The Moroccan, undersigned authors of this appeal, who contribute to Souffles-Anfas, aware of
- the serious threat posed by the Zionist occupation to the Palestinian people, a threat that consists in an act of terror against the national and cultural existence of the Palestinians and in the miserable attempts to transmogrify its personality and uproot it (as a people),
- the avantgarde role that the Palestinian revolution, which is integral to the global revolutionary wave, plays in the project of the liberation of Arab people and their struggle against imperialism,
- the strong impact that this revolution has on the Arab masses in the Middle East and in the Maghreb and in its function as an expeditor historical change, especially in relation to the ideological and political clarification of the dimensions of the struggle in the Arab world.
- the nature of the organic relationship between the struggle of the Arab Palestinian people and the struggle of the Arab Maghrebi peoples.
- the transformations ushered in by this revolution and the changes that will be brought about in relation to the pillar of modern Arab culture and regarding the function and responsibilities of the Arab intellectuals.
- the deplorable conditions in which the Arab Palestinian writers live and the various forms of repression directed against them.
They are convinced that the Palestinian revolution will triumph and affirm that:
- The output of this revolution for us—Maghrebi writers—is decisive.
- It imposes an entrenchment of our choices and obligations. We consider any form of writing or actions, silence or indifference, by any Moroccan writer to be supportive of reactionary conservatism in our country and falls into its trap and thus becomes an opponent to the liberatory project of our peoples and are confined, in our opinion, to the same abusive apparatus. The sole unequivocal position is to effectively participate in the national struggle side by side with the genuine progressive forces and the exploited masses.
- It pushes us to reconsider the creative process and methods of operation and communication and to launch new excavations in order for our writing play a role in the cultural movement a social mobilization.
- It makes feel the urgency of consolidating our fight against colonialism in all its forms, particularly the cultural, which employs, through insidious tactics, the same false means used by the Zionist imperial occupation in Palestine in order to denature and disfigure our culture.
- It affirms even more the imperatives which we have strongly overemphasized, which consist in rethinking the static contents and forms of our traditional culture as well as the false methods of the Western bourgeois culture, which have up to now shaped the fundamental grounds for the intellectual and psychological embargoes in the Maghreb.
- Based on the aforementioned, we feel that we are more equipped to lay the foundations for a new literature that is capable of contributing to the revival and construction of our national culture, and also capable of releasing the creative energies of our peoples.
- This revolution requires particularly from French-speaking Maghrebin writers (if this has not yet occurred) a radical geo-cultural reorientation to enrich the dialogue and debate with the Middle Eastern writers with the hope of asserting that our postcolonial literature regardless of the language in which it is written constitutes an essential component of the Arabic literature with which our future in intrinsically bound.
They observe that the literature of Arab Maghreb—in its diverse linguistic expressions—has not stopped lagging behind since national independences.
The current situation is characterized by:
- The multiplicity of bastardized literary movements mired in tautology, reveling in imported literary modes and styles without any genuine engagement with our countries’ deeply rooted cultural realities.
- Literary shallowness and expressive literary “followism”.
- Quasi-total sterility resulting from the dread of the creative adventure and what it carries in terms of rejection and transformation.
- Causing a brain drain, which is explained by the fascination of a number of writers with the colonial countries; a fascination that is motivated by many complexes, or simply put, a pursuit of simplemindedness and fuss.
In this respect, we insist on asserting that exilic solution has only one end, which is the “the marginalization” of the Moroccan writer and his use by the various monopolizing institutions to publish abroad while seeking to integrate him in accordance with the tastes and illusions of western intelligentsia, which still relishes faraway exoticisms and which hardly withholds its paternalism and guardianship.
We affirm that the writer must work from within no matter what the circumstances with full knowledge that with the creative work that is not nourished by everyday life in reality can only lead to its marginalization and to false allegations or to the formation of a group of isolated geniuses or self-conceited writers.
We further observe that:
The ideological and cultural connections of the Moroccan literary production with the global facts and with the Palestinian revolution are still only understood in an emotional and romantic way.
The literature that expresses Palestine still wallows in several ambiguities, starting from nostalgia to a new lost Andalusia to defeatist lamentations and elegies.
In this vein, we do not claim that poetry and fiction written by Moroccans can change anything about the reality of the Palestinian issue or in the balance of powers confronting each other in the region.
Furthermore, the Palestinian writers are better placed and more qualified to articulate the reality and the aspirations of their people. They, like revolutionaries, shoulder with splendor and depth the epic of asserting the nationalist character. If we reject the ceremonial or occasional literature written to engage with ceremonies and occasions, which has become a genre in and of itself, and which appears in its own rhetorical modes, we assume that our literature ought to incorporate the Palestinian revolution in all its ramifications, as an example, seismograph and trajectory for the Arab revolution that the Maghreb writers are required to achieve.
Additionally, the greatest contribution to the support of the Palestinian national struggle consists in our participation in boosting popular masses’ awareness of the struggle’s prospects and anti-imperialism, in particular.
The signatories of this appeal urge the Moroccan writers to:
1. strive in our countries and on all fronts to fully ensure the freedom of speech and in order to firmly ingrain the conditions for such freedom and its practice through publishing, distribution etc.…
2. expose, and at all levels, the foreign hegemony over the means of expression and cultural communication.
3. Actual participation in the clarification of the Palestinian issue.
4. Fostering communication between the national and global public opinion with regard to the issue of barbarism that lies in the obliteration of the Palestinian people’s culture by the Zionist occupation.
5. Exposing the new racist anti-Arab trends in whatever manifestation they take in order to wage an ideological and cultural battle that is liable to eradicate stereotypes that imprint the Arab people and their reality.
6. Remaining completely vigilant and cautious regarding the terminology used in the analysis of the Palestinian issue and exposing any attempts to exploit Palestinian people’s struggle. This exploitation that seeks to cover up national problems and its real relationship with this struggle; meaning the emancipation of our exploited people and the anti-imperialist battle.
7. Publicizing Palestinian thought and the revolutionary culture that emerged from the struggle for liberation in all manners, both locally and globally.
Rabat, October 1969
Tahar Ben Jelloun / Bensalem Himmich / Driss Nakouri / Mostafa Nissabouri
Abdellatif Laabi/ Ahmed El Madini / Abdelaziz El Mansouri/ Azzeddine El Madani
Ahmed Joumari/ Ahmed Mejjati / Abdelkebir Khatibi/ Houcine Tanjaoui
This appeal is open to any writers or intellectuals who desire to sign
Translated from Arabic by El Habib Louai