Mohamed Choukri |
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Collection title
Namadidj
First broadcast date
07/27/2001
Abstract
Interview with the Moroccan Arabic-speaking writer Mohamed Choukri (1935-2003). Author of the famous novel “Pain nu”, Mohamed Choukri lived in the city of Tangiers. A city that occupies a large place in his writings.
Audiovisual form
Magazine
Primary theme
Languages and literatures
Secondary themes
- Tourism and cultural sites
Credits / Cast
- Talbi Abdellatif - Director
- Latifi Maria - Journalist
Map locations
- Morocco - North - Tangiers
Context
Mohamed Choukri
Richard Jacquemond
During the time Morocco was a French protectorate (Spanish on its northern coastline), Tangier had an “international status” which lasted from 1925 to 1956 (with a break from 1940 to 1945). This period in the city's history is often presented as its golden age, a time of spreading international influence, an atmosphere of cosmopolitan co-existence, especially since at the time the city was attracting many European and American writers and artists (but also a whole underworld linked to smuggling and the drug economy). This image was fuelled by King Hassan II virtually abandoning northern Morocco during his reign (1961-1999), an act of retaliation for the Rif rebellion (1959-61). Things changed in 1999 with the accession of his son, Mohammed VI. The first years of his reign were marked both by political liberalization and a new willingness to tie the North in with the rest of the country, in particular by starting a series of major development projects.
The writer Mohamed Choukri (1935-2003) is closely associated with Tangier. He lived there most of his life and the town provides a framework for almost all his writings. In his most famous work, Le pain nu (The naked bread), using a crude, stripped-down language, he writes about his wretched childhood and adolescence in a city which, in his oppressed condition, he had no idea was going through a “golden age”. Nevertheless he remembers some happy moments during this black period, “stolen” he said. For him real life began with Morocco's independence in 1956: that was when, aged 21, he learned to read and write. He went to study at the Ecole Normale de Larache, returning to Tangier “to teach the oppressed like [himself]”. Le pain nu, written in 1970-71, was immediately translated into English by Paul Bowles (1973), the American writer who lived in Tangier and was close to Choukri. In 1979 it was translated into French by the French-language Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, another child of Tangier, but when Mohamed Choukri had the original Arabic version printed in Morocco, at his own expense, it was immediately censored. He published it in London and the Moroccan ban was only lifted in 2000. When this documentary was made, Choukri was in the evening of his life, an internationally recognized writer and a major figure in the cultural life of Tangier.
So this archive film, made by the Moroccan public channel M2 in 2001, could not have been produced before or afterwards. It took a change of monarch in 1999 for Choukri to become persona grata on Moroccan TV, and probably also for Tangier to be shown as it is here, and within two years the writer had died. The misunderstandings however have not all been lifted: one feels a certain gap between Choukri's uncompromising rhetoric on the one hand, and the beautifully composed images and semi-journalistic, semi-academic commentary on the other. And at no time are we allowed to hear Choukri's own voice, that is to say his literary texts.
Bibliography
Mohamed Choukri, Le pain nu, trad. Tahar Ben Jelloun, Paris, Seuil (Points), 1997 ; Jean Genet et Tennessee Williams à Tanger, Paris, Quai Voltaire, 1992
Michel Peraldi, « Economies criminelles et mondes d’affaire à Tanger », Cultures & conflits, 68, hiver 2007. URL : http://conflits.revues.org/index5973.html
