Narrative
For Bread Alone
الخبز الحافي
Mohamed Choukri · 1973
Synopsis
During the great famine of the Rif, a boy makes his way on foot to Tangier with his mother, his father and his little brother Abdelkader, on the promise of a bread that the city does not give. The father, a deserter from the Spanish army, beats his wife and children, and kills the younger brother who was crying from hunger. The child rummages through rubbish, flees the house, serves in a café in Tetouan whose pay his father confiscates, drinks and smokes hashish from the age of twelve, then lives on the street among thefts, smuggling, brothels and prison, in colonial northern Morocco.
Context
Written in Arabic in 1972 and refused by Moroccan publishers, the book first appeared in London in 1973, with Peter Owen, in the English translation by Paul Bowles; Tahar Ben Jelloun translated it into French for Maspero in 1980, and the Arabic text was published in Morocco only in 1982, before being banned there from 1983 to 2000. It opens an autobiography in three volumes and has been translated into some thirty languages. Rachid Benhadj brought it to the screen in 2005, and Abdelaziz Mouride made a comic book from it.
Who it is for
A short autobiographical narrative, of a rawness that long led to its being censored; it can be read in French in Tahar Ben Jelloun's translation, in paperback.
Prizes and reception
Tennessee Williams saw in it “a true document of human despair”; translated into more than thirty languages, it remained banned in Morocco until 2000.
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