Mohamed Choukri obituary

Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri died of cancer at the age of 68 on November 16, 2003, in Rabat's Military Hospital. Choukri had lived simply and alone in Tangiers, the setting of most of his books, rejecting the bourgeois luxuries to which his autobiographical writing had granted him access. He had been ill for many months.

His tales about his experiences with drugs and homosexuality were banned in his country. A friend of Jean Genet, Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams, Choukri was considered one of Morocco's greatest contemporary authors. His best-known work was For Bread Alone, which told
of his difficult adolescence.

Born during a famine in the Rif mountains, Choukri migrated to Tetwan with his family as a small child, eventually settling in Tangiers where he engaged in a variety of jobs (one of which involved a months-long sojourn serving a French family in the Algerian Rif) to supplement his tyrannical father's meagre income. Following one of many family disputes he left the house at the age of 11, embracing a life of homelessness and petty crime. These early experiences provided him with material for his first and most famous book, Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (For Bread Alone, written in 1972 but not published in Arabic until 1982). The book was banned in his North African country until 2001.

In 1955, at the age of 20, Choukri – thief, small-time smuggler, male prostitute – managed to procure a place at a school in the desert town of Al-Ara'esh where he finally learned to read and write. Back in the cafés and whorehouses of Tangiers he began to record his personal history The prestigious Beirut monthly Al- Aadab published his first short story, Al-Unf ala Al-Shati' (Violence on the Beach) in 1966. His other works include Zaman Al- Akhtaa aw Al-Shuttar (Time of Mistakes or the Streetwise, 1992), three collections of open-ended texts – Majnoun Al-Ward (Madman of the Roses, 1979); Al-Khaima (The Tent, 1985); and Al-Souq Al-Dakhili (The Inner Market, 1985) – as well as a play, Al-Saada (Happiness, 1994), and a series of reflections on literature, Ghuwayat Al-Sharour Al-Abyad (Temptation of the White Blackbird, 1998).

For a more complete overview of his life and work, read the Al-Ahram, click here.