Poetry
الفروسية
Not translated into English
Ahmed El Majjati · 1987
Synopsis
Eighteen poems, several of which bear the name of a city: Jerusalem, Ceuta, Casablanca, a beach in Tangier, the ramparts of Damascus, Dhar el-Mehraz; another, “Dar Loqmane 1965”, bears a date. Ali El Moutaki sees in it the collection of the city par excellence: the Arab city of the sixties and seventies, a place of protest, becomes in it a space of liberation and revolt. The river speaks there in the first person, between nostalgia and the rebab; in “Jerusalem”, the city drinks from the cup of death while those who speak have only thirst.
Context
The poems were collected in 1987 by the National Council for Arab Culture; two years earlier, the collection had won its author the Ibn Zaydoun Prize of the Hispano-Arab Institute of Culture in Madrid. Madarat reports that it is also known as “the Tavern”, al-Khammara, and that some in Morocco called it “the gospel of the poets”; the same journal cites Mahmoud Rahbi, for whom its author stopped writing poetry after the defeat of 1967. Mohammed al-Wali reads in it a protest against colonisation, backwardness and oppression.
Who it is for
A slim collection in literary Arabic, steeped in references to history and religious heritage; no French translation identified.
Prizes and reception
Ibn Zaydoun Prize in Madrid in 1985, then the Morocco Book Prize; its author's only collection, reprinted several times.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.