visited a site Ibn Battuta described as a “terrifying sight.” It was in fact a place where Battuta witnessed wives throwing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands to join them in the afterlife. From a photo of the grounds, it was evident that one of the larger rocks was still blackened from the fire, even though the site had been deserted for several centuries. Mackintosh-Smith recounted how, upon reaching the south of India, he had had the exact same meal that Battuta had written about his in travelogues, and exhibited a photograph to prove it!

On the picturesque shores of the Maldives is where the audience next found themselves, hearing how neighbouring islands claimed that Battuta had landed there first.  Mackintosh-Smith delved deeply into the mystical elements of the islands: He spoke of jinn and ifriit, which play a big role in the islands’ storytelling tradition – as recorded by Battuta. Stones engraved with terrifying faces flashed across the screen as the audience heard of Ibn Battuta’s romantic encounters with the islands’ princesses.

After a brief stop at Adam’s Mountain in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which Mackintosh-Smith scaled, the journey ended in China, in Quanzhou and Guangzhou to be exact.  The audience was treated to pictures of a mosque from 1000 A.D, and learnt of how the Maliki sect is most prevalent in that part of China. Mackintosh-Smith dwelled on how the same sect is dominant in Morocco today, leading the group to ponder whether this was but a mere coincidence.

In closing, it became clear how intense Ibn Battuta’s desire was to return home. Even though he was in a predominately Muslim part of China, the culture shock still wore him down. The Writer-in-Residence pointed out how Battuta’s journey to China took up nine hundred pages or so, but his return home was documented in a mere nine.

Mackintosh-Smith’s detailed narrative made the audience feel as if they were on the journey with him, his accompanying photos helping to truly magnify this sensation of discovery. He ended by touchingly stating that he set off across the world to defend Ibn Battuta’s writings and prove to naysayers that the legendary Moroccan explorer had indeed set eyes on all that he had written about in his seminal works. One gathers from his passionate delivery and vivid evidence that Mackintosh-Smith has put forth a strong argument in support of that stated mission.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s books – Travels with A Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010) – are available at the DIWC or from major booksellers worldwide. Those in Dubai can also go to www.diwc.ae to read about future talks and workshops.

Sawad Hussain is an Arabic teacher, translator, and litterateur residing in Dubai.

If inspired, you can also take a virtual tour along with Ibn Battuta on Berkeley’s site.

Ten Arab artists under 35 have been granted awards from Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy as part of its 2014 Production Awards Program. Two are writers:

They are Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun and Moroccan poet and novelist Soukaina Habiballah.

The other grantees are working in the fields of music, theatre, film, video and visual arts.

Mamoun won a grant — which can be up to $6000 — to write a novel titled Azeeb, while Habiballah’s was to write Why Must Zubeida Commit Suicide?, a book reportedly about the suicide of a small-town mother living in northern Morocco.

Mamoun was born in east-central Sudan in 1979, and has worked both in print and in broadcast journalism. She’s published a book of short stories, The Thirteen Months of Sunrise (2009) and a novel, A Wild Plant (2006). Mamoun also received an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) grant in 2009 and was selected to participate in the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction nadwa, an annual writing workshop.

But Mamoun is perhaps better-known as an activist who was arrested in September 2013 and put on trial for “inciting riots.” In December 2013, she was convicted of causing a disturbance during protests sparked by rising fuel prices. According to AFP, she was ordered to pay 500 pounds, about $65, or spend a month in jail.

Habiballah also won an AFAC grant for the organization’s novel-writing program and published a poetry collection in 2014.

A total of 130 projects were submitted for this round of awards. According to Ahram Online, the final selection brings the total of supported projects by Al-Mawred to 177 since the inception of the programme in 2004.

This year, the literature jury was made up of prominent literary artists: Syrian author Khaled Khalifa, Moroccan poet Yassin Adnan, and Algerian novelist Bachir Mefti.

More on Mamoun:

A Wild Plant: An extract from her novel (English)

Mamoun’s testimony on being arrested for protesting in September 2013 (English and Arabic)

Mamoun’s blog (Arabic)

More on Habiballah:

Her page on the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture website (English)

Her poetry (Arabic)

As I wrote over at The Guardian when the IMPAC’s 142-book longlist was revealed late last year, its global outreach was decidedly underwhelming:

Painting from the author’s website: http://www.mahibinebine.com/

But its 10-book shortlist does have three books in translation — and, as the Dublin-based award proudly adds, one author from Ireland. The shortlist boasts one novel translated from the Portugeuse and two from the French, including Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God, translated by Lulu Norman (2013).

Last year, Binebine’s novel also made the Best Translated Book Award shortlist. It also won an English PEN award and made World Literature Today’s list of the “most important translations” of 2013.

Mahi Binebine was born in 1959 and grew up in a house in Marrakech’s Old Town. He studied in Paris and taught mathematics while also painting and writing. He was recognized first as a painter, then later as a novelist, and lived in New York in the late 1990s, when his paintings began to be acquired by the Guggenheim Museum.

But according to a profile in Qantara, it’s not his life in Paris or NYC, but his childhood that “left a deep impression, and it practically forced his literary themes upon him. He tells of the characters who populated his childhood cosmos: the walking wounded, outcasts and failures – or ‘those left footsore by life,’ as he puts it.”

