eternally unctuous termite-eaten land wandering aimlessly down
my spine the undulation of lightning that curdles
the music colluding
with the worn-down needles inside my sepulchral
Proximal Morocco
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Translated by
Jake Syersak
Khalid Lyamlahy, Contributor
March 2023
...a poetic force.
Emma Ramadan
Originally published in 1975, Proximal Morocco— is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine written in fits and starts during a span of 10 years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.
About the Author
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941 – 1995) was a Moroccan Amazigh writer and poet. His first book, Agadir (Éditions du Seuil, 1967), was awarded the Jean Cocteau Enfants Terribles prize. One of the major Francophone avant-garde poets of his generation, Khaïr-Eddine was hailed as the “Rimbaud of the Maghreb” and won renown for his Surrealist-inspired “linguistic guerrilla warfare,” which he developed in works such as Corps négatif(1968), Soleil arachnide (1969) Moi l’aigre (1970), and Le Déterreur (1973). With Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissabouri, he helped found the avant-garde Moroccan journal, Souffles-Anfas, before he was compelled to self-exile in 1965. Khaïr-Eddine lived in France until returning to Morocco in 1979. He died in 1995 in Rabat.
Praise
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine is a poetic force, and Jake Syersak's unrelenting, uncompromising translation brings one of his most alive books crashing into English ‘in the likeness of thunder.’ Khaïr-Eddine's work offers not only a new perspective on Morocco, but also on how language can be used in the name of land and longing.
Emma Ramadan
Jake Syersak brings his translator’s bravura to bear on Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s guerrilla warfare with and against the French language. In a feat of lexical precision and alliterative cadences, a voice ‘composed in the likeness of thunder’ strives to ‘unlearn the viaticums of violence’. In rebellious screams and hallucinatory dreams, it conjures the landscapes of an Amazigh childhood to exorcise history’s assaults – colonial trauma, the tyranny of the state, the pangs of exile –, for ‘only the earth / remembers / and howls / what terror is brooding / beneath’ and ‘never once / did our ancestors offer asylum to kings.’
Omar Berrada
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Morocco—this Morocco, his title asserts—is more than a place. It is the raw substance of his inimitable, excoriating voice, “composed in the likeness of thunder” and made of ‘rainette porphyry tetrodon,’ ‘the laterite gone unexplored.’ Adamantine yet triple-jointed, outraged yet backed by tenderness, his voice is as much material as his body (‘this querulous landscape this miserable landscape’). There is no separation of the self and its methods from the land that bore and shaped it, whatever bitter exile and rancid kings and avaricious developers might try. Jake Syersak’s translation channels the radical electric current of Khaïr’s sonic intensity, so we can feel him ‘sneer / poetry” and “speak death absolutely [while] bring[ing] along an orchid.’
Conor Bracken
Praise for Previous Work
I didn't vomit / the pistol-like word which is fearless.” I'm grateful to Jake Syersak for continuing to bring Moroccan poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's work into English. These poems are written with the greatest intensity and urgency. They are angry and political, but they are also deliriously intoxicated with language and its possibilities.
Johannes Göransson, author of Transgressive Circulation: Essays On Translation
Among the most “intrepid horses” of avant-garde North Africa, midcentury poet Khaïr-Eddine was a vicious, visceral critic of colonialism whose “entranced transmutations” acted as a countervailing cultural force for self-definition and determination. In these early poems written from exile, fluent with delirium, Khaïr-Eddine collapses firmament and abyss, glottal-stopping a psychosomatic j’accuse at once terrifying and glamorous: “pack of jackals” and “blacking out,” “voodoo magic,” “violet ink,” epidemics of “brutal shock” and alchemical ache. In Jake Syersak’s versions—deftly cauterized, now bleeding out—these spasms evoke a triggerhappy seer packing “the pistol-like word,” itching “to take up my work once more.”
Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun : f/11
Who was Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine? A poet, a Berber, a technician of “guerilla linguistics.” An intercessor to the gods of revolution, Khaïr-Eddine sang the psychoses of his country in its post-colonial and autocratic crises. I know this because of Jake Syersak, who here translates some early and vicious poems from this giant of Moroccan literature. The language of this translator is, like that of the poet, made of antennae: it receives, and gives receipt of, the commotions and collusions of nature, “the secret still-birth(s)” and “geological fears,” the sonic eruptions of peoples in strife and corpses in decay. I am ever grateful for this ongoing work of translation.
Aditi Machado, author of Some Beheadings and Prosopopoeia
Jake Syersak has rendered the fugitive brilliance of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine by expanding his verbal inclement into English. This being an inclement that positively infects our collective auditory range, verbally scorching the isolate capillaries of monsters who seem empowered by malevolence. Not unlike Césaire, Khaïr-Eddine savages this malevolence by opening to us a kind of neurological revelation. In this translation, the work of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine rises up as a creature from the unexpected torching rational containment via his complex imaginal salivation, so that the Maghreb and by implication sub-saharan Africa gains by his incensement the nobility that magically honours resistance.
Will Alexander, author of Across the Vapour Gulf
About the Translator
Jake Syersak is the author of the poetry books Mantic Compost and Yield Architecture. He is also the translator of several books by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. The recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, his poetry and translations have appeared in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Currently, he edits the micro-press Radioactive Cloud and lives in Seattle.
About the Contributor
Khalid Lyamlahy is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Chicago where he teaches North African literature. He is the coeditor of Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond (Liverpool University Press, 2020). His scholarly publications have appeared in PMLA, Research in African Literature, and The Journal of North African Studies. Besides his academic work, he has published a novel, Un roman étranger (Présence Africaine Editions, 2017) and translated into Arabic Felwine Sarr’s Habiter le monde: essai de politique relationnelle (Kulte Editions, 2022). He is also a regular contributor to several literary magazines in France and the US.
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-08-8
Trade Paperback
128 pp, 5.75 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: March 15 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)