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Re-evaluating Mohamed Choukri'sAutobiography Al-Khubz al-Ḥāfi: TheOppression of Morocco's AmazighPopulation, the Ṣaʿālīk, and BacklashNatalie Khazaalaa Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature,Department of International Studies, Texas A&M University,Academic Bldg 330-B, College Station, TX 77845, USAPublished online: 10 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Natalie Khazaal (2013) Re-evaluating Mohamed Choukri's Autobiography Al-Khubz al-Ḥāfi: The Oppression of Morocco's Amazigh Population, the Ṣaʿālīk, and Backlash, MiddleEastern Literatures: incorporating Edebiyat, 16:2, 147-168, DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2013.843259

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Re-evaluating Mohamed Choukri’s AutobiographyAl-Khubz al-Hafi: The Oppression of Morocco’sAmazigh Population, the Saʿalık, and Backlash

NATALIE KHAZAAL

Abstract

In the 1990s, Mohamed Choukri’s controversial autobiography, Al-Khubz al-hafı (ForBread Alone), was re-evaluated as a social criticism of poverty. This article argues thatAl-Khubz should also be re-evaluated in the context of minority politics. Choukri, anAmazigh author, was committed to redressing the oppression and linguisticdiscrimination by Morocco’s Arabs against its Amazigh minority. There were noAmazigh models for him to emulate, so he used literary devices to create analternative identity mediated through the dominant language of literary Arabic and thetradition of Arabic autobiography. He modeled his autobiographical self after a groupof pre-Islamic brigand poets, outsiders to society known as saʿalık. His choice providesthe key to understanding Choukri’s intersubjective negotiation of Amazigh identity.

Introduction

What I symbolize, not how I lived, will remain after me. (Mohamed Choukri)

In the four decades following the publication of Mohamed Choukri’s (1935–2003) con-troversial autobiography, Al-Khubz al-hafı (For Bread Alone, 1973; hereafter Al-Khubz),international and Arab academics have helped change public perception of him from thatof an apolitical low-life to a political writer committed to anti-colonialism and a modernMoroccan nation.1 The biggest change involved an upgrading of Choukri’s use of sex,sexuality, and the body from pornography to social criticism. The attention that hiswork received from scholars and critics placed Morocco’s 17-year long ban on his

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

Natalie Khazaal, Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Department of InternationalStudies, Texas A&M University, Academic Bldg 330-B, College Station, TX 77845, USA. Email:nataliekhazaal@tamu.edu1Mohamed Choukri, Al-Khubz Al-hafı (Tangiers: author, 1982); and Mohamed Choukri, Al-Khubz Al-hafı. 10th ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Saqı, 2008). Also known as Muhammad Shukrı. Choukri has published aserial autobiography in three parts (1973–2000). In 1973, Part One was published in Paul Bowles’sEnglish translation as For Bread Alone. In 1982, the author subsequently published it in Arabic as Al-Khubz al-hafı (Barefoot Bread). Translating the title as Barefoot Bread is an interpretive choice that Ijustify in detail later in the section, ‘Barefoot Bread’ as a Biomythography. In 1992, he published PartTwo as Zaman al-akhtaʾ (Time of Errors) and in the same year it appeared in London as Al-Shuttar.Mohamed Choukri, Al-Shuttar (Rogues: Dar al-Saqı, 1992). Dar al-Saqı also published Part Three asWujuh (Faces, 2000).

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2013Vol. 16, No. 2, 147–168, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2013.843259

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work under close scrutiny. Unfortunately, no such reassessment has taken place regard-ing the Amazigh author’s commitment to redressing the oppression and linguistic dis-crimination against Morocco’s Amazigh people. I argue that although Choukri doesnot use direct depiction and criticism, he nonetheless writes an alternative history oftheir oppression through a sophisticated use of literary devices. Choukri’s primary lit-erary device involves modeling his autobiographical or literary self after a group ofpre-Islamic brigand poets, outsiders to society known as saʿalık (sing. suʿluk). I arguethat Choukri’s homage to the saʿalık provides the key to understanding how he negotiatesthe role of literature in minority politics while addressing multi-ethnic audiences.

Choukri’s Amazigh Identity is Foundational to Al-Khubz

Choukri was born in the Amazigh village of Ait Chiker in the Rif Mountains of northeast-ern Morocco, from which his family took its name. He belonged to the Riffian Amazigh,who are one of the three major groups of Moroccan Amazigh—Riffian, Central AtlasAmazigh, and Shilha (Chleuh). Although Choukri did not brand himself as anAmazigh, his identification with the oppression of the Amazigh population underliesAl-Khubz, as can be seen in the following examples.

Choukri describes Al-Khubz as a shared autobiography about ‘an oppressed group ofpeople that included me and my family.’2 Even though Choukri’s background is wellknown, scholars have interpreted the ‘oppressed group of people’ as the Moroccanpoor. Sabry Hafez, who wrote the afterword to Choukri’s sequel Al-Shuttar (Rogues,1992), places Choukri within the ‘occluded, silenced, and marginalized social space’ oftheMoroccan poor.3 He refers to them as the ‘dregs’ of humanity, meaning the homeless,the destitute, thieves, thugs, andmurderers.4 Even thoughHafez does not explicitly claimthat the Moroccan poor Choukri describes are all Arab, his failure to distinguish theAmazigh from the Arabs uncovers a common assumption that the two can be read simi-larly and that a discussion of ethnicity cannot help uncover hidden or discursively sup-pressed social inequalities. This tendency for ethnic-blind reading continues even twodecades later. In 2009, for example, Salah Moukhlis warns against tearing Choukri’sprose from its socioeconomic and historical context. Looking at Choukri through thelens of postmodern hybridity, nomadism, and subject positionings, he argues, onlymade Choukri indistinguishable from any other postmodern subject, whether in theWest or in contexts of world poverty. Contrary to his own warning, Moukhlis fails torelate Choukri’s narrative to its Riffian Amazigh context and claims that it is ‘simplyMor-occan.’5 In stark contrast to Hafez’s and Moukhlis’s lack of differentiation betweenChoukri and the Arab poor, Choukri offers a clear division between them and his family.

In 1943, the Amazigh Rif was hit by a devastating famine and unemployment. Alongwith thousands of other Riffians, Choukri’s family fled to the more affluent coastal citiesof Tangier and Tetuan, which had large Arab populations. The famine killed thousandsof humans, cows, sheep, goats, and dogs. Choukri’s uncle was one of the victims.

2Mohamed Choukri, ‘Al-Kiyan wa al-makan,’ Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 6 (1986), 70.3Sabry Hafez, ‘Al-Bunya al-nassiyya li-sırat al-taharrur min al-qahr,’ inAl-Shuttar. 5th ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Saqı, 2004), 228.4Ibid., 221.5Salah Moukhlis, ‘Localized Identity, Universal Experience: Celebrating Mohamed Choukri as a Moroc-can Writer,’ in Writing Tangier (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 29.

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Contrary to their hopes, the family’s situation in Tangier was no better. In Al-Khubz,starvation forces Choukri to scavenge garbage and his father to silence Choukri’syounger brother’s cries for bread by strangling the baby to death. Choukri depicts thexenophobia of Tangier’s Arab poor against the Amazigh:

There are differences between me and the other kids in the neighborhood thatmake me feel inferior although some of them are just as poor. […] They sayabout me, ‘He is a Riffian. He came from the land of hunger and murderers.’‘He doesn’t even speak Arabic.’ ‘This year all Riffians are sick with the diseaseof hunger’ […] ‘If one of their sick cows or sheep or goats dies, they eat them.They eat even rotten flesh.’6

Comparing his family with poor Arab families in Tangier, Choukri writes:

Why did we have to flee the Rif, when others remained on their lands? Whydoes my father have to go to prison and my mother to sell vegetables, leavingme alone hungry, when this man can stay at home with his wife?7

Choukri’s experience is not comparable with the Arab poor, but a nuanced alternativeexperience that carefully draws attention to ethnic divisions in his communalautobiography.