The titles on this year’s IMPAC shortlist were nominated by mostly North American and European public libraries: in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. A  judging panel made up of Valentine Cunningham, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Daniel Hahn, Kate Pullinger, and Jordi Soler, and chaired by Eugene R. Sullivan, will select the winner, which will be announced on June 17.

The IMPAC Award, an initiative of Dublin City Council, is worth €100,000.

An excerpt of Horses of God can be found at the publisher’s website: Tin House Books. There’s also a Q&A with the author about the novel.

The full list of 2015 IMPAC-shortlisted titles:

1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigerian) Published by Fourth Estate and by Alfred A. Knopf.

2. Horses of God by Mahi Binebine (Moroccan) Translated from French by Lulu Norman. Published by Tin House Books.

3. Harvest by Jim Crace (British) Published by Picador and by Alfred A. Knopf.

4. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Australian) Published by Vintage Australia.

5. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Australian) First Novel. Published by Little, Brown & Company and by Picador Australia.

6. K by Bernardo Kucinski (Brazilian) Translated from Portuguese by Sue Branford. Published by Latin American Bureau.

7. Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andreï Makine (French, Russian-born) Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan. Published by MacLehose Press.

8. TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (Irish) Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Random House Inc. and HarperCollins Canada.

9. Someone by Alice McDermott (American) Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

10. Sparta by Roxana Robinson (American) Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

This dispatch is the first from the 2015 Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which opens today:

By Olivia Snaije

Mohammed Berrada is considered one of Morocco’s most important contemporary writers. Born in Rabat in 1938, he has written numerous books; he is a literary critic, translator (French to Arabic) and has taught Arabic literature at the Mohammed-V University in Rabat. One of the founders of the Moroccan Writers Union, he was also its president from 1976–1983. Berrada studied Arabic literature in Egypt and was part of a literary movement that began to experiment with language and integrated local dialects — in Berrada’s case, Fassi (from Fez) into his novels.

At the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair this week, he will present his books and answer questions about Moroccan literature. He was interviewed for the Fair’s Show Daily, which has granted permission to reprint the interview on Publishing Perspectives and here:

What influence has France had on your writing in terms of inspiration, colonialism, or thought?

For me, France is a pole, a source of enlightenment. Given that France occupied us for over 40 years, colonialism forces one to be open-minded towards the other, to see what happens on the other side. Little by little, as I learned French, it became a way of thinking, and of dialogue. Of course I was inspired by writers ranging from [Alphonse] Daudet to [Jean-Paul] Sartre. As a lifestyle, the culture and civilization were very present and constituted an imaginary world. At the same time I was raised in a nationalist milieu, so there was also rejection of all that was colonialist.

Was the choice to study Arabic and to write in Arabic a political act or did it come naturally (or both)?

My uncle sent me to a school in Fez that was built by the Moroccan Nationalist Movement. Its goal was to counter the French-language movement. This allowed me to study Arabic, which channeled the Nationalist project. It federated its constituents — Arabic or Berber speakers, for example — because they could understand each other. Arabic also allowed the Nationalist Movement to have ties with political movements in other Arab countries such as Syria or Egypt. In the 1950s, we couldn’t continue our studies at a university in Morocco so we had to study in Iraq, or Syria or Egypt. Those who had studied in French had the opportunity of going to university in Bordeaux or in Paris. So this choice allowed us to resuscitate the Arabic language, which, with Berber, is now the official language in Morocco.

What inspired you in the Arab world in terms of authors, eras, or political movements?

The influence of the Arab world was enormous. Of course the great writers provided inspiration, but living in Egypt for five years it was also the cinema, the theater, and music. Above all I felt that this Arabic language to which I belong is manifold. There was modern standard Arabic, which is very supple — Freud, Sartre and so many others have been translated into it. And then there was the Egyptian dialect, which dominated as an artistic medium. That’s what galvanized me to write L’ubat al-Nisyan (The Game of Forgetting) and to use dialect in dialogues to explain the character. Little by little I used [the North African dialects called] derja above all for dialogues. As far as the political dimension, we all had this dream of the Nahda [renaissance]. This thought that began, was aborted, then began again, but these movements came to nothing. We are united in our failures. Arab countries live in a disorientation because of these missed opportunities and the lack of democracy. The regimes that settled in following independence were unfaithful to what people had hoped for. Everything has yet to be done.

Since the 1970s when you helped found the Moroccan Writers Union, how has Moroccan literature evolved?

The idea came from [philosopher, novelist and poet] Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi. I was young and convinced that this union was the place to develop a dialogue. We wanted it to be open to the left and to the right. In the 1960s, all the young Arabic-language writers followed [French philosopher Jean-Paul] Sartre’s way of thinking. It was the beginning, but we evolved and even realism, which dominated, left room for other movements. Moroccan literature was open to everything. There were also writers in the union who wrote in French.

At the same time, Mohamed Choukri was there and I published two chapters of his al-Khubz al-Hafi (For Bread Alone) before it was translated. It was really the cutting edge. Our friends writing in French weren’t necessarily bolder. Today there are three times as many authors who write in Arabic than in French. But this comes with its own difficulties, due to the factor of illiteracy in Morocco, which is at least 50%, as well as problems with distribution. This means no author is autonomous financially — none can live from writing.

