{"id":15127,"date":"2017-02-14T12:31:36","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T16:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15127"},"modified":"2017-02-14T12:31:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T16:31:36","slug":"abdellatif-laabis-in-praise-of-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/abdellatif-laabis-in-praise-of-defeat\/","title":{"rendered":"Abdellatif La\u00e2bi’s “In Praise of Defeat”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Archipelago books<\/a> \u2014 maybe right now\u00a0the finest US press truly turned toward & tuned in to the world beyond\u00a0these Benighted States \u2014 has just released a gorgeous 800-page bilingual tome of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif La\u00e2bi’s Selected Poems under the title In Praise of Defeat<\/em>. The choice of poems is the author’s own, and the excellent translations from the French are by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rather than “review” & laud the book here now, I’ll own up to the fact that it was my great pleasure to write a foreword for the book, which I’m reproducing here below. Enjoy, & then buy the book \u2014 don’t let the heft make you hesitate: the book \u2014 in archipelago’s usual square format \u2014 rests\u00a0well in the hand, is a pleasure to handle & read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Abdellatif La\u00e2bi : So many betweens!<\/b><\/p>\n

I’m not the nomad
\n<\/i>searches for the well
\n<\/i>the sedentary has dug,
\n<\/i>I drink little water
\n<\/i>and walk
\n<\/i>apart from the caravan.<\/i><\/p>\n

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi<\/p>\n

In 1966 the great German-language poet Paul Celan, an exile living in Paris, France, called his new book of poems, to come out the following year, Atemwende, <\/i>compounding the nouns for breath and change; that same year, a young Moroccan poet by the name of Abdellatif La\u00e2bi (born in the city of Fez in 1942) called his newly founded magazine, Souffles<\/i>, meaning \u201cBreath\u201d in the plural.\u00a0 I translated Celan\u2019s title as Breathturn<\/i>, i.e. a turning of, a change of, the breath. Something \u2014 poem, movement, event \u2014 that wants to bring real change, does, has to, take the breath away in order to effect this change and in the same movement, it \u2014 poem or event \u2014 gives new directions to one\u2019s (next) breath \u2013 one\u2019s pneuma, the systole\/diastole that is the one certain way we know that we are alive. In Morocco, La\u00e2bi and friends wanted & needed to draw many free, new and unsettling breaths, des<\/i> souffles<\/i> \u2014 & the magazine by that name\u00a0 indeed did just that & was immediately & has remained until today the great North African avant-garde poetry magazine of the period. In Paris, Mohamed Khair-Eddine showed me a copy just before I embarked for America in late 1967 & I realized immediately that if poetry in French was to be again of essential use it would need to be retooled there, in a Maghreb struggling to create itself as a new, independent and revolutionary society, far away from a Parisian living on its pre-war modernisms. Souffles<\/i> took one\u2019s breath away, heralding the changes being made in Maghrebian poetry while proposing changes that needed to be made in the life of the people \u2013 that is, it could not but be a politically revolutionary magazine too. The absolute seriousness of La\u00e2bi & his friends concerning this need for change, for an Atemwende<\/i> at every level did not escape the notice of the powers that be, & the magazine was eventually censored & in 1972 La\u00e2bi was jailed, tortured & submitted to all the humiliations a dictatorship will submit its opponents to. Abdellatif survived, kept writing poems, letters, prose, essays, producing a continuous & courageous witnessing to his & this society\u2019s fate. In 1980 he was released & in 1985 he moved to Paris, France where he still lives most of the time, in that permanent exile that seems to be the lot of so many of the century\u2019s best poets & doers \u2013 a poet, from Greek \u201cpoesis\u201d to make, to do, is or should be, and in La\u00e2bi\u2019s case is, indeed, a doer, an activist. In recent years he has been able to return and live part of the time in Morocco, though this is not without its dangers, as some painful misadventures two years ago prove.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi is without a doubt the major francophone voice in Moroccan poetry today. It may \u2014 and does, especially for some of the arabophone poets of the Maghreb & the Mashreq \u2014 bring up the question of why should a Moroccan author write in the colonial language after his country\u2019s independence? The most forceful way I have heard this question answered is by the Algerian poet & novelist Kateb Yacine who, when asked by journalists after Algeria gained its independence in 1962 following an 8 year war, if he would now write in Arabic, responded: \u201cWe won the war. We\u2019ll keep French as the spoils of war.\u201d Kateb went on to say that for a Maghrebian to write in Arabic would simply be to submit to an earlier, if more acculturated colonial domination, given that the autochthonous cultures are Berber with their own languages (Tamazight) and writing (Tifinak). Be that as it may, the multilingualism of the Maghreb has made for a very rich, multilayered tapestry of writing and, as I have shown elsewhere, it is exactly in those ex-colonies or ex-protectorates that an enriched French has made for a poetry more impressive than the relatively pale\u00a0 \u201cmetropolitan\u201d version. Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s language is proof of this.<\/p>\n

He writes with a quiet, unassuming elegance that holds & hides the violence any act of creation proposes. Every creation is of course a breaking apart, a making of fragments \u2014 making is<\/i> breaking \u2014 something La\u00e2bi states ab initio <\/i>in his poem Forgotten Creation<\/i>: \u201cIn the beginning was the cry \/ and already discord.\u201d And this poem \u2014 as does most of his vast oeuvre \u2014 follows the movements of this cry, tracing its starts and stops, circling its essential enigma, descrying all the false mysteries and hopes and fantasies it gives rise to, despite itself. Creating itself, the poem learns that \u201cwhere nothing is born \/ nothing changes,\u201d and that eternity is but \u201can impenetrable jar \/ no magic will open.\u201d But the poem, La\u00e2bi insists, will get us inside this act of imaginative creation. It is exactly the processual nature of his poetics, demanding a close listening to both inside and outside worlds, and the will and courage to follow changing meanders as the outside historical situation and the personal ecology of the poet\u2019s world evolve, at times clash, but always inform \u2014 taking careful account of both the \u201cin\u201d and the \u2018\u201cform\u201d the word proposes \u2014 his work.<\/p>\n

