Resurrection of Wild Flowers

Literature & Fiction

Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed

Literary

OOMPH! Press

Poetry. "Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khaïr-Eddine writes in 'Black Nausea,' the poems 'offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.' The distortive energies of Khaïr-Eddine's 'linguistic guerilla war' agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed."--Johannes Göransson "No, decolonizing is not a metaphor, but it is a proposal emerging from the place where land and consciousness meet. To get closer to that place Khaïr-Eddine's SCORPIONIC SUN resists any nation state--or any reader--who would take up land or consciousness, song or bodies as mere instruments. Wisely, then, Conor Bracken's translation doesn't so much use as it delivers English into the brutal ongoingness of what Teresa Villa-Ignacio has called Khaïr-Eddine's 'seismic line.' Thus thoroughly shaken and gone we can find one another 'by a necessary association with events to come.'"--Farid Matuk "Khaïr-Eddine grabbed hold of the French language with a violent passion; he loved it ferociously, without concession, without moderation. Along with Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire, it is he who has done the most to rattle and enrich the language."--Tahar Ben Jelloun

Scorpionic Sun

Khaïr-Eddin, Mohammed

Poetry

Ohio State University Press

"With its undulating body, I, CAUSTIC reproduces the two-pronged movement that testifies to the continuing relevance of KhaÔr-Eddine's writing: destruction and reconstruction, annihilation and regeneration, death and revival.--Khalid Lyamlahy (from the Postface) "Khaïr-Eddine's corroded lyric I spews the detritus of autocratic narcissism in this absurdist take-down of its patriarchs: the king and his advisors, military and police officers, husbands, fathers, older brothers. In the wake of the Moroccan student and worker uprising of March 23, 1965, which emboldened both government repression and popular movements for democracy, the characters ponder the irony of revolution when everyone has co-opted its rhetoric and wonder whether the so-called dregs of society--sex-workers, abandoned children, unemployed laborers--can rise up to prevent a nuclear Arab apocalypse. Yet from the King's privy in Rabat to a coastal town in southern Morocco, humanity's inhumanity is just one force of nature among so many others: what's the point of all this trouble when you'll end up a maggot-eaten corpse? Syersak's energizing translation delivers into English all the poet's acerbic humor and idiomatic exuberance. You'll laugh so hard your inner hyena will come out. Is your blood boiling yet?"--Teresa Villa-Ignacio "Khaïr-Eddine's excoriating satire of independent Morocco, written in the first decade of Hassan II's rule, from the remove of voluntary exile in France, performs a devastating critique of the violence of the ruling class, the incompetence of government, the hypocrisy of organized religion, and the stubborn presence of police brutality, even as it fashions radically new modes of literary and poetic expression. Sometimes crude, even grotesque, often brilliantly seductive, irreligious, and funny, Jake Syersak's bold translation into English breathes new life into this important and too-long neglected work of modern Moroccan literature."--Thomas C. Connolly, Department of French, Yale University Poetry. Hybrid. Middle Eastern Studies.

I, Caustic

Humor & Satire

Litmus Press

Fiction. African & African American Studies. Poetry. Drama. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated by Pierre Joris and Jake Syersak. AGADIR is loosely based on the earthquake which devastated the Moroccan city of the same name in 1960, and KhaÃ¯r-Eddine's experience as a civil servant assigned to investigate the aftermath of the cataclysm between 1961 and 1963. An unnamed narrator sent to the city "in order to sort out a particularly precarious situation" tells the story of a veritably razed Moroccan epicenter and a citizenry begging for reconstruction and reimagination. In a surreal, polyphonic narration that explodes into various tesserae of fiction, autobiography, reportage, poetry, and theatre, the narrator quickly discovers that in exhuming the city's physical remnants he cannot help but exhume the complex social, political, cultural, and historical dynamics that make up postcolonial Moroccan society. The mysterious narrator, increasingly besieged by hallucinations of the past and visions of the future, comes to incarnate what Albert Memmi once called "the role of the colonized," and to suffer "a magnified vision of all the ambiguities and impossibilities of those colonized." To which KhaÃ¯r-Eddine appends his envisioned role of the writer: one who uses his magnified vision to transform his very life into "an investigation, a fight against all forms of oppression and repression" until his "literature is a beautiful weapon."

Agadir

United States

Dialogos / Lavender Ink

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