Impersonal memoirs… Abdullah Kannoun’s biography opens up to history and the values ​​of knowledge

Abdullah Kannoun Written by Abdullah Kannoun

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Autobiographical writing – in general – involves the representation of literary and intellectual values ​​that transform self-history into a writing horizon that challenges the scope of disclosure and confession, into an awareness that seeks to understand the world surrounding the writer’s life. Therefore, writing about the self sometimes opens up to adjacent literary genres such as travel, travel, diaries, and memoirs, according to a contract you establish with the reader, with the aim of reinventing the self and liberating the statement from every restriction that may be imposed by the conditions of society, language, or forms of expression.

Thus, we find ourselves faced with writing about the self that indicates that textual identity is not a given and prior to writing, but rather is the result of Being’s search for the meaning of its existence in time and space between the past and the present. This is what gives biography a special status that distinguishes it as a literary genre produced by forms of writing: narrative biography – mental biography – autobiography – anonymous and non-gendered texts.

If biography, according to one of its common definitions, is: retrospective prose written by a realistic person about his actual existence, and it also sheds light on his individual life and especially on the history of his personality, then its textual identity is restricted by the necessity of matching between the roles of the author, the narrator, and the main character. The theory of literary genres has shown the nature of the basic features. The distinctive feature of the autobiographical narrative is its connection to the various living experiences of its writer, and it weaves a common and regulating thread in its close connection to society and culture. The life stories in every autobiography remember and recall a time that has passed and bring it back to a present time, because a person’s life is a selection of a collective life. The autobiography reshapes its identity culturally because it is an expression of its owner’s vision of the world. This means that subjectivity is not an isolated individualism, but rather it represents a collective consciousness that becomes With him, every autobiography is an alter ego that derives its credibility from the objectivity of social and historical facts.

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It seems difficult – at least in these brief papers – to grasp the entire peculiarities of the cultural path of the scholar Abdullah Kannoun, especially when it comes to focusing thinking on questions that fundamentally go beyond the path of a single thinker and attach it – from the perspective of perception – to a historical and social context. In this sense, cultural and intellectual productions are not considered entities independent of the experiences of their owners and the social and historical horizons to which they belong.

At the conclusion of an intellectual and biographical dialogue with Al-Karmel magazine, January 1984, and in response to the answer: Do you write memoirs? Abdullah Kannoon said:

“Yes, and these are diaries that are still under my pen, entitled ‘Impersonal Diaries’, in which I record some things that people forget, or perhaps burn, and they contain things related to childhood, and I do not mention them because they relate to me, but rather I mention them because they depict what Moroccan society was like. It includes what is related to the study, and what is meant is how the study was. In it I also talk about life, responsibility, work, and the obstacles that a person faces and his clash with his surroundings. There is cultural, political and social activity, and the work of some individuals and the contacts that I had with them. It is a memoir that is very close to me, but it is also linked to what modern Morocco experienced, through its customs and ambitions, and therefore it is impersonal, it is a remembrance of a time and its people.”

Abdullah Kannoun reveals at the beginning of these non-personal memoirs, which were published in early 2020, that he never thought about writing a personal memoir about his life, for the simple reason that he did not consider his life worthy of being recorded in the detail that writing a memoir calls for unless he would burden its footnotes with worthless trivia. ; In addition, Kannon expands on the explanation he gave for his unwillingness to write personal memoirs, staying away from the fabrications and assumptions expressed by psychoanalysis, including judgments aimed at destroying the human personality of the translator and interpreting simple events from life by giving them unlimited dimensions. Or for a friend mentioned by the translator to express this and claim that the words he mentioned contain exaggeration and have nothing to do with reality.

With this perception, Kannon’s memoirs were not personal, rather they were impersonal, and he did not limit them only to the facts of the self, but also made them open to the facts of history, and if the first facts were close to illusions, the second were not illusions, but rather facts that actually happened and were transmitted and narrated with honesty and honesty. .

With this logic, Abdullah Kannoun wrote his memoirs in relation to public history, because he was aware that what he would write goes back many years. It is a record of his conversations, presentations, and observations that he conveyed to his brothers and friends, so they urged him to write it and take it out of the circle of private conversation into the public.

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This experience will, then, constitute an incentive for Abdullah Kannoun to write memoirs, making the emotional and human dimensions the central topic in the text, so that the spaces of writing – with what they announce with quite a bit of realistic and direct reference – become a reference either to known moments of private or public history in their relationship to what he lived. Morocco’s events during the period before independence, or during the period of national struggle, and the years of achievement and learning that followed.

