1 Introduction
Food, and in the absence of food, hunger, are key elements in the architecture of Muḥammad Šukrī’s (Mohamed Choukri, 1935–2003)1 narrative. Furthermore, we argue that his deprivation of food might have been to some extent the catalyst for his writing. In Choukri’s works, food and hunger also present strong connections with the colonial situation. The hungry colonial body becomes for the Moroccan writer some kind of metaphor of the political situation of the colonized country. We will focus on Choukri’s novelistic autobiography to explore the colonial body under colonialism, situating the texts in their historical setting. In such a colonial context, the typical Spanish fried dough churro becomes a symbol of the colonial presence that traverses the colonized society of Morocco under the Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956).
Polemics have surrounded Choukri’s texts and life since the beginning of his extraordinary and peculiar literary career. In 1973 was published For Bread Alone, the English version by Paul Bowles of a supposedly Arabic original that was finally published in 1982 as al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī. Once published, the Arabic text had a profound impact on Moroccan society and was immediately forbidden until the year 2000. Although Choukri’s position as a Moroccan writer took a while to be recognized due to the controversial nature of his literature, he has become one of the widest-known Moroccan authors, with his works translated into many languages. He is one of the greatest representatives of autobiographical fiction, a trend that has “provided some of the most distinguished works of modern Moroccan literature.”2 His irruption in the realm of Moroccan literature was a turning point in the literary canon, both in terms of content and style. He is part of a generation of writers that turned the focus from the grand nationalist narratives to the daily life of the lower classes in colonial and postcolonial Morocco. The case of Choukri is especially outstanding, as he has portrayed the life of the most vulnerable groups in Morocco, denouncing the situation of injustice and violence experienced by them, hunger being one of its many expressions. His work has been widely studied from many different perspectives, especially with regard to its autobiographical dimension.3 However, some elements of his literature have remained relatively unexplored, such as the functions of food and hunger in his autobiographical trilogy.
In this chapter, we rely partially on recent scholarship that combines Food Studies with Postcolonial Studies and that is proving productive to tackle the ways in which food and hunger reveal power relations in colonial and postcolonial contexts.4 As Parama Roy states, the combination of these critical perspectives offers an opportunity to “defamiliarize certain well-known postcolonial literary texts by training the lens of food studies upon them; it provides a portal for thinking in expansive, supple, and sometimes counter-intuitive ways about what postcolonial taste might involve.”5 We will approach Choukri’s narrative from this angle, in order to explore and interpret the hungry colonial body and its textual forms. In our analysis, food and hunger will be regarded as a metaphorical language. Following Donnale Freega, we consider that, “as a language, food-behavior is multifaceted, uniting both the biological desire for food and more complicated longings for less tangible but hungered-for ‘foods’: acceptance, respect, love, support, security, self-determination.”6 Therefore, by focusing on food and hunger in Choukri’s narrative from this perspective, we will explore the many different dimensions of hunger in his literature, its relation to colonialism, and the narrative strategies deployed in his texts to overcome it.
