{"id":91451,"date":"2015-10-30T14:28:17","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T18:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91451"},"modified":"2015-10-30T14:28:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T18:28:17","slug":"great-waves-of-vigilance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/30\/great-waves-of-vigilance\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Waves of Vigilance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems are at war with barbarism.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Oscar Wilde\u2019s <\/a><\/em>De Profundis<\/a>, here<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In Le livre impr\u00e9vu<\/em>, his 2010 collection of autobiographical essays, the Moroccan poet Abdellatif La\u00e2bi suggested that there were \u201ctwo branches of the human tree\u201d with which he\u2019d been in touch over the course of his turbulent life:<\/p>\n

\n

I think I know well miseries and luminosities, pettinesses and grandeurs, barbarism and refinement. Provisionally, I\u2019ve fixed myself in the space between the two, the better to estimate the fault line that separates them and the state of the roots in which they meet far under the earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

La\u00e2bi has returned to the word barbarism<\/em> throughout his career. \u201cI am happy,\u201d he wrote his wife in one of the many revelatory letters he sent her during his eight-year jail sentence under King Hassan II for \u201cinfringing on the internal security of the State.\u201d He continued: \u201cWhat a paradox for the barbarians, the enemies of the sun.\u201d Early in L\u2019arbre de fer fleurit<\/em>, the first of several long poems he published from prison, one verse\u2019s speaker encourages an unnamed friend to hold on when it comes time to take \u201cyour first steps in the barbarous night.\u201d And the five poems collected in La\u00e2bi\u2019s first book, The Reign of Barbarism<\/a><\/em>, were written in Rabat years before his arrest in 1972, but first published in 1976 by the publishing imprint of his friend Ghislain Ripault\u2019s literary magazine Barbare<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

La\u00e2bi relishes playing on the associations that the word barbare<\/em> would likely call to mind for his French readers. By the seventies, it had long been a term of disparagement for anyone whose speech sounded, to the ears of Morocco\u2019s French former colonizers, like a series of crude monosyllables. The Greeks, a familiar legend goes, called foreigners barbari<\/em> because it was the sound they heard whenever the people in question opened their mouths. In his autobiographical novel,\u00a0The Bottom of the Jar<\/a><\/em>, published in 2001 and translated in 2013, La\u00e2bi cast his first encounter with the French language as a kind of reenactment of that origin story. \u201cNot only did they sound strange,\u201d the young protagonist thinks about his French teacher\u2019s words, \u201cbut even the way he moved his lips, hissed between his teeth\u2014and the loud scraping noises that rose out of his throat\u2014were gestures and gutturals that Namouss didn\u2019t know how to interpret.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now seventy-three, La\u00e2bi has so far written exclusively in French, and many of his numerous books can be understood as attempts to reduce that language to unfamiliar, challenging growls and scrapes. The poems in The Reign of Barbarism <\/em>are built out of dense, unpunctuated phrases that seem to have been muttered into a wide silent space, an effect that comes out just as clearly in Andr\u00e9 Naffis-Sahely\u2019s recent translation:<\/p>\n

\n

strong wind
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0inhabits one
you explore my history
walk
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 hung or guillotined
but shuttle body
sweats
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 marches
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 uses
walks
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 hush the pillory
unmake language
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 shape the word
come back to me
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 give me your hand
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 grip the navel
utter your heresies
I have no love for your tuareg moon<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is nothing barbarous about La\u00e2bi\u2019s exacting, propulsive early verse. If anything, in La\u00e2bi\u2019s writing from The Reign of Barbarism <\/em>to Le livre impr\u00e9vu<\/em>\u2014and nowhere more than in the writing he produced from prison\u2014it\u2019s a sign of decency, humility, and civility to be able to unmake one\u2019s language, to recognize one\u2019s own spoken or written tongue as no less of a guttural, hissed-out, scraped together thing than any other. (At intervals in the early poems, La\u00e2bi literally opens up holes in certain words by inserting a space between each of their letters.) Barbarism, in contrast, is to insist that one\u2019s language is too sacred to suffer unmaking\u2014and to silence violently anyone who tries to unmake it. La\u00e2bi would watch Morocco successfully liberate itself from the rule of one such barbarous regime, then fall under the control of another.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of The Bottom of the Jar<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

La\u00e2bi was born and raised in Fez during the twilight of Morocco\u2019s period as a French protectorate. In the time recounted in The Bottom of the Jar<\/em>, he saw the country\u2019s popular sultan Mohammed V forced into exile, replaced on the throne by his widely distrusted uncle, then permitted back into the country under the influence of the Istiqlal<\/em> party and other nationalist groups with strong public support. La\u00e2bi\u2019s novel memorably suggests how loud the cry for Moroccan independence had become by the time of Mohammed V\u2019s return in late 1955. In one episode, a neighborhood mosque\u2019s khatib<\/em>\u2014a sermon-giver\u2014is shot dead in front of Namouss\u2019s house for having made favorable comments about the deposed monarch\u2019s illegitimate replacement; in another, a city collectively sees the sultan\u2019s face appear in the moon.<\/p>\n