Abdullah Kannoun was only four years old when he left the city of Fez with his family. When the protection authorities introduced reforms to the educational curricula of the villagers, many of its scholars were determined to leave the city, including Kannoun’s father, who moved with his family to Tangiers, from where the intention was to cross to the East, had it not been for The outbreak of World War I led to his residence in Tangier, and Abdullah Kannoun grew up in it. He received his initial education, from the echoes of Fez and its farewells, from growing up in Tangier and living there, and from the first years of education to the establishment of the Free Islamic School, from memorizing the Qur’an and understanding the hadith, and reading the most important heritage books and keeping up with what was produced by the literary renaissance movement in the East.

The first study was focused on the necessary elements of education and linguistic acquisition, and was about Islamic legislation and its sciences, as well as Western literary translations coming from the Levant, and learning languages, especially French and Spanish, from his colleagues with modern education. Thus, Abdullah Kannoun acquired a diverse culture, which the memoirs highlight when they limit it to two basic stages: the stage in which he loved to go to Fez to test his knowledge, and to attend the lessons of the great scholars whom he had previously known, and this lasted for a week or two. Abdullah Kannoun mentions that he once went to Fez and did not find the lessons regular. This scholar did not attend today, and that scholar did not come yesterday. Weak organization, so he and his cousin decided to climb Aqabat Al-Talaa, and they found Moulay Abdullah Al-Fadhili, who is one of the well-known scholars, so they greeted him. The scholar asked him: Did you come to study here? He said to him: What study do you have here in Fez? He added: Do you study hadith? The scholar Al-Fadhili reminded him that hadith is not taught in Fez. Unlike the city of Tangier, Al-Bukhari and Muslim, Al-Muwatta, and Abdullah Kannoun has since put off the idea of ​​​​returning to Fez. The second stage was reading books, newspapers, and magazines coming from the East. He would read two medium-sized books in one day, and from here was the general cultural formation and openness to knowledge and literature.

A defining moment in the life of Abdullah Kannoun, which he described in more than one place in his memoirs, was when he moved with his family from Fez to Tangiers. Despite the loss of many comforts and the severance of contact with loved ones, acquaintances, and relatives, his father’s decision to settle in Tangiers was fraught with relief for the situation he was in. Tangier was deprived of independence and did not include French or Spanish protection, and because it was planned to establish an international protection system for it. The establishment of this system was delayed for more than ten years, and even when the system was established, none of the protectorate countries had actual influence over the citizens. Abdullah Kannoun’s father adapted to this new environment, and developed good relations with the notables of Tangier, in addition to the respect he enjoyed from the governors and the love of the people.

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In these memoirs, Abdullah Kannoun gives his experience in writing stories remarkable importance: “I said about my experience in writing stories: I never thought about being a storyteller, and that the few stories I wrote, based on their content, dictated the style of the story, so it is not valid to write them in any other way.” . Therefore, I considered my stories to be literary articles, so I published them in my literary and critical collections” (p. 171); This means that Abdullah Kannoun scatters in his literary and intellectual articles from his personal and life experiences many personal opinions that come from extensive experience from his exposure to books and the experiences of relationships and friendships, from those literary and intellectual books that have biographical features, especially mention: “Vinegar and Grass, and Weeds and the Oasis of Thought.” .

Abdullah Kannoun’s choice of writing in non-personal memoirs is characterized by the interweaving of self-narration with memorial narration, and his inspiration for the transformations of the place with its historical and social events during the stage of resistance and liberation, and the emergence of the renaissance in politics and thought.

in this meaning:

In his memoirs, Abdullah Kannoun takes the past and its events as a charter to talk about: childhood, family, and learning.

In these memoirs, writing about oneself is not concerned with the stages of formation, but is also concerned with questions of thought, culture, and the values ​​of knowledge.

Perhaps the most important feature of Abdullah Kannoun’s biography writing in his memoirs lies in the openness of the subjective experience to the general social, political, and cultural event. Therefore, you see him writing a biography of others or a biography of a place, and you sometimes see him analyzing the literary idea and ideological position.

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I could not find anything more concise to conclude this opinion than what he said in his book “The Oasis of Thought.” Contemplate and enjoy the genius of this great scholar:

“We flee from the hustle and bustle of life to the wise silence and eloquent stillness of nature… If we are exhausted by thought and bored by sight amidst the stagnation of our mental activity, then we flee to this literature and feel the rejuvenation, pleasure, and strength! We underestimate literature if we consider it a distraction with which we kill time, and a form of perfection in our mental life, while it is the soul of culture and the essence of knowledge.

Thus… Abdullah Kannoun spoke; And with this, an oasis of thought was revealed.