Chapter 211: A Writer’s Career Doesn’t Begin the Moment They Start Writing.”

Two turning points that forged Mohamed Choukri’s (1935-2000) career as a writer were his stint in prison in 1955 and, much later, in a psychiatric hospital in 1977. The first is the most obvious: it was on the wall of his cell that he learned the first letters of the Arabic alphabet.

Perhaps the most renowned Moroccan writer and a uniquely visceral narrator, Choukri was famously illiterate until he was 21. His is an unlikely case when most authors’ biographies tell of precocious vocations, childhood poems, or the spark lit by early readings. Not every writer starts as a voracious bookworm, but I know of none so accomplished without any schooling whatsoever into adulthood. Choukri did not have the privilege of a childhood.

He describes the pivotal scene nearly two decades later. After the policeman slams the cell shut, Hamid, another detainee, begins writing a protest poem on the wall. Choukri asks him to read it to him, and tells him he is lucky to be able to write. Hamid asserts that he can do the same and begins to teach him.

Days later, while being released, Choukri’s illiteracy is made all the more searing. It is his first criminal record, but he cannot sign it. The policeman mocks Choukri, as the author later recalled: “‘He is like most Moroccans, illiterate’…I was ordered to sign with my thumb… What did they write about me on that sheet of paper? They can write anything and make me say anything as long as I can’t read.”

The scene arrives near the end of For Bread Alone, his first book, which narrates his youth from the murder of his baby brother by his father, through his struggle for survival, begging and sleeping in cemeteries to avoid being raped, finding abjectness and occasional beauty along the way, until his decisive encounter with the written word, aged twenty. Many may lay claim to be autodidacts, but few have Choukri’s painful credentials. Against all odds, he would go on to study and be a teacher.

I first heard of this book late one night, in Barcelona, fifteen years ago, when a middle-aged Moroccan man told me what it had meant to him. A week later, I found it at a flea market, read all I could find, and finally went to Tangier last year.

The Mediterranean port city is where Choukri arrived in 1942 with his family, aged seven, fleeing the rural famine in their native Rif region. It would become his home, his inspiration, and frequent downfall. He would be its greatest storyteller.

The city has long been a cultural hub; under colonialism, the 20th century saw it become the subject of Western myths –painted by Delacroix, then Matisse– a petri dish for expats seeking exoticism and the illicit. Separate from the rest of Morocco until 1956, administered by foreign powers, the permissive no man’s land attracted writers in search of transgression. Paul Bowles arrived in 1947, Burroughs in 1953, writing Naked Lunch in the Hotel Muniria, soon visited by Ginsberg and Kerouac seeking new horizons for their beatnik lifestyles.

For all those names, Tangier is first and foremost the city of Mohamed Choukri. “Unless you know how to drink its bewitching wine, Tangier will break you. I’ve known those who thought they’d become poets there, and didn’t even manage to master the pidgin of its bars. Those who wanted to paint her, and never knew how to blend her colors”, he wrote.

Among the many who were drawn to the city, Choukri found a kindred spirit in the writer Jean Genet, another who started writing in prison. As they go from terrace to terrace, he tells Choukri a phrase valid for both: “I’ve always written—even before I tried to write anything. A writer’s career doesn’t begin the moment they start writing.” Choukri’s style owed much to being a storyteller long before he could use a pen.

One place they went to together was the Librairie des Colonnes. Today, Choukri’s framed photo hangs above the counter. Its bookseller, Monsef Bouali, remembers his visits, “He was always closely connected to this place, just as he was to certain cafés and restaurants in the city. In his later years, he came to occupy an almost symbolic place in the hearts of many readers: that of a living memory of Tangier, both familiar and demanding. Readers held him in deep respect, even when his work made them uncomfortable; perhaps precisely for that reason,” he told me. “Beyond the myths that have surrounded Tangier—often created by foreign gazes fascinated by the city—Choukri occupies an irreplaceable place as a chronicler of Tangier from within, in all its contradictions, its harshness, and its beauty: he portrays it with a radical truth.”

That role owes much to the fame and scandal of For Bread Alone, which was published in English (1973), then in French (1980), before appearing in Arabic. For that first edition, Choukri, already an author of short stories, convinced Bowles, whom he’d met in the 1960s, and his editor that he had finished a memoir. “In reality, I hadn’t written a single word… relying on my excellent memory as an illiterate, I began drafting the first pages that very night…I would dictate the text to [Bowles], sentence by sentence, and he would translate into English.” His natural talent, his oral past, blended with his hard-earned culture and craft.

When the book finally appeared in Arabic in 1982, it was banned until 2000, three years before its author’s death. Tahar Ben Jelloun, who made the French translation, wrote, “Choukri describes the kind of thing that isn’t spoken of, or at least isn’t written about in books—and certainly not in Arabic literature… It seems it is a graver offense to write about poverty than to live through it!”