2 Bread as a Symbol
As noted by Muzna Rahman in Hunger and Postcolonial Writing, hunger has occupied a relevant role both in the colonial imagination and in the colonized subjects.7 This dynamic becomes evident in the first volume of Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical trilogy, al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī (For Bread Alone). The very title of the book, which we could render as “just bread,” indicates the precarious situation of the protagonist, Mohamed, and his family. The pervasiveness of hunger in Choukri’s works becomes a key narrative element with dramatic dimensions.8 In this context, bread (ḫubz), also present in the title, appears as a central element in the architecture of Choukri’s narrative. Bread becomes a synonym of food, and its absence means hunger and pain. Bread is food and food is bread.9 For Mohamed, bread is the means to survive in a very tough environment and in an even tougher family that had to live under the “urgence of bread.”10
In fact, bread is the element that sets the action in motion in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, as Mohamed and his family decide to leave the Rif region, devastated by a severe famine in a time of hunger, for the city of Tangier. Before leaving, the mother tells her son Mohamed that in that city “there is tons of bread. You won’t cry for bread when we arrive in Tangier.”11 Bread becomes a kind of manna, a “blessing from God” (niʿmat Allāh),12 and Tangier becomes some sort of promised land, of paradise. And the exodus from the Rif to Tangier becomes a kind of pilgrimage through a horrific and deadly wasteland: “All along the way to our exodus, that we made on foot, we saw dead cattle, dogs and crows hovering around them. Horrible smells, perforated entrails, worms, blood, pus.”13
However, once in Tangier, the protagonist complains: “I did not see the tons of bread that my mother had promised. There was hunger even in Eden.”14 They will even end up buying “stale bread that was sold by the beggars.”15 It is the first of many deceptions the young Mohamed will have to face from an early age in his fight for bread to survive such a precarious life. This precarity has been underlined by the author himself when recalling his childhood: “When I was a child, I used to live in a shack. When it was time to eat, there was always a mouse in front of me that asked me to share some of my food with it.”16 In fact, other accounts of Choukri’s life have often described his childhood as “a childhood marked by hunger.”17
Against this reality, bread appears as the basic item for survival. As long as there is bread, there is hope, there is a spark of dignity. At least that is what Mohamed’s uncle, who migrated to Algeria to make a better living – as did many Riffians back at the time – thinks: “Here in Oran, life is not easy either, but as long as we can get bread and onions, our dignity will remain preserved.”18 Sometimes, bread not only serves to satisfy hunger, but it also provides warmth and refuge. For instance, the first-person narrator recalls how, in winter, he used to sleep “in a corner of a bakery. I rolled myself up like a hedgehog, pushing my back against the wall of the warm oven.”19
At the same time, it is in his search for bread, for food, that Mohamed suffers some of the strongest humiliations. On one occasion, he jumps into the filthy waters of the harbor of Tangier trying to pick up the remains of a sandwich thrown away by a fisherman. Surrounded by oil and garbage floating on the water he helplessly tries to catch the piece of bread but: “it slipped through my fingers. Pieces of shit were floating around me, together with lumps of oil from the boats. I swam toward the slippery stone stairway, with pieces of bread and shit floating in front of me. In my mind I mixed both, bread and shit.”20
In addition to the humiliation caused by poverty and hunger, bread acquires new dramatic and symbolic dimensions in Choukri’s narrative when connected to another element that marks the story of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī: the violence of the father. From the beginning, there is a dramatic connection between bread and paternal violence for the young protagonist: “My father arrived and found me crying for bread. He started kicking and punching me.”21 As stated by Rojas-Marcos, this constitutes “the most intense terror that a child can feel: fear of his own father.”22
Furthermore, although the presence of bread and food is normally associated with dignity and scenes of happiness and pleasure, the father in Choukri’s narrative manages to turn food into another means of torture and violence. The narrator even describes how he is unable to eat in front of his father because of the tremendous fear he feels: “My hand shakes when I cut a piece of meat in front of him. Why does he stare at me in anger? I end up eating cautiously, like a cat.”23 Therefore, in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, bread (food) is both a blessing and a curse, as the protagonist is exposed to countless situations of violence and humiliation, and all for “the damn bread” (al-laʿna ʿalā al-ḫubz).24
The lack of bread, or, in other words, the lack of food, unchains a series of reactions in the body of the protagonist that make him feel pain. To compensate for these feelings of hunger and pain, we argue, he deploys different strategies: vomiting, sex and, finally, writing. In a sense, these strategies related to expulsion, liberation and cathartic processes, act as an escape from hunger, poverty, violence, abandonment, and exclusion.
3 Vomiting as a Purge
From the very beginning of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī there is also a strong connection between hunger and pain, which has been characterized by Rojas-Marcos as “hunger pain.”25 Hunger is at times so extreme that it provokes vomiting due to the total emptiness of the stomach, as in the opening scene of the book, where the first-person narrator with his empty stomach and crying from sheer hunger states: “I vomit and only threads of saliva come out of my mouth.”26 Vomit is the last resource of the starving body before consuming itself: “I vomited and vomited until there was only the sound of vomit, only its sound.”27
Vomiting also happens in the first time young Mohamed tries majoun (a mixture of cannabis, honey and nuts) and wine, when he is still a child and, forced by his father, starts working in a café: “You only vomit the first time you try it,”28 states one of the clients. Here, vomit is like an initiation rite, a sort of baptism. After that, he will turn to substances such as hash and alcohol, as a way to escape his many hungers.
