"Poetry in the street" .. When the poets of Morocco recite their poems in the squares and lanes

Magda Ait Laktawi-Essaouira

Standing tall in front of the microphone and his back to the archaeological wall of the most famous square in the city of Essaouira (south of Casablanca), echoing poetic verses saying: "I am not lucky, Labib sea, you are my class and vow of the storm without drowning, shout hearing, let Mtalakati aside."

The poet Rachid Fjaoui continues to recite his poem, not in front of a crowd sitting on a pamphlet, but for the passers-by and visitors passing through the Moulay el-Hassan square in the center of the Atlantic Ocean.

For the poet from the neighboring city of Safi, the place of poets and their poems is the open air, which led a group of Moroccan poets and artists to launch a cultural and artistic demonstration called "poetry in the street."

Because ancient poets from Sumerians, Greeks and Arabs sang poems in open theaters and inside squares and markets, according to the poet Fijawi, he felt with other colleagues to take poetry out of the narrow halls to the spaciousness of the squares and streets.

The owner of the Diwan says, "I was absolutely right, my father."

For the sea and for the transients
Moroccan poets, artists and intellectuals succeeded in stopping the transiters for a moment through the expressions of their poems and melodies of their music. The city of Mogador in four languages ​​(Arabic, Amazigh, French and English).

Because singing is ample space at the first meeting of the Poetry in the Street initiative, which will be organized in cities and villages across the country, the poet Khadija Messaoudi preferred to unveil another artistic talent.

The young poet chose to perform the song “Ghani Li Shui Shui” by Mrs. Oum Kalthoum, as an incitement to herself and others to sing, which made the audience sway and repeat the lyrics with joy and enthusiasm.

"I believe that poetry seeks music, that music seeks poetry," Khadija tells her experience to Al Jazeera Net. "They are a duo that fill each other's spaces." And the ocean, bystanders and seagulls. "

If those who were standing in the square or preferred to relax a little over traditional carpets and rugs, they received a share of the beauty of the poems they sought instead of seeking them, others left the cups of tea and coffee aside and approached the ring to chant with Khadija, the singer of the Spirit Life. ".

Hair service
The organizers' keenness to include musical and singing passages was not arbitrary, but a service to poetry and poem, according to the poet Abdul Rahim Khasar to Al Jazeera Net.

Although the interaction of the people was beautiful and sophisticated during the beginning of the meeting and the subsequent readings of the poetic texts, the succession of paragraphs between singing and music brought the audience approach and interact in a positive and joyful way.

Because the public loves music, the organizers have achieved the equation and mixed it with poems, and they left the closed halls and intended people on the street, and made them stop a little to discover that "this poetry is a beautiful art that touches the hearts and not strange and elitist," according to the Moroccan poet.

In search of a wider audience and different segments and to pay for the taste and aesthetic poetry, poets, intellectuals and artists agreed to strike dates for consecutive meetings in the yard or street or lane, bringing together the two and bring poems and poems closer to the public.