Nirvana Tanoukhi, who wrote a seminal study on Choukri’s investment in national-ism, also obscures the importance of Choukri’s ethnicity when she argues that ‘thenational history written by Al-Khubz al-hafı envisions a community brought togetheras a nation not by race or religion, but by a shared cultural and economic experienceof colonialism.’8 Yet the Amazigh community’s experience of colonialism, both histori-cally and as depicted in Al-Khubz, differed from that of Arabs. For example, pan-Arabnationalism, which was born from the experience of colonialism, did not fare well withnon-Arab minorities. Pan-Arabism denied the divide between the Amazigh and Arabsby calling it colonial propaganda. The ambition of pan-Arabism distorted the pictureof Morocco’s ethnic composition. It validated only two groups, the persecuting Euro-pean colonizers and the victimized Arabs, thus creating a false dichotomy by excludingthe Amazigh.9 The Amazigh resisted Morocco’s pre-1956 and post-1956 independence

6Mohamed Choukri, Min ajli al-khubz wahdih: al-aʿmal al-kamila (Morocco: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafı al-ʿArabı: Al-Dar al-Baydaʾ, 2008), 17–18.7Ibid., 19.8Nirvana Tanoukhi, ‘Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon: Paul Bowles’s ForBread Alone as Translation of Mohamed Choukri’s Al-Khubz Al-Hafi,’ Research in African Literatures34, no. 2 (2003): 131.9The exploration of the plurality of Arab and Amazigh identities is beyond the scope of this article. Formore of the subject, see among others: Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller, eds, Berbersand Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010);Katherine E. Hoffman, We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco. 1st ed. ( Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); and Wolfgand Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities: Tribal Structures in the High AtlasMountains,’ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 1 (1998): 1–22. Also see DanielJ. Schroeter, ‘The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities,’ Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1(Oxford: Malden 2008): 145–64.

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attempts at their Arabization.10 Their opposition to such marginalization intensifiedwhen the country gained independence in 1956. Morocco announced that its nationalidentity was Arab and its official language was Arabic, dismissing the fact that at least45% of Moroccans were native speakers of an Amazigh language.11 Amazigh and Arabidentities in the region continued to compete for decades. In the early 1970s, the Bou-médienne regime in neighboring Algeria (where Choukri lived briefly in the 1950s) vil-lainized Amazigh identity as backward, belonging to what Islam defined as the pre-Islamic period of ignorance (Jahiliyya), and outlawed ‘the public and literary use ofAmazigh.’12 I am not suggesting that what happened in Algeria is analogous to what hap-pened in Morocco, but rather that the ethnic and linguistic discrimination against theAmazigh in both countries provided the background against which Choukri’s workwas later read by Amazigh expatriates (I will discuss this in more detail below).

Choukri’s family exemplifies the Amazigh resistance to Arabic through its struggle tolearn the language and adapt to the culture in Tangier. In addition to his native Riffian(Tarifit), Choukri’s father knew only a little Spanish. Learning the Moroccan dialect ofArabic (darija) took him years, and Choukri’s mother learned only a few words. Linguis-tically Choukri was the most successful in his family—he learned darija, Spanish, literaryArabic ( fusha), French, and even English. Nonetheless, the Arab literary establishmentmaintained that he did not know Arabic grammar well and that his prose did not soundlike Arabic.13 Choukri proudly stated that he was ignorant of the rules of Arabicgrammar; Hasan Ahmad Birish entitled the first chapter of his book,Hakadha takallamaMuhammad Shukrı (Thus Spoke Mohamed Choukri), after that statement.14 Choukriembeds the family’s struggle with Arabic and their close identity with Riffian when inAl-Khubz he records his mother’s conversations with him in Riffian and only then trans-lates her statements into Arabic. In an interview, he said: ‘I’m speaking my Riffian. If youdon’t understand, learn Riffian, just as I learned Arabic.’This statement shows the depthto which Riffian was foundational to his identity.15

In Al-Khubz and Al-Shuttar, Choukri clearly distinguishes himself and the Amazighfrom Arab nationalists in their response to the colonial regime. In Al-Khubz, he describeshow Riffians turn to vandalism and looting moments after being recruited in the anti-colonial protests of 1952. In Al-Shuttar, he denounces the nationalist mob in the cityof Larache during the immediate post-independence period.16 The mob wants to killthe pasha for collaborating with the colonialists, but he has fled; instead they burn hisblack servant alive. A Spanish woman dies of a heart attack upon seeing how the mob

10On the question of Amazigh identities, consult the recent work of scholars such as Rachid Aadnan, JaneGoodman, James McDougall, Paul Silverstein, and David Crawford. The only major source available onthe subject before these recent studies was Ernest Gellner and Charles AntoineMicaud,Arabs and Berbers:From Tribe to Nation in North Africa (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1972).11Fatima Sadiqi, ‘The Sociology of Berber: The Place of Berber in Morocco,’ International Journal of theSociology of Language 123 (1997): 7–21.12Paul Silverstein, ‘Realizing Myth: Berbers in France and Algeria,’ Middle East Report 200 (1996), 12.For Amazigh activism in Morocco, consult Paul Silverstein and David Crawford, ‘Amazigh Activismand the Moroccan State,’ Middle East Report 233 (2004): 44–8.13Christina Civantos, ‘Literacy, Sexuality and the Literary in the Self-Inscription of Muhammad Shukri,’Middle Eastern Literature 9, no. 1 (2006): 32 and 38–9.14Hasan Ahmad Bırısh, Hakadha takallama Muhammad Shukrı (Tangier: Maktabat al-Fajr, 1999), 5.15Mohamed Choukri, interview by Sandra Milburn, audiotape, June 1997.16Choukri, Al-Shuttar, 15–20.

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burns an old village chief alive. Choukri condemns other rampant mob murders com-mitted on the mere accusations of collaboration with colonialists. By denouncing themob in writing and showing sympathy with the collaborating pasha’s servant and theSpanish woman, Choukri demonstrates that he was not always aligned with the nation-alists. The ‘shared cultural and economic experience of colonialism’ that Tanoukhi seesin Al-Khubz reflects the pan-Arab perspective of identity in Morocco, but it is inconsist-ent with Choukri as an author and his literary self. By bringing the divergent experienceof the Amazigh and his own identity as a Riffian into focus Choukri contradicts the beliefthat Moroccan society was only split between colonizing Europeans and colonizedArabs.

When Choukri wrote Al-Khubz, there were no appropriate mainstream models thatforegrounded Amazigh languages and identities that he could emulate. Even 30 yearslater, providing Amazigh-Moroccan writers with culturally and linguistically appropriatemodels was a politically charged and controversial issue. In 2003, Morocco’s two-year-old government-run Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture announced its plans to translateAl-Khubz into Amazigh together with other famous Amazigh authors’ works in orderto promote Amazigh languages and cultures.17 The pro-Arabo-Islamic newspaper,Al-Tajdıd, vehemently protested against the institute’s plans on the grounds thatAl-Khubz offended public morality, even though at the time the Arabic edition of Al-Khubz had been legally available for four years.18 The contestation of the Amazighcommunity’s right to appropriate Al-Khubz clearly indicates that Al-Tajdıd equatedreclamation of the text within the Amazigh language with its destruction as an Arab-Moroccan cultural symbol. Al-Khubz’s official sanctioning as an Amazigh culturalsymbol also threatened to empower the Amazigh community and intensify the battlebetween the Arab and Amazigh communities in the upcoming municipal elections.

The many interviews Choukri gave at different periods of his life show the changes inthe kinds of authors he read; his later statements point to an increasing interest in modernArab authors. In earlier interviews, however, closer to the time ofAl-Khubz’s publication,Choukri expressed his dislike for or disinterest in contemporary Arabic literature as hisreferences to specific authors and works suggest.19 Two examples are the foundationaltext for Moroccan Arab nationalist literature Fı al-tufula (In Childhood, 1957) by Abdel-majid Benjelloun (1919–1981) and the writings of Ahmad Amın (1886–1954), a famousIslamic reformist and a proponent of Arab Muslim nationalist identity, which suggeststhat Choukri felt put off by models of Arab nationalist identity.20 By contrast, he wasan avid reader of pre-nationalist Arabic literature because it ‘liberated him.’21 In particu-lar, pre-Islamic poetry appealed to Choukri because it predated Arab nationalism and

17‘Mashruʿ Tarjamat, ‘Al-Khubz al-hafı’ Ila al-amazıghiyya yuthır hafıdhat al-usuliyyin fi al-Maghrib,’ Al-Sharq al-Awsat, January 29, 2003, http://www.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&issueno=8828&article=149638&search=%E3%CD%E3%CF%20%D4%DF%D1%ED&state=true (accessed October 5, 2013).18Muhammad Aʿmarı, ‘Hal yanwı al-maʿhad al-malaki li al-thaqafa al-amazıghiyya tarjama,’ Al-Tajdıd,Rabat, Morocco, January 28, 2003, http://www.attajdid.info/def.asp?codelangue=6&infoun=10508(accessed February 4, 2013).19Choukri’s interest in western literature has been well documented, and one can argue that his self-adver-tised preference for western literature had something to do with his eschewing of Arabic literature. Here Iam interested indistinguishingbetween the kindoforiginalArabic literaryworks he read and those hedidnot.20Choukri, ‘Al-Kiyan wa al-makan,’ 71.21Ibid., 71 and 75.