On occasions, hunger pushes the protagonist to eat rotten food, like fish or other animals, even rats. However, this food is so disgusting that he ends up vomiting: “I chew on the emptiness in my mouth. I chew and chew (…). I get sick, and yellow water wells from my mouth and nose.”29 Therefore, vomiting operates in a natural way to expel food and substances that are harmful or unnatural for the human body, like carrion. There is a scene at the beginning of the book when Mohamed finds a dead hen in the garbage and takes it home. At the sight of the hen, his younger and sick brother smiles and seems to recover a little, “as if he had just woken up after a swoon.”30 However, their joy doesn’t last long, because as soon as their mother arrives, she grabs the hen stating: “humans don’t eat carrion.”31
The vomiting or emesis is an ancient way to expel poison from the body. In Choukri’s works, it plays this depurative role but also a significant literary and even political role. For Choukri, writing is also vomiting his own life in a cathartic process where he sublimates his tough life experience through literature. Just as the young Mohamed vomits the remains of rotten food, Choukri, through his writing, vomits the pain and the unbearable truths of his childhood. In an almost bulimic dynamic, he confesses some terrible acts committed by himself or by others, in his direct and frank style, without dramatism and while he remains unaltered, in appearance.
Therefore, the (literal or metaphoric) act of vomiting is a strategy to bring out things that Mohamed cannot accept, that his body cannot admit. In the second volume of his autobiographical narration, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ (Eng. title Streetwise), while studying in the town of Larache, he sometimes goes to a charity center to eat. During one of the meals, he is sitting with a group of old men with different disabilities, and the narrator cannot help but think: “Their deformities are reflected on me (…). They look at me while chewing their food noisily and greedily. I am ashamed of myself for not having any disability.”32 He sees his miseries reflected in those men. Finally, he has to leave the center to end up vomiting in disgust: “Nothing disgusts me more than human decline,”33 states the narrator.
Choukri creates a kind of poetics of vomiting, as a recurrent bodily reaction and as a powerful writing action. Furthermore, some of the harsher confessions “vomited” in Choukri’s narrative are related to sex. Violence and hunger contributed to awakening an unrestrained and at times violent sexual instinct in the young Mohamed, who, again in an almost bulimic dynamic, soon starts to search for ways to satiate his sexual appetite. Just as vomiting is a way to purge himself, so is sex.
4 Hunger Sex
Sex is another architectural component in Choukri’s narrative. And probably one of those elements that caused profound unease in Moroccan society, resulting in the prohibition of the first volume of his novelistic autobiography for almost two decades.
Together with food and hunger, there is an extreme sexual appetite in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī. It seems at times as if the protagonist is trying to compensate for his physical hunger with sexual experiences. Also, sex seems a way out of violence, especially the violence of his father, as he himself expresses: “My father’s rough treatment aroused my desire for anything corporeal.”34 In his sexual impulses, there is a kind of hunger for sex, which could also be interpreted as a hunger for love. The connection with others through sex, as recognized by the narrator, is a way to prevent him from falling “into emptiness” (fī l-farāġ),35 from being lost “in an unknown desert” (fī ṣaḥrāʾ maǧhūla).36 And as the first-person narrator of Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ will also admit: “onanism and decadent sex was what saved me from falling into the trap of futile love.”37
As we argued in the introduction, reading hunger as a metaphoric language allows us to link hunger for food with hunger for more abstract “foods” like love, respect, or recognition. Physical hunger and hunger sex in Choukri’s writing can also be read in this frame. Some of the protagonist’s sexual practices described in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī might seem shocking and violent. He spies on girls and women, he has sex with animals, he wonders from brothel to brothel, and even abuses a young boy. Some of his sexual encounters could even be described as carrion sex or rotten sex, just like the dead animals or the rotten food he sometimes resorts to, in a desperate attempt to satiate his multilayered and multifaceted hunger. Eventually, in the following volumes of Choukri’s autobiographical work, as the young Mohamed learns to read and write, and as he acquires recognition, acceptance, and love, the harsher aspects not only of physical hunger but also of his sexual practices will gradually disappear or, at least, be softened.
