{"id":6851,"date":"2022-01-31T09:46:38","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T07:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=6851"},"modified":"2025-03-20T11:54:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T09:54:01","slug":"poetic-justice-70-contemporary-poets-of-morocco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/poetic-justice-70-contemporary-poets-of-morocco\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetic Justice: 70+ Contemporary Poets of Morocco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry<\/em>
\nEdited and Translated by Deborah Kapchan with Driss Marjane
\nUniversity of Texas Press<\/a> (2019)
\nISBN \u00a09781477318492<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

El Habib Louai<\/h4>\n

Poetry has long been my first love, and reading and writing poetry has been a most favorable preoccupation during this prolonged pandemic. I find it soothes one\u2019s troubled spirits and provides sustenance, particularly in insecure times.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Poetic Justice<\/em><\/a> is the published by the University of Texas Press<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Deborah Kapchan\u2019s anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry, featuring more than 70 poets, has indeed been a soothing balm for me and for my limited circle of professional teachers, and I assume for any committed admirers of poetry and arts, during the subsequent months of the pandemic when everybody here in Morocco has been confined at home, waiting for the events of a life-changing calamity to unfold. It was near impossible to receive books in Morocco through the mail during the first months of the pandemic and everything seemed chaotic and unpredictable, but at least there was a possibility to read online and exchange one\u2019s translations and latest writings through the virtual world \u2014 technology turns out to be not such a bad thing after all and it certainly brings us together, albeit at a distance, when the habitus of the external world become threatening.<\/p>\n

Poetic Justice<\/em> has tried to do justice to all the various schools and modes of Moroccan poetry through a representative body of work that underscores the different sensibilities characteristic of the Moroccan poetry scene across historical periods. I emphasize the fact that this anthology \u201chas tried\u201d since there is always room for unheard or irretrievable voices that might have been overlooked inadvertently. Kapchan does acknowledge in the introduction that, \u201cwith a few exceptions, the younger generation of poets is not included in this volume,<\/span>\u201d <\/span>and notes that her intention was to concentrate principally on Moroccan poets who felt more at ease expressing themselves and sharing their views and ontological experiences of the land, its people, culture and history in Tamazight, Arabic or French.<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, the most distinctive feature of Poetic Justice<\/em> lies in its appreciation, appraisal and celebration of the oral tradition and indigenous poetic sensibilities of Moroccan Amazigh poets and Moroccan Zajal rhapsodists. Ahmed Lemsyeh, a Zajal poet himself, paid his dues for his valuable assistance in tracking down Amazigh poems at The Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture<\/a> in Rabat and for having put Kapchan in touch with many other poets who might have been overlooked or effaced from Mohammed Bennis\u2019s canonical \u201cshort list.\u201d This humbleness expressed by Lemsyeh illustrates a revival in the all-embracing spirit of an authentic artist who believes in cultural diversity on mutual grounds.<\/p>\n

Kapchan appreciates and stresses the importance of orality\/aurality as distinctive modes of expression that permeate our Moroccan poetic spectrum, by dwelling on some instances of Zajal (poetry in Moroccan Arabic, or Darija). Ahmed Lemsyeh is representative of this movement and his poems are quite sarcastic in their critique of greed, banal shallowness and malicious behavior, brought about by a capitalistic metamorphosis witnessed by a society that has recently started to move away from an agrarian standard of living. With a certain kind of angst and malaise, he addresses his readers:<\/p>\n

Give me your attention
\nAnd listen carefully to my words
\nI want to listen to my bones
\nI ate too much guinea fowl and now I\u2019m sick
\nI want to reconcile with my days
\nI want a cave where I can sequester myself
\nI\u2019m sick of crowds
\nI want to be a letter and its envelope
\nA burning coal that\u2019s wrapped in darkness
\nThere are things hiding in my head
\nEntanglements that won\u2019t be resolved except by death
\nLife is a flower with a worm<\/p>\n

Like the ill-tempered and sarcastic personas of Lemsyeh, Driss Amghar Mesnaoui points to this impoverishment of the soul and scandalous absurdity that enshrouds Man\u2019s life on a planet that is constantly dismembered by man-made materialistic desires and needs. Almost like a destitute person who finds himself in a hostile environment, the poet struggles to disentangle himself from a deplorable reality only to fall prey to alienation resulting from the indifference of those on whose behalf he speaks. Mesnaoui articulates:<\/p>\n

From the white hell
\nI gathered the splinters of life
\nI discovered my time is the time of myself
\nSometimes it makes me remember my duties
\nSometimes it makes me forget.
\nThe new world is based on
\n\u201cDon\u2019t do as I do
\nDo as I say\u201d
\nSee the needy getting more impoverished
\nand the rich getting even richer.
\nWill I, after this old disaster,
\nseek more riches?<\/p>\n