In Hayawât mutajâwira, Morocco is the subject of your novel. You have written about Egypt in Mitla Saifin lan Yatakarrar (Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated). Are you tempted to write about other countries in the Arab world?

In my novels, I always try to understand my relationship with time. Time is an essential factor. There’s always a distance with time, daydreaming, and time combined with dreams. InHayawât mutajâwira, I used the concept of neighbors to express the fact that there are several societies in the country that is Morocco. Naïma Ait Lhna is influenced by a French tendency. She ends up in prison because society can’t help her stay on the right path. Ould H’nia is illiterate and represents a typical type of Moroccan youth today. El Wariti is a religious scholar who learned French, but after independence evolved towards the Makhzen, or the centre of power, and has a fairly open-minded rhetoric. The novel reveals the lack of coherence and the discrepancies in today’s society. I wrote about Egypt because I lived there for five years, but I would have to know other Arab countries much better in order to write about them.

The Arabic language unites countries from the West to the East in the greater Middle East, however the socio-cultural realities can be very diverse. As a Moroccan author benefitting from a long cultural and literary tradition in Arabic and French, what do you think of the UAE’s efforts to establish themselves as important centers in these domains?

The language is what contributes to the richness of this Arab world where 300 million people can speak the same language. Modern standard Arabic is a great advantage when you compare it to the 26 languages spoken in Europe. At the same time, we have 22 dialects in this space. But 80% of them stem from classical Arabic, so language really occupies an important space where there can be many positive interactions. The Gulf countries, which belong to this language and patrimony, can accomplish a lot because of their financial resources. Organizations such as Kalima [translation project] can preserve the patrimony. There haven’t been many strategies to allow the Arabic teaching methods to evolve; this could give a breath of fresh air to the language.

This first appeared in the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair’s Show Daily and on Publishing Perspectives.

Morocco’s “National Coalition for Arabic” is reportedly up in arms over a Ramadan sitcom it says “mocks the Arabic language”; a government minister says speaking formal Arabic causes her “a fever”; a recent report suggests teaching Darija, or Moroccan Arabic, in early primary:

An ordinary summer in the struggle over language in Morocco.

Darija* (the language that’s doing the mocking) and Standard Arabic (the language being mocked) are just two of the players in a landscape that also includes French, English, and Tamazight. French and Standard Arabic seem to be associated more with older generations, with English and Darija, or “Moroccan colloquial,” for the young. The language war is also, it seems, a culture war, with the blog “The View from Fez,” quoting a “critic” who suggests “if we speak Standard Arabic we will end up like the Saudis!”

For poets and novelists, these are certainly not small decisions. Most prominent and award-winning Moroccan writers who work in an Arabic continue to write in the standard literary form. Globally celebrated Bensalem Himmich and Mohammed Bennis write in standard Arabic, as does International Prize for Arabic Fiction winner Mohammed Achaari. The prominent Moroccan authors who don’t write in standard Arabic generally write in French. Fewer write in English,  Dutch, or Tamazight. And while there are novels and poetry collections in Darija, there are perhaps no authors who write solely in the langauge.

But as Alexander Elinson wrote in “Darija and Changing Writing Practices in Morocco,” the landscape is nonetheless shifting:

Beginning in the 1970s, but really taking off inthe early to mid-2000s, writing in darija has gained support as serving the practical, political, and artistic needs of a dynamic and multilingual society.

The first-ever prize for literature written in Darija was reportedly offered in 2006, followed by others. Since then, the debate has been growing hotter (or more feverish, perhaps).

Elinson quotes the highly regarded Moroccan literary critic, academic, and novelist Abdelfatteh Kilito as saying that colloquial Egyptian alienates him from a novel, but, for Moroccan literature, “colloquial Arabic . . . as a bearer of [a certain] history and geography, would allow one to recognize a Moroccan work, in Arabic or French, ancient or modern!”

Yet for himself, Kilito wrote in 2013 (trans. Kristin Gee Hickman), reading in Darija is difficult:

I speak colloquial Arabic, I read classical Arabic. My education has, indeed, accustomed me to only reading texts written in French and classical Arabic. There are certainly poems, stories, proverbs in colloquial, but they remain, for me, fundamentally, connected to orality. When I happen to read them, I have a bizarre experience: because of my lack of habit, I start deciphering them as if they were written in a foreign language. As easy as it is to speak in colloquial, reading it is equally laborious and full of obstacles.

Education usually still trumps in determining an author’s language of choice.

There is also yet no standardized orthography for Darija, and critics of its use have pointed to regionalizations, and the multiplicity of words for carrot, for instance. But a growing number of authors have staged novels in the language, with more or less success, including Youssouf Amine Elalamy, Murad ‘Alami, Driss Mesnauoi, and ‘Aziz Regragi. Graphic novels, such as Fatima’s Memories by Safia Ouarezki and Mahmoud Benameur, also create new and fertile ground for Darija.

Many proponents of a literature in Darija, such as celebrated novelist Fouad Laroui, write most of their work in French or another European language. Yet it seems Darija is growing in strength, and unlike in other places where the lament is that “Arabic is dying,” here a new sort of literary production is being born.

More:

Elinson’s “Darija and Changing Writing Practices in Morocco”

Martin Rose’s “Bavures and shibboleths—language in Morocco”

*The decision to capitalize Darija is to recognize it as a language.