Sex also appears as a resource to gain money to buy food. After being paid 50 pesetas38 for a sexual encounter with a man who talks to him in Spanish, the young Mohamed says: “a new profession has been added to my other two jobs: begging and stealing.”39 Therefore, prostitution in colonial times is also an issue exposed in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī. In fact, in the scene previously mentioned, and in other scenes, Choukri gives a hint about some of the most unspoken aspects of prostitution in colonial times: male and child prostitution. Also, Moroccan and Spanish prostitutes are compared very often in Choukri’s trilogy. In fact, most of the protagonist’s sexual experiences are with prostitutes. Nowadays, we also know that in colonial contexts prostitution played a significant role, as analyzed in the Spanish colonial context in Northern Morocco by Etxenagusia Atutxa in La prostitución en el protectorado español en Marruecos (1912–1956). Moreover, Mohamed’s first sexual encounter with a woman happens with a prostitute. When they are about to have sexual intercourse, the narrator asks himself if the woman’s “lower mouth might have teeth!”40 A reflection that portrays to what extent sex can be unsettling for him and how, in a way, it is connected in his mind to food and to the act of eating.
Although Mohamed’s relation with sex seems rather unsettling at times, his sexual awakening is also connected to pleasant memories and, again, with food.41 The first time he sees a female body naked, he is hiding on top of a fig tree, while he eats figs “happily and greedily” (bi-faraḥ wa šarāha).42 And on several occasions, he compares the parts of a woman’s body with fruit, like grapes, oranges, or peaches. In Choukri’s vision, fruit and vegetables are associated with pleasure and hope. They are what the mother of the protagonist sells in the market to try to make a living for her and her children while the father is in jail after deserting the Spanish army or hanging out in the cafés: these products are a possibility for dignity in feeding and nourishment.
Therefore, while searching and fighting for bread is connected to the urgency of surviving, fruit appears related to abundance and pleasure. Hence, it is evident that the very different food items that appear in Choukri’s narrative have a strong symbolism in the story. Some of these food items also have a powerful connection to the colonial context in which Choukri grew up.
5 Colonial Churro
The typical Spanish churro, a culinary popular tradition that arrived in Northern Morocco with the colonial Spanish presence, and that is often mentioned in the works of Choukri, might serve to explore the connection of food and deprivation with the colonial context of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco. In the second volume of his autobiography, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, while in the Moroccan city of Larache which is under the Spanish Protectorate, the protagonist states: “I bought a peseta of churros.”43 To some extent, this sentence condenses the colonial reality of food and currency. The Spanish peseta44 was the currency in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. And the churro, a typical Spanish food, arrived in Northern Morocco along with poor Spanish migrants coming to the Protectorate in search of a better future. The author himself knew these poor Spanish migrants well, especially “gypsies and Andalusians, marginated as ourselves,”45 who lived in the same neighborhood as Choukri in Tetouan and Tangier and who taught him his first words in Spanish, according to his own testimony.46 Therefore, the churro portrays the material nature of Spanish colonization, popular and precarious, nonetheless colonial.
Churro and peseta are just two of the many words and expressions in Spanish that appear in Choukri’s texts,47 another sign of colonialism. In fact, there is much more evidence of the Spanish presence in colonized Morocco in Choukri’s works. Starting with several utterances in the Spanish language, poetry and songs, it is also manifested in different kinds of people, including policemen, military men, prostitutes, and a whole gallery of characters of popular classes.48 Even the toponomy of the colonized cities in Northern Morocco is in Spanish and so is reproduced in Choukri’s texts. Furthermore, the presence of Spanish elements is constant and goes beyond the colonial period. A good example of these traces can be found in a chapter from Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, whose title is the Spanish woman’s name “Rosario,”49 which tells the story of a leftist Spanish woman, a roja,50 who runs a pension in Tetouan where Mohamed stays for a while. In the chapter, Rosario talks about the political situation in Spain, criticizes Franco’s regime, and recalls how her husband was executed by the fascists in Tetouan for being a communist. In the background, the characters in this chapter drink carajillo coffee, jerez wine, El Mono anise, and Rioja wine.
