Mohamed Zafzaf

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” was burnt in Drake, N.D.; Lee Harper’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” was banned in schools in Lindale, TX in 1996 because it “conflicted with the values of the community.” Even Hergé’s famous “Tintin au Congo” is banned from the public surface of the Brooklyn Public Library after patrons complained it was “racially offensive to black people.” The list goes on and on. You can find a more comprehensive list at the Banned Books web site of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom:www.ala.org/bbooks.

Mohamed Choukri

There was a time in Morocco when the Islamist groups and the repressive government of Hassan II, despite their irreconcilable political and religious differences, equally loathed Moroccan literature, especially the Arabic written one whose writers broke away from the romantic mold and the burdened narrative of the previous generation – Abdelkrim Ghalab, Abdelmajid Benjelloun, Mohamed Barada and others . The Islamic groups, which at the time were impotent and mostly underground, were incapable of voicing their acrimonious condemnations, let alone act on them. Hassan II, on the other hand, jailed Moroccan writers and poets and banned their books simply for exposing pretense by their unsparing depiction of the hopelessness, violence, despair, and deprivation that were the stuff of daily life to the majority of Moroccans.

Up until the nineties, the term “Arabic literature” in Morocco excluded Moroccan writers, playwrights, and poets. The Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito, one of the most celebrated literary critics in the Arab World, noted in an article he wrote for “Art and Thought,” a cultural magazine published by the Goethe Institute, that for Moroccan readers, literary books came from the Middle East and western countries. The curriculums the ministry of education designed for all levels of education regarded Morocco’s native literature as one of a lesser kind. Suffice it to say that Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical novel “For Bread Alone” was originally written in Arabic, but was first published in English in 1962. It wasn’t until 1982 that

Driss Khouri

the book was published in its original form; it was, then, banned from 1983 to 2000. Zafzaf himself became known to mainstream Morocco posthumously. Abdellah Zrika, one of the most famous poets in Morocco today, spent two years in jail and saw many of his poems censored. Idriss Khouri was marginalized. These were (Idriss Khouri is still alive and writing) the Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the Charles Bukowski, the Pedro Juan Gutiérrez of Morocco.

Since Mohamed VI became king, the government has largely withdrawn itself from banning literary books. Islamist, however, resurged as a brutal repressive force against Morocco’s bards of brothels and bars. They labeled some apostates and accused others of heresy. Their constant venomous and over-the-top opposition should come as no surprise; Zafzaf and other Moroccan writers like him railed against a society that both the government and Islam failed; they wrote, not to the academia, but to the downtrodden of Moroccan society in a style far from mellifluous. While the Islamic fringe is revolted, Moroccan readers are besotted by their realism and easy diction.

Between Morocco and a more consensual society, its Islamists. There are writers, poets, and artists in Morocco today who impose on themselves a stiflingself-sensorship and whose creative process is stymied by the pernicious ideology Islamists advocate. Their work, consequently, is piffle compared to that of Zafzaf et al. If the Islamists have their say, school curriculums will consist of nothing more than the Koran and hadith. This literature that Czeslaw Milosz, in one of his poems, described as “A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,/A tournament of hunchbacks, literature” will be on sufferance, or disappear.

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Mohamed Zafzaf, morocco, moroccan, education, freedom, speech, ban, brooklyn, hassan II, king, Abdelkrim Ghalab, Abdelmajid Benjelloun, Mohamed Barada , Idriss Khouri, poems, education, islamic, islam, brothels, bars, apostate

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