Rabat (Union)
What came in the book “Muhammad Shukri: The Seduction of Writing and Living” was not written by a critic or researcher who approached his literary works with an academic approach, in order to obtain literary praise or a university degree. Rather, they are memoirs written honestly and faithfully by a friend who lived for years alongside Muhammad Shukri. Before he harvested the fruits of his fame, he is Mohamed Ezz El Din El Tazi, the well-known Moroccan novelist and author of this book that introduces us to Mohamed Choukri, the famous, his worlds and the difficult social conditions that made him one of the great writers of the world in the modern era, who tasted the heat of reality to write a truly realistic novel It is an incendiary writing that stirred up a lot of stagnant water and touched the taboos it touched.
In the introduction to the book, Tazi says, “When I dared to recapture moments from the life of the late literary friend Muhammad Shukri, and what we lived together, from an intimate common, I was careful not to slip towards restoring part of my memory, and narrate some chapters from my life, based on the saying “When I write about others, I write about myself.” Therefore, these notes, bearing the name of Shukri, seek to evoke his person, and moments of situations we lived together or lived with others, so I was a witness to them, a revelation he told me in times when he lived his own anxiety.
Shukri was not illiterate as was rumored about him, rather he was educated and a reader, but it was rumored about him because he did not learn to read and write until he was twenty years old, as he continued to declare on many occasions.
According to Al-Tazi, Mohamed Choukri was described as an “oral writer”, compared to the narrator Mohamed Al-Murabit, who was telling stories and tales of the American writer residing in Tangier, Paul Bowles, in English, and those who describe Choukri as such, forget or ignore that he entered the literary scene He published his short stories in the Beirut Literature Journal, in Al-Alam newspaper and other platforms, in the mid-sixties, before he wrote “Barefoot Bread”.
Al-Tazi confirms that the late Muhammad Shukri “did not worship money, but rather spends it on occasions in which he celebrates himself or his friends. He is the one who learned from the experiences that he lived that money comes and goes. And in his poor days he would share what he had with his friends, and in his rich days he would lend to his friends if they were in financial distress.
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