Abdellatif Laâbi

This is basically a bildungsroman set in the years just before Morocco regained its independence from colonial rule in the mid-20th century. Some of it is charming, as we follow the adventures of young Namouss exploring the medina, meeting a good many interesting characters, spending time with his father in the saddlery shop, avoiding his mother's tirades, and getting an introduction to languages at the Franco-Muslim school. Reading it was also a frustrating experience for me, however, as the underlying Moroccan history that should inform the story is unknown to me. Some references to the past, to politics, or to cultural and religious practices were given end notes, but a great many were not. I found my efforts to do quick informative research on the internet often met with less than helpful results, and I was simply thrown out of the story too frequently for me to enjoy it on its merits. I also think there are some translation issues, as an occasional sentence seemed to have no meaning in context. I won't rate the book, given that most of the failing here is mine, and YMMV.… (mere)

In Praise of Defeat: Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi by Abdellatif Laâbi is an anthology of the poets work from 1965 through 2014. Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco. He is one of the founders of the artistic journal Souffles. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergence. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World. Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was, in 1985, forced into exile in France.

Here is a man who was a revolutionary with the pen instead of the gun. His work not only landed him in prison, but he continued to write while imprisoned. Of all the poems in the collection, the poetry from his imprisonment is the most powerful. He writes of the torture of the innocents and yet he writes of the prison torturer as a person who wonders if he can support his wife and five children and how much food prices will rise and what the late rains will so. He is a normal man until he starts his job.

Write, write, write is Laabi's message from prison even though that is exactly what put him in there. Write in a cell 1.3 meters by 2.3 meters which part is blocked by a concrete bed. A small window, a squat toilet, and iron door with a sliding slat, and the luxury of a small wooden shelf make up the poet's world. It is a dismal life even without a trip to see the torturer. Yet, from this existence, the writing gains strength:

Then we started to talk as the world around us became more real, as poetry made us more human, as our people by virtue of its struggles provide us with a livable nation, and as we ourselves awoke to the meaning of commitment.
“Chronicle of the Citadel of Exile

They banned my poems
My name
They exiled me to an island
of concrete and rust
they placed a number
On my back…
“Four Years”

From the 1993 collection The World’s Embrace “The Poem Tree” tells of the extinction of poetry:

From time to time the memory of men gets saturated. At that point they jettison the most cumbersome and make room for the novelties that so infatuate them.

He compares poetry in the modern world to a tree unable to move, but resilient to efforts to manipulate it. The tree provides different fruits in different seasons -- some sweet and others venom. It protects itself from predators with its own thorns. But unlike the novelties of the world, cell phones, gaming consoles, and video entertainment on demand, this is living breathing art that has set its roots and fights to survive in the world.

Laâbi work is in the original French on the left side of the book and English on the right. Donald Nicholson-Smith does a superb job of translating the work to English. I can not vouch for the structural portion of the translations, but in relaying the message, art, and the emotion of the original it would be difficult to find any better translation. Without this translation, Laâbi’s work would most likely not have an English speaking audience. A great collection of poetry and struggle lasting over fifty years. It remarkable that in the modern world that such repression can be fought and exposed with poetry and not violence.


… (mere)

Abdellatif Laabi is one of the most famous of the Moroccan poets who wrote in French and whose work can be considered roughly postcolonial in both its political fervor and in its searching explorations of identity, power, and history. Here we have a massive collection of his major poems from 1965 to very nearly the present, brought together by the poet and his translator Donald Nicholson-Smith together. With characteristic attention to detail and integrity, independent press Archipelago Books has published In Praise of Defeat in a handsome en face edition, meaning that the original French text appears facing Nicholson-Smith's translation -- a feat of generosity and courage by both Archipelago's publisher Jill Schoolman and Nicholson-Smith, who has said publicly that he welcomes and actively wants to enable reader second-guessing. Since the selection was made by the poet himself, this is a book that currently exists in English only. The result is a major event in the history of francophone literatures of Africa and a survey of a body of poetry that is by turns scarifying, lyrical, ardent, and ferocious.… (mere)

Beautifully written by Morrocan poet Abdellatif Laâbi, this autobiographical novel is based on his childhood in Fez during the 1950s. Having recently read Laâbi's memoir [Rue du Retour], the account of his eight and a half years in prison for "crimes of opinion" and his struggles to reintegrate after his release, I found reading this lyrical and gentle story an interesting counterpoint to the brutality depicted in his philosophical memoir.

The book opens with an adult narrator reuniting with his family at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. As he waits for his brother, who has a complicated relationship with the family, the narrator's thoughts return to his childhood, beginning when he was seven or eight. Nicknamed Namouss (Mosquito) by his playmates for his flighty inability to keep still, the narrator relates vignettes of family life, going to school, exploring a wider section of the ancient city, and peripherally notes the beginnings of a nascent movement against the French colonizers and for national liberation.

I particularly liked his descriptions of encountering French for the first time, his early love for books and desire to own them, and the descriptions of the souks and winding streets of the ancient city of Fez. He depicts his family with affection, and it seems that the book is in a way a tribute to them. His father is a saddle maker and works hard to support his family, yet finds time to teach young Namouss to swim. His mother is prone to dramatic outbursts and outrageous claims, but lives for her family and is happiest when the center of her bustling household.

Although there are no great philosophical insights or denouements in the story, it is a pleasurable glimpse into a time and place that no longer exists. And if things are seen through rose-colored glasses, it is perhaps a balm for the troubled soul that spent his young adulthood in prison.… (mere)