Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa have been celebrated by the literary world as writers defying tradition in their transgressive tellings of migration, sexuality, and selfhood; yet, in the Anglophone sphere, their works have also been exoticised and misappropriated in Orientalist contexts, filtered through the othering perspectives of a western literary hierarchy. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Alex Tan delineates a reading of these two Moroccan writers that situates them in the vehicles of their own language and cultural context, with the unique ways their writing interrogates the borders of being. This essay is part one of two, the second of which can be read here.
“The Maghrebin is always elsewhere. That’s where he makes himself come true.”
— Habib Tengour, Exile is My Trade (tr. Pierre Joris)
1998, Cairo. Midway through her Modern Arabic literature class at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Professor Samia Mehrez receives urgent missives from the university administration. Though she does not yet suspect the storm to come, she is compelled to cease the lecture and dismiss the students. Walking over to the administrative office, she is greeted with the news that several parents have complained about the inclusion of “pornography” on her syllabus, sufficiently blasphemous to “corrupt an entire generation.”
What text could claim such power? At the heart of the controversy was Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (translated by Paul Bowles into English as For Bread Alone), which would soon precipitate the eruption of a nation-wide culture war over the uses of literature in the classroom.
Fast forward to 2012—El Jadida in Morocco, six years after Abdellah Taïa comes out as gay in the magazine Tel Quel and is hailed as the first Arab writer to be open about his homosexuality. Certain Islamist groups, anxious about moral taint, are clamouring for the outlawing of his oeuvre. Taïa had been invited to speak at a university about his latest work to be translated from French into Arabic; unfortunately, before it could happen, professors and students organised a protest to shut down the event. Slogans such as “don’t spread homosexuality on campus” were intoned.
It has become, by now, somewhat commonplace for the West to fetishize Arab writers and intellectuals who suffer widespread condemnation in their countries of origin—particularly from Islamist quarters—before enshrining them in the exclusive club of world literature. One thinks of works like Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell, banned immediately upon its 1966 publication in Egypt, or Haidar Haidar’s A Banquet of Seaweed, which induced accusations of heresy from Al-Azhar clerics and protests by university students against its inclusion on syllabi. At times, it almost seems as if censorship, political oppression, and exile are a rite of passage for international renown—a disturbing reality that signals to us what Anglophone literary markets value in a work from the Arab world.
Such may be the plight confronting an Arab world writer who sets sight on a global (read: primarily Euro-American) market of literary circulation. The brilliant literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito has opined that, after the nahda of nineteenth-century Egypt, Arabs have been unable to write a text without “thinking about the possibility of transferring it into a European language.” Hovering at the back of their mind—consciously or not—might be the spectre of making their work legible to a readership that maintains only a passing familiarity with Arab culture. Often, this audience is imagined as a predominantly white, middle-class, and metropolitan population that consumes novels in its spare time; every now and then, this diet might include a translated tidbit from abroad.
This is to say that, if the Arab writer must constantly perform their Arabness in a palatable way to exist sustainably within the inequalities of an international literary space, then they are always already translating themselves for someone else’s gaze—and not just in a linguistic sense; the gulf to be traversed inevitably includes differences in genre, social milieu, and cultural context.
Choukri and Taïa
We see these tensions in the very contestations over how For Bread Alone was composed and translated. The basic facts are difficult to dispute: Mohamed Choukri, born into destitution in the Rif Mountains, fled from his family early on in his life and migrated to Tangier, where he lived as a vagrant on the streets of the International Zone. As a member of the subaltern class, he was illiterate until, at age twenty, he made the decision to learn to read and write Classical Arabic. He soon made the acquaintance of Paul Bowles, a writer who (alongside Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet) belonged to an epicurean set of expatriate intellectuals that discovered in Morocco, among other things, a sanctuary to indulge their homosexuality, Orientalist fantasies, and visions of primitivism. In the 1960s, Bowles, who understood Darija (Moroccan Arabic), had begun translating the orally recounted memoirs of disenfranchised street youth into English. Choukri seized the opportunity, too, for publication and visibility. He was eager, as he expresses in an interview, to “prove to myself that I was a writer.”
Here is where events begin to blur. Choukri has said that he lied to Bowles about having a manuscript in Classical Arabic, and had actually delivered the original words of For Bread Alone orally. In what language did this interchange take place? If For Bread Alone first assumed written form in Bowles’s English translation, can we say that the English version is the “original” text? The recordings—if they ever existed—have not survived, as far as we know. Later, in an interview, Choukri said that he had dictated his memoir to Bowles in Spanish, and that the latter’s claim to have translated directly from colloquial Moroccan was “an outright lie.” In light of the numerous antagonisms that emerged between Choukri and Bowles later on, it is difficult to know whose word to credit.
