Meeting presents “The Infested Land” in Tangier

Last weekend, the Riad Sultan Theater in Tangier witnessed an artistic and critical meeting to present and sign the poetry collection “The Infested Land” by Moroccan poet Mukhlis Al Saghir.

The ceremony witnessed the participation of the artist Hamdallah Rouicha, who played the Moroccan Amazigh rhythm on the stringed instrument, while the Moroccan theater artist Zubeir Bin Bouchta, director of the Riad Sultan Theater, excelled in directing the ceremony, while the critic Najib Al-Aoufi presented a study on the collection “The Infested Land” by Mukhlis Al-Saghir, who concluded the meeting with poetry readings from his new collection.

In her opening speech, Zahra Amhaouch, the regional director of the Ministry of Culture in the Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima region, stressed that “this meeting was an opportunity to meet one of the most important contemporary Moroccan and Arab poetic voices, the poet Mukhlis Al Saghir, and it was also an opportunity to celebrate his collection of poems recently published by a well-established publishing house, the Arab Institution for Studies and Publishing in Beirut, while the publication of the collection constituted an Arab cultural event, and began a series of publications that were signed at the International Publishing and Book Fair in Rabat in its last session.”

“It is not strange that the city of Tangiers is hosting the presentation and signing ceremony of the poetry collection of the poet Mukhlis Al Saghir, who is the son of this region, firstly, as he belongs to an Andalusian family and culture that settled between Tetouan and Tangiers, and also the real poetic launch of this poet was from here, in the city of Tangiers, in the mid-nineties of the last century, when he won the National Prize for Young Poets. Before that, Moroccans heard his poetry for the first time on the airwaves of Radio Tangiers, when he was a university student, and students flocked from different parts of the region to listen to his poems in the lecture halls of the Moroccan university,” Amhaouch added.

For his part, Moroccan critic Najib Al-Aoufi considered the collection a poetic gathering, and said that “its joy is not complete, and its tone is not balanced, except by a reader who has a taste for sweet and good speech and is aware of some of the secret codes and absent texts, which are the two basic features that dominate the texts of ‘The Infested Land’, which means that these texts establish a creative agreement between the poetic and the cultural, which is the difficult equation that is absent or almost absent from our abundant, rainy texts – post-modernism, wandering in the wilderness of poetic nonsense, and the blame here is pure intention.”

Al-Awfi stopped at the threshold – the title “The Infested Land” and said that it “is intertextual with Eliot’s masterpiece and epic “The Waste Land,” which he wrote in 1922, the poem in which he described with creative, apostolic boldness the spiritual and human devastation of Western civilization, and in which he predicted a bad fate. And here is one of his readers in the twenties of the twenty-first century, Mukhlis al-Saghir, picking up the Eliotian code to write “The Infested Land,” after the reckless, Zionist West, the enemy of Eliot and the world, once again ganged up on the East and wreaked havoc and destruction in it.”

Najeeb Al-Aufi stressed that “the most beautiful poems on earth are not confined only to the joys and miseries of the earth, but rather the most eloquent and beautiful poems on earth are also those that spring from the groaning and longing of the earth. And like Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Mukhlis Al-Sagheer’s ‘The Infested Land’ seems to be a poignant elegy, or a poignant elegy for the bad – disgusting – Arab time.”

If the poems of the plagued land were written during the past twenty years, then “this first twenty years of the third millennium,” says Al-Aufi, “was one of the most difficult, harsh, and most tense and catastrophic historical periods. In this twenty years, the earth shook and swayed, and earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes raged in it, and it woke up in astonishment at strange temporary pandemics that had never crossed the mind of a human being. Its glaring and tragic title was the Corona pandemic that confined people to cages, and it was afflicted by wars and aggressive invasions that history had never seen the likes of, and its peak and hump was the aggression on Gaza.”

It is noteworthy that Najib Al-Awfi concluded that “this land, plagued by human rabies, global warming, and spiritual and human ozone suffocation, is in dire need of someone to restore life to the soul, and in need of the sting of poetry and poets, and the symbolic and childish versions of the messengers and prophets, for these are the wick of the candle that stands firm in the plagued/destructive land.”