Abdellatif Laabi
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Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco.
Laâbi, then teaching French, founded with other poets the artistic journal Anfas/Souffles, an important literary review in 1966. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergency of a poetic stand and revival, but which, very quickly, crystallized all Moroccan creative energies: painters, film-makers, men of theatre, researchers and thinkers. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World.
Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" (for his political beliefs and his writings) and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was then forced into exile in France, just like his friend, and contributor to the "Anfas" journal, Abraham Serfaty, who after seventeen years in jail, was also exiled in France in 1991.
Laabi has lived in Paris since 1985, and since 1988, is a member of the Académie Mallarmé.
Laabi has been a defender of other writers who are persecuted for their writing, including Salman Rushdie.
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[edit] Quotations
"Everything which the Arab reality offers that is generous, open and creative is crushed by regimes whose only anxiety is to perpetuate their own power and self-serving interest. And what is often worse is to see that the West remains insensitive to the daily tragedy while at the same time accommodating, not to say supporting, the ruling classes who strangle the free will and aspirations of their people."
[edit] Drama
- Le Baptême chacaliste. Paris : L'Harmattan, 1987.
- Exercices de tolérance. Paris : La Différence, 1993.
- Le Juge de l'ombre. Paris : La Différence, 1994.
[edit] Autobiography
- Le fond de la Jarre (translated in Spanish : Fez es un espejo, Madrid, ediciones del oriente y del mediterráneo, 2004)
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Jeune Afrique magazine, September 5, 1990, cited by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander in "Unholy Babylon, The Secret History of Saddam's War" (Victor Gollenz Ltd London 1991): p. 71
[edit] Further reading
- Laabi, Abdellatif (2003). The World's Embrace: Selected Poems. City Lights Publishers. ISBN 0-87286-413-8. The World's Embrace consists of poems selected by Laabi from three books published in French over the past ten years: Le Soleil se meurt (The Sun Is Dying), L'Etreinte du monde (The World's Embrace), and Le Spleen de Casablanca (The Spleen of Casablanca).
