Bowles’ retrospective view of the collaboration: • “Had I known how difficult it would be to make English translations of Mohamed

Choukri’s texts I doubt that I should have undertaken the work [. . .]. When we were translating his autobiography For Bread Alone, he sat beside me, in order to see that I was making a word-for-word translation of his text. If he noticed an extra comma he demanded an explanation. I was driven to reiterating: but English is not Arabic!”

• “After Choukri, it was a relief to return to the smooth-rolling Mrabet translations. (I had done two novels and a book of his stories earlier.) [Unlike Choukri, Mrabet] has no thesis to propound, no grievances to air, and no fear of redundant punctuation. He is a showman; his principal interest is in his own performance as virtuoso storyteller.”

Bowles’ collaboration with Mohamed Choukri: “a sympathetic interlocutor giving voice to illiterate native”? What is at issue here?

• Choukri’s text: “[invested] in a literature, rational, and modern nation”;“politicized literary trajectory”; social realism – social, political and economic struggle

• Bowles text: personal, existential struggle; postmodern primitivism; apolitical

Arabic: “I was overcome by the desire to cry. What do I do with this old man who just sucked me?”English: “Are all the maricones as nice as he was?”

The explanation for why Mohamed wasn’t brought to school as a young boy in Arabic: “It’s just that we’re too poor, and learning costs a lot [in Tetuan].”And in English: “I don’t know. But he didn’t ever take me to any school.”

When Mohamed’s aunt demands an explanation of why he had sex with a boy, in English, his response is, “I don’t understand myself.”In Arabic: “In Tetuan, the thighs of prostitutes were available to me in the Saniya Bordello. But here, who can I desire? Am I supposed to desire your thighs? Monique’s thighs are her husband’s. Yours are your own husband’s. And what about me?”

Upon nearly swiping the purse of a foreigner in the market (in Arabic only):“You mistress of the world, it is the world’s misery that its owners are themselves never ashamed. They buy us at the cheapest prices. Perhaps you don’t need to sell yourself.”

After sex with the boy, Mohamed is overcome with self-disgust (in Arabic only): “I hated the pleasures of my body [. . .]. Damn my body”.

“Non-realist writing is frequently privileged by postcolonial critics searching for a form to hold disruptive politics because of the assumption that its various forms are inherently conducive to political subversion due to their capacity for presenting multiplicity. The prevailing idea, as it has been developed or assumed by many postcolonial critics, is that realism is almost necessarily conservative, and non-realist forms are inherently somehow more postcolonial -- and therefore have greater potential for resistance.”

“Theoretical responses to realism produced in postcolonial locations have ranged from viewing it as a form that interpellates the ideology of imperialism, to characterizing it as naïve or simplistic, to configuring it as an attempt at the representation of a single authenticated experience. Realism is seldom established as a viable form for resistance narratives.”

- Laura Moss, University of Manitoba, 2000 (http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/moss.htm)

Realism = individual, non-communal perspective; one single “truth”“Non-realism” (ie, postmodernism) = multiplicity of view, more “conducive to political subversion”

“In this Arab context, realism is not simply understood as a technique of representation built on simple verisimilitude. Rather, realism here is constructed through a particular and very powerful discourse about collective social and political identity. Realism has to construct the basic elements of narrative fiction—time, place, character, plot—in a way that “mirrors” the particular social, cultural and political reality (waqi‘) of the national collectivity. When Arab critics use the word “reality” to talk about Arabic fiction, they mean “national reality,” a term that raises the specter of a whole set of specific historical and social issues such as colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle, the rise and hegemony of national bourgeousies as well as the real and imagined social composition of the national community.”

Samah Selim, “The Narrative Craft: realism and fiction in the Arabic canon”, Edebiyat 2003, vol. 14, no. 1 & 2, pp. 109-128

Choukri on al-Khubz al-hafi:

“In Al-Khubz Al-hafi, I depict immoral scenes to search for morality and ideals. My characters are not content with their immorality: they do not rejoice in their corruption as they are compelled to act corruptly under the strain of disgraceful social oppression. Their life is commodified and they consequently lose their humane values. My life among them is emblematic: I got an education then made education my profession. I used my writing to protest against oppressive exploitation. It is an attempt to set things right, regardless of whether I win or lose.”