On 21 January, the first discussion of the work took place, and on 13 February (at 6 p.m.) there will be an exchange of ideas with Miguel Lázaro García, from Editorial Cabaret Voltaire.
The Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo, continues with its reading club Tres con libros in 2014, and does so with the work Plain bread, by Mohamed Chukri. In doing so, Tres Culturas joins in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of Chukri's death and the 40th anniversary of the publication of Plain bread.
The crudeness and literary audacity of this autobiographical novel established Mohamed Chukri as one of the essential voices of contemporary Maghrebi literature. This cult work, banned for almost two decades in Arab countries, is now published for the first time in a revised version by the author.
The story is set during the time of the famine in the Rif. A family leaves their home and embarks on an exodus to Tangiers in search of a better life. But the cruelty of a violent father forces little Mohamed to run away from home. It is the path of apprenticeship. He suffers hunger, fear and violence in the harsh streets of Tangiers and Tetouan. In the nights spent under the stars, he will taste the flavour of sex and the bitterness of prison. A geography of misery where growing up means discovering pain, injustice and compassion.
Mohamed Chukri(Beni Chiker, 1935 - Rabat, 2003).
He was born in 1935 in Beni Chiker, a Moroccan village in the Rif. Brought up in a poor family, his father's violence forced him to flee and, at the age of eleven, to live on the streets of Tangiers surrounded by misery, violence, prostitution and drugs. At the age of twenty, still illiterate, he went to Larache to study. It was during this formative period that he came into contact with literature. In the 1960s, Chukri returned to Tangiers, where he continued to frequent bars and brothels, and where he began to write about his personal experiences.
His first story, Violence on the beachappeared in the magazine Al-Adab in 1966. His literary interests led him to rub shoulders with established writers such as Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams, meetings which were recorded in his memoirs (Paul Bowles, the prisoner of Tangiers and Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams in Tangiers). In addition to his literary output, he also translated poems by Machado, Aleixandre and Lorca, among others, into Arabic. Chukri achieved international success thanks to his autobiographical novel Plain bread (1973); censored as scandalous in Arab countries, it was not definitively published in Morocco until 2000. Time for errors (1992) y Faces, loves, curses (1996), are the other two novels that make up the trilogy of his life. Mohamed Chukri died in Rabat in 2003.
PROGRAMMING
- From 2 to 10 January 2014. Collection of the copy.
- Tuesday, 21 January 2014. Sharing of the work and exchange of ideas (6 p.m.).
- Thursday, 13 February 2014. Sharing of the work and exchange of ideas (6 p.m.). Meeting via skype with Miguel Lázaro García, from Cabaret Voltaire, the Catalan publishing house that has rescued all the work of the Moroccan writer to publish it in Spanish. Miguel Lázaro García will talk to us about this work and the process of publishing the biographical trilogy of Mohamed Chukri.
This session will be open to all those interested in attending. The members of the reading club 'Tres con libros' (Three with books) will be there.
Portuguese