Translator André Naffis-Sahely is working on a forthcoming Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi (Carcanet, 2016). As he does, poems have been trickling out here and there:

From the author’s website

The collection recently won English PEN’s “Writers in Translation” award; meanwhile, a different collection, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and forthcoming from Archipelago, won a Hemingway grant.

Two Laâbi poems, trans. Naffis-Sahely, appeared recently  in the PEN Poetry Series — “My Mother’s Language” and the charming  “Burn the Midnight Oil.” Another long poem — “Letter to My Friends Overseas” — appeared in the summer edition of Asymptote, also trans. Naffis-Sahely.

A new collection of Laâbi’s work has also just appeared in Italian.

Laâbi — a poet, novelist, playwright, translator, and activist — was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942 and began writing in the mid-’60s, which is when he helped found the influential literary magazine Souffles. He didn’t spend long editing the magazine before he was arrested for his trouble in 1972. He was sentenced to nearly a decade in prison and left Morocco for Paris after his release.

Laâbi has also written prose — his Bottom of the Jar was trans. Naffis-Sahely — and he’s also translated a number of Arab authors into French, including Mahmoud Darwish, Abdelwahab al-Bayati, and Hanna Mina. Laâbi received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2009, the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011, and the Prix Ecritures et Spiritualités in 2015.

Interviews:

The Quarterly Conversation: The Abdellatif Laâbi Interview

DoubleChange: Interview with Kristin Prevallet

Review-Essays:

ArabLit: Abdellatif Laâbi, Terra Incognita

Daily Star Lebanon: Dreams of the Past, Memories for the Future

Event Reviews and Interviews:

‘A Child of this Century': Launching Abdellatif Laâbi’s Dual-language Chapbook

ArabLit: Majalla: Fighting Mental Prisons

Poems:

“Two hours in the train”

“Glory to Those Who Torture Us”

“Far from Baghdad,” “Fingerprints,” “Knowledge Is Unforgiving,” “One Hand Isn’t Enough to Write with,” “The Manuscript,” and “The Word Gulag,” all at the Poetry Translation Centre 

Moroccan writer and scholar Fatema Mernissi, author of the acclaimed memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, has died at 75:

Born in 1940, in Fes, Mernissi was celebrated for her sociology. Her most popular works included Beyond the Veil, The Veil and the Male Elite, and Islam and Democracy.

Mernissi was mainly a scholar, studying political science at the Sorbonne and doing her doctorate in sociology at Brandeis University. She later taught in the field of sociology at Rabat’s Mohammed V University.

But Mernissi was also a gifted writer, and her works, both scholarly and memoir, were accessible to a wide public. On writing, she once said: “Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.”

Mernissi won numerous awards for her work. In 2003, Mernissi was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award along with Susan Sontag.

You can find more about her work at her website, http://www.mernissi.net/. There are also many remembrances on Twitter. A selection:

Today in NYC, poet and Dar al-Ma’mûn co-director Omar Berrada will give a talk about Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011), author behind the cult classic L’hôpital and groundbreaking film Mirage. Despite his acclaim, much of the polymath author-artist’s work is only now being organized for publication:

In Bouanani’s lifetime, Berrada said in an email interview this week, he published four books: three poetry collections and the novella L’hôpital (1980). Also interested in film, Bouanini released one feature film, Mirage, and four shorts.

Yet this is only the tip of the artist-author’s ouevre.

What he left behind “is not a collection of notebooks,” Berrada said, “but several dozen *finished* manuscripts (i.e. written, re-written, proofread, sometimes typed, dated, etc.).” These were not just prose or poetry, but a wide array of genres: poetry, fiction, plays, film scripts, essays, history books, as well as drawings and graphic novels.

As to why Bouanani didn’t publish these works, Berrada acknowledged that Bouanani had no love of the limelight. But that, Berrada said, doesn’t tell the whole story. “[W]hen you read his work, it was obviously not only written just for himself. We know he was badly censored as a filmmaker, + never given state grants, etc. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t publish without making compromises, and he was not ready for compromises.”

One of the reasons L’hôpital continues to fascinate, Berrada said, is it asks the post-colonial question “Are we [Moroccans] a people?” The book builds an answer to this question over the course of its slim hundred pages.

It is set in a hospital (for people sick with tuberculosis), an enclosed space in which patients are abandoned by a failed infrastructure, and from which nobody exits. It is partly autobiographical, as Bouanani spent 6 months in such a hospital in 1967/68. It is the story of a double itinerary/travel for the writer-narrator: 1/ a travel through time, via memories of childhood, which are the only escape from the confines of the hospital. 2/ a ‘travel’ toward the other patients/inmates, who constitute the other characters in the story and who are mostly illiterate, marginalised individuals, working class singularities. Even though the book is in French, somehow you can almost hear regional accents and social variations. The hospital is a microcosm of Morocco, and the book stages a reconciliation of literature/the writer with the people.

Bouanani, Berrada says, spent a lot of his life documenting Moroccan oral poetry, crafts, ceremonies, popular myths and beliefs. “He didn’t see them as fixed folklore or museum material, but rather as as locus where collective memory is embodied, preserved, and constantly renewed.”