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was free of religious symbolism (since he was an atheist).22 Not surprisingly, in 1990 hecompared himself with pre-Islamic poets: ‘I am now like a Jahiliyya poet, before Islam,who would start crying over the traces of his beloved’s campsite.’23

Among those pre-Islamic poets were the saʿalık, who were outsiders to their tribalsociety. The nationalism-free and religion-free model that they provide bears a strikingresemblance to Choukri as an Amazigh outside the Arab nationalist majority. The differ-ences in the historical and cultural circumstances of Choukri’s modern Moroccansociety and the saʿalık’s pre-Islamic tribal society invite caution against drawing all-too-fitting parallels between the two. Our knowledge of the saʿalık poets is limitedbecause they are known only through poetry and a small number of (biographical) anec-dotes (akhbar), both having reached us indirectly via later recensions. In comparison,there is a lot of historical information about Choukri, some of it in his own writing. None-theless, it is still beneficial to look at their similarities. The parallel attempted here doesnot invalidate alternative parallels comparing Choukri with contemporary Moroccansociety outside the saʿalık heritage, as well as parallels with western literary models, asJean Genet’s thief in The Thief’s Journal, 24 whose influence Choukri personallyacknowledged.

The Pre-Islamic Saʿalık: Legendary Figures and a Literary Archetype

In Al-Khubz and Al-Shuttar Choukri describes himself and an acquaintance of his assaʿalık. The saʿalık provide a viable model for Choukri because the central motive fortheir poetry and biographical anecdotes is their banishment from tribal society. Somewere banished because they opposed the tribe’s decision to forego its duty to avengetheir slain relatives. Others were banished because their mothers were black or slaves,so their fathers disowned them. In the hostile environment of pre-Islamic Arabia(before 622 CE), survival was difficult without relying on other tribesmen, so banishmentwas usually a death sentence.25 Consequently, the saʿalık swore life-long revenge againsttheir tribe. The famous suʿluk poet, al-Shanfara, for instance, vowed to kill 100 of his tri-besmen.26 He had killed 99 by the time they trapped and killed him. Then a young tribes-man accidentally stepped on al-Shanfara’s skull, cutting himself, and died from theresulting infection, fulfilling al-Shanfara’s vow. The saʿalık’s representation as legendary

22Mohamed Choukri, ‘Spitting Image No: 2 By Ludmilla Biebl,’ 1997. In an interview with LudmillaBiebl for Spitting Image, Choukri confirms this: ‘[LB] ‘You are an outspoken atheist. A dangerous positionhere. Aren’t you afraid to become a victim of the Islamic fundamentalists.’ [MC] ‘There is no point inbeing afraid. If it happens, it happens.’ The best example of Choukri’s literary condemnation of organizedreligion is his short story Al-Firdaws al-saghır (Little Paradise) published in 1985 in Casablanca by theauthor as part of the collection Al-Khayma (The Tent).23Mohamed Choukri, ‘Tanger, nervures secrétes de mes racines’ 48 (Maroc: Les Signes De l’Invisible,1990), 26.24Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (New York: Grove Press, 1964).25Details on the saʿalık’s banishment can be extracted from Yusuf Khulayyif, Al-Shuʿaraʾ al-saʿalık fi al-ʿasral-jahilı (Cairo: Dar al Maʿarif bi-Masr, 1966), 116–17, although his theoretical framework is differentfrom mine. For a short overview, see also C.E. Bosworth, et al., eds, ‘Saʿalık,’ in Encyclopedia of Islam(Leiden: Brill, 1995).26Michael Cooperson, ‘Al-Shanfara,’ Arab Literary Culture: 500–925. Dictionary of Literary Biography(Detroit: Gale, 2005), 318–324.

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figures was handed down by the Arabic literary tradition, so the historical existence andaccuracy of its characters is subject to debate.27

Having referred to himself as a suʿluk does not bind Choukri to following the legendarymodel of the saʿalık to the letter. In fact, Choukri’s cultural background favors a broaderperspective on the saʿalık, which includes understanding the saʿalık as part of a15-century-long Arabic literary tradition—a perspective no possible historical saʿalık orthe many classical authors who wrote about them could have had. Choukri’s understand-ing also differs in significantways from that ofmodern literary critics such as Suzanne Stet-kevych. In her interpretation, the suʿluk is the literary archetype of a ‘permanent liminalentity’ who has failed to reincorporate into his tribe at the end of the rite of passage.28

The suʿluk in this view embodies a failed rite of passage fromnature to culture, permanentlyliminal, or in limbo, and unable to reintegrate into society. Not everyone accepts that her20th-century model of cultural interpretation is easily adapted to discussions of ancienttexts. One should not assume that it is universally applicable, as my interpretation ofChoukri will demonstrate. Nonetheless, some elements in her theory can be helpful inlooking at the continuity in the Arabic literary tradition. In the study of Arabic literature,scholars have regularlymade a sharp division between classical (pre-Islamic andmedieval)and modern. Classical and modern writings differ in language, and a change in social,economic, political, and cultural background is said to begin around 1800. Thereforethe divide may seem practical. However, in emphasizing the modern context of contem-porary Arabic literature, literary theorists often overlook its roots in pre-Islamic, early, andmedieval Islamic and Arabic cultures. This article highlights one aspect of the continuitybetween classical and modern Arabic literature. It shows how pre-Islamic poetry andbiographical akhbar (anecdotes) illuminate Choukri’s autobiography.

Choukri’s Passage as a Suʿluk

Taking revenge on their tribe and knowing that they can never reintegrate, the saʿalıkmake use of literary devices to pervert the tribe’s sacred conventions of the rite ofpassage. They pervert the literary conventions for defining kinship to portray an alterna-tive ritual and rhetorical experience. I argue that by creating a literary self-aligned withthe saʿalık, Choukri subverts the restrictive model through which Arab nationalismsees the Amazigh. Thus, ritually, rhetorically and politically, he creates a valid alternative

27Gregor Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read. Revised. (Edinburgh Uni-versity Press, 2009).28Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych,TheMute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and Poetics of Ritual (CornellUniversity Press, 2010), 87 ; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Lewis HenryMorgan Lectures) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 95; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elemen-tary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 8. Stetkevych views the suʿluk as a literary archetype—a poor outsider, who relies on no one: ‘who journeys repeatedly and habitually, never arriving at a desti-nation, a perpetual passenger in a transitional state. […] In ritual terms, the suʿluk is a permanent liminalentity.’ The archetypal suʿluk is a passenger in a rite of passage, which according to Arnold Van Gennephas three stages. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. (London: Routledge reprinted 2004(1960)) The suʿluk’s banishment from the tribe represents the first stage, known as separation. Thesecond stage, known as liminality for being in limbo, represents the suʿluk’s transitional journey. Reinte-gration into society, or in this case the tribe, is the third stage. The suʿluk is denied the third stage. He isstuck in the liminal second stage and remains in what Victor Turner has described as the cracks betweenpositions people adopt in society. The liminal stage is also the realm of nature, as Claude Lévi-Strausscharacterizes it, free of the social norms of its opposite, the realm of culture and community.

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Amazigh experience. Below I discuss first how saʿalık poetry and (biographical) anec-dotes pervert the conventions of the rite of passage, then analyze howChoukri, in mourn-ing the deaths of his uncle and brother, uses the blood vengeance ode to create a literaryself modeled after the saʿalık.