The churro is also connected to the protagonist’s first steps in writing. When Mohamed starts studying in Larache, he has no money to buy notebooks, so he gathers bits of paper from the street, including paper that has served to wrap up churros:
Sometimes, when I don’t have money to buy a notebook, I pick up bits of used white paper to write my notes on them. If some of these bits of paper have been used to wrap up churros, my writing disappears into the oil stains. One word here and one word there. I enjoy watching the resulting calligraphy, which sometimes looks childish.51
Here, the churro, the colonial trace in the form of food, conditions the shape of Mohamed’s writing.
The connection between food and the colonial context is also evidenced in the disparities between colonized subjects and colonizers both in food access and its quality.52 There is a scene that summarizes Choukri’s approach in this sense, when another street boy recommends the protagonist to look into the garbage of Christians in Tangier: “The garbage downtown is better than in our neighborhood. The garbage of Christians is better than the garbage of Muslims.”53 According to the narrator, they did not just search other people’s garbage, but they were “the children of the garbage” (aṭfāl al-mazābil).54 Also, when Mohamed is traveling by bus from Morocco to Oran, forced by his father to work, the narrator subtly portrays how settlers were living a life of luxury and wealth, while Moroccans of the lowest classes had hardly any access to decent food: “The valuable things belonged to the Christians. We ate dry raghif and boiled eggs that started to give off a disgusting smell.”55 Hence, with his writing, Choukri did not only write about hunger in colonial times, but he also exposed the many different angles and implications of that hunger.
6 Writing Hunger
A very comprehensive biography of Choukri recently published in Spanish by Rocío Rojas-Marcos with the title of Mohamed Chukri (2021), has the subtitle of Hambre de escritura (Writing hunger). The idea underlying this subtitle and the whole essay is that Choukri’s deprivation of food was to some extent the catalyst for his writing. Clinging to writing allowed Choukri to expose hunger, poverty, and violence during colonial times, challenging some idealized images and nostalgia associated with Spanish colonialism and colonial cities, especially Tangier; a nostalgia that the author found “absurd.”56 With his writing hunger, what Choukri accomplished was not only to write about his own painful life but also to write about the hunger of the poorest classes during the Spanish colonial period and especially about the Riffians and famine migrants.
The Riffian element is a key contextual historical element in the narrative of Choukri, since the Riffians were clearly second-class colonial subjects. As the narrator of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī portrays, they were even discriminated against by other fellow Moroccans who said that Riffians “came from the country of hunger and of murderers.”57 Riffians were even considered as a plague of locusts who “had infested the happy city [of Tangier].”58 The author himself, in a lecture where he reflects on his roots, recalls how, when he was only seven years old, he was stigmatized by the kids of Tangier who called the young Riffian child “son of hunger.”59
The Northern Rif region experienced severe famines during the period 1939–1945 that deeply affected the region and its inhabitants, due to a series of droughts. According to Moroccan historian Mimoun Aziza, the repercussions of these famines were “one of the factors behind the social changes that occurred in the Rif during the 20th century.”60 The repercussions of the famine were aggravated by the consequences of the so-called Rif wars between Moroccans and the Spanish colonial army that took place between 1921–1927, as well as by the critical economic situation of the Spanish Protectorate in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The harsh repercussions of the famines, as Aziza also points out, were a direct consequence of the economic and social transformations that resulted from agricultural colonization, as this colonial strategy was “responsible, to a large extent, for the disorganization of the traditional structures of Riffian society.”61 The frail economic system implanted in the region led to a rupture in the “balance between needs and resources in which Riffian society lived.”62 The famines of the Rif had different consequences on the demographic, social and economic levels: rural exodus, intense migration to Algeria, enrollment in the Spanish army and an increase in death tolls. All these aspects are portrayed in Choukri’s narrative.