If the one constant in La\u00e2bi\u2019s life has been writing \u2014 in the early prison volume Between the Gag, the Poem<\/i> he framed it thus: \u201cWrite, write, never stop\u201d \u2014 it is however also clear that there has been an evolution throughout his writing career. The earlier work shows all the outward projective force and explosive power the discovery of revolutionary possibilities immediately succeeded by the experience of injustice, jail and torture under a profoundly flawed and paranoid political system entails. The drive, jaggedness, mutilated syntax, dissociative, near-surreal and explosive verse associating a sharply analyzed exterior world and a internal turmoil and questioning is not without reminding the reader of some of the writings of the American Beat poets: this is indeed a Maghrebi \u201cHowl.\u201d It is interesting to note, as La\u00e2bi did on the occasion of a meeting earlier this year, that at that time he and the Souffles<\/i> writers were unaware of the American poetry scene, and thus of the Beats and other \u201cprotest poetry\u201d which they were to discover only some time later. They were however knowledgeable about avant-garde traditions in European and especially French poetry from Rimbaud on through the surrealists, and, given their political readings, of some of the Russian avant-garde and of poets such as Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet.<\/p>\n

If over the years La\u00e2bi has also produced a range of prose works \u2014 from novels, memoirs, tales & essays to plays & several volumes of interviews \u2014 poetry has clearly been the guiding light of his work. It is in following the changes the decades brought about in his poetics, that we can trace La\u00e2bi\u2019s development, which has morphed from the early work described above to a quieter, lyrical voice \u2014 quieter, but in no way less searching, less demanding, less questing. The volumes of the last ten years may look deceptively simple at the level of their lyric line & language at quick glance (though the multi- or at least double-cultured metaphors remain often stunningly potent), but don\u2019t pre-judge: this is in no way a self-satisfied Altenstil; this is, rather, the calm, easy-breathing simplicity of achieved yet always again questioned wisdom, after a life of struggle. Maybe one should think about La\u00e2bi\u2019s achievement here as Blakean, at the level of both poesis and lived life: it is the clarity of an innocence regained, with much exertion, after having gone through all the experience a human can take. It is the achieving of alchemical gold after many decades of labor in the double pelican of life and writing.<\/p>\n

My own attraction to La\u00e2bi\u2019s work over the years has been rooted in my fascination for what I\u2019ve come to call \u201cbetweeness,\u201d that state of exile (voluntary or not), of one\u2019s de facto multi-lingual (& thus non-linear) space in a post-colonial situation (& I\u2019d argue that we all are post-colonials to some extent). Here is how he defined this space of betweenness some twenty years ago:<\/p>\n

I truly feel myself located on this hinge of being between life and death\u2026, between a sun that is dying and another one whose rising has been confiscated, between two planets, two humanities that turn their backs to each other, between the feminine part in myself and my status as a male (which however has no desire to change gender), between two cultures that don’t stop misapprehending each other, two languages that speak themselves so continuously in my mouth that they make me stammer, between the madness of hope and despair’s just returns, between a country of origin that dribbles away and another country, an adopted one, that isn’t able to firm itself, between a “natural” tendency toward meditation and an irrepressible need for action, between belonging and non-belonging, nomadism and sedentariness… So many betweens!<\/p>\n

And La\u00e2bi, in his life and in his work, has shown us the elegance and graciousness it takes to accomplish this task. What it takes to reside in this betweenness is negative capability, i.e. (in Shelley\u2019s word) \u201cwhen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\u201d For La\u00e2bi that means, for example, to see the question of \u201cidentity\u201d as something that is \u201cmore of a project than something acquired at birth.\u201d Culturally and ideologically this is of great importance in his world \u2014 where the culture\u00a0 given at birth is a knot of religion and politics that cannot be untangled \u2014 and in which \u201cidentitarism is one of the oldest and most insidious forms of integrism,\u201d which makes \u201cvoluntary servitude the price of belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes this path in-between so many in-betweens walkable, livable? How do these many doubleness not end up simply becoming a permissive fog in which one gets lost, voluntarily or involuntarily, \u2014 or act outside the view of the world? La\u00e2bi has been clear that his essential battle has been the one he fights against the hiatus between discourse and praxis, between thought and action, between the work \u2014 including that of poesis<\/i>, of poetry \u2014 and the man. As he puts it: \u201cFor me ethics is the basis of politics as much as of literature or thinking.\u201d It is this struggle, what he calls his \u201csolitary-solidary struggle,\u201d deeply committed, deeply political, yet situated outside any ideological system, a struggle toward the construction of an ethics able to equal the complexities of our world, that has been his compass.<\/p>\n

The rest is poetry.<\/p>\n

Pierre Joris, Brooklyn-Paris \/May\/June 2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archipelago books \u2014 maybe right now\u00a0the finest US press truly turned toward & tuned in to the world beyond\u00a0these Benighted States \u2014 has just released a gorgeous 800-page bilingual tome of the Moroccan poet...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,22,66,91,103],"tags":[123,1356],"class_list":["post-15127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-launch","category-book-review","category-maghrebi-literature","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-abdellatif-laabi","tag-donald-nicholson-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15131,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15127\/revisions\/15131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}