Compelling poems from one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed of contemporary North African writers. Imprisoned for many years by the Moroccan authorities, Laâbi’s poetry is haunted by memories of torture and prisons and bears witness to his preoccupations with—and resistance to—the growing international sickness of state-supported inhumanity.Abdellatif Laâbi was born in 1942 in Fez. In 1966, he founded the avant-garde literary and artistic journal Souffles, which helped spark a literary and artistic renaissance through North Africa. Imprisoned for seven years in the ’70s for his political beliefs and his writings, he has lived in Paris since 1985. His latest book, a novel, will be published this year by Gallimard.

The World's Embrace: Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

LAÂBI, Abdellatif

George, Anne

Reinking, Victor

Makward, Edris

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

One of the central writers and thinkers in contemporary Maghreb letters and banned by the Moroccan government, Abdellatif Laabi's poetry is increasingly influential on the international scene and spans six decades of political and literary change, innovation, and struggle. Including a wide range of work, from piercing domestic love poetry to a fierce lyricism of social resistance informed by nearly a decade spent in prison for "crimes of opinion," all of Laabi's poetry is situated firmly against tyranny and for life--an almost mythic sense of spiritual and earthly joy emanates from this resistance through the darkness of political oppression. This selection of poetry has been masterfully rendered into English for the first time by Donald Nicholson-Smith and introduced by the eminent poet and critic Pierre Joris--the first in translation to be chosen by Laabi himself.

In Praise of Defeat: Poems by Abdellatif Laabi

History & Criticism

Archipelago

Rue du Retour

His magisterial prose and poetry have won Abdellatif Laâbi successively France’s Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie from the Académie Française. Rue du Retour brings to the English reader the full drama and intensity of the poet’s thought and words in this account of his return to life and hope after torture and then more than eight years in a Moroccan prison. He now lives in exile in Paris, but is honoured in his home country of Morocco, in France and throughout the Maghreb as a towering literary figure —combining poetry, politics, translation, fostering creativity and younger talents male and female, in Arabic and in French.

Rue Du Retour

Biographies & Memoirs

UNKNO

His magisterial prose and poetry have won Abdellatif Laâbi successively France’s Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie from the Académie Française. Rue du Retour brings to the English reader the full drama and intensity of the poet’s thought and words in this account of his return to life and hope after torture and then more than eight years in a Moroccan prison. He now lives in exile in Paris, but is honoured in his home country of Morocco, in France and throughout the Maghreb as a towering literary figure —combining poetry, politics, translation, fostering creativity and younger talents male and female, in Arabic and in French.

Readers International

Abdellatif La bi is an important Morroccan poet and intellectual; his writing in French is highly-regarded in both Morrocco and France, but he is under-represented in English. This book helps to redress this, by presenting this long poem in a fresh new English translation, along with the full text of the French original.

Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis

Leafe Press

Finally available in English, Le Règne de la barbarie by Abdellatif Laâbi is one of the most daring poetic visions of the second half of the twentieth century. First published in 1976 when Laabi was serving an eight-year prison sentence (1972-1980) for ‘crimes of opinion’ against the Moroccan State, The Rule of Barbarism is a devastating flight through consciousness, acquainting the reader with the trials of a society caught between a colonial past and the tragic realities of a brutal dictatorship. Analysing the presence of ‘barbarism’ inherent in all of us, and yet deepening our capacity for compassion despite the allure of revenge, this stunning debut from a writer on the threshold of a groundbreaking career can be read as an epic of love, empathy, anger and despair—and is as resonant today as when composed nearly fifty years ago.

The Rule of Barbarism: Pirogue Poets Series

Humor & Satire

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020 Winner of an English PEN Award Introduced by Jim Moore, with an interview by Christopher Schaefer Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco’s greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi’s poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi’s poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from ‘beyond the borders of what is human’, as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are ‘the only weapon we’ve left’. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet’s cell, which is ‘right here / inside me / like a second body’, and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that ‘epic of silence’. These poems, Laâbi’s ‘bitter fruits of the murderous twilight’, renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher’s vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet’s duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laâbi’s renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laâbi is more than Morocco’s leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.

Beyond the Barbed Wire: Selected Poems

Carcanet Press Ltd.

The Bottom of the Jar is the journey of a boy finding his footing in the heart of Fez during the 1950s, as Morocco began freeing itself from the grip of the French colonial occupation. The narrator vividly recalls his first encounters with the ebullient city, family dramas, and the joys and turbulence of his childhood. He recalls a renegade, hashish-loving uncle, who at nightfall transforms into a beloved Homer, his salt-of-the-earth mother's impassioned pleas to a Divine ear, and his father's enduring generosity. Told in the spirit of a late-night ramble among friends where hilarious anecdotes and poignant recollections flow in equal parts, Laâbi's autobiographical novel offers us a generous glimpse into the formative experiences of a great poet, whose integrity and commitment to social justice earned him an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence during Morocco's "year of lead" in The 1970s.

The Bottom of the Jar

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

English speakers can now join Africans and Africa scholars in recognizing Abdellatif Laâbi as Morocco’s preeminent living poet. He is winner of France’s Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix de La Francophonie, a poet who shares the stage with the best-selling novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun. This recognition has been an uncertain journey, first interrupted by imprisonment, then accelerated by great productivity in the years that Laâbi has lived in France. Laâbi’s fame, and his troubles, grew in the 1960s when he founded the journal Souffles. It was, at first, a venue for Moroccan writers and not a forum for the politics that would attract the government’s ire. When this journal, and the journal Anfas, became more political, Laâbi was arrested in 1972. There are numerous allusions to his imprisonment and torture in the work.
Perishable Poems is a quiet volume, less suggestive and startling than receptive, like a fifty-eight year old man’s reevaluation of life. These poems gently question the yield of disparate episodes in a long life, and of experiences more harrowing than most of us can understand. It has now been thirty-six years since Laâbi’s release from prison, but the passions or that memory and the disappointments of Arab Spring still shine a light both human and harsh on authoritarianism, and on the life that flowers again after the cruelest repression.

Perishable Poems: Poèmes Périssables

Dialogos

Poetry. Translated by Annie Jamison. Latest book of poems from Moroccan writer, Abdellatif Laâbi, a French-language poet, playwright, translator, essayist, novelist, raconteur, and activist whose many works reveal his engagement with social and political issues and a strong commitment against oppression, injustice, and human rights abuses. Laâbi's style pendulums between colloquial humor and sophisticated criticism in a collection of poems that glow with the fire of protest. His writing addresses the many aspects of society with which he has become disenchanted over the years. He speaks of Morocco, as well as his home in France, with sentiments that are both intimate and critical. Laâbi reveals the introspective process of writing poetry while reflecting on the years he spent in prison and the toll they have taken on his person.

The Uncertainty Principle

Lithic Press

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Books by LAÂBI, Abdellatif