A curious fact of this text’s afterlife is that, before it was granted publication in Arabic, it had already circulated in Bowles’s English translation—as an artifact of world literature—for seven years. From the very beginning, then, Choukri’s work can be said to have anticipated its own reaction, and this is further complicated by Bowles’s suspect nostalgia for an exoticised, imaginary Morocco. In his introduction to For Bread Alone, he romanticises and exceptionalises Choukri, the “illiterate,” as someone who “remembers everything.” One wonders how his personal politics may have informed the process of translation. Did Choukri feel a need to inflect the account of his own poverty and illiteracy to conform to Bowles’s terms? And how will the expectations of the Anglophone reader, coming to For Bread Alone for the first time, be shaped by Bowles’s portrait?
Something similar is observable in Salvation Army, the English translation of Abdellah Taïa’s L’armée du Salut. The famous gay writer Edmund White, in the introduction, emphasises that the narrator is “foreign to us, our world foreign to him”—appearing to cement an irrevocable otherness between a First World ‘us’ and a Third World ‘them.’ Who, after all, is this ‘us’? Could it be said to include Anglophone readers who belong outside of America and Europe? The discomfitingly unequal power dynamic at work in both For Bread Alone and Salvation Army should remind us of the translators’ mediation; without Bowles’s intervention and the prestige he had accrued in American letters, Choukri’s work would possibly have never seen the light of day. One can make a case, too, for how White’s whiteness (as it were) ratifies Taïa’s homosexuality and literary merit for Anglophone readers. Quite ironically—perhaps inevitably—White aligns himself with the character Jean in Salvation Army, a domineering Swiss man to whom “everything” in Morocco “was foreign.”
Nothing about a translated novel—or anything that has warranted the fraught label of “world literature”—can be taken for granted. Not even, for instance, the fact that it is marketed as a novel, under which texts, voices, and styles of radically diverse stripes have come to be grouped.
Translating the Untranslatable: Choukri’s Classical Arabic
The challenge for us, if we are to be critical readers of world literature, is the delicate balance of acknowledging pressuring forces of homogenisation in the international literary market—without erasing the complexities of voice which translated works inhabit. This is why, instead of being conjoined under the onus of politics or content, our understanding of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa’s work would be enriched immensely by looking at how they self-reflexively appropriate language itself—Arabic and French, respectively—as a vehicle of desacralisation. To probe the outsized moral panics that have developed around Mohamed Choukri’s and Abdellah Taïa’s writing, we might begin by thinking through the instability of adab—the word that Arabic speakers currently take to mean “literature.”
The scholar Michael Allan points out that, during the Abbasid Caliphate of the ninth century, adab also referred to character, cultivation, and manners. Only during the nineteenth century did adab come to take on the meaning of “new literary forms such as short stories and the novel.” This historical connotation, where literature is seen as synonymous with a particular repertoire of moral sensibilities, persists today. Vis-à-vis Choukri, many people’s objections pivoted off the fact that the text had been written in Classical Arabic to describe ugly realities of sexuality and faithlessness. They insisted that Classical Arabic’s rightful domains—following the Qur’an—were unequivocally those of the moralistic and the beautiful. If only the book had been assigned to students in Paul Bowles’s English translation, they might not have stirred up such a brouhaha.
Classical Arabic, as a language regarded by some as literary and deemed sacred by others, produces a contested scope of what literature is and ought to do. Niloofar Haeri has written that Arab Muslims tend to hold “the relation between the linguistic forms of the Qur’an and their corresponding meanings [to be] nonarbitrary because the text reflects the words of God.” If form and content are essential to each other’s integrity, it makes sense that Arab Muslims act as custodians of Classical Arabic’s sanctity. For them, this could mean preserving the words of divine revelation as they were originally inherited, and keeping the profane world out of Arabic’s reach. More than ensuring the propriety of subject matter, however, their duty entails guarding the beauty and floridity of Classical Arabic—since its very form incarnates its holiness. In the minds of the protestors, perhaps, the absence of stylistic embellishment in Choukri’s work—his self-consciously spare voice—represented a scandalous insult to Classical Arabic’s glorious tradition of ornament and exaltation. Nothing less than their very sense of identity was at stake.
The Qur’an represents the untranslatable text par excellence. In its wake, any literary text’s respect for the sacredness of Arabic—at least from a certain perspective—can perhaps be measured by the degree of its untranslatability. This fact throws into sharper relief the translated afterlives of For Bread Alone. For many detractors, the fact that his work had enjoyed such prestige among non-Arabic speakers inferred that Choukri cannot have written anything meaningful—or, indeed, moral. He must have disfigured the Arabic language to satisfy the modern needs of literariness. At every stage of the text’s production and reception, Choukri desacralises form and content. Desacralisation might be one name for the politics of his aesthetics.
