Letter to my Friends Overseas

Abstract

bdellatif Laabi was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. He took a degree in French literature at Rabat University, and until the time of his arrest in 1972, he taught French at the Lycée Al Laymoune in Rabat. Laabi is a leader of Morocco's Marxist-Leninist Frontiste movement. In 1966 he founded the radical literary revue Souffles, first published in French and later in French and Arabic. In 1971 he founded another magazine, Anfas ( in Arabic). Both Souffles and Anfas were important influences on the new generation of writers and poets in Morocco, and both were banned when Frontiste members were rounded up in 1972. Arrested on 27 January 1972 along with a number of teachers, students and other intellectuals, Laabi was tortured, imprisoned, given a provisional release, then re-arrested and transferred to the secret detention centre at Moulay Cherif in Casablanca. He undertook a series of hunger strikes before he was granted a trial in August 1973, when he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiracy against the state. After being held at Casablanca and later at Kenitra, where he spent several months in solitary confinement, Laabi was transferred to a prison hospital in 1978, suffering from severe rheumatism ( with a risk of paralysis) and eye problems. Laabi's long poem Letter to My Friends Overseas, excerpts of which we reproduce here, was sent out of prison part by part, ostensibly as separate letters to twenty different ‘friends overseas’. The poem was later assembled and published with Laabi's permission by the Paris magazine La Nouvelle Critique, in its issue of August-September 1978. Other poems by Abdellatif Laabi are available from Inéditions Barbare publishers, Paris.