The perversion of the vengeance pact

The blood vengeance ode is a pre-Islamic poetic genre that depicts a tribal member aven-ging a slain relative’smurder. The ode involves a vengeance pact and vow.The avenger is ayounger relative (usually a son or brother) who follows a rite of passage in his quest forrevenge. In the ode’s opening, the avenger promises that he will succeed, then departs.The promise is a vengeance pact that allows the avenger to state his claim of inheritance—he will acquire the slain person’s social status and weapons in return for fulfilling thepact.29 The ode’s middle part depicts the avenger’s liminal journey to vengeance. Thefinal section depicts the avenger’s reunion with the tribe and his inheritance of the slainperson’s higher status and weapons. Blood inspires the ode’s diction and imagery. Atypical metaphor consists of an owl that rises from an unavenged victim and asks for theenemy’s blood, crying ‘Give me drink’ until vengeance quenches the owl’s thirst.30

Another typical metaphor is the spilling of the killed murderer’s blood and its conversioninto food for the avenger, thereby increasing his kin’s chance of survival. The same bloodalso becomes poison for the non-kin (the murderer’s tribe), decreasing the non-kin’schance of survival. In essence, the vengeance pact involves the protection of kin andmurder of non-kin, ritually offering food to kin and poison to non-kin.31

The circumstances of the saʿalık’s banishment place them in a dual status. From theirown perspective, they are victims of their tribe’s unjust banishment (their metaphoricalmurder), and are therefore ritual victims. However, since they take it upon themselves toavenge their own banishment, they are also avengers. In other words, despite being meta-phorically dead, the saʿalıkmust avenge their death. These perverted circumstances fore-shadow the saʿalık’s eventual perversion of ritual conventions in the different types ofodes they compose and in the (biographical) anecdotes collected to explain theirpoetry. Perverting the pact, the saʿalık kill kin and protect non-kin, exemplified by al-Shanfara who vows to kill 100 of his tribesmen. The saʿalık also pervert the food/poison metaphor; they offer poison to kin and food to non-kin. An anecdote relatesthat Taʾabbata Sharran agrees to bring his mother the seasonal truffles that young tribes-men are expected to collect for their families. Being a suʿluk, instead of truffles he collectsvipers, which he carries in a sack under his arm. When he offers the vipers to his motherin place of food, she gives him the nickname Taʾabbata Sharran (‘he carried evil under hisarmpit’).32 In another version, he holds a knife under his armpit.33 Taʾabbata Sharran

29Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 62.30Charles James Lyall, ed., The Mufaddaliyyat: An Anthology of Ancient Arbian Odes Compiled by al-Mufad-dal Son of Muhammad According to the Recension and with the Commentary of Abu Muhammad al-Qasim IbnMuhammad al-Anbari. vol. 1. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 322; and Th.E. Homerin, ‘Echoes of aThirsty Owl,’ Journal of Near Eatsern Studies 44, no. 3 (1985): 165–84.31For a discussion how polluting non-kin blood purifies kin, see Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak,66.32ʿAbd al-Rahman Al-Mustawı, ed., Dıwan Ta’abbata Sharran (Beirut: Dar al-Maʿrifa, 2003), 6.33Ibid.

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perverts the ritual that expects him to bring food and propagate his kin’s line; instead heattempts to kill them by bringing something ‘destructive or deadly.’34 Like their pact, thesaʿalık’s claim of inheritance is also a perversion because they can never acquire a higherstatus in the tribe. Neither do they enter the reintegration stage, no matter how manytimes they retaliate for their banishment.

Choukri’s Al-Khubz is structured as a blood vengeance ode and modeled after thesaʿalık’s perversion of the vengeance pact and claim of inheritance. He frequentlyannounces a pact to kill kin—his murderous father. He fantasizes about killing hisfather, and dates events by the number of years remaining until his father’s death in1979. His vengeance pact is a catch-22: if he kills his father, he will spill kin blood,which would turn it ritually into poison. Poisoned kin blood will prevent him from com-pleting the rite of passage. However, if he fails to avenge his brother, his brother’s bloodwill turn to poison; yet again he will not complete the passage. Choukri’s no-win situ-ation is instrumental in perverting the pact and triggering his repeated use of pervertedfood/poison metaphors. For example, the starving young Choukri finds a dead chicken.He attempts to slaughter the corpse through the ritual he has seen adults perform. Heremembers how relatives forced his sick mother to drink the blood of a ritually slaugh-tered ram. His mother survived the illness, thereupon reuniting with the group. But imi-tation of the adults’ ritual actions and incantations does not grant Choukri a similarreunion. The chicken’s corpse spills no blood to be offered to the kin; rather, it consistsof poisonous flesh. When his mother sees him cleaning the corpse before cooking it, sheyells that he wants to feed them poison and calls him crazy.35 Choukri brings his familypoison instead of food, symbolically destroying them, just as happens in the anecdoteabout Taʾabbata Sharran. In both stories, kin vilify the protagonists by calling themevil (Taʾabbata Sharran) or crazy (Choukri), treating them as non-kin. Choukri pervertsthe food/poison metaphor in other instances as well, incorporating images of polluted,poisonous blood—mixed with urine and pus, as well as polluted and poisonous foodmixed with feces or gasoline. Choukri’s claim of inheritance is also a perversion,because it can never ripen. Being the older brother, Choukri will not acquire a higherstatus because his current position is already above that of his sibling; nor will heacquire any of his brother’s weapons because he had none. This rite of passage recountedin Al-Khubz has no reintegration stage either, because Choukri never avenges his broth-er’s death. Denied reintegration, Choukri is set on a permanent liminal path, where heperverts the pact and another generic convention—the vow of vengeance.

A careful comparison of Al-Khubz and many saʿalık poems reveals a still larger patternof parallels in structure.

Perversion of the vengeance vow

Having taken on the pact, the traditional avenger enters the second, liminal stage of the rite,marked by observing a vow of vengeance. This vow reflects a process with two components.The first involves deprivation, in which the avenger forswears the trappings of culture andcommunity that symbolize prosperity and indulgence, such as flesh-eating, wine, sex,washing, and so forth; the avenger temporarily assumes characteristics of nature, such as

34Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 95.35Choukri, Al-Khubz al-hafı, 11.

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hunger, thirst, abstinence, and so on.36 When the avenger kills the murderer, deprivationends. Resumptionmarks a rejoining of the tribe. The avenger indulges in what had been for-sworn, such as eating flesh from ritually killed non-human animals, engaging in sex for pro-creation, and so forth. The vow requires that deprivation and resumption do not mix.

The saʿalık pervert the vow by mixing deprivation and resumption and perverting thecommunal nature of indulgence during resumption. As a sign of deprivation, they sufferfrom hunger. In Lamiyyat al-ʿarab (The ‘L’-Poem of the Arabs), al-Shanfara describeshow he desensitizes the feeling of hunger by adapting his body to longer periods of star-vation. He likens hunger to a vocation and himself to a cordmaker who spins his hollowguts as if they were threads:

I stretch the times of starvation until I kill hunger […]

I plait my hollow guts, like a cordmaker,

who spins and twists his threads.37

However, the saʿalık simultaneously plunder their former tribe’s herds so they can eatflesh. Mixing deprivation with indulgence and satiety is a perversion of the vow. Whenthey chase their former tribe’s herds and kill some among them like predators, theyare also perverting the ritual nature of slaughter.

Instead of forswearing sex, they indulge themselves and brag about it. However, theypervert the procreative purpose of communal sex by being impotent only when they arewith girls who live with the tribe. Taʾabbata Sharran admits this when he berates his penisafter it fails to harden:

Oh, what an unreliable member you are!

You were too weak for a long-skirted slave-girl.38

Rather than a life-giving phenomenon, sex for the saʿalık is destructive. For instance,Taʾabbata Sharran calls his penis a sword. For the saʿalık, sex is also barren becausethey have intercourse with non-human animals or supernatural beings such as ghouls.The ghoul, whom Ibn Manzur describes as changing ‘into all sorts of differentshapes,’ shows how deprivation and resumption are unstable and enmeshed with itsshape-shifting nature and deformed body:39

I met the ghoul racing

through the desert, through the flat and arid wasteland. […]

I lay upon her until morning came.

Only then could I clearly see what had come to me:

36Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 72–3.37Imıl Badı ʿ Yaʿqub, ed.,Dıwan al-Shanfara. 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ʿArabı, 1996), 62–3 (empha-sis added).38Ibid., 47.39Muhammad ibn Mukarram Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-ʿarab. 15 vols. (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1955), 11: 508.

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Two eyes in a hideous head,

a cat’s head with a cleft tongue,

The deformed legs of a prematurely born camel, the back of a dog

covered in a tattered, drooping waterskin.40

Additionally, the saʿalık thwart procreation by sexual and gender ambivalence. TaʾabbataSharran has intercourse with a ram (male) and the ghoul (female). In the ‘L’-Poem of theArabs he is described as chivalrous (male) and mothering (female).