That severe famine of some colonial subjects can be framed within the larger reflection of Choukri about colonial violence in general, the privation of food being one of its manifestations. In Hunger and Postcolonial Writing (2022) Muzna Rahman explores how hunger and food deprivation interact in complex and different ways with power structures put in place by the colonial order, whether it be food insecurity and famine but, also, self-imposed hunger. Choukri’s autobiographical narrative serves to explore how some of these processes operate in literature.
In al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, the violence of the father is interpreted by the narrator as a sequel to the violence of colonial order.63 As mentioned above, the father also inflicts violence on his son through food, to the point that the child refuses to eat in front of him. In a very symbolic scene, the father forces young Mohamed to stuff himself with food, while beating him: “By yourself you are going to eat all this food. By yourself. (…) From this day you’re not going to refuse any food that’s offered to you. (…) You won’t even refuse carrion.”64 The child faints and ends up in the hospital needing a gastric lavage. In a similar way, the apparent opulence offered by the colonial regime, the luxury goods that colonizers enjoyed and that could even be distinguished by the difference in their trash and food garbage, also becomes a means for violence, like the act of forcing someone to eat beyond their capacity, as Mohamed’s father did. Colonized subjects should accept and be grateful for what is being offered to them, even if it is carrion, even if it is harmful to them. Just as, whether they wanted it or not, they had to “swallow” the violence of colonization that was portrayed as pacification or as a civilizing mission. The persistence of this colonial system of representations and “its perverse duplicity”65 has also been unveiled in the Spanish colonial context.
Furthermore, the violent character of the father is related by the narrator to another very complex aspect of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco: the case of Moroccans that joined the Spanish army and participated in the Spanish Civil War. At different points in Choukri’s autobiographical work, there are references to the fact that the father of the protagonist might have been part of the Spanish army and had fought in “Franco’s war” (ḥarb Frānkū)66 before deserting from the Spanish army. It is important to note that the region of the Rif was strategic for the recruitment of Moroccans, who were very often duped by the Spanish military rebels. The catastrophic situation experienced in the region at the time, marked by harsh episodes of famine, was probably among the reasons why so many of its inhabitants decided to join the Spanish army. With hunger, the economic crisis, and unemployment being the norm in the region, the army was seen as a work opportunity, as the soldiers and their families received important economic incentives in return.67 This complex and painful episode of the shared history between Spain and Morocco has hardly been dealt with by scholars.68 In Choukri’s narrative, the repercussions of this reality can be traced through the violent character of the father. The painful consequences of this phenomenon are condensed in a very symbolic element: the father’s military belt from his Spanish army uniform that he frequently uses to beat Mohamed and his mother.
In this context, the son’s rejection of eating in front of his father can therefore be considered as a political act, as some sort of hunger strike. As Rahman argues, in some colonial contexts, self-starvation through a hunger strike can act as a way of resistance against the colonial order, “as a response to imprisonment and control.”69 There is another passage in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī that can be read in a similar vein. When Mohamed is arrested with a friend after being involved in a fight, the prison guards offer them bread as their only meal. One of the detainees with whom they share the cell decides to throw the bread down the toilet. When asked for the reason, he bluntly states: “I’m free to do what I want with my bread.”70
The narration and exhibition of hunger during colonial times in al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī could also be symbolically read as Choukri’s own literary hunger strike. It is a way of turning starvation, in his case, not self-imposed, but forced upon him due to the political and social context, into a strategy for resistance and commitment. As Rahman states, “hunger strikes can voice erased colonial histories by using one’s body as text, and by ‘making flesh’ the violence of these elided narratives.”71
In addition to violence and resistance, hunger is also linked to death in Choukri’s works. The narration starts with the family of the protagonist burying his uncle who has died of starvation. Moreover, his father kills Mohamed’s brother who cannot stop crying because of the pain he feels due to the lack of food, just as the colonial order inflicted violence on starving colonial subjects. Hunger even pushes people to commit suicide, like the uncle of his friend Tafersiti, who killed all his family and then himself because “they hadn’t eaten in days.”72
Therefore, in addition to a denunciation of the Spanish colonial order, al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī could also be read as a denunciation of what hunger brings to human life. Hunger pushes the protagonist to a life where death, pain, violence, delinquency, and humiliation are the norm. Part of that humiliation happens during the protagonist’s search for bread, but it is also caused by his analphabetism, which is another consequence of his poor social situation, because “studying costs money.”73 Mohamed’s feeling of humiliation regarding his analphabetism becomes evident when he is asked to sign some documents so he can be released from the police station, when the narrator wonders: “What did they write about me on this paper? They could write whatever they wanted because I couldn’t read what was written on that paper. And I didn’t dare ask them to bring someone to read it to me before signing.”74 He even feels rejected and shamed by his peers because he can’t read: “Sons of bitches. They are all against me today. They feel they are better than me. I am not at their level today.”75
Against this reality, Mohamed realizes that writing is the only way to redemption: he must learn to read and write, although he feels that, for him, “it is too late to become an angel.”76 Rather, writing becomes his only way to salvation, the only means to stick to life. And here is where character and author converge. As Choukri states in the prologue of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, his book is a call to “bring the living one out of the dead. (…). To bring him out of the hungry stomachs and from the spine of those surviving from just bread”.77 Therefore, besides an act of resistance and denunciation, writing hunger for Choukri becomes a way of hanging onto life, of celebrating it.
