“Thoiza” Cultural Festival distances Mohamed Choukri’s credit from “moral scissors”

In keeping with its annual tradition of dedicating a theme to celebrating the “white thrush” Mohammed Choukri, the “Thwiza” Cultural Festival in Tangier held, in its 18th session, the “Sixteenth Forum to Commemorate the Literature of the International Writer,” this time under the title “The Immoral Choukri,” which Hespress reported a few days ago sparked a heated debate among writers and novelists who strongly criticized this title.

The “Thwiza” Festival, in the person of the writer and poet Abdel Latif Benyahia, the forum’s manager, revealed today, Friday, that the organizing committee is sticking to this description, because it escapes the “suffocating censorship” and moral guardianship, which indicates that “in the cultural issue we are still miserable”; adding that “the exceptional status that Shukri’s works enjoy on the international level is originally due to this moral persecution.”

Value judgments

Researcher Shams Al-Doha Al-Buraqi said: “The title provoked me, because at first glance I did not consider the person or friend we had known for a long time and who was a member of the family to be ‘immoral’,” wondering: “Is he judged as such because he used to drink alcohol, for example? Perhaps this is Shukri’s only ‘immoral’ behaviour,” adding: “Putting quotation marks in the title refers to estrangement; so it is not about the person who left us.”

Al-Buraqi mentioned that there is “another judgment, related to the writer who may sometimes mix with the narrator in some of his works,” which incites the description of “immoral,” and she continued: “We first ask whether we can issue a value judgment here, or is creativity a process that goes beyond the value judgments that society creates in a certain circumstance? Are morals variable or fixed? Do judges who deal with crime in a certain society have the right to rule with the same laws on a hero or a fictional character?”

“When we ask about the relationship between creativity and morality, we also ask about the space we give ourselves as readers to accept what the writer brings, and whether we read it with the eyes of today or the eyes of the past,” the speaker continued, adding: “‘For Bread Alone’, for example, published in the mid-seventies, exposes the cruelty of society and poverty, and the cruelty of a father who is pushed by his son or tries to kill his son. At that time, could the son criticize this father’s actions without society labeling him disobedient?”

The same researcher added: “If For Bread Alone was published today, would we pass the same judgments on the author? In this era, we are talking about children’s rights and best practices for their benefit. That is, about new ethics that were not present in that era.” She added: “According to this logic, would we talk about the ‘disobedient son’ who criticizes and criminalizes the father’s actions? Even when we go back to the ‘age of mistakes’, we find that it is a reference to a bygone era.”

Ability to speak up

Iraqi critic Abdullah Ibrahim addressed the relationship between ethics and narration in his intervention, considering it “a thorny relationship in every sense of the word.” He continued: “How, then, does Shukri’s literature differ from other types of literature? And why is he sometimes described as an immoral writer? Unlike most writers, he does not content himself with drawing from his life experiences, but rather he declares them, does not conceal them or keep them secret, and narration for him is a means of disclosure, not camouflage.”

The critic continued by saying that the author of “Majnoun Al Ward” decided to narrate his life experiences instead of imagining their events, “which earned him the stigma of ‘immoral’; and many well-known and established writers in the history of literature share these experiences with him, but they deny them and do not acknowledge them,” asking: “Would a writer be moral if he concealed his life experiences? And would he be immoral if he revealed them?”

The same speaker noted that “Shukri indulged in experiences that he was forced to and desired; is absorbing them through narration an immoral act? Or is the immoral writer the one who is evasive and shows what he does not hide? Is the moral writer the one who falsifies? And the immoral one the one who reveals?” He added: “The type of answer in the mind of each of us determines what is moral and what is immoral. Each of us suggests his answers; and the view of Shukri goes back to searching for his personal behavior in his imaginary works. And here lies the focus of the problem.”

Here, according to Ibrahim, there is “a crossing and forgery from one field to another; his actions are investigated in his imagination; and Shukri’s works contain a high tone of confession and a tendency to benefit from his experiences and the occurrence of their events in the spatial space in which he lived, which is most likely the underworld of Tangier. There was collusion in assuming the identity between him as a human being and his characters who were guided by his experiences, so the search for his personal conditions took precedence over the search for his narrative characters.”

Writer of “Shuttari”

Moroccan novelist and translator Salma Al-Ghazawi said, “Judgmenting any creative work as immoral is a value judgment that is arbitrary and arbitrary, especially if the author of this controversial work is a writer of the stature and quality of Al-Shahrour, Mohammed Shukri, who was the first Moroccan writer to write the ‘smart’ novel that depicts, with a mixture of realism and a sarcastic and mocking style, the underworld with the aim of satirizing, exposing and laying bare society, its ills, the falseness of its values ​​and its double standards.”

Al-Ghazawi spoke about the desire that governs this type of writing, which is “criticizing the blatant and unfair class disparity, as well as denouncing injustice, poverty, exploitation, and the violation of human dignity, among other things that the tormented and forgotten marginalized people suffer from,” stressing that Shukri “Al-Shater’s” goal, through sharing his difficult life experience, was to “describe what he witnessed and lived in the world of the underworld that is teeming with the destitute, the vagrant, the homeless, the outlaws.”

The spokeswoman continued: “It is true that Shukri’s concern, like any marginalized and destitute clever person, is to obtain a morsel of ‘bare bread’, in order to survive and continue to struggle against the miserable, decadent and immoral reality. However, despite the intense presence of subjectivity in his writings, he did not neglect to present a document of testimony that in some passages is almost a protest petition about what his comrades are living in misery and the toiling passersby he met.”

The Moroccan translator considered that “Shukri is very proficient in the formal and thematic characteristics of the Shatari novel with its imagination and realism that exudes passages that depict homelessness, suffering from marginalization and injustice, as well as adventures and vagrancy. He also adopted a critical realism of the miserable reality, and rebelled and revolted against this bitter reality with its vulgar values ​​and customs.”