“Who caused the blood wound?”.. The departure of Al-Mahi, the bohemian poet, after moral and material displacement

“Shkoon Jarh Al-Dam”, “Tears of Water”, “Lahmaq Tasta”, are collections of zajal poetry. Their poet Abdelkrim Al-Mahi, who lived the Ghiwane phenomenon and “honest creativity, which is not eaten with bread and only causes problems”, passed away, leaving behind him moral and material homelessness as well, after the water stopped providing life, in his 52nd year in the world of people, this August.

The second madman

In a statement to the electronic newspaper Hespress, Murad Al-Qadri, head of the House of Poetry in Morocco, said that Abdelkrim Al-Mahi “is the second madman that the plains of Doukkala have given us after Sidi Abdel Rahman Al-Majdhub, the great poet and Sufi who used to roam the popular markets and public squares, speaking wisdom.”

Al-Qadri, a Moroccan colloquial poet who discussed his doctoral thesis on zajal poetry in Morocco, added: “Between the first and second Majzoub, Abdel Karim Al-Mahi, there are more than eight centuries. However, it seems that the two Majzoub poets have escaped from the narrow local horizon confined to the plains of Doukkala, to embrace a broader horizon capable of embracing the human being, providing him with a decent living, and preparing answers for him in his relationship with his surroundings, his society, and the world.”

Then he added, saying: “The poet Abdelkrim El Mahi, whom we lost (…) in addition to the fact that he also emerged from the plains of Doukkala, he followed in the footsteps of his first grandfather, Sidi Abdel Rahman El Majdhub. In a number of poetry readings, he wore the rags of the madmen and spoke their words. In addition, he lived guided by the spirit of vagrancy and bohemianism, which made his poetic insight capable of penetrating the veils and exploring the hidden aspects of the beautiful poetic saying.”

Unique experience

Abdelkrim Safir, who was a philosophy inspector, researcher, and national secretary of the Moroccan Association of Philosophy Teachers, spoke to Hespress about the late Al-Mahi’s “unique experience in contemporary Moroccan zajal,” adding: “What distinguishes him is that there is no distance between his poem, his life, and his person. He lived his poem and his poetry, and the poem cannot be separated from his body. He was a poem in and of itself, singing and chanting.”

Shahid added: “He is one of the few people who are distinguished in their Zajal poetry by drawing from an ancient Moroccan dictionary, in Moroccan colloquial Arabic, which constitutes a celebration of the forgotten language and a re-consideration of a margin that is not a margin but rather the reality of Moroccan culture; for colloquial Arabic is the language in which we think and communicate, but it is excluded from the official field in writing, media and school.”

Then he said: “In the zajal, we find words in the colloquial dialect from different Moroccan linguistic identities, Berber, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hassaniya… What distinguishes it in Al-Mahi is his poetic recitation of his poems written in it; he is a singer, of Ghiwani nature, and he has Ghiwani performances in his zajal, and his poem is written and heard, and with his body, his suggestions, and his movement, another poem, gives him a special distinction and uniqueness that is rarely seen in the Moroccan cultural and zajal arena.”

Life is a choice

Moroccan poet Ahmed Lamsih, who won the most recent edition of the Morocco Book Prize in the poetry category, making his collection the first in the colloquial language to win this category in the history of the prominent cultural award, told Hespress that much of the widespread obituary of Abdelkrim El Mahi “contains a lot of hypocrisy in the face of his death, which I do not accept; he is a person who consciously chose to live this life, as he wanted it, in the margins, to live in misery, and I repeat, by his choice, and it is a choice of bohemianism, with cruelty to the soul and the self, he chose it, and no one pushed him to it.”

“Al-Mahi chose to be an outcast and to have a suicidal relationship with existence, like the artist who also came from Al-Jadeeda, Ahmed Jawad. Every day they thought about suicide, and they had an existential quarrel, not idle talk. They were both living a suicide project at every moment, and perhaps Ahmed Jawad dared and carried it out by choice in protest against the injustice that had befallen him. But Al-Mahi committed suicide every day, calling his friends and telling them: This is the last call, and tomorrow I will be dead. He might wake up in the morning and postpone his project, but the malignant disease entering his brain hastened the matter,” added Lamsih.

Then the poet added, “For me, what matters at this moment is not the hypocritical crying on Facebook, far and wide; rather, he is a different poet. I emphasize this because he writes texts that you do not see in others, and he is not part of any zajal group, but rather he is his own voice, not an echo of anyone else.”

The author of “Ana Ma Kainsh” continued: “Abdelkrim El Mahi is a poet whose zajal writings I admire. For those who don’t know him well, he left his job by choice or by force. He worked in the railways and chose to isolate himself from his family. He chose to be only what he wanted to be (…). He practiced theater, tried the Gnawa experience, and was fond of the “Lmshaheb” band. All of this created an exceptional mixture for us called Abdelkrim El Mahi. No one wronged him, and many will be angry at what I say, because I avoid emotional outbursts at the moment while neglecting reason. He is a friend of mine and I sit with him a lot.”

The witness continued, saying: “What I like and confirm is that he is the one who chose, consciously and with decision, and chose to live, and I do not say live; rather, he chose to live as we knew him, and many people avoided him and evaded him, and even stopped his calls from reaching their phones, and now they are crying over him. He triumphed in choosing to be on the margins, and resisted what could tempt him to leave this margin, and to his greatness he chose, and was not pushed to this, and we must respect the value of this choice without exaggeration (…) but we are hypocritical intellectuals, we seek to be hysterical instead of being rational.”

Then the poet Ahmed Lamsih concluded his testimony about Abdul Karim Al-Mahi’s poetry and life, saying: “His experience is beautiful. It said to life: ‘Fuck it.’”