The Shutters
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This surreal poetry maps Morocco’s cultural history, as Bouanani hauntingly evokes all of the violence inflicted on his country
The Shutters collects the two most important poetry collections—"The Shutters" and "Photograms"—by the legendary Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani. By intertwining myth and tradition with the familiar objects and smells of his lived present, Bouanani reconstructs vivid images of Morocco's past. He weaves together references to the Second World War, the Spanish and French protectorates, the Rif War, dead soldiers, prisoners, and poets screaming in their tombs with mouths full of dirt. His poetry, written in an imposed language with a "strange alphabet," bravely confronts the violence of his country's history—particularly during the period of les années de plomb, the years of lead—all of which bears the brutal imprint of colonization. As Bouanani writes, "These memories retrace the seasons of a country that was quickly forgetful of its past, indifferent to its present, constantly turning its back on the future."
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"My country has lived for centuries off the lies of the dead./ So it is only natural that we build sanctuaries where we heal our insane," writes Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and dissident artist Bouanani (1938 2011) in this scathing, fearsome, and hallucinatory collection. Though The Shutters was originally released in Morocco in 1980, Bouanani composed many of its poems in the 1960s and '70s. This translation by Ramadan also includes Bouanani's like-minded 1989 book, Photograms, and together the two collections comprise half of the work Bouanani published in his lifetime. The poems assemble into a powerful portrait of Morocco surviving war, occupation, and the postcolonial "years of lead" under the violent rule of King Hassan II: "Our country has no more warriors/ only timeworn fig trees beaten thoroughly by/ the thousand winds of misfortune." Bouanani describes how "the flowers have wolf's skin, the innocent birds get drunk on beer, some even hide a revolver or a knife." A bulwark against both state tyranny and collective apathy, Bouanani's work mocks authoritarianism and fanaticism, despairs of Morocco's democratic failure, and struggles to hold on to the cultural and historical inheritance its government is bent on erasing "mouths filled/ with dirt, our poets/ keep on screaming."