The saʿalık also pervert the understanding of kin as humans. Following their banish-ment, the saʿalık make non-humans their kin, as al-Shanfara describes:

I have closer kin than you, a wolf, swift and sleek,

a smooth and spotted leopard and a long-maned one—a hyena.41

Taʾabbata Sharran is drenched in the ram’s urine when he carries the ram under hisarmpit (or the ghoul’s in other versions of the same anecdote).

The circumstances of Choukri’s vengeance pact also foreshadow his perversion of thevow, imitating that of the saʿalık. He mixes deprivation and resumption, and perverts thecommunal nature of indulgence during resumption. Just as saʿalık born to black or slavemothers were banished once when their fathers had disowned them and a second timewhen their tribe exiled them, Choukri is also banished twice—once exiled from the Rifand a second time shortly after his arrival in Tangier when his father disowns him rituallyby calling him a bastard.42 After his banishment, Choukri encounters deprivation, fre-quently starving for days. To survive, he roams the streets, picks at garbage, and triesto eat decomposing fish or a discarded pastry floating in water along with feces and gaso-line. Starvation becomes a prominent theme in his narrative, similar to al-Shanfara’simages of threads and hollow guts:

Mad hunger and heat rob me of the ability to see things clearly […] I chew myhollow mouth. I chew and chew. My guts gurgle.43

Starvation in the Rif […] Hunger hurts. I suck and suck my fingers. I vomit butonly threads of saliva come out of my mouth.44

However, Choukri perverts deprivation by attempting to eat flesh (the chicken’s corpse)and through continual indulgence in alcohol, kıf and maʿjun, two kinds of marijuanamixture.45

40Al-Mustawı, ed., Dıwan Ta’abbata Sharran, 75.41Yaʿqub, ed., Dıwan al-Shanfara, 59. Transl. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 143.42Choukri, Al-Khubz al-hafı, 9.43Ibid., 100–01 (emphasis added).44Ibid., 9 (emphasis added).45Kıf is the crushed leaves of marijuana that are smoked, maʿjun, like the name suggests, is paste preparedwith the marijuana flowers and can be eaten. It is close to hashish. See Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: HashishVersus Medieval Muslim Society (Leiden: Brill, 1971).

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Choukri also disregards the prohibition against sex. He frequently brags about hissexual prowess and escapades. He dreams of his penis as a giant pen, only able towrite one letter, such as having sex for one purpose—pleasure—not procreation. Thisresembles Taʾabbata Sharran’s description of his penis as a sword. Choukri nevermarries, has no known children, and has sex almost exclusively with prostitutes,occasionally with men, or masturbates, always wasting his sperm. His version ofTaʾabbata Sharran’s ghoul is the tree-woman. Choukri transforms a tree into a womanby carving four holes—two for the breasts, one for the mouth, and one ‘between thelegs.’ In the upper three holes he puts oranges for sucking or apples for biting. He fillsthe fourth with an oiled rug and attaches pictures of women to the tree. In its distortionof female sexuality and the procreative nature of communal sex, the tree-woman is com-parable with Taʾabbata Sharran’s ghoul. Both exist away from society, are seductive andrepulsive, and are a mosaic of diverse objects—cat, camel, dog, fetus, and water skin forthe ghoul; and wood, apples, oranges, cloth, oil, and pictures for the tree. Like the shape-shifting ghoul, the tree can change in Choukri’s eyes—sometimes it is a tree, or a woman,or food, or all three. Choukri also engages in homosexual acts that parallel the saʿalık’ssexual and gender ambivalence. He positions himself as masculine when having sexwith women, but as feminine when he prostitutes himself for a Spanish man. Thus,Choukri perverts the procreative nature of communal sex.

Further, Choukri ritually positions himself within nature among non-humans awayfrom humans. Ostracized by his human family because they believe that he has humi-liated them in his work,46 the author lives with his non-human family: the squirrelsCastor and Pollux, the canary Mozart, and the dog Juba.47 In Al-Khubz, when hespends a night at the Tree Hotel, Choukri is alarmed by the inebriated guests and des-cends to the hotel’s barn to sleep next to a mare. The mare urinates on him while heis sleeping, like the ram who urinates on Taʾabbata Sharran. Afraid to return home tohis tyrannical father, Choukri spends winter nights rolled into a ball, leaning against astill-warm bakery oven, and lets cats sleep on him.

Choukri’s perversion of the vow matches his perversion of the pact. He starves or eatspolluted or forbidden food, drinks alcohol and has sex without procreation. Mixingdeprivation and resumption, Choukri ritually leaves his human kin to join non-humans as if they were kin. Like the saʿalık, Choukri fails to complete this rite ofpassage by perverting its conventional three-stage process.

The parallels between the saʿalık’s poetry and Al-Khubz are too many to be a coinci-dence. One could argue that they are based on something deeper, older and more uni-versal, such as Victor Turner’s claims about ritual. However, instead of essentializingthese parallels, I argue that Choukri makes use of the saʿalık model available throughhis shared cultural background. Even if Choukri never consciously modeled his lit-erary self after the saʿalık, his use of the term suʿluk twice indicates that it was partof his cultural knowledge. In either instance, he uses the term expertly, first whenhis father calls him a suʿluk as a way of describing him as a failure, and secondwhen Choukri describes his acquaintance ʿAbd al-Malik as an outcast who has fledhis family.

46Choukri, interview by Sandra Milburn.47Reda Ben Jalloun, ‘Mohamed Choukri: l’écriture m’a sauvé,’ Jeune Afrique 1769 (December 1994), 61.

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Inspirations from the pre-Islamic saʿalık can still be found in modern Moroccanculture, as when Vincent Crapanzano describes how sexually impotent outcastsexplain their trouble by stating that they are married to camel-footed she-demons(Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan).48 Instances like this that illustrate the existence of apublic memory playing off the pre-Islamic saʿalık provide an alternative source forChourki’s homage to the saʿalık.

Madness

Choukri is skeptical that completing the rite of passage will guarantee him immortalidentity. At the typical ode’s opening, the tribal poet confronts his fear of death ashe stares at the abandoned tribal campsite. The famous tribal poet, Labıd, forinstance, questions the ‘mute immortals’—the rocks from the dead campfire—onhow to attain immortality:

Then I stopped and questioned them,

but how do we question

Mute immortals whose speech

is indistinct?49

The typical ode closes with the riddle of immortality being solved when the poet realizesthat he becomes immortal only through his kin. If his kin propagates, the poet’s line con-tinues, thus ensuring his immortality; however, if his kin dies, he too will be forgotten.

Labıd, an Arab, was reincorporated into his Arab tribe and became metaphoricallyimmortal. Since the dominant concept of communal identity available to Choukri atthe time of his writing was Arab, Choukri would have had to discard his Amazigh identityand assume a non-Amazigh identity in order to become metaphorically immortal withinthat community. In his 1990 negotiation of Labıd’s topos of the ‘mute immortals,’ whichChoukri renders as ‘petrified dead,’ Choukri contrasts Labıd’s successful reincorpora-tion to his own failure:

Why these silences? … I am now like a Jahiliyya poet, before Islam, who wouldstart crying over the traces of his beloved’s campsite. Stop there… But the windhas erased everything. Time has devoured the days among days…The dead arepetrified, and my poem is but a painful melody that tears the sky, opens theearth and shows there madness.50

Unlike Labıd who solves his riddle, Choukri cannot solve his because ‘the wind haserased’ the solution. For Choukri, Labıd’s solution, that the individual becomes immor-tal through his kin, makes no sense; it is ‘madness’ because it presupposes a communitywith an Arab identity and erases Choukri’s Amazigh identity.

48Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,1980).49Labıd’s ode, line 10, transl. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 10.50Choukri, ‘Tanger, nervures secrétes de,’ 26.

