Peter Spillmann, Olivier Hadouchi and myself went to Paris last week to meet the Laâbi’s. The conversation will be published soon, the exchange was great and full of new insights.

Photo by Olivier Hadouchi

1972. Transcript and translation of a conversation recorded July 14, 2015, in Créteil, Paris, with Abdellatif Laâbi, poet and editor of Souffles-Anfas magazine published in Rabat from 1966 to 1972.[1]

Abdellatif Laâbi: First there was an understanding that my generation could not move forward without having resolved our problems with the colonial experience. The generation that preceded us, of Moroccan men and women, was preoccupied with the political fight against the colonial system. That generation succeeded, as Morocco was able to regain its independence in 1956. But that generation never asked itself the question of whether colonization was a loss of autonomy and national dignity or if it was a loss of something else. What happens in a colonial situation? Is it simply political oppression, economic, all of that? Or is it something else? It was my generation that concretely asked itself about these problems. What happened culturally? What was the colonial enterprise in the framework of culture? What was the impact of colonial politics on the being, on the psychology of Moroccans, on their identity, on the relationship they have with their past, present, and future?

Our first challenge was: How to decolonialize minds? How to decolonialize culture? How do we rediscover our autonomy, our freedom of creation, in relation to a culture that was imposed upon us? But with this paradox: all of that must happen in the language of the colonizer. A paradox, a contradiction. It was necessary to deal with this paradox and this contradiction. How to produce a literature that would carry this movement for the emancipation of the human being? We worked with the only language that we had at our disposal. We didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose to write in French—French was imposed upon me during a history that went beyond me personally. The important thing was to see what I did with this language. What did I succeed in creating within this language? How did I make this language my own?

The second challenge, which came out of the first, was to ask oneself: What does it mean to be Moroccan? Ten years after independence, we asked ourselves the question of identity. And we answered it with a clear response, one very original for the time: we claimed a cultural plurality. To be Moroccan is to be Arab Muslim, Amazigh (Berber), Jewish, African, Mediterranean, Saharan. We claimed our identity as one of pluralism, because Moroccan identity can only be understood if we see all the components that constitute it.

The third challenge was: How to create a new literature? A literature that carries the mark of our memory, of our personality, our subjectivity. I believe that what was created with the journal Souffles was a sort of rupture, a sort of forward flight. We rejected the models that existed at the time, whether that be the Western literary model or the Arab literary model, the Near East. We had to invent our own model. And therefore, inevitably, there was a very violent split at that time. It was necessary to go forth into the unknown. We took a leap into the unknown, maybe not exactly entirely consciously. It was an urge that led us to make this jump into the unknown.

We felt that there was a universal dimension to our adventure. A Maghrebian dimension. Because we knew that in the other Maghreb countries, there were the same realities, the same challenges. But also beyond the Maghrebian dimension. This universal dimension was evident to us right away.

The fourth dimension: When we revolted against the Western models, the orientalizing models, we aimed to create our own concepts, something of the future. Of course, at the time, we found some intellectuals, some creators, who helped us in this process: Frantz Fanon, who went very far, in a clinical way, to analyse the colonial phenomenon as it happened and its repercussions on the identity of peoples and their cultures. Aimé Césaire, of course, an important poet, who was at the time one of our older brothers. And other poets who were kicking at the stalls, as they say. Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of these, for me anyway. Russian poetry from the 1920s and ’30s, not just Mayakovsky and futurists such as Velimir Khlebnikov, among others, but also the Turkish poet—whose engagement was not only in writing, but also in politics—Nâzım Hikmet. A poet who paved the way by demonstrating that poetry could be very dangerous, but that it was necessary to accept this danger.…

The fifth challenge: In our drive to dismantle the colonial constraints, we paid attention to a domain in which colonial ideology had worked extensively, in order to know popular Moroccan culture. Traditional art, popular poetry, oral poetry, all of that. We undertook a task of rehabilitating this popular culture. That was very important in our process. And not least for the poets… Thanks to this popular culture, we discovered that popular poetry was not only in writing, but also in breathing and speaking. This heritage of poetry and oral literature in Morocco breathed life into us with the dimension of the spoken word. For painters and visual artists, again there was an enormous heritage. All the popular arts. Therefore we began revisiting this heritage that was considered to be nothing more than folklore or ordinary artisan craft. All the more so, as these popular arts were not only meant for contemplation, like a painted canvas, but were also integrated into our lives, inserted among the objects that we use in daily life, in our homes, everywhere. In Germany, for example, it took time to consider that art could also be functional, that it could be integrated into architecture, that it could be an element in architecture. So [at Souffles] we did this work that consisted of getting closer to popular art, to take away the folkloric dimension given to it by the colonial period and to make it one of the driving forces of literary and artistic creation.

And there I’ve given an overview of the fourth dimension. It just goes to show that an avant-garde movement must go very far into the past in order to make a leap into the future.

[1] The conversation was conducted by Marion von Osten with the assistance of Olivier Hadouchi. The excerpt was translated by Kathe McHugh Stevenson. The video recording was done by Peter Spillmann, edited by Marion von Osten and Peter Spillmann. The full transcript was published in full as part of the tricontinentale.net project #02 Don’t breath normal, read Souffles! in February 2018. tricontinentale.net is an exchange platform initiated by the Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture (CPKC), Berlin.