Poetry
The Thousand and Second Night
La Mille et Deuxième Nuit
Mostafa Nissabouri · 1975
Synopsis
A single poem, as its subtitle announces, one hundred and ten pages long, whose title opens one more night after those of the Arabic tales. According to the study of Moroccan poetry published by Limag, the poet vigorously attacks the “city of the hopeless”, “city-blood”, “city of sudden disappearances”, calls himself “a series of caverns where possible memories are forged”, and sings of the resurrection of Scheherazade, whose speech triumphs over “the creature that feeds on bloodied flesh”.
Context
The book appeared in Casablanca, from the publisher Shoof, in 1975, four years after the banning of Souffles. Its author had explained, in a statement cited by Limag, that he destroyed French in his poetry in order to find through it his own language. Pierre Joris, in the North African anthology he edited with Habib Tengour, ranks it among the author's three major collections, with Rupture and Aube, and translated an extract of it into English, reprinted by Otis Books. Diacritik places the title in a line that runs through Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne.
Who it is for
A long poem in a single movement, in French, in a language that James Kirkup called classical in its vocabulary and surrealist in its images.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the major books of the poetry that came out of Souffles; Limag cites it among the texts in which poetry becomes an act of denunciation.
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