Description
A collection of visceral, anti-colonial poetry from the Maghreb region of North Africa that is as indebted to Surrealism as it is to Negritude.
Originally published in 1975, PROXIMAL MOROCCO— is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine written in fits and starts during a span of 10 years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.
“Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine is a poetic force, and Jake Syersak's unrelenting, uncompromising translation brings one of his most alive books crashing into English ‘in the likeness of thunder.’” — Emma Ramadan
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translation.
Author Bio
Jake Syersak received his MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. He is the author of YIELD ARCHITECTURE (Burnside Review Press, 2018) and several chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Verse Daily, Omniverse, and elsewhere. He edits Cloud Rodeo, co-edits Radioactive Cloud, serves as a contributing editor for Letter Machine Editions, and co-curates the Yumfactory Reading Series in Athens, GA.
Author City: ATHENS, GA USA
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine was born in 1941 near Tafraout, Southern Morocco, of Berber heritage. One of the major Francophone avant-garde poets of his generation, he is especially well-renowned for his "guerrilla linguistic," an incendiary, Surrealist-inspired, insurrectionary style of writing. AGADIR, his first full-length work, won the Jean Cocteau "Enfants terribles" prize in 1968 and was followed by numerous works of prose, poetry, and drama, including Corps négatif suivi de Histoire d'un bon dieu (1968), Soleil arachnide (1969) Moi, l'aigre (1970), Le Déterreur (1973), Une odeur de mantèque (1976), and Résurrection des fleurs sauvages (1981). One of the co-founders (with Abdellatif Laâbi) of the magazine Anfas/Souffles (Breaths), he lived in self-exile in France from 1965, returning to Morocco only in 1979. He died in Rabat on November 18, 1995, Independence Day in Morocco.
Author City: PARIS FRA