For Anglophone readers, L’hôpital will come out in English next year from New Directions. For those in Morocco, Bouanani will be also be a focus of this year’s Biennale de Marrakech, opening February 24.

If you’re in NYC:

Hear Berrada talk Bouanani at 7 p.m.: “In this talk [Berrada] will attempt to argue for the relevance of Bouanani’s work in rethinking North African literary and cinematographic modernism and its links to oral traditions and popular culture. ”

Get to know Bouanani’s work:

The 22nd Casablanca International Book Fair (SIEL) opened February 12 and will continue through the 21st. Olivia Snaije was there:

More than 680 publishers from 44 countries are taking part in this mid-sized fair, which features the giving of the Global Alarcanah Poetry Prize, which this year went to the German poet Volker Braun. The UAE is this year’s guest of honor at the fair.

Photos by Olivia Snaije

Tareq Bakari’s Numedia (“نوميديا”), already shortlisted for the 2016 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, yesterday won a Morocco Book Award:

Image from the author’s Facebook page.

Numedia is narrated by a Frenchwoman, Julia, but tells the life story of an orphaned Moroccan boy named Murad. According to IPAF organizers:

Murad is cursed by the people of his village. Ostracised, insulted and beaten, he turns to love in an attempt to take revenge on fate: first with Khoula, who becomes pregnant; then Nidal, his classmate and fellow comrade in resistance; then Julia, seen as the French coloniser, and with his final love Numedia, the mute Berber. The rich story of Numedia unfolds against the backdrop of the real-life historical, political and religious landscape of Morocco.

Tareq Bakari was born in Missour, eastern Morocco, in 1988.

The Morocco Book Award gives awards in six categories, including literature, translation, and poetry. Winners were selected from among 175 submissions, 36 of which were in the literature category, 37 in poetry, and 35 in translation.

The poetry award went to Abdel Karim al-Tabbal for his collection Nimnimat (“نمنمات”).

According to Hespress, there was controversy last year over the independence and transparency of the judging committee. This year, the chair of the judging committe, Mohammed Noureddine Afaya, detailed the work the judging committee had done and said that the books were examined from a “scientific” perspective more than any other. All the winners were male.

Four books — a French graphic novel that tells a refugee’s story; a “costumbrismo” novel by Galician author Cristina Sánchez-Andrade; a collection of political essays by Mexican journalists and activists; and the latest book by Prix Goncourt-winner Tahar Ben Jelloun — have won 2016 PEN Promotes awards:

Ben Jelloun’s book, translated from French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman, and set to be published by Saqi this July, is, in PEN’s words, “an evocative tribute to his mother and his homeland of Morocco.”

According to PEN, this marks the end of an era:

This is the final round of the PEN Promotes awards scheme in its current form, supported by Bloomberg. The PEN Promotes award, which was the cornerstone of Writers in Translation when the programme was first established in 2005, has supported 95 books in ten years, including prize-winning novels such as Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Daysand Fabio Geda’s In the Sea There Are Crocodiles as well as modern classics such as Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building and Chasing the King of Hearts by legendary Polish writer Hanna Krall. The grant will now be redeveloped in consultation with publishers, venues and retailers. Promotion support from English PEN will return in a new form in 2017.

However, English PEN reassures that their “other major translation grant, PEN Translates, supported by Arts Council England, continues unchanged and is currently open for submissions.”

This year’s PEN Promotes winners:

• About My Mother by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated from French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. Published by Saqi Books. July 2016
• Alpha: Abidjan–Gare du Nord by Bessora and Barroux, translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone. Published by Barrington Stoke. August 2016
• The Sorrows of Mexico by Lydia Cacho et al, translated from Spanish by various translators. Published by MacLehose Press. August 2016
• The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, translated from Spanish by Samuel Rutter. Published by Scribe UK. August 2016

This interview first appeared — in a tighter, faster-paced version — over at Bookwitty. Here at ArabLit, the longer version of our three-way chat:

Translator Emma Ramadan with author Fouad Laroui in NY this March.

Fouad Laroui has a gift for simultaneously expanding his readers’ minds, spinning a yarn, and making us roll our eyes and laugh. Fellow Moroccan writer Laila Lalami has been calling for translations of his work into English for at least a decade. Finally, a collection of his short stories, The Strange Affair of Dassoukine’s Trousers, has been translated by Emma Ramadan and published by Deep Vellum.

Laroui, also an economist, writes scientific work in English and has published two poetry collections in Dutch. He writes poetry in Dutch, he says, to keep it private. “Short stories are different: you are not expected to lay bare your soul, you just tell a story. For me, it’s like telling it to a couple of good friends – or good listeners, it is usually the same thing.”

Fouad Laroui and his translator Emma Ramadan both sat down, like a few good listeners, to talk with Bookwitty’s Marcia Lynx Qualey about The Strange Affair of Dassoukine’s Trousers, the titular of which won France’s Prix Goncourt in 2013.

Marcia Lynx Qualey: How serious were you when you said “I write poems in Dutch so that I am sure nobody I know would be able to read them”? By contrast, you intend your short stories to be (widely) read? Do you have a particular or imagined reader?