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‘Barefoot Bread’ as a biomythography

An autobiography’s title usually communicates the narrator’s constructed identity tohis readers in a pithy phrase. Like the text itself, the title Al-Khubz al-hafı and subtitleA Novelistic Autobiography also communicate Choukri’s minority politics. The titleconsists of two words: ‘bread’ (khubz) and its equivocal epithet ‘barefoot’ (hafı). Itis an unusual combination, reminiscent of the phrase ‘khubz haff’ or plain, drybread, without anything to go with it. Because the title is unusual and reminiscentof plain bread, Paul Bowles missed its political aspect when he rendered it ForBread Alone in the English edition. Academics have also missed it and understoodthe title as a symbol of poverty or bare-bones style of writing. Instead, the literal trans-lation—Barefoot Bread—communicates the political aspect of Choukri’s constructedidentity to the readers because it is a homage to al-Shanfara and the saʿalık. Whenal-Shanfara tried to escape an ambush, he removed only one of his shoes in orderto fool his pursuers into thinking that he was a hyena because of his one-shoedgait. As Joseph Chelhod has argued, the shoe is the quintessential symbol ofculture.51 Conversely, walking completely barefoot is a symbol of nature. Stetkevychhas shown that walking wearing only one shoe places al-Shanfara in a ‘typicallyliminal position’ between culture and nature.52 It is al-Shanfara’s identity card as aliminal entity, someone who has failed to complete the rite of passage. The title Bare-foot Bread is thus Choukri’s version of an identity card as a liminal entity, succinctlydescribing his liminal position: ‘Barefoot’ narrates his link to nature, whereas ‘bread,’as cooked food, narrates his connection to culture. The combination, ‘barefoot bread,’declares that Choukri is half-shoed (alternatively half-fed) and half-barefoot, betweenculture and nature. Incidentally, the French translation, Le pain nu (Naked Bread), ismore appropriate than Bowles’s because it better reflects Choukri’s uncertain positionon the nature–culture continuum.

Autobiography as a genre incorporates many of the literary devices of the novel. Owingto the failings of memory it involves a measure of invention or fiction to render a storycoherent. When the subtitle of an autobiography specifically includes ‘novel’ or ‘novelis-tic,’ it makes a statement beyond the genre. Arab writers, including autobiographers, onoccasion fictionalize real events in order to avoid censorship or harsh political conse-quences.53 However, Choukri’s addition of ‘novelistic’ to the subtitle is not intendedas a distraction to trick the censors; rather, it highlights the ritual dimension encapsulatedthrough Choukri’s bond with the saʿalık. It indicates that Al-Khubz is a biomythography(i.e. autobiography with ritual dimensions) and as such a testimony of Choukri’s com-mitment to bringing attention to the oppression of the Amazigh.54 As Choukri says inWujuh (Faces, part three of his autobiography): ‘What I symbolize, not how I lived,

51Joseph Chelhod, Le sacrifice chez les Arabes: recherches sur l’évolution, la nature, et la fonction des rites sacri-ficiels en Arabie Occidentale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 75–9.52Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak, 130.53For a discussion of classical Arabic autobiography, consult Dwight F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self:Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition.1st ed., 1st print. (full number line). (University of CaliforniaPress, 2001); for contemporary Arabic autobiography, consult Robin Ostle and Stefan Wild, eds, Writingthe Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 2001).54For the term biomythography, consult Claudine Raynaud, ‘A Nutmeg Nestled Inside Its Covering ofMace’: Audre Lorde’s Zami,’ in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1989).

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will remain after me.’55 Choukri uses the title and subtitle of Al-Khubz as literary devicesto foreground the Amazigh’s situation just as the saʿalık used literary devices to fore-ground their own exclusion from the tribe.

Choukri Addresses Multi-ethnic Audiences

The theoretical framework of the rite of passage and the nature–culture continuum I haveused so far reflect one version of the literary Choukri—a contemporary suʿluk, an outsi-der. As an idealized, unified self, this version represents the narrator’s attempt to givecoherence and meaning to his life. In Morocco, when Choukri wrote Al-Khubz, Arab-ness dominated cultural expressions of the meaning of one’s life, so they constrainedhim in his expression of an alternative Amazigh identity. The unified literary selfallowed the narrator to challenge these restrictive models and create an Amazigh identityon his own terms. However, in order to sell that identity and publicly assert his authorityover his life experience, he needed to convince his readers that his literary self was valid.Because he was addressing multi-ethnic audiences, Amazigh, Arab, and international,real and imagined, he accomplished this by writing a polyvocal narrative. Vying for vali-dation from his readers, he created in Al-Khubz other literary versions of himself, intension with his unified outsider self because they would address the expectations ofhis multiple audiences. This is one significant aspect in which Choukri’s text differs inhis free interpretation and adaptation of the saʿalık model from the kinds of monolithicinterpretation of the saʿalık made by critics like Stetkevych. In these versions ofhimself, he invokes Arab and Amazigh audiences to identify with him. He reincorporatesinto a community of outsiders, re-evaluates the conflict between himself and his father,and attributes it to the Amazigh situation. While undermining the claims of Arab nation-alism, he also engages them.

Choukri’s second ritual passage

Until the final scenes inAl-Khubz, Choukri sees only one side of the saʿalık, their outsiderstatus, and he performs that outsider identity in his own failed rite of passage. Hisencounter with ʿAbd al-Malik radically enlarges his perspective on the saʿalık, and thistriggers his second ritual passage. ʿAbd al-Malik is a poor, sexually ambiguous, literateman who has left his family to be a suʿluk and now frequents Si Muh’s café. His politicalspeeches are full of literary pathos and deeply impress Choukri with their powerfulimpact, so powerful that the café’s illiterate visitors confuse ʿAbd al-Malik’s opinionswith those of the Qurʾanic Allah:

He was always right in our eyes. Some visitors didn’t always distinguishbetween his words and those of Allah. Often one of them would say: ‘AllahAlmighty is truthful,’ and ʿAbd al-Malik would correct him, ‘Allah Almightyforgive me—these are not Allah’s words, they are mine.’56

55Choukri, Min ajli al-khubz wahdih, 494.56Choukri, Al-Khubz al-hafı, 215–16.

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The visitors’ overwhelming respect for ʿAbd al-Malik and their eager acceptanceof his political views ignite Choukri’s aspirations for similar influence. For Choukri,ʿAbd al-Malik has two very important qualities: he is both a liminal suʿluk and a literarygiant.

The carefully constructed interaction with ʿAbd al-Malik represents Choukri’s broaderunderstanding of the pre-Islamic saʿalık: they are both social pariahs and literary para-gons. For 15 centuries their poetry has topped the Arab canon. For example, accordingto Stetkevych, al-Shanfara’s ‘L’-Poem of the Arabs has acquired the status of the quintes-sential pre-Islamic ode. Michael Cooperson writes:

much to the consternation of high school students, who find the languageincomprehensible at first sight, the poetry of the saʿalık remains part of the cur-riculum in Arab countries, where it is presented as the supreme expression ofthe virtues of courage and self-reliance.57

The saʿalık have subverted some of the literary conventions of the pre-Islamic Arabs andbecome trend-setters whom others have imitated. Choukri is attracted to the saʿalıkmodel because it has become uncontroversial, broadly accepted, and internalizedwithin the conventions of Arabic literature. For Choukri, then, being a suʿluk (as hedescribes ʿAbd al-Malik) represents social liminality necessarily coupled with a high lit-erary status that grants considerable influence to one’s political views. By modeling hisliterary self after canonized heroes, Choukri espouses the Arab mainstream and prescrip-tively writes himself as part of canon, claiming legitimacy for his political views andenabling himself to write a legitimate alternative history that incorporates rather thanexcludes the Amazigh.

The literary Choukri is successfully reincorporated into the community of saʿalık,which is not to be confused with mainstream society, but is rather a metaphorical com-munity of outsiders. This outsider community is in competition with the imagined Arabmajority; Choukri’s successful reincorporation into it is one way in which his unified lit-erary self is contested (because it involves a successful passage). Choukri’s homage to thesaʿalık that includes a successful reincorporation also differs significantly from Stetke-vych’s interpretation of the saʿalık as permanently liminal. After a brief quarrel withʿAbd al-Malik (who insults Choukri for being illiterate), Choukri goes to a brothel,then buys an Arabic language textbook. When he shows it to ʿAbd al-Malik, the twoare reconciled and ʿAbd al-Malik takes Choukri to the cemetery to read for the deadfrom the Qurʾan. Choukri asks him to read for his brother, then realizes that hisbrother does not need it because, since he never did anything wrong, he must be anangel. Al-Khubz ends with Choukri calling himself a devil, whose time to do good haspassed. Their interaction represents the three stages of the successful ritual passage.The first stage is ʿAbd al-Malik’s rejection of Choukri and the angered and humiliatedChoukri’s departure to the brothel. The second is Choukri’s liminal journey within thebrothel, described as a journey into the desert in typical liminal terms similar to those ofthe pre-Islamic saʿalık. Typically, the tribal poet had a she-camel as his mount duringhis journey, but in their perversion of the pact, the saʿalık use their feet. Choukri uses aprostitute whom he imagines as a she-camel crossing a desert. Fearful that he might not

57Cooperson, ‘Al-Shanfara.’ 324.

