Beyond the Barbed Wire

Selected Poems

Laâbi Abdellatif, André Naffis-Sahely

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784100537
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020

Winner of an English PEN Award

Introduced by Jim Moore, with an interview by Christopher Schaefer.

Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco s greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from beyond the borders of what is human, as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are the only weapon we've left. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is right here / inside me / like a second body, and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that epic of silence. These poems, Laâbi's bitter fruits of the murderous twilight, renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet s duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laâbi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laâbi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.

FROM

The Poem Beneath the Gag

(1981)

Chronicles from the Citadel of Exile

Write, write, never stop. Tonight, and for all nights to come.

When I finally found myself alone and had to take stock of the situation. Away with my uniform. I’m no longer like a lost land-surveyor wandering around a circumscribed area. I no longer obey those miserable orders. My prisoner number stays behind the door. I’m fed up with drinking, eating, urinating and defecating. I’m fed up with talking just to call things by their hackneyed names. I chain-smoke one cigarette after another, the smoke shoots out of my lungs in bursts and flies off in acrid plumes of denials. The prison-like night has swallowed up the artificial lights of day. Dishevelled stars populate the vault of my visions.

Write.

When I stop, my voice becomes very strange. As though obscure notes clung to my vocal chords, driven by unfamiliar storms, having come from all the lands where life and death look at one another and spy on one another, two uniquely-coloured beasts appear, both crouching down, ready to pounce, rip apart and destroy the underlying principle of the other.

Write.

I can only keep living by tearing myself away from myself, tearing out my stitches and my failures, there, where I feel closer to my heartbreaks, the collisions, there, where I de-fragment into pieces to live once more in countless elsewheres: earth, roots, spectacular trees, a grainy effervescence in the light of the sun.

Write.

When indifference disappears. When everything speaks to me. When the sea of my memory turns rough and its waves come crashing against the shore of my eyes.

I tear apart amnesia, and stand up, fully-armed, and become the implacable reaper of what is happening to me in the light of what has already happened to me.

Easy does it, inner turmoil. Easy does it, my despair over what slipped through my fingers. Easy does it, my fury to live.

Write.

Even when it’s impossible to simply think of you. And when my hand can no longer put up with burning due to your absence, your regular or anxious breaths, the smell of your hair, the endlessness of your shoulder, that silence where I can feel every variation of your emotions flow through me. You move a hand, cross or uncross your legs, your eyes twitch and I know exactly what kind of shudder ran through you, the moment when that uncomfortable light bothers you, the moment when your nostrils flare at the birth of a new smell, the image, yes the sleek image that blurs your vision. Is so much happiness even possible? You have goosebumps only on your left arm and you plunge once again into that wave we share, which lulls us.

Easy does it, tenderness. Easy does it, my craving for certainties. Easy does it, my aphasia-destroying dream.

Write, write, and never stop.

Ten years? What does that amount to in the equation of life? It was a dawn, in the hollow palm of your warmth. When did you fall asleep? What time did I get back? Then the doorbell started ringing like crazy. They were knocking the door down with their fists. We understood right away. I leaped out of bed, went to stand by the window, and cautiously parted the curtains. The black car was parked down there on the street. Its headlights switched off. A Fiat 125. All our doubts evaporated. Then we started making all the necessary preparations, as though we were about to leave on a long journey. The doorbell rang like crazy. They were knocking the door down with their fists.

Write.

It would be impossible not to. I thought and thought until I fried my brain pondering this need that took a hold of me. Which has exercised its hold on me for so long. Which means that the reality which appears before me is always geared to another reality that is yet to come. Which means that the present is a constant project, the place where I accumulate matter, the building materials of an edifice which I don’t know anything about for the time being, and which I can only comprehend as the pulsing of a new organ which had lodged itself in me, which has grown until it has started to hurt and gradually began to organise its activities. How could I describe this fanatical and watchful espionage of the real? And its arena is the vast theatre of our struggle, our suffering, our genocide and our revolutions, all the liveliness that buckles under the yoke of silence, under the weight of all those clandestine cries, al...