Poetry as an existential truth and a fateful tragedy .. Abdullah Zreikah and poetry translated by the great French writer Bernard Noel

Abdallah Zreikah .. Wouldn't you hear bright bells ringing in the contemporary Moroccan night of poetry?

Or are the scraps of poetry, language fragments, and the tyranny of the official media machine and its institutions concealing from people everything that establishes the aesthetics of Moroccan poetry?

Despite this, Abdullah Zreikah is not busy with this "media rush", which is now competing around poets to market their pictures, instead of their poetic works.

At a time when Abdullah Zorika only wishes to enter more into his blue isolation since the 1990s;

Although he is completely absent from the Arab poetry scene, his works are strongly present, digging their course deep inside the international festivals in their different languages: French, English and German. His poetic works have settled in them since the Moroccan-Francophone poet Abdel Latif Al-Laabi translated his poetic work "Laughs of the Tree of Words" This was published by Zorika in the 1980s, which marked a turning point in his poetic experience.

Although this work is his most inflated work with a prison wound, the reader discovers Abdullah Zoraiqa's ability to make poetry an existential reality and a fateful tragedy in the human body. In it, he is freed from the power of the political dimension that marked his first poetic work, "The Head and Rose Dance."

Then a series of sober poetic works continue, such as: “Black Butterflies”, “The Needle of Presence”, “Voids Patched with a Sun's Thread”, “The Insect of Infinity”, “Metaphysics Ladders”, “The Tortoise of Erase” (2019), “Sugar of Erase” ( 2020), and others;

As these poetic works were not dedicated to Abdullah Zorika only as a poet writing poems, but rather as the author of an original poetic project unique within contemporary Arabic poetry, due to the hidden aesthetic dimensions of his poetry, in which one finds only Abdullah Zureka himself, nor Another one, this “other” that inhabits many Arab poetic experiences.

Zerika says in "The Insect of the Infinite":

Words do not enter Hell

Because the door dogs do not find meat in which they eat

And the clothes of the poor remain in the cold

Until dust wears it

And the thieves' desires are blown by the wind

Which could not enter Hell

And the socks of the sick are buried in dirt

Books can only be seen by the ground

And the coats of poets remain hanging in the doors

The fire of Hell is like the mouth of a beast

Do not eat anything but meat

And leave the pleasure to heaven. "

Book covers for the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zerika (social networking sites)

From sociology to poetry

Today Abdullah Zreikah is considered one of the greatest poets, not only within the second generation (the seventies) of the Moroccan poetry scene, but within contemporary Arab poetry, and one of the most Arab poets who possessed a firm stance towards authoritarian and repressive regimes. The prison experience in the late seventies led him to a breakout My poetic project escaped from the grip of recycling and residence in the borders of the other, which made poetic experiences seem to be an echo of what is published in the East or within some purely French experiences.

The prison experience greatly influenced Zorika's poetic experience, and made her enter into a strange existential relationship with the poet's body, his attitudes, and his view of everything that surrounds him from the culture, things and worlds.

Abdallah Zerika is almost the exception who has been working independently of the official Moroccan institutions, without ever pushing himself inside them or for her tongue to justify her faults and faults.

It is a difficult and firm position, which contains the concept of commitment that characterizes Abdullah Zariqa’s stances towards poetry, the institution and the culture in general. The cultural gains - for which Zariqa fought with poets and writers who shared the bitterness of imprisonment, the fever and hissing of poetry - vanished since the nineties of the last century during the experiment of "consensual rotation." Today, at the expense of an entertainment culture, intellectuals are faced with changing their masks and positions in order to work with the authority and its institutions.

“Everything is finished,” this is how Abdullah Zreika says to me bitterly whenever we meet, which is an expression - despite its brevity - that stores a wound in our bodies devoid of the fate of the cultured and culture today, and indicates that what is now on the surface of our cultural reality does not represent the true image of Moroccan culture with its art. And its symbols, as it seemed in recent years to live on the past of this culture, literature, thought and translation.

This cloudy picture is almost expressed by Zoraiqa in one of his erotic poems when he says, "Oh, the truth is like a dead face charred in the darkness of a grave."

Poetic and aesthetic

Since the seventies of the twentieth century, Abdullah Zreikah appeared different in his committed stances towards culture, politics and society, through a number of important articles that were published by “Al Muqaddimah” magazine and other magazines, where the Arab reader found it more closely related to the Moroccan reality and its setbacks and confusion during the seventies of the last century. A compelling authority swept away everything from the history of modern and contemporary Moroccan culture, at the expense of consecrating the tradition, which are writings that penetrated the repressed Moroccan culture and its traditionalism, and made poetry welded to human issues and liberation.