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complete the passage and vanish in the desert of anonimity, Choukri muses:

I mounted her back in order to journey. She tried to knock me down from her

hump. I grabbed her hair tightly [so as] not to fall in the emptiness.

She was a she-camel flying over a desert. Falling from her [back] meant

getting lost in an unknown desert.58

This scene encapsulates Choukri’s fear that if he does not acquire literary status he willget lost in the foreign territory of Arab identity, which will then replace his Amazigh iden-tity. Choukri’s passage ends with the third stage, reincorporation, when ʿAbd al-Malik,upon seeing the Arabic textbook, accepts him back. ʿAbd al-Malik seals the reincorpora-tion when he takes Choukri to the cemetery. Choukri’s unified literary self starts as anoutcast and remains as such, never reintegrating into mainstream society. However,through his interaction with ʿAbd al-Malik, another version of the literary Choukri is rein-corporated into the community of outcast saʿalık. In this latter sense, although oneChoukri fails at being reincorporated into mainstream society, another completes asecond ritual passage in his effort to join the ranks of literary paragons.

Choukri’s conflict with his father as a consequence of the oppression of the Amazighpopulation

While the second literary Choukri is reincorporated into the community of saʿalık, a thirdversion of him also symbolically rejoins the Riffian Amazigh community. Like Choukri,the literary Riffians have many suʿluk qualities. For instance, after the famine expels themfrom the Rif, many die of starvation and the rest struggle with permanent poverty anddisenfranchisement. Linguistically, culturally, and politically marginalized, they cannotbe incorporated into the Arab majority, which regards them as eaters of rotten flesh,meaning that they eat poison instead of food and offer it to kin. In Al-Shuttar, Choukri’sfather describes his son as a ‘suʿluk, like me.’59 Sanctioning his father’s self-description asa suʿluk, the narrator re-evaluates his father’s murderous behavior, seeing it as beingcaused by the threat that the oppression of the Amazigh population poses to the literaland metaphorical survival of the Riffians.

Their redemption requires Choukri to relinquish the pact to kill his brother’s mur-derer. Choukri is no longer an avenger only of his brother, but of the community ofRiffian Amazigh, the ‘oppressed group of people that included [himself] and [his]family.’ In this sense, killing his father would harm the Amazigh community. Choukri’sbroadening perspective from individual to community represents a second challenge tohis unified self. Again, Choukri’s double ritual passage represents a failure to incorporatehimself into an imagined community with an Arab identity and a simultaneous success atreincorporating himself into an imagined community of Amazigh. To be a ‘devil’ is todefy a restrictive pan-Arab identity, while aspiring to political clout within the Arabmajority through the literary prowess of a suʿluk.60

58Choukri, Al-Khubz al-hafı, 225.59Choukri, Al-Shuttar, 92.60Choukri, Al-Khubz al-hafı, 228.

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As I mentioned, Choukri’s text does not need to conform in all its details to Stetke-vych’s interpretation of the suʿluk poems. The above discussion shows other ways inwhich Chourki differs from Stetkevych’s interpretation. Whereas in the pre-Islamiccase the saʿalık model is an embodiment of the endeavor of a marginalized individual,in Choukri’s it is the endeavor of the marginalized Amazigh community. Moreover, ethi-nicity does not play a role in the pre-Islamic case, in contrast to its critical importance inChoukri’s. Also, the saʿalık in Stetkevych’s interpretation never attempt re-evaluation ofthe those who have wronged them, unlike Choukri, who positions his father within theAmazigh community to which Choukri himself reincorporates. In this sense, Choukri’swork is not a perfect corroborator of Stetkevych’s theory. Nonetheless, it can be illumi-nated by aspects of the saʿalık model provided they are not treated as prescriptive.

Choukri’s conflicted nationalism

Choukri has a conflicted, unstable relationship with nationalism that displays anadditional tension between his idealized unified literary self and another literaryChoukri. To gain legitimacy as a political writer who can challenge pan-Arab nationalistidentity, Choukri engages its cultural codes. In one instance, Choukri devotes an entirechapter to the 30 March 1952 nationalist protest against the French Protectorate treaty,which the police brutally repressed. Initially, Choukri includes himself in the imaginedMoroccan nation when he asks: ‘What do we Moroccans want from the Frenchtoday?’ Choukri also defends the nationalist provocateur, al-Mirwanı, against hisfriend’s accusation that he is a Spanish agent. Not surprisingly, consumers and academiaread Choukri as a committed nationalist. For example, the 2004 Italian–French–Alger-ian film adaptation of Al-Khubz (by the same name) alternates shots of Choukri’s despic-able poverty with depictions of the affluence and profligacy of the French and Spanishcolonialists, suggesting that Choukri’s colonial experience gave rise to a nationalist con-sciousness that is analoguous to that of Arabs. Similarly, when the movie portrays theprotest, Choukri is placed in the middle of the nationalist rally, captivated by al-Mirwanı’s oration. When the armed colonial police aim indiscriminate shots at thepeaceful looking rally, Choukri manages to escape his chasers with the help of anArab. Such departures from the narrative in the book demonstrate that the movie reflectsthe conception of its Algerian director; Moroccan and Algerian audiences have con-sumed it as a nationalist reading of Choukri. Within the context of academe, Tanoukhihas also read Choukri as a committed nationalist, arguing that his ‘desire to empowerhimself over the foreign police’ motivates him to learn Arabic at the age of 21.61

However, for Choukri nationalism serves as a point of reference rather than of origin.The matter is more complicated for Choukri than for Arab North Africans, for whomadopting French as a literary language is a charged decision as we can see from thedebate about the status of French-language literature in North Africa. Had the politicallymaturing Choukri been Arab, he could have had two choices: he could have chosen theforeign police’s language—Spanish or French—to prevent the foreign police from defin-ing him as a colonial subject through writing; or he could have seen adopting the foreignpolice’s language as accepting colonial status and thus adopted Arabic as a form ofprotest. In Choukri’s case, however, the dilemma is not between choosing a colonial

61Tanoukhi, ‘Rewriting Political Commitment,’ 141.

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language or a native tongue; rather, it revolves around which of two ‘colonial’ languagesto choose. This may also have influenced him in settling for Arabic. Choosing to learn thefusha, the most eloquent form of Arabic, might have signified a desire to influence Arabnationalists, not to protect himself from French colonialists. Likewise, the protest scenein the book also portrays a schism between Choukri and the nationalist movement ratherthan between Choukri and the colonialists. In the book, upon hearing that the protestorsare Riffians, he concludes that the Spanish must have organized the protest, presumablybecause he can envision a Riffian alliance with colonialists, not with nationalists. Indeed,as al-Mirwanı urges the Riffians to protest, they initially throw stones at the police butthen turn to vandalism and looting. Worse, most of the fatalities are Riffians. Agitatedby a nationalist provocateur, Riffians end up paying the price. When some protestorsare killed and their blood is spilled on the street, Choukri urinates there. Within theritual framework the mingling of blood with urine pollutes the blood and reaffirmsChoukri as an outsider in the Arab nationalist rally. Overall, one literary Choukrishows slight sympathy for nationalism, but another ends up subverting it by indirectlyaccusing Arab nationalists of sacrificing Amazigh lives. The use of the saʿalık model toanalyze Choukri’s narrative demonstrates that he is subverting the false dichotomy invol-ving European colonialists versus Moroccan nationalists in favor of a more nuanced por-trayal, one that includes Amazigh as a legitimate and independent ethnic and politicalgroup whose ideological engagement with Morocco competes with that of Arabs.

