{"id":923,"date":"2009-03-17T03:41:35","date_gmt":"2009-03-17T11:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=923"},"modified":"2009-03-17T03:41:35","modified_gmt":"2009-03-17T11:41:35","slug":"abdelkebir-khatibi-1939-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/abdelkebir-khatibi-1939-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Abdelkebir Khatibi (1939-2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"771007-915417\"Moroccan novelist, poet, essayist & sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi passed away on Monday morning in Rabat. Khatibi was a major force in contemporary Moroccan writing. There are only two of his books available in English at this point, namely Love in Two Languages<\/a><\/em>, translated by Richard Howard (& that one is in print probably only because Jacques Derrida’s book Monolingualism of the Other<\/em><\/a> is a response to this essay by Khatibi) and The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy<\/a>, co-edited with Mohammed Sijelnassi\u00a0(a large, splendid book indeed, about what lies at the core of Arabic culture, art & poetics, namely its deep investment in calligraphy).<\/p>\n

There is thus a dire need to translate some of the core works by this incontournable<\/em> Maghrebian author: a good place to start would be the novels\u00a0La m\u00e9moire tatou\u00e9e (1971)<\/span><\/span><\/strong> and\u00a0 La Blessure du nom propre<\/em> <\/strong> (1974), the collection of poems <\/span>Le Lutteur de classe \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re tao\u00efste<\/em> (1976), the essay\u00a0\u00a0“<\/em>Le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse”\u00a0(in:\u00a0Vomito blanco,\u00a0Collection 10\/18, 1974), and the superb essay collection\u00a0Maghreb pluriel<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong> (Deno\u00ebl, 1983).<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have been reading Khatibi since I first came across his work in the early seventies: it is essential work for anyone wanting to understand not only contemporary Morocco, but also the whole of post-colonial North Africa. Writing about the Maghreb, I have\u00a0several\u00a0times quoted the following from\u00a0Love in Two Languages:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Yes, I spoke, I grew up around the Only One and the Name, and the Book of my invisible god should have ended within me. Extravagant second thought that stays with me always. The idea imposes itself as I write it: every language should be bi-lingual! The asymmetry of body and language, of speech and writing \u2014 at the threshold of the untranslatable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which leads him to say in another essay that what would indeed be extraordinary would be to write \u201c\u00e0 plusieurs mains, \u00e0 plusieurs langues dans un texte qui ne soit qu\u2019une perp\u00e9tuelle traduction\u201d \u2014 to write with\/in several languages a text that would be but a perpetual translation. A thought close to my heart & mind, one that I find essential for trying to think a nomadic or diasporic poetics commensurate with the complexicity of this, our twenty-first century world.<\/p>\n

\"61gfqjpxmrl_sl500_aa240_\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moroccan novelist, poet, essayist & sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi passed away on Monday morning in Rabat. Khatibi was a major force in contemporary Moroccan writing. There are only two of his books available in English...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[122],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-abdelkebir-khatibi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","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=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}