On this basis, some few critical writings continued to see that Zreikah's experience - through "the head-and-rose dance" and "laughter of the tree of speech" - a poetic testimony to a time that permeates political sediments in the structure of Moroccan culture, towards a poetic modernity that makes the aesthetic dimension the last resort It takes cover by the blue experience, poetry and aesthetics.

But the funny thing in some of the books that dealt with the experience of Zorika is that she did not notice that the "laughs of the tree of speech" - the first poetic work in which Zariqah disavowed a direct political character towards philosophical poetry works - made the poet flying into a strange land by looking at the experiences of Arabic poetry. Contemporary.

It is an experience fueled by his early study of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, and although Ziraqa did not devote his time and effort to sociological thinking, he went to work on the poetic text as a laboratory for all forms of human thought of all colors and stripes, from history, philosophy, mysticism, formation and cinema, all of which are strongly present within His poetic works, brilliantly re-weave them in his texts in various forms of poetic expression and aesthetic synthesis, although most of these texts remain vague and have a philosophical dimension behind which words disappear, as if he says, for example, in "The Stairs of Metaphysics":

Do not write in this white

In which the angels shed ants

And do not read that paper

So as not to reveal God

Hidden behind the word

But be a demon

If you see

God

Does not remove fear of words

Only hermeneutics

And no point horror

Only a deletion

And do not dread footnotes

But forgetfulness

Existence wound

The "Needle of Presence" represents a qualitative leap within Ziraka's poetic works, by betting on philosophy, not as an aesthetic choice that distinguishes Zariqa's poetry from the rest of the poets, but as an existential destiny that the poet lives in his daily life isolated from the media clamor of seminars, readings and participations that Ziraka believes that she may It affects his silence, the essence of his poetic writing, and its artistic and aesthetic industry.

Therefore, Ziqa hid from view since the nineties of the last century, although his works are strongly present in the mind of the reader, and the latter has a special and intimate relationship with the poet by virtue of the great respect that the readers have for the poet Abdullah Zerika, since despite his absence he always inhabits the imagination and conscience of those who love him as a poet and friend And a fighter, he does not change his convictions or his positions for the sake of positions and jobs, defending human values, liberation and modernity.

And this matter is inseparable from his project of writing, as his poetry starts from an ontological wound, before it is beautiful, extravagant, or even an artistic industry in the expression of the ancients and the modernists;

In "The Insect of the Infinite" and "The Ladders of Metaphysics" (translated by the French poet Bernard Noel), the true face, image and isolation of Abdullah Zriqa is revealed in relation to philosophy, from which it seems that it is difficult to get out, especially since his writing becomes synonymous with the concept of liberation that begins with his body and sweeps With him the text and the world as a whole, it does not establish conditions or put obstacles in front of the space in which his poetry works, but rather expands it and places it on the frontiers of philosophy.

Here, the text becomes like a code for the dissection of the body and penetrates the boundaries with which the political authorities and traditional institutions try to enclose the poet's thought, without causing a rupture in its order and coordination or even a fleeting pleasure or whimsy in the dry areas of the human body's unconsciousness and its basements.

Abdullah Zreikah says - in his article on writing and the issue of emancipation in the introduction magazine in its first issue in 1982 - “The freedom of the writer is very necessary and fundamental, for a writer who does not go beyond all forms of oppression secretes a half-dead fetus, and the writer who pre-determines its area digs a grave for his writing in that The limited space. The person whom writing claims is a bold, frank, and united person. Writing it is like the power of his creativity. Creativity and strength are two things that go hand in hand. The creativity of the masses, for example, lies in their strength and agglomeration and in their belief in this creativity which is nothing but their struggle.

But what Zreika does not pay attention to here is that this freedom within literary writing may not be controlled by external factors, such as those related to critical and declarative writing, as much as its goal is determined by internal factors related to the emotional flow of the writer.

Arabic book covers by the Moroccan poet Abdullah Zerika (social networking sites)

Poetic and plastic arts

As for his artistic poetic work "Sukkar Al-Mahw" (Algeria, 2020) with the Algerian artist Rachid Qureshi, Zorika revisits the experience of working on the painting, after his first work "The Apple of the Triangle" with the great Moroccan artist Abbas Al-Saladi. In his experience with Rachid Qureshi, Zerika expands The boundaries of poetry and the word by trying to establish identification with painting and a real embrace with the various Arab and Amazigh visual signs that characterize the work of Rachid Qureshi, one of the most prominent signs in the Algerian composition;

As poetic and visual metaphors merge and penetrate together the unknowns of being, where the poet and the artist meet.

Ziraqa expresses the experience in poetry, saying: “Sir, come on, secret. The needle with which time is sewn into the clothes of days is lost. And the rain does not erase anything when it falls. You will laugh at the tooth that you found in the dirt. And when you cry, your eyes will hang where your tears fall. You will see the whole sea smaller than What sadness is in you. You want to scream and no sound comes out of you. Even if I die, forgetfulness will be released in your body instead of worms. "