The French translation ofAl-Khubz, Le pain nu, apperared in 1981 and played a role inwhat Paul Silverstein describes as ‘the popularization of the Amazigh myth’; that is, ima-gining the Amazigh as a community, with its myths of authenticity, ancient origins andimaginings of one’s relation to that community.62 After the 1980 Amazigh Spring (TafsutImazighen) in Algeria and the 1983 Beur movement that followed in France, NorthAfrican immigrants to France, overwhelmingly of Amazigh ethnicity, debated theirplace as a minority through a series of cultural performances, such as theater, music,dance, and art, and through cultural organizations aiming to popularize Amazighculture. Le pain nu hit the market to great success and must have been read at least par-tially as part and parcel of the challenge posed to Arab nationalist identity by ‘urban sub-proletariat minority youths,’ roughly the kind of people with whom Choukri identified.63

Al-Khubz (Arabic version) was published in 1982 in the middle of this international dis-cussion of the Amazigh minority status. The fact that the French and Arabic versions ofChoukri’s autobiography appeared within the short span of two years during an intenseperiod of minority politics provides an insight into how Amazigh audiences were sensitiveto the undercurrent of minority politics in Choukri’s autobiography. On the other hand,since Choukri made some changes to the Arabic original prior to its translation intoFrench, he might have responded to the discussion of the Amazigh situation andadapted the earlier manuscript. This might explain some of the ideological differencesbetween Bowles’s translation and the Arabic version, although to my knowledge thereis no record of the original manuscript for forensic comparison. (For example, inBowles’s rendition, Choukri lacks an understanding of nationalism or of the need toredress social inequalities. Bowles misunderstands Choukri’s modernist investment ineducation and selectively renders education as irrelevant to Choukri’s emancipation.

62Silverstein, ‘Realizing Myth,’ 13.63Ibid.

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In Al-Khubz [Arabic version], however, education has profound significance to Chouk-ri’s identity and prison plays an important part in it.)64

Choukri’s dual passage does not entirely fit the failed ritual framework. It depictsChoukri’s nuanced and conflicted portrayal of his literary self as a political entity. Chouk-ri’s political project is aimed at redressing the oppression of the Amazigh population; hisaudience is the Arabic-reading community; his format, the saʿalık model; and hismedium, fusha Arabic.

Fluidity of the Saʿalık

Choukri’s conflicted nationalism and his dual failed/successful passage demonstratethat the liminal framework of the saʿalık is more restrictive than necessary. The dualstatus of the saʿalık as social pariahs and literary paragons also suggests that their limin-ality is not monolithic, in contrast to Stetkevych’s portrayal of them as permanentlyliminal. In the different genres of odes attributed to them, the saʿalık pervert the riteof passage compared with the typical tribal poet, using perverted blood-vengeancetropes such as poisoning kin and nourishing non-kin. However, it is only in thegenre of the blood vengeance ode that the saʿalık conform to the rite of passage.This is another reason to believe that their liminality is fluid. In Elegy of TaʾabbataSharran, the most famous blood vengeance ode, al-Shanfara explicitly forswearswine (and by implication sex) in order to successfully avenge another suʿluk and bereintegrated into a community of saʿalık formerly led by Taʾabbata Sharran, aswould the typical tribal poet. Studying the extent to which the saʿalık’s blood ven-geance ode follows the ritual and literary conventions of the pre-Islamic ode andwhether this genre has exclusive status among the saʿalık’s poetry is an area forfuture research.

Backlash Against Choukri’s Minority Politics

As a text, Al-Khubz represents Choukri’s negotiation of the role of literature in minoritypolitics. As public communication between narrator and his readers and those headdresses in his narrative, it also represents the beginning of Choukri’s tumultuousrelationship with the Arab literary establishment. For three decades, Choukri and the lit-erary establishment played a complex literary-political game. When Al-Khubz was pub-lished, the establishment was anxious about safeguarding Arab identity. Al-Khubzchallenged the establishment because it provoked recognition of the oppression of theAmazigh population in their society. Such re-evaluation of minority politics wasdeemed damaging by the establishment, and they opposed it by shifting the discourseaway from politics. Instead, they focused on language, defaming Choukri’s credentialsto write in Arabic by attacking his grammar, colloquialisms, and no-nonsense descrip-tions of sex and the body. According to Christina Civantos, the establishment did notsee Choukri’s work as real Arabic literature because he challenged their understandingof what constitutes the ‘literary.’65 Attacking Choukri’s language and asserting that

64Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Le roman Arabe (1834–2004): Bilan Critique (Arles: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 2006),320; and Tanoukhi, ‘Rewriting Political Commitment.’65Civantos, ‘Literacy, Sexuality and the Literary,’ 32 and 38–9.

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Al-Khubz did not belong to Arabic literature was a way of suppressing Choukri’s min-ority politics without addressing the issue. The attack was narrow-minded (and thusCivantos’s conclusion is misleading) because Choukri closely followed, rather than chal-lenged, Arabic literary conventions by borrowing from the literary archetypes, themes,and diction of the pre-Islamic blood vengeance genre, the saʿalık’s poetry and the biogra-phical anecdote.

After Al-Khubz was banned, Choukri’s motivation for writing plummeted for a periodof 10 years.66 During the sequel’s protracted writing stage, he frequently discussed hiswork with Muhammad Barrada, the Moroccan Writers’Guild president. Choukri bank-rolled/financed the sequel's first edition under the title Zaman al-akhtaʾ (Time of Errors)in 1992. The title suggests that Choukri had re-evaluated his life as a series of mistakes. Asecond, more successful attempt to obscure Choukri as a political writer came a fewmonths later when the London-based publishing house Dar al-Saqı republished thesequel under the title Al-Shuttar (Rogues).67 This recasts Choukri as an apoliticalrogue, thus suppressing the politically involved literary self he had adopted to negotiateAmazigh politics. The repackaged title did not represent the sequel’s text in good faith;Choukri’s treatment of sexuality, language, and style remained similar to those of Al-Khubz. The repackaged title, however, neutralized Choukri’s minority politics and redir-ected the public eye to see Choukri as a rogue and common thief.68 Only then did theestablishment’s opinion on Choukri begin to change in a more positive direction; as arogue, his autobiography is less threatening to Arab identity than as a political writeron minorities. A few years later, the ban on his works was lifted.

As an act of negotiating intersubjective truth, Choukri’s serial biomythography doesnot simply express what Civantos has deemed Choukri’s ‘complicity in his ownoppression.’69 It is rather a space where the voices of the narrator, the establishment,readers, addressees, and so on, compete for authority over minority politics. Althoughmediated by the narrator, these voices are not reduced to his voice alone. Al-Shuttar’stitle and text, for example, although stamped by the author’s hand, contest eachother’s authority, representing different readings of Choukri’s minority politics. Amore detailed study of Choukri’s negotiation of minority politics and the ways inwhich he threatened the establishment and triggered its response is a direction forfuture research.

Conclusion

Applying the pre-Islamic saʿalık’s poetic structure to Choukri’s autobiography reveals acommon pattern, one of outcasts writing about injustice for themselves and others likethem. Choukri’s identity as an Amazigh and political writer has been suppressed andAl-Khubz has been misinterpreted because Choukri’s artful use of the saʿalık modelwas not recognized and the cultural establishment was prejudiced against Amazigh

66Choukri, ‘Al-Kiyan wa al-makan,’ 75.67Despite contacting Dar al-Saqı to confirm Civantos’s claim that Choukri chose the title Al-Shuttarhimself, I have not received a reply from them.68See Ismail El-Outmani’s argument that Choukri is a rogue. Ismail El-Outmani, ‘Prolegomena to theStudy of the “Other”Moroccan Literature,’ Research in African Literatures 28, no. 3 (1997), 110–21. Simi-larly, ʿAlı al-Raʿı and Jamıl Hamdawı argue that Choukri is a shatir (rogue).69Civantos, ‘Literacy, Sexuality and the Literary,’ 41.

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identity as a colonial invention. The Arabic-speaking community has also been slow torecognize Choukri’s political contribution because of other distractions, such as mis-translated and misrepresentative titles, doubts about Choukri’s literacy, and dispropor-tionate attention to Choukri’s use of sexuality.

Al-Khubz is a text that discusses political identity. When Choukri wrote it, the domi-nant models of identity through which he could understand his relationship to theAmazigh and non-Amazigh communities of Morocco were inadequate. In order toescape these models, channeled as they were through the dominant media of theArabic language and modern Arabic autobiography, and in order to carve a space foran alternative Amazigh identity, Choukri superimposed on them the media of Riffianlanguage and the saʿalık’s perversion of the pre-Islamic blood vengeance ritual. Engagingand challenging the Arabic tradition of life narrative, Choukri represented a polyvocalintersubjective negotiation of Amazigh identity in Morocco mediated by the influenceof the Arab literary establishment, publishers, and readers’ expectations on the processof production.

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