Agadir. By Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. Translated by Pierre Joris and Jake Syersak. Columbia, SC: Diälogos Books, 2020. Pp. 132. ISBN: 9781944884857.
“Should one build on the site of the dead city?” (p. 119) we are asked by the protagonist in Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s novel/political essay, Agadir. The main character, a government employee, is in Agadir, a city in the south-west of Morocco, to survey the destruction of the historic February 1960 earthquake that destroyed the city’s casbah within 15 minutes and led to the deaths of an estimated 15,000 people. Entire portions of the city became mass graves. The author was himself sent to Agadir in the aftermath of the earthquake as a civil servant and this of course informs his literary work, Agadir. The lives of the real survivors were unsettled in a myriad of ways and Morocco, a country that had only just fought for and won its independence from French colonization four years earlier, was forced to make sense of the earthquake as a stark reality and as a metaphor for its own vulnerability.
Segalla considered the earthquake to be “a cataclysmic environmental intervention in the decolonization process,”[1] as it triggered a further evacuation of French citizens who were still living in Morocco while empowering the Moroccan monarchy to further cement its power over the people. The book Agadir is itself unsettled, with moving parts and uncertainties. Prose follows poetry. There are short theatrical scenes which allow for the voices of different kinds of Moroccans to be heard. But the strongest voice is that of the main character trying to make sense of what happened in Agadir in the aftermath of the earthquake (“My first task: Report to my immediate superior; give him a feel for what little hope I have of revitalizing the people here” [p. 29]), and what happened to himself in a long prose digression into his childhood and family dynamics in a Berber (Amazigh) village—“Perhaps I have a history of my own…Was I born? I was born, therefore I live…” And ultimately, the book examines what is happening in Morocco under an authoritarian monarchy, which Khaïr-Eddine repeatedly criticizes and resists. In one scene, a housewife laments, “The king organizes the price increases. The king feeds off the blood of the people” (p. 85).
In the introduction to this English translation of the original French, Khalid Lyamlahy explains that Khaïr-Eddine expected readers to make repeated efforts to engage with his writing. I would suggest at least two readings of Agadir. Reading Agadir is an interactive exercise in which the reader has to come with some previous knowledge of Moroccan history, culture, politics, and religion, and how those were playing out in 1960s Moroccan society. A reader without such background knowledge should read the book with someone who could provide the explication needed to parse the at times dense text and cultural references. Lyamlahy, a scholar of Khaïr-Eddine’s work, expertly provides context necessary to approach Agadir, but that is not necessarily enough to help navigate the book’s direct and indirect illusions to pre-Islamic North African deities, medieval Moroccan monarchs, French colonialism, nascent Amazigh (Berber) nationalism, the turmoil of the “years of lead” when politically active or dissenting Moroccans were taken as enemies of king Hassan II and were disappeared, tortured, imprisoned, and/or executed, and intra-Moroccan politics between secular leftists and the more religiously abiding.
As a part of the corpus of modern Moroccan literature which is itself multi-lingual and manifold, Agadir sits in company with the works of noted authors such as Mohammed Zafzaf or even one of Khaïr-Eddine’s co-editors from the journal Souffles, AbdelKebir Khatibi. This English translation could speak to an audience of those interested in the immediate post-colonial moment in North Africa. It would certainly work well in a course covering literature from North Africa or the Middle East region or that wanted to balance out ethnographic and political works on the region with literature. Libraries supporting such programs could consider adding it to their collections.
Agadir is not an easy read, but for those who have an interest in the pivotal traumatic event of the 1960 Agadir earthquake and in the particular post-colonial moment in Moroccan history, when a certain group of young Moroccans used their creative energies to redefine Moroccanness (which for Khaïr-Eddine is tied up in mediations on blood as biology and blood as a social construct for belonging and relatedness), it might be worth the effort Khaïr-Eddine intended for you to extend to access the text.
Sumayya Ahmed
Simmons University
[1] S D. Segalla, Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 108.