7 Conclusion
Tackling the literary functions of food and hunger in Choukri’s novelistic autobiography has allowed us to throw light on rather unexplored aspects of this well-known work of Moroccan postcolonial literature. From bread to fruit to the churro, the presence and absence of food have proven to be central elements that set the narrative in motion, with different layers of meaning. In Choukri’s works, survival under the “urgence of bread” acquires new implications in the context of colonialism that not only brought new culinary traditions that have remained in the country, like the churro, but also had important socioeconomic consequences for Moroccan society.
In this colonial context, food and, more importantly, hunger, unchain complex reactions in the colonial body, which adopts a series of strategies to escape from the consequences of hunger. In the case of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, vomiting and sex appear as reactions of the body to exorcise the pain and humiliation caused by poverty and hunger. In Choukri’s narrative, vomiting as a purge gives place to a poetics of vomiting that allows the author to reveal his life and transform it into literature, while hunger sex in search of affection is replaced with a connection with others through writing. Just as writing appeared to the protagonist of al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī as an opportunity for survival, it allowed Choukri, the writer, to expose the repercussions of Spanish colonialism in dramatic social and economic events, like the serious famines that especially affected the region of the Rif in Morocco. In his own words, he realized that his writing: “could serve to denounce and protest against those who had stolen my childhood, adolescence and part of my youth.”78 Choukri proved that writing served as way out of surviving on bread alone.79
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Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo and Cañete, Carlos. “Spanish-Maghribi (Moroccan) Relations Beyond Exceptionalism: A Postcolonial Perspective.” Journal of North African Studies 24, no. 1 (2019): 111–133.
Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo. “Morocco.” In The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, edited by Waïl Hassan, 339–357. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo. “La supuesta picaresca de Chukri.” In Autobiografía y literatura árabe, edited by Miguel Hernando de Larramendi, Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla and Barbara Azaola, 139–149. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2002.
Freega, Donnale. “Speaking in Hunger: Conditional Consumption as Discourse in Clarissa.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 28, no. 1 (1995): 87–103.
López Enamorado, María Dolores. “Muḥammad Šukrī: el Protectorado Español en Marruecos desde la marginalidad.” Philologia Hispalensis 2 (1998): 59–72.
Muʿtaṣim, Muḥammad. “Kitāba bi-l-rūḥ wa-l-ǧasad.” Ᾱfāq 72 (2006): 163–168.
Rahman, Muzna. Hunger and Postcolonial Writing. New York and London: Routledge, 2022.
Rojas-Marcos, Rocío. Mohamed Chukri. Hambre de escritura. Málaga: Zut Ediciones, 2021.
Rooke, Tetz. “Moroccan autobiography as a national allegory.” Oriente Moderno 77, no. 2–3 (1997): 289–304.
Roy, Parama. “Postcolonial Tastes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, edited by Michelle J. Coghlan, 161–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
al-Šāwī, ʿAbd al-Qādir. Al-Kitāba wa-l-wuǧūd. Casablanca: Ifriqiyā al-šarq, 2000.
