The English Pen Online World Atlas

Mohamed Choukri

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Biography:

Mohamed Choukri was born during a famine in the Rif mountains, Choukri migrated to Tetwan with his family as a small child, eventually settling in Tangiers where he engaged in a variety of jobs (one of which involved a months-long sojourn serving a French family in the Algerian Rif) to supplement his tyrannical father's meagre income. Following one of many family disputes he left the house at the age of 11, embracing a life of homelessness and petty crime. These early experiences provided him with material for his first and most famous book, Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (For Bread Alone, written in 1972 but not published in Arabic until 1982).

In 1955, at the age of 20, Choukri -- thief, small-time smuggler, male prostitute -- managed to procure a place at a school in the desert town of Al-Ara'esh where he finally learned to read and write. Back in the cafés and whorehouses of Tangiers he began to record his personal history in standard Arabic, a language that differs appreciably from Moroccan darja, the vernacular with which, along with the Berber tongue of his birth, he was familiar. The resulting stylistic tension made for a unique idiom. The prestigious Beirut monthly Al- Aadab published his first short story, Al-Unf ala Al-Shati' (Violence on the Beach) in 1966. In the 1960s Choukri also began associating with hippies who had settled in Tangiers, benefiting from the city's cosmopolitan community and meeting writers like Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and, perhaps most notably, Jean Genet.

Reading Choukri is comparable to reading Genet: it is like entering a hothouse, a form of realism that, rather than inducing a sense of verisimilitude, acts to engulf the reader's psyche in an alternative, compelling and ultimately dissimilar network of relations. Where Choukri differs from Genet, however, is in his aversion to mythologysing. Though characters may acquire dramatically justified larger-than-life proportions they are never turned into symbols. Nor is the sometimes agonising daily process of finding enough food on which to survive and locating an appropriately safe space in which to sleep endowed with any (illusory) grandeur. Dispossession emerges all the more clearly, its constituent elements -- extended, minute descriptions of the workings of hunger on body and mind, and the techniques resorted to ameliorate its pain, for example -- presented as given, physical precepts that do not stand in for any grander thoughts or emotions.

Excerpted from Al-Ahram's obituary. Read the full piece here.