Fouad Laroui: When it comes to poetry, I often feel ill at ease at the idea that someone would actually read what I write. Poetry is so personal, so intimate… Being read is like being spied on by a peeping tom. On the other hand, why write poems if you just tear them up or bury them? Publishing in Dutch is the ideal solution to this dilemma. The two books do exist, they have been published by a respectable publisher (Vassallucci / Prometheus), they were on sale for a while, they figure in libraries’ catalogues, yet I have never met anyone who had read them. Since my family and my friends cannot read Dutch, there is a distinct possibility that no living soul has ever set eyes om my poems. It is a very reassuring thought. Every January, the publisher sends me a nice little letter with an account of my royalties for the past twelve months. It amounts every time to exactly 0,00 euros.

By contrast, I have actually met people who have read some of my short stories and I am very happy about that. Short stories are different: you are not expected to lay bare your soul, you just tell a story. For me, it’s like telling it to a couple of good friends – or good listeners, it is usually the same thing.

MLQ: What element of this collection particularly grabbed you, made you feel, *yes,* this is what I want to take on?

Emma Ramadan: What I loved about these stories was how funny they were, how clever they were, while still shedding a new and valuable light on Morocco, on language, on our globalized world. It’s so rare that truly funny books are published in translation – almost as if there’s this idea that translated literature has to be incredibly serious, “important,” heavy. I’ve heard people say that reading translated literature is like eating your vegetables. Why is that? Probably because there’s so little money in translated literature that American publishers feel like if a book hasn’t won 7 awards and gone through 16 printings and been translated into 30 other languages, it’s not worth it. These stories show a book doesn’t have to be a chore to read to expand our minds, to teach us something new about a particular place or way of life.

MLQ: So, as Emma says, the stories do sometimes expand our thinking. Do you ever think of this, as you work?

FL: I do, from time to time. As a reader, I want to learn something, almost in every page of the book I am reading – that’s why I love biographies (I am currently reading Abraham Pais’ book on Einstein). As a writer, I want to reciprocate. My publisher hates it. “Fouad, it’s not a lecture, it’s a novel!” In my new novel (‘Ce vain combat que tu mènes au monde’) which Julliard publishes next month (August 2016), there is a whole chapter on the History of science – my publisher has succeeded in reducing that chapter from 100 pages to 20… On the other hand, you don’t have to give a lecture when you write. The reader can learn a lot ‘about a particular place or way of life’, as Emma says, in a novel which does not look like a college course.  That is why I love reading Jane Austen.

MLQ: Many of your stories have a strong oral element, stories that foreground storytellers (as well as listeners getting a word in edgewide), while, as Laila says in her introduction, the reader eavesdrops. It would be quite a feat to shoehorn them into classical literary Arabic, but was there ever a time when you thought of writing in Darija?

FL: I have thought of writing in darija, as an act of heroic folly. Someone has to start. But how do you do it? There is no established tradition you can refer to. What alphabet would you use? If you use the Latin alphabet, you could be accused of being a traitor who wants to undermine the Arabic language and, as a consequence, Islam (think of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk). If you use the Arabic alphabet, there are some redoubtable technical problems… It will take 2, 3 or 4 generations of daredevil writers before darija is established. I can’t wait that long. I shall continue to write in French.

MLQ: You’ve said that a Dutch translation of your work seemed to you “cruder, less polished” than the original, and surmised part of that had to do with the language. How do you see yourself in the English-language mirror? Do you look different?

FL: No. I like what I see in the mirror. The English translation is much closer to the original tone and nuances. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that English has been used by all kinds of people, of cultures, of temperaments. Dutch seems cruder because the Dutch tend to be straightforward: they ‘tell it as it is’. I remember an occurrence when I had to use the word… shall we say ‘derrière’, in describing a young lady. I used an old and cute little French word, ‘popotin’, to do so. The Dutch translator used ‘kont’, which is the Dutch equivalent of ‘ass’… The nuance was gone. I was mortified when I read the translation.

MLQ: Does Fouad’s fluency in English restrict you from playing around with possibilities? You’ve now had two living, English-fluent writers in a row: Is this a benefit or a drawback?

ER: I didn’t feel restricted at all! Some of the other authors I’ve translated have wanted to be more hands on, more involved. With Fouad, I asked him about parts I didn’t understand, and then he read the whole translation over once I had finished it and sent me some notes on places where I missed a reference, but he didn’t try to change the way I had translated plays on words or jokes or anything like that – which I like to think is because he approved? Maybe he can speak to that. But Fouad’s fluency in English was definitely a benefit for me.

MLQ: A sense of being both amused and amusing weaves through your writing, even in the poetry, where I expect it least. There’s also a wide range of humorous tints, from dark to buffoonish. Why…humor?

FL: My uncle, the famous historian Abdallah Laroui, once told my French publisher: “My nephew’s style is ironic and humorous. I have no idea where it comes from: we Laroui’s are renowned for our lack of humor.” If my uncle the genius cannot answer the question, how could I?

MLQ: Did you read the dialogue aloud as you read it? What aspects of the soundscape did you particularly focus on capturing and recreating in the English?

ER: I definitely read the stories aloud after I translated them to make sure they came off as realistic dialogue, to make sure the jokes worked (at least to me). Fouad’s voice is really strong throughout these stories, and in all of his work. The voice sort of screams off the page and so I think the humor is very much crafted in his voice even in English – I didn’t try to Americanize the humor or make it sound like jokes I would tell. The humor actually reads as a bit British to me.

