A TRIBUTE TO THE BLUEBIRD
He is the prominent Amazigh Moroccan writer Mohamed Khair-Eddine, who has excessively written in French and enchanted the most celebrated minds of his era. The bluebird fluttered in the libraries of Choukri, Sartre and Senghor, and about the supreme absurdist Bickett. They all appreciated the vituperative spirit of his literature and the agitative aura of his bitter ire and oneirics.
He was born in an Amazigh town called Tafraout in southern Morocco. His family left the countryside and moved to Casablanca city. Few years later, his father divorced his mother and married a younger woman. This incident dehydrated the heavenly childish meadows within him, and its dry and scary aroma continued to reign over his works. It also explains his wistful yearning to his childhood and to his mother, which construes his callousness towards his father and his reprobation and vehement rejection to the notion of the “Father” and its manifestations: Authority, Obedience, Order, Orthodoxy, fixed morality and traceableness. In a word, Mohamed Khair-eddine is the figure of rejection. He refused to be categorised or classified, thus- and as the great Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri described him “Khair-Eddine was of no fixed abode. He changed his clothes at his friends’ houses and was not punctual. He was the bluebird and he owned the sky. “
The bluebird was a maverick, iconoclastic rebel and for him rejection and a work of art must be a total, complete act. His rebellion was not only limited to the purport and denotation of his thoughts, it exceeded into the very structure of his works. He revolted against the stylistic rules of writing. He shattered the bottle of language, and poured out its alluring secrets then he fractured the ligatures of punctuation, and unshackled his thoughts from the chronological and territorial manacles. On the edge of a disaster he stood, citing aesthetic expletives and being amidst the apocalypse. He once referred to this exceptional style of writing as “Linguistic guerilla warfare.” He believed in the significance of the image and the symbolism of the style over the meaning.
Khair-Eddine’s first novel was “Agadir”. It was in this city that the bluebird fledged, and flew over the destroyed Agadir city in 1960. The ghastly terrifying narratives to which he was exposed contaminated him. They caused an internal psychic earthquake within him by shocking everything that constituted him. In “Agadir” one might feel that Khair-eddine was drowning in a Cocytus (The River of lamentation in Greek Underworld) that existed inside him. He was excruciating the imploding of his consciousness and everything he ever knew or believed in: faith, morality, philosophy and traditions..
After “Agadir”, a tsunami of Khair-Eddine’s acrid and vehement thoughts inundated Francophone literary scene of the 20th century. He desired to shake the readers off their lethargy and he succeeded. His readers tasted the putrid flesh of the dead with “Le Déterreur/ the Exhume” and drunk gall in the cups of his poetry. They shivered with the coldness of exile and got absorbed by the nostalgic memory of his old protagonists. However and unlike the majority of the postcolonial writers, Khair-Eddine did not sanctify the past and the traditions of his people, which was mostly the subject of his works. He symbolically denounced the past and was obsessed with the present.
If Charles Bukowski failed to liberate his bluebird and was too tough on it, Khair-Eddine was brave enough to embrace it and to become it. He escaped from the cage, and flew as high as he could, apathetic to the weak and yielding voices of the world. He dared to commit the “No” and to set the confining ropes on the fire of his forgotten ancestry that he carried within.
I was once at a bookshop here in Agadir, fetching for Khair-Eddine’s “Corps négatifs” and other works, when the seller asked me whether I am looking for anything specific. I told him and then he said to me “They have killed Khair-Eddine and now they are killing his oeuvres.” Nonetheless, I discovered that what really strangled the bluebird was not only the regime but was also the social degeneracy and mediocrity. It was our disinterring habits. He returned from the darkened coal soil, to “This Morocco” where the cadaver eaters are revered and the decayed relics are sacred. The yesterday “always errant people” are now settled in the pandemonium labyrinth of ignorance and compliance. Ironically, he died on their “independence” day, which was 18th November 1995.
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