In early 1956, Mohammed V successfully negotiated Morocco\u2019s independence as a conservative monarchy. Some of the furious tirades that punctuate The Reign of Barbarism<\/em> are implicitly directed against the French colonists whose influence continued to linger in the newly liberated country (\u201cyou lie prone my race \/ you protest your public toilets \/ your ditches of torture \/ fourth-class rail car \/ with the livestock\u201d). But even from the book\u2019s title, it\u2019s obvious that La\u00e2bi had another addressee in mind. By the end of 1965, he had evolved into a prominent member of the opposition to Mohammed V\u2019s successor, Hassan II, whose regime had brutally suppressed a student uprising earlier that year. \u201cAllow me to tell you,\u201d the king famously told the nation two days after the riot, \u201cthat there is no greater danger to the State than a so-called intellectual. It would have been better if you were all illiterate.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was in response to barbarous remarks like the one above that La\u00e2bi, in collaboration with a group of Francophone Moroccan poets including Mohammed Kha\u00efr-Eddine and Mostafa Nissaboury, founded the magazine Souffles<\/em> in 1966. By the early seventies, the publication had evolved into an iconic voice on the international Left\u2014a space where translations from the Arabic ran side by side with essays on the Black Panthers, reports on the Palestinian occupation and dossiers \u201con the plastic arts.\u201d For a period starting in 1968, the paper went bilingual. By the time it generated an Arabic-language offshoot publication called Anfas<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>in 1971, it had emerged as an unmistakable source of\u2014in words the monarchy would soon use to justify its editors\u2019 arrest\u2014\u201ctrouble to the public order.\u201d<\/p>\n

A bravely intransigent radical, La\u00e2bi was also a doting husband and father. The letters he wrote to his wife and children in 1972\u2014after being twice arrested that year, tortured, imprisoned, and eventually convicted to ten years in K\u00e9nitra, though he never served the last two\u2014show him channeling much of his energy to the task of putting his family at ease. \u201cPrison,\u201d he wrote to his two slightly older children, \u201cis like a big house with many rooms. The only thing that\u2019s different from houses like ours is that you can\u2019t leave.\u201d (He was being held in a cell with two other inmates; between them, they had a single large sleeping palette and a blanket each.) On September 18, he wrote his wife, Jocelyne, to declare that<\/p>\n

\n

I never let myself worry; I don\u2019t suffer anything; I\u2019m developing \u201cgreat waves of vigilance\u201d in my heart. The passage of time, of waiting, is becoming relative in a certain sense. The \u201creal life\u201d here is just like they say, but that too isn\u2019t forced on me. It\u2019s I who decide, and I\u2019m satisfied for now with the glow of the great fire that burns, neither too far nor too close, which burns, I know it, and that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That letter dates roughly from the time La\u00e2bi was composing L\u2019arbre de fer fleurit<\/em>, and some of the desperate optimism of his correspondence seeped into the poem. \u201cYes,\u201d one speaker utters in the last line of one stanza as if in answer to an unasked question, \u201cpoetry will restore man.\u201d Another insists in the final line of a second stanza that he has \u201ca terrible passion for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

La\u00e2bi must have realized that his good spirits could be carried too far. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to give you the impression of some sort of monolithism,\u201d he wrote Jocelyne on May 2 of the following year. (His final trial was still four months away.) \u201cOf course it comes up on me sometimes to feel frissons of torment, suffering and pain.\u201d He went on:<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t imagine me as the hero of a solo play, or like some eminent Prophet without contradictions or doubts. (I know that you wouldn\u2019t think anything so simplistic about me.) Always imagine me living and struggling, in unity and contradiction, but always pushing ahead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An issue of Souffles<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

As late as February 1975, soon before he was sentenced on mystifying charges to five months of almost total solitary confinement, he could write Jocelyne that \u201cthe most important thing is for us to accept our condition lucidly, consciously agree to make sacrifices, and keep clear horizons in our eyes without fail.\u201d His worries in subsequent letters over the time it took her replies to arrive (\u201cI hope these delays won\u2019t start back up\u201d) and his cryptic references to \u201cthe problems with the kids\u201d culminated in 1977 with an exhausting, pained string of letters in which the couple cataloged and sifted through their marital grievances.<\/p>\n