MLQ: So the humor (humour?) reads as a bit British to Emma. It reads as French to me, or maybe French cosmopolitan. What would uncle Abdallah say?

FL: Uncle Abdallah would grumble something like: “What can you expect from a Moroccan who was educated in French schools and then spent years in Cambridge and York?”

MLQ: Did any aspect of the humor resist translation?

ER: Fouad is really, really good with plays on words, and this book is full of them. Translating that sort of thing is always quite difficult, but I managed to find solutions I liked for all of them but one. One thing he does in the story “Bennani’s Bodyguard” is he misspells the French word for bodyguard (guard du corps) throughout the story (once as gardkor, once as gardicor, etc), to reflect and poke fun at the accent of Moroccans speaking French. And once in the same story the characters call a BMW a BM, which Fouad explained to me was to poke fun at how these young Moroccan kids were so unfamiliar with expensive cars that they couldn’t even get the name of a BMW right. Things like that I ended up dropping in English for the most part, this play with accents and dialects that works so well in French but didn’t seem to in English. But overall I think the humorous story arcs work in English. The idea of swimming in sand or on grass is just as ridiculous in English as in French, and in “Born Nowhere” too, poking fun at Morocco’s bureaucratic systems or at this uncle who goes to these extreme lengths to ensure his nephew can vote for him in an election twenty-one years later – the situations are absurd but also believable in countries like Morocco, and therein lies the humor, which I think translates. One thing about Fouad’s humor is that it certainly requires a certain understanding of the world, of what life might be like in other countries. But I think your average reader of short stories in translation is someone familiar with, or at least interested in, other countries and cultures, someone with an open mind and the ability to imagine.

MLQ: I think in some cases it’s better to skip the joke rather than to ruin it? That one sour or hamhanded joke can sink a story?

ER: I agree! And I certainly hope I didn’t do that in my translation. Others will have to be the judge.

MLQ: I see that “Dislocation” has been read as an anti-feminist story, because of its ending. But I’m interested in why you chose that incantatory manner, why that was the path to get to your end, the slippers-off relief of the final moment.

FL: When I was a student, I was fascinated by a question posed by Freud: how come that badly injured soldiers keep on re-living their horrible trauma, the moment that the bullet hit them? Would it not be more natural, from a Darwinian point of view, that we evolved a mechanism by which we could forget traumatic memories? When I started writing Dislocation, I put myself in a kind of trance in which I started by asking myself a ‘traumatic’ question: how would it feel to be an absolute foreigner, with nothing familiar in the world around me? And then, remembering Freud, I kept on asking and asking the same question, with some increment, a new idea, a new memory, every time. I wrote the whole story in one go, till the last word. I then ‘woke up’ and realized that I had been writing for hours… The slippers-off relief had brought me down to Earth, to life, to the familiar and reassuring world.

MLQ: Emma, how did you see the ending of “Dislocation,” where the wife takes off the husband’s slippers?

ER: I was surprised when someone at the event Fouad and I did at CUNY in March brought this up as a point of contention. I read the ending as a man who feels completely out of place in the country he lives in coming back home, to the only place on earth where he feels like himself, because it is filled with love and acceptance and above all, habit. That moment when his wife removes his slippers, he’s reminded of why all of his dislocation is worth it – he has chosen this life for himself because of his love for his wife, the love they share makes his discomfort as a Moroccan living in Utrecht worth it, and in that moment when she takes his slippers off, all of his panic disappears. I often do little things like this for my partner, and never do I feel as though I am allowing him to impose his male domination upon me. Maybe some readers are tempted to interpret it that way because the character is a Moroccan man and we have that preconceived notion of Arab/Islamic culture.

MLQ: How do you see your work talking with Driss Chraibi’s?

FL: Something strange happened when my first novel, Les Dents du topographe, was published in 1996. I received a phone call by Driss Chraibi, who had got my number through my publisher. At that time, I thought he was dead (no one had heard from him for a long time), so I suspected a hoax. But after a while, I realized it was really he who was talking to me. I remember only one thing: he told me that Les Dents du topographe was the new Passé simple. Now, as you know, Chraibi’s Le Passé simple, published in 1954, is probably the Great Moroccan Novel. You can imagine how elated I felt. The next spring, I went to France, to Crest, to visit him. It became a tradition: I kept on visiting till his death in 2007. We shared many thoughts, inclinations, points of view, the only difference being that he was a kind of anarchist and I do not believe in anarchism, I am far too rational for that. We shared a lot of laughs – and food: his Scottish wife, Sheena, could make a wonderful couscous (no haggis, fortunately).

MLQ: Did you imagine any English-language texts as you were working out how to make it sound?

ER: Honestly, no – I don’t read a lot of “funny” books come to think of it – how sad is that? I mentioned earlier Fouad’s voice felt very strong to me and I let that guide me. But I was reminded of the book Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi and translated by Bernard Adams, which is really funny and the humor also hinges on having an understanding of many different cultures.

MLQ: Fouad, do you read funny books? What strikes you as funny in writing (or film)?

FL: I love reading ‘funny’ books, but then I find almost every book funny. Céline’s masterpiece Voyage au bout de la nuit makes me laugh when I am supposed to cry. A truly great book… When Kafka was reading his short stories aloud to his friends (a very small circle), he used to burst frequently into laughter. We are too serious or not cruel enough. What strikes as funny is how clumsy we are when we try to take life too seriously.

