Abdellatif laabi autobiography of malcolm v

Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laabi is a French-language poet, playwright, translator, essayist, novelist, raconteur, and activist whose works reveal his engagement with social and political issues and a strong commitment against oppression, injustice, and human rights abuses. He played a key role in the cultural renewal of Morocco in the mids, restating the complex issue of developing nations nationalism and decolonization.

Laabi was born in Fez, Morocco presumably in , to a Muslim family of craftsmen, into an illiterate environment. He has pointed out that one of the reasons he started to write was to allow people who are not able to express themselves to speak. His mother, Ghita, was in constant crisis about her condition as a woman, and in a way was a feminist without knowing, Laabi has said; he made her the central character in one of his novels, La fond de la jarre The bottom of the jug, Laabi attended the French-Muslim School.

At school, children were taught only in French. At that time, he realized his condition of colonization, and this situation generated internal conflict: when he began to write, the only language that he really knew was French, even though his birth language was Arabic. When he was fourteen years old, Morocco declared its independence from France.

He entered the University of Rabat where he earned his B. They staged plays by Fernando Arrabal and Bertolt Brecht , and after only one season they were censored and the theater was closed down.

Into this fraught picture entered Abdellatif Laabi, founder, editor, and publisher of Souffles.

He also founded an important literary review, the journal Souffles Breaths , in ; the Arabic version of this journal was called Anfas. He founded it with the poets Mohammed Khair-Eddine, a major poet and novelist who died in in total poverty, and Mostafa Nissaboury, who continues to write and publish. Later on, other artists and writers participated in the project, from Morocco, Algeria, other parts of Africa, France, and one from Germany.

The magazine lasted for six years and published twenty-three issues in French and eight in Arabic before it was banned in The magazine allowed an avant-garde movement to be born and express itself, and therefore encouraged the literature of all Arab countries, as well as opening Morocco to cultures of the other countries of the Maghreb and of developing nations.

This group of writers rebelled against French literature.