La\u00e2bi\u2019s side of the correspondence, the only one published, suggests how conscientiously he worked to prevent imprisonment from dulling his sensitivities. (It also suggests a strain of patrician\u2019s condescension in him, against which he struggled with frequent, if not constant, success.) In his early poems, words had gushed from him in colorful, Rimbaud-like torrents. (One poem in The Reign of Barbarism <\/em>lingers on the speaker\u2019s \u201cawareness \/ that other fluids converse in my blood \/ and release \/ other starry earthworms.\u201d) As he approached the end of his sentence, he was lingering more anxiously over the sense and tone of his speech, in his letters as well as in his verse. Several of his poems from this period are derived directly from his correspondence, both with his children (\u201cmy beloved son \/ I got your letter \/ you\u2019re already talking to me like a big person\u201d), and\u2014in the case of one sprawling, effusive passage from his 1975\u20131976 collection,\u00a0Le po\u00eame permanent<\/em>\u2014with Jocelyne:<\/p>\n

\n

my beloved
I have your poem here in front of me
it isn\u2019t a jeweler
who\u2019s set some words
in a precious metal
lifted from a cursed treasure
it doesn\u2019t obey
what they call
\u201cthe rules of Art\u201d
but in it I find all intact
your regal stature
your furious grips
the firmness of your step
and that stuns me
like coming out of a long book
where I feel
as if a real man
lingered behind the lines
brotherly<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For many stanzas in the long poem Sous le b\u00e2illon<\/em>, he exchanged his earlier poems\u2019 chopped-up, spaced-out lines for short, condensed epigrams:<\/p>\n

\n

Learn silence
so that our words weigh
all their weight in pain
tell the essence of our acts
under the hangman\u2019s blindfold
know how to recognize the blindfold
of our own survival<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In his prison letters to Jocelyne, La\u00e2bi seemed to want to ensure that his words took their actual weight in pain. \u201cOur site of words,\u201d he wrote in September 1972, \u201cis a citadel open to all the horizons, but founded on dead languages, sterile colors, decrepit sensibilities and disgraceful acts.\u201d Two years later, he records having \u201crecognized at the same time the supreme complexity of what\u2019s real and the supreme difficulty of capturing its richness and movement.\u201d To vent these worries in language itself was a way of asserting the preeminence of careful, good faith inquiry over barbarism\u2019s self-preserving affirmations and denials. (His interest in children\u2019s education, a subject to which he returns repeatedly in the letters, was another way.)<\/p>\n

In an early letter, he refers to a practice in the pre-Islamic Arabic world of holding annual poetry contests, writing the winning verses down on gazelle skins, then hanging them year-round from the most central public site in Mecca. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking often about the architecture of these suspended poems,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand not for the comfort of \u2018returning to the source\u2019 or any of that exoticism, but because, beyond its morals, I\u2019m comfortable in the precise rhythm of the qasida<\/em>, in the abundance of liberty it gives.\u201d La\u00e2bi has always been interested in inviting his readers to imagine what it would look like for a society to publicly honor, rather than privately imprison, the poets responsible for unmaking its own language. The hope he put in the promise of such a society was effusive, insistent, and sometimes touched by a note of suppressed self-doubt. In his best writing, it led him to inveigh against literary barbarism with the energy of someone possessed by \u201ca terrible passion for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Postscript: Last week, just before\u00a0midnight\u00a0on the night of October 18, Abdellatif and Jocelyne La\u00e2bi were attacked at knifepoint by an unidentified assailant at their home in Rabat. \u201cHe struck at me,\u201d\u00a0La\u00e2bi later told the press, \u201cwithout asking for money or anything.\u201d The couple were hospitalized with minor injuries after their neighbors helped them restrain the man and call the police.<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Oscar Wilde\u2019s <\/a><\/em>De Profundis<\/a>, here<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems are at war with barbarism. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on Oscar Wilde\u2019s De Profundis, here. In Le livre impr\u00e9vu, his 2010 collection of autobiographical essays, the Moroccan poet Abdellatif La\u00e2bi suggested that there were \u201ctwo branches of the human tree\u201d with which he\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19434],"tags":[20020,20021,19436,20024,182,20026,5875,747,7221,165,19435,20025,20022,20023],"class_list":["post-91451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prison-lit","tag-abdellatif-laabi","tag-andre-naffis-sahely","tag-incarceration","tag-le-livre-imprevu","tag-letters","tag-mohammed-v","tag-morocco","tag-novels","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-prison-literature","tag-souffles","tag-the-bottom-of-the-jar","tag-the-rule-of-barbarism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Reign of Barbarism: Abdellatif Laabi\u2019s Prison Poems<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For his series on prison literature, Max Nelson explores the Moroccan poet\u2019s history and work.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/30\/great-waves-of-vigilance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Great Waves of Vigilance by Max Nelson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 30, 2015 \u2013 Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems are at war with barbarism.Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. 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