A Language of Silence: Taïa’s French
Taïa’s use of French evinces a similar irreverence, aimed at a colonial language steeped in the echelons of elite power. In Morocco, French carries associations of wealth and prestige, and has frequently been wielded against the poor. Desacralisation, for Taïa, is more of a methodology of defiance against the violence of (neo-)colonialism than, as in Choukri, at the rigidities of institutionalised religion. But given that both writers bespeak a generalised disillusionment in all forms of authority—whether patriarchal, religious, juridical, national or colonial—this kinship is more than felicitous.
In For Bread Alone, Choukri’s Mohamed figures his father as “like Allah,” who “pronounces judgment” on “those who are not here.” This presages his denunciation of divinity: “Did Allah mean to make the world like this, with such disorder and confusion?” Taïa deepens this desacralisation by constantly holding himself at a remove from French, the very medium of his writing, for in the archives of the colonial language, someone like himself would never have been made legible. In Salvation Army, when the narrator’s relationship to the Swiss man Jean turns as stifling as a “prison,” it shatters the fantasies he previously harboured of “freedom in the West.” Hollowed of meaning, freedom’s ideal shrinks to “just a word.” The metonymic connections drawn between Jean, Western colonialism, and the French language sharpen our sense of how exactly French alienates and entraps the narrator.
Against a language experienced as the technology of oppression, Taïa professes his goal as “saying something to society, with perhaps the same violence as that which it had imposed on me.” More than simple self-translation or mere capitulation, Taïa’s French constitutes a counter-utterance that retaliates against the language’s brutality. Rather than being passively haunted by language, Taïa gives himself—and his past selves—the right to haunt it in turn; he inserts “experiences, tastes, hauntings” from the margins of “poor Morocco” into a language that, as the celebrated Algerian writer Assia Djebar has it, has been historically weaponised to “entomb” entire populations.
On the level of form, Taïa’s sparse tone owes a debt to Choukri. One trace of this is the diegetic reference, in Salvation Army, to Choukri’s For Bread Alone, which is credited as “the book that introduced me to literature.” Combined with Taïa’s rejection of a Western genealogy of influence, the elevation of Choukri as his “second father” explicitly suggests a sense of inheritance. Taïa’s acceptance of Choukri’s legacy illustrates a literary chain of transmission, or isnad. In Islamic terms, an isnad is an unbroken line of transmitters testifying to the historical authenticity of the Prophet’s sayings. By positioning Choukri as his literary ancestor, Taïa desacralises isnad.
In an Asymptote interview, Taïa said of his literary forefather: “[Choukri] was one of the first writers that talked about real life in the Moroccan streets. But he did not write as a sociologist; he wrote about himself and his prostitution and thievery. He showed the Moroccan boy that we see, but we don’t see.” Situating himself in relation to Choukri, Taïa designates him as a witness from whom he inherits a hermeneutics to grasp his world. Indeed, this isnad, which both fetters and anchors, is why a comparison between the two authors’ work is insightful.
At the same time, Taïa works against what Arabic signifies, likely estranged from the language by the lack of a lexicon in Arabic for the articulation of queer sexuality. For queer Arabs who perpetually negotiate the risks of visibility in their contemporary reality, Arabic’s inability to name their experiences redoubles the violence they suffer. French can be thought of as the personal inflection, born of necessity, that Taïa lends to Choukri’s defacement of Classical Arabic. After all, French holds out for many Moroccans the promise of upward social mobility; Taïa himself regarded it as “a way out,” and the character Jean in Salvation Army is the “cultured man” who “got me out of my working-class world.” Little wonder that Taïa’s surrogate narrator, before arriving in Geneva, imagines French as “a language that allowed you to express your ideas in a clear, precise way”, and to “defend yourself.” Besides echoing the title Salvation Army, the last clause implies that French protected his queer self’s coherence to an extent by staking a claim on legibility.
Later on in the book, when French becomes “the language of silence,” it fails for him as Arabic has. Having disavowed French, he can and must assert himself—beyond any language—as “an army for my own salvation.”
In the second part of this essay, we explore how Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa subvert autobiographical conventions at the limits of world literature.
Alex Tan is a writer, aspiring translator, and student of comparative literature at Columbia University, with a particular interest in the literatures and language politics of Southeast Asia and the Maghreb. They currently work with Transformative Justice Collective in Singapore and serve as an assistant editor of fiction at Asymptote.
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