From a review of Muhammad Zafzaf’s The Elusive Fox, trans. Mbarek Sryfi and Roger Allen, that can be read in full at Qantara, “One rule for them.”

It opens:

The ′60s generation of US writers was shaped by a Morocco that emerged in the writings of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles and many others. This Morocco was frightening, welcoming, exotic, hallucinatory and completely ″new″. It was a space not just to be read, but written.

These works inspired young travellers and coastal Morocco swelled as a popular destination for American and European counter-cultural drifters, hedonists, artists and others.

This, of course, did not go unmarked by Morocco′s artists and writers. Muhammad Zafzaf (1945-2001), the twentieth century′s ″godfather of Moroccan literature″, was, in the 1960s, a young writer, a student and later a Casablanca high-school teacher.

His 1989 novel ″The Elusive Fox″ may have been based on some of his own experiences and observations, as translator Mbarek Sryfi notes in his afterword. The book is set during one 1960s summer in coastal Essaouira. It′s populated by the European hippies who floated around Morocco, but written from the point of view of Ali, a long-haired gym teacher from Casablanca who travels out to the country′s west coast because he too wants to smoke hash, drink wine, enjoy free love and swim nude in the ocean.

Rife with contradiction

The book highlights many of the divisions and contradictions of the ″global″ counter-cultural movement, as staged in small-town coastal Morocco. In the opening pages, Ali meets a tough, ″tomboyish″ Moroccan woman. He′s looking for a sleep and she tells a hotel clerk that Ali can share her room. ″I′ve an extra bed.″

Contradictions are immediate. The clerk forbids her to share her room with an unrelated man, threatening her with expulsion if she does. When she argues that the European hippies do it, he tells her ″All the boss cares about is money.″ As to why she can′t: ″You′re a Muslim woman.″

This female lead, Fatima Hajjouj, first appears strong and brave and willing to transgress almost any rule of sexual and body politics. This is how she remains around European hippies and village peasants.

Yet when she′s around a wealthy Moroccan man with status, Azeddine, she turns suddenly weak and submissive, allowing him to mock her. Ali is at first shocked. But then he surmises that Fatima is just ″hiding the viper inside her, just as I was hiding my own fox, surveying everything going on with a quiet prudence.″

Poverty is also appears to be a different experience, depending on whether you′re European or Moroccan. Ali′s poverty as a high-school teacher makes it almost impossible for him to move around the country. Meanwhile, the ″penniless″ European hippies might be broke, but still have enough money to buy alcohol and hash and always enough to keep moving.

″They′re all that way,″ one character says. ″They don′t have a penny, but they still travel. I don′t know how they do it. A month or two later, they′re sending you postcards from somewhere else in the world.″

You can read the full review at Qantara. 

There are two volumes of poetry by Prix Goncourt winner Abdellatif Laâbi out in fresh English translations this year:

The first, Beyond the Barbed Wire, is out from Carcanet this month. The second is In Praise of Defeat, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and introduced by the poet-translator Pierre Joris, published by Archipelago, set for release in November.

The poems in Beyond the Barbed Wire were translated and selected by André Naffis-Sahely, introduced, somewhat surprisingly, not by a Moroccan poet or scholar but by American poet Jim Moore.

Moore connects with Laâbi urgent work as a poet, but also personally: “I wish Abdellatif Laâbi had been with me, some forty years ago, when I was in prison! Laâbi and I were almost exactly the same age, and halfway across the world from each other the Moroccan poet and I were doing time.”

While in prison, Moore discovered a hidden book of poetry in which, he said, inmates had written poems that were important to them. “I hadn’t quite understood that poetry doesn’t only matter to people with college educations; that it is a medium that those in trouble turn to instinctively.”

The poems in this collection are pulled from different moments in Laâbi’s acclaimed career, with the largest selection coming from his from his 1981 collection, The Poem Beneath the Gag, and his 1993 collection The World’s Embrace.

A poem from the first, “Letter to My Friends Overseas,” appeared in Asymptote. There, Naffis-Sahely wrote that “The original text of ‘Lettre à mes amis d’outre-mer’/’Letter To My Friends Overseas’ was first published in La Nouvelle Critique in August 1978, after being smuggled out of prison piecemeal to friends of Laâbi’s in France and later reassembled.”

It opens:

Friends
you’ve become
one of those beacons of light
who help to defend me
from the forceps of the night

Laâbi is still concerned with the work of imprisoned poets, and recently brought Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within from Arabic into French.

His “Death” also came from that collection, which opens with the ringing and plain-spoken:

Here I am aged thirty-three years
and I too start to think
about death
I’m not talking
about death with a capital D
but simply my own
which might come any day now
and is an experience with which
I must settle some scores

An interview with Naffis-Sahely just published in Guernica sheds light on the poems that he chose for his collection.

Donald Nicholson-Smith, we can assume, chose different poems. One appeared in March in Bomb, “Poems Fallen from the Train.” Its urgency is somewhat different, and it is laced with humor. And this wonderful line:

Reading sometimes means
being humiliated for not writing

These two collections represent a major push toward making Laâbi’s work more available in English; they will be interesting to read against one another.