Prohibition did not prevent its influence. As the contemporary Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa recounts in Salvation Army, “…buying a book like that and, since it was banned at the time, tearing off the cover and hiding it under the bookshelf, among the underwear… I read and reread this novel about Mohamed Choukri’s hard and terrible life in Tangier without ever growing tired of it.”

The book’s success affected Choukri even as it fulfilled his dreams. It defined him thereafter and overshadowed the full extent of his talent. “For Bread Alone has tended to eclipse the rest of his work, something Choukri regretted. It is undoubtedly a seminal book, but reducing his writing to that single text undermines our understanding of his career,” Bouali tells me. “His short stories reveal great subtlety and an ability to distill deeply intense life experiences.”

Finally available in English as Tales of Tangier, they are vignettes, sketches, short fictions cut from the cloth of street life, both told in brilliant similes and caught in the raw. Choukri bends the tradition of storytelling, or never bends to it. Yet, apart from two collections of short stories, he did not publish another “novel” for twenty years. His was not an easy life, as the photos of him often attest. It cost him to write, much as it had cost him to learn to do it.

Among the most moving portraits of Choukri, tired or thoughtful, often with books and bottles nearby, were made by his friend, the photographer Rachid Ouettassi. I asked about his memories of the man. “He’s an alcoholic. That’s normal—the behavior of someone who drinks almost all day, from morning until night. So there you go: he has friends, he has enemies—that’s it. Before For Bread Alone, he was really someone who didn’t have means,” he tells me. “I met him in Tangier; I see him often because I’m from here... I tried to take a picture of him, but he wasn’t available at first. A lot of people come to take pictures of him, and he hates it. But over the years we got along really well, became friends. So then, whenever I ask to take pictures, he doesn’t say no.”

What does Ouettassi see in those portraits? “I see a man who had the courage to challenge all the taboos—especially in Morocco, with religion—and to say what he can say. I asked Choukri that question one day, ‘You’ve shared a lot of things, of intimate details. Is it true you told everything?’ He told me: ‘No, there are things I couldn’t say. Those I keep to myself.’”

Both Bouali and Ouettassi point to Choukri’s long-awaited second long work, Time of Mistakes (or Streetwise), published in 1992, as his best. It’s a book full of life’s sculpted driftwood, its meaning coalesced by precision and veracity. It begins as a direct sequel, dealing with his time in school, but soon expands into snapshots of bliss and loss across the intervening years, into portraits of people compiled over time. Their accuracy makes you wonder whether Choukri was, in fact, a magnificent non-fiction writer, but lost lives cannot be fact-checked.

“I find it to be a work of great sensitivity, in which both his narrative talent and the intimate difficulty that the act of writing entailed for him are clearly evident. Choukri was a natural storyteller, yes, but he was also someone who conquered writing through effort,” Bouali says.

It is a work made possible by overcoming his demons often enough, long enough to write it. It originates in that second turning point in his career: in 1977, he checked into a psychiatric hospital. From there, he writes to his friend Mohamed Berrada: “This is my twelfth day…I walk aimlessly and alone or sit with one of the patients and he tells me the tragedy of his life. Rarely will you hear beautiful memories here…The thought of writing has started to invade me in this hospital. When I get out of here I will try to change my life for the better.”

Years later, he writes in his book: “When I look at a madman, I see stifled intelligence, like a petrified lava flow as old as humanity itself. Here, the extreme misfortune of mankind is laid bare”.

Among the work’s protagonists is his city. “You can only leave Tangier if she lets you. I’ve always come back, sometimes from far away, despite everything. Time will tell.”

Choukri’s gravestone can be found in the Marshan cemetery, stating he was a writer and novelist, who died in 2003; traces of him can be found in many places, from a mosaic in the Medina, to photographs in a restaurant now named after his most famous work. His books are in the Librairie des Colonnes. “Mohamed Choukri’s writing has had, for me and for many readers, a profound impact. He gave voice to the marginalized with rare honesty and strength,” says Bouali.

Ouettasi doubts if he’s had the posterity he deserves, but he remembers: “We shared good times. Sincerely, with me, he was a lovely man, truly generous; all you could ask for. You just have to accept him as he is, especially at night.”

Choukri understood the darkness well, and the words that might be brought back from it. “Beautiful flowers with no scent. Perhaps they exist only to bloom and wither, to be plucked by chance and absentmindedly crushed underfoot. Tonight, I have nothing to lose, just like this flower I’m crumpling between my fingers. I’ll sleep here or there, in the sweetness of the sea breeze.”

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Photo courtesy of Rachid Ouettassi.