Slimani, Leïla. Le pays des autres. Paris: Gallimard, 2020.
Šukrī, Muḥammad. al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī. Casablanca: al-Naǧāḥ al-ğadīda, 2005 [2000].
Šukrī, Muḥammad. Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ. Casablanca: al-Naǧāḥ al-ğadīda, 1995.
The name of the author is also written Mohamed Chukri in some references. The choice of the written form in each reference will be preserved for sake of clarity.
Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo, “Morocco”, 2017, 345.
See Rooke, Tetz, “Moroccan autobiography”, 1997; al-Šāwī, ʿAbd al-Qādir, al-Kitāba wa-l- wuǧūd, 2000; Būaʿzza, ʿĀmir, Fātahu an yakūn malākan, 2015; and Rojas-Marcos, Rocío, Mohamed Chukri, 2021.
See Bahri, Deepika, “Postcolonial Hungers”, 2018; Roy, Parama, “Postcolonial Tastes”, 2020; and Rahman, Muzna, Hunger, 2022.
Roy, “Postcolonial Tastes”, 162.
Freega, Donnale, “Speaking in Hunger”, 1995, 97.
Rahman, Hunger, 1.
There has been a tendency to categorize Choukri’s works as picaresque. If there is in fact a connection with the classical picaresque genre in which food and hunger were central, the role of food and hunger, and of language, in his autobiographical texts is quite different. See Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo, “La supuesta picaresca”, 2002.
So strong is the connection between bread and food that in Moroccan Arabic the Spanish word comer (to eat) has become komera/kommera to designate the Spanish baguette.
Rojas-Marcos, Mohamed Chukri, 8.
Šukrī, Muḥammad, al-Ḫubz al-ḥāfī, 2005, 5.
هناك خبز كثير. لن تبكي على الخبز عندما نبلغ طنجة.
Since For bread alone is not really a translation and it differs from the Arabic text, we will make our own translations from Choukri’s works based on the 2005 reimpression of the 2000 edition by al-Naǧāḥ al-ğadīda for al-Ḥubz al-ḥāfī. We will also translate from the 1995 Arabic original of the same publishing house for Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ.
The present chapter includes many short quotes from the studied novel. For convenience, the Arabic original will be placed in the footnotes.
Ibid., 205.
Ibid., 6.
في طريق هجرتنا، مشيا على الأقدام، رأينا جثث المواشي تُحَوِّمُ حولها الطيور والكلاب. روائح كريهة، أحشاء ممزقة، دود ودم وصديد.
Chukri, Mohamed, “Raíces”, 1997, 168.
Rojas-Marcos, Mohamed Chukri, 11.
al-Ḫubz, 55.
هنا أيضا في وهران الحياة ليست سهلة، لكننا ما دمنا نستطيع تحصيل الخبز والبصل فإن كرامتنا ستظل مصونة.
Ibid., 108.
وفتته في قضبة يدي. قطع الخراء تعوم حولي. بقع من زيت المراكب. سبحت نحو السلم الحجري الهلامي، قطع أخرى من الخراء والخبز تطفو أمامي. اختلط في ذهني الخبز بالخراء.
Rojas-Marcos, Mohamed Chukri, 17.
Ibid., 109.
Rojas-Marcos, Mohamed Chukri, 17.
Šukrī, Muḥammad, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, 1995, 47.
انعكست عليّ تشوهاتهم. (…) ينظرون إليّ عاجنين مضغتهم باستلذاذ وتَلَمُّظ. خجلت من نفسي أيضا لأنه لم تكن فيَّ أية عاهة.
Ibid., 240.
Ibid., 241.
Šukrī, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, 162.
ان الاستنماء والجنس المنحط هما اللذان أنقذاني من السقوط في فخ الحب الخائب.
Peseta was the national Spanish currency before the euro.
The connection between food and sex is also present in the work of other Moroccan writers, for example Malīka Mustaẓraf, who has sometimes been compared to a female version of Choukri. In her writing, Mustaẓraf has exposed the injustice and violence that women are subject to, a reality that she harshly expresses as maʾdabat al-dam (blood feast), the title of one