A number of poems in the anthology ponder the political legacy of Moroccan history, especially those periods of upheaval and confusion engraved on the collective memory and hearts of the people as \u201cThe Years of Lead.\u201d Artists, political dissidents and democracy activists were imprisoned and subjected to torture in hidden dungeons, simply because they held a different view from what was widely recognized as the status quo. Abdellah Rajie deplores most loudly the misery of his time and the condition of his oppressed people in the post-independence era, in a metaphorical language that risks demarcating him as a delusional nihilist instead of a witness to an era that yearned for emancipation. Rajie\u2019s flame burned silently in his interiority, in every line he inscribed, aspiring for a homeland where love reigns harmoniously and simultaneously with freedom:<\/p>\n

For you oh homeland oppression is drawn on the walls of the heart
\nHere I am leaving the shadow of my sweetheart and the eyes of my sweetheart
\nto follow your shadow
\nHere I am changing you into a suitcase of love oh homeland<\/p>\n

Mostafa Houmir bemoans the death of one of his intimate comrades in his elegy \u201cThe Wall\u201d without holding any grudge towards the oppressor:<\/p>\n

I implore the Almighty
\nTo pardon
\nMy torturers
\nAnd all the monsters of the earth.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Salah El Ouadie, a political prisoner who suffered under the cruel machinery of a despotic political system, contemplates in \u201cTazmamart\u201d the ordeal of incarceration and entreats the ruler to have mercy on his subjects:<\/p>\n

How many tears were shed there?
\nHow many shudders did your hands know?
\nHow many painful sighs rose to the highest sky
\nfalling down to the ground to overwhelm
\nmy ears wet with moaning?
\n\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..
\nYou
\nwho will rule over people
\nleave
\nan instant of affection
\nfor your heart<\/p>\n

Issues of gender and sexuality are also presented in a manner that reflects the controversial polemic about women\u2019s agency, their rights as free subjectivities as well as their roles in a new socioeconomic condition segmented by neoliberal values and technological commodification. Rita El Khayat, for instance, dwells on the issues of forced marriage and sexual abuse to which women are subjected in conjugal relationships, established usually under the patronage of a fatherly figure. In her poem \u201cThe Raped Flower,\u201d El Khayat describes the physical and emotional damage that Amina undergoes because of archaic legal inequality. She laments:<\/p>\n

The judge married you
\nto the man who raped you
\nYour sex ripped apart like a crushed flower
\nbled yet again
\n\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..
\nThe judge, Amina, here in these parts
\nis an eager and perverse coward
\nbribery a manure in his stomach<\/p>\n

In Mohamed Achaari\u2019s poem \u201cA Stone Tale,\u201d the woman is portrayed as an insurgent individual that transcends the limits of the patriarchal representations of her as a docile angel to become a rebellious agent aware of disparities permeating dysfunctional matrimonial relationships. Achaari\u2019s persona ruminates on the possibilities of return to a woman\u2019s authentic self as a belated performer in the narrative of unrequited love:<\/p>\n

She wants nothing the way it is
\nShe wants to leave him
\nA traditional tale indeed . . .
\nBut whatever the woman does
\nshe will not leave her husband
\nIt is too late
\nthe two men have aged
\nAnd love is no longer a man
\nbut a story
\nNothing in it is clear but a woman
\nIf she could find it within herself
\nshe would escape the tale
\nrelease her life to the wind<\/p>\n

Similarly, Mehdi Akhrif appears to value in a celebratory manner a prototype of woman who is not depicted as a cheerful constituent that embellishes the male\u2019s environs, but rather as an intellectually fierce agent with an indispensable part to the play in the ontological experience as such. Akhrif is in quest for women who:<\/p>\n

gather kindling from the ashes of
\nwords
\nAnd women
\nigniting with agony
\non the mirrors of words.
\nI have women who safeguard my despair.
\nThey are the orphan\u2019s flowers.<\/p>\n

Mohamed Bennis\u2019s Andalusian \u201cOther Self\u201d in a Jungian sense, with all its unacknowledged proclivities and desires, owes a great deal of gratitude to the women of his country for their nobility, care and intelligence. He invokes a category of women different from the ones who are stereotypically portrayed as ignorant, idle and instinctive beings with a propensity for conspiracy and intrigues. Bennis expresses this sense of recognition in the following verses:<\/p>\n

I am the one raised on women\u2019s laps
\nand between their festive hands
\nThey were the ones who taught me poetry, script
\nand the Qur\u2019an
\nFrom their secrets I learned what others
\nhardly knew<\/p>\n

In this perpetual quest for the genuine meaning of love and affection, both the female and the male find themselves in awkward situations analogous to contrived chivalric theatrical scenes in postmodern times. The beloved and the lover play their assumed roles in spaces such as parks, airports or Caf\u00e9 de l\u2019Opera, where Taha Adnan\u2019s persona, due to discrimination against immigrants, looked like \u201ca spot of oil\/ On a white shirt,\u201d a setting where he is scrutinized by \u201ca Flemish woman disguised as baroness in a classic film\u201d while \u201cclutching her handbag between her arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issues of gender and sexuality are propounded in relation to exiles and \u00e9migr\u00e9s, as in Yassin Adnan who responds with a poem that anticipates, in apocalyptic epithets, the aftermath of oppressed people as they approach the 2000s. Yassin invokes more consciously the condition of immigrants gazed at suspiciously in public spaces, those driven out of their countries due to ethnic and religious conflicts. Yassin draws his readers\u2019 attention to the ordeal of these oppressed minorities when he affirms:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t come here by chance
\nI crossed seas and deserts
\nI saw corpses hanging down
\nfrom wire cables in abandoned towns
\nI passed Yazidi Kurds
\nwith the picture of the devil
\non the walls of their shrine in northern
\nIraq
\nwho suddenly started reciting their
\nsacred legend
\nto naked grandchildren<\/p>\n

Indigenous people\u2019s culture, traditions, rights and prerogatives are also explored in poems by Amazigh writers such as Ali Sedki Azaykou, one of the first Amazigh poets to turn to the politics of language and cultural identity. In his poem \u201cWords,\u201d which I would rather translate as \u201cLanguage,\u201d Azaykou insists on identifying and glorifying Tamazight as a space for self-enunciation to ward off linguistic discrimination and cultural amnesia:<\/p>\n

Amazigh is my verb.
\nno one understands it
\nbearer of so much meaning
\nwho can dance on it?
\nalone I hold fast to it
\nmy verb suspended
\nlike a rope around my neck
\nmy language still alive
\ncontinues to speak
\nin the middle of the deaf; it is not tired
\nthe thirsty word must
\nquench our thirst<\/p>\n

There is also Khadija Arouhal who turns to natural components like the flower, as an emblem of the sublime and virtuous worthiness, to guide her through dark dungeons and save her from the lies of a miserable and corrupt world. She is weary of unrealistic political ballyhoo that merely tickles na\u00efve simpletons and she seems to find a solace in supplicating Amazigh mythical figures like \u2018Ounamir\u2019 and \u2018Tanirt\u2019 to redeem her from a land where justice is not only blind, but also devoid of common sense:<\/p>\n

Oh horse of Ounamir
\nbecause the foot gets weary
\nthe way is endless
\nthe heel bruised
\nthe gravel
\nhas no mercy!
\nLift me up!
\nRaise me!
\nWill I find Tanirt
\nwaiting for me?
\nWill I find
\npeace among the stars
\nand a path without thorns?
\nWill I find a land where rights
\nexist?
\nI would like to forget you oh earth.
\nI would like to forget myself<\/p>\n

Ali Chouhad, who is equally an engaged Amazigh singer and a lyricist with a sensitive disposition, embraces poetry or the spoken word as an elementary practice that endows him with a sense of originality and ethical basis against wickedness, injustice and vices of the mundane world. Chouhad would rather resort to poetry as a sublime and liberating artistic form than surrender to the banality and ignorance. Poetry, in his view, coalesces both pleasure and difficult labor as it struggles to come into being. He confesses, \u201cVerses do no harm to garner blame\/ they make no one a gainful income.\u201d Poetry does not seek to retaliate or accumulate bounties at the expense of other people\u2019s honor, dignity and right to difference. It is a raison d\u2019etre, a fountain that does not dry up nor die. His last outcry deprecates the herd\u2019s persistent indulgence in self-destruction and pursuit of ignoble causes that disperse its efforts. Chouhad laments:<\/p>\n

Oh poetry!<\/p>\n

How much time do I need to warn
\nthe herd that rushes to the summit
\nI have no more worries, I no longer expect the worst
\nLet them fall into the abyss without any rescue<\/p>\n

Poetic Justice<\/em> captures the urgency of the situation by blending some of the representative poetic voices of the past with new sensibilities embraced by contemporary Moroccan poets who experienced the conflicts of the \u201cArab Spring,\u201d the War on Terror and immigration crises. It has equally included other voices that participated in the aesthetic experience as such without necessarily belonging or enmeshing themselves in identity politics. By doing so, this anthology underscores the perpetual virtues that the poetic brings to a fragmented human reality. Implicitly, it reiterates that Hegelian classical formula which propounds that, \u201cpoetry has always been and is still the most universal and widespread teacher of the human race\u201d (Hegel\u2019s Aesthetics<\/em>, Vol. 2, 972; Hegel, Werke, Vol. 15, 239\u201340).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazigh Moroccan poet El Habib Louai reviews a recent anthology that has warmed the hearts of English-reading Moroccans during the 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