Proximal Morocco

Author: Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Press (2023)

Originally published in 1975, Proximal Morocco—is a collection of poems by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine written in fits and starts during a span of 10 years (1964-1974), during the fever pitch of his political exile from his homeland of Morocco which he fled, partly for fear of political persecution and partly to pursue a literary career in Paris, France. Laced with the same politically-inflected Surrealistic fervor as Aimé Césaire, the book is at once a powerful outcry to fellow artists for international solidarity of the colonized and outcast and a documentation of the pain and struggle of exile.

"Jake Syersak brings his translator’s bravura to bear on Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s guerrilla warfare with and against the French language. In a feat of lexical precision and alliterative cadences, a voice ‘composed in the likeness of thunder’ strives to ‘unlearn the viaticums of violence’. In rebellious screams and hallucinatory dreams, it conjures the landscapes of an Amazigh childhood to exorcise history’s assaults— colonial trauma, the tyranny of the state, the pangs of exile—, for ‘only the earth / remembers / and howls / what terror is brooding / beneath’ and ‘never once / did our ancestors offer asylum to kings.’"

–Omar Berrada

"Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine is a poetic force, and Jake Syersak's unrelenting, uncompromising translation brings one of his most alive books crashing into English ‘in the likeness of thunder.’ Khaïr-Eddine's work offers not only a new perspective on Morocco, but also on how language can be used in the name of land and longing."

–Emma Ramadan

"Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Morocco—this Morocco, his title asserts—is more than a place. It is the raw substance of his inimitable, excoriating voice, “composed in the likeness of thunder” and made of ‘rainette porphyry tetrodon,’ ‘the laterite gone unexplored.’ Adamantine yet triple-jointed, outraged yet backed by tenderness, his voice is as much material as his body (‘this querulous landscape this miserable landscape’). There is no separation of the self and its methods from the land that bore and shaped it, whatever bitter exile and rancid kings and avaricious developers might try. Jake Syersak’s translation channels the radical electric current of Khaïr’s sonic intensity, so we can feel him ‘sneer / poetry” and “speak death absolutely [while] bring[ing] along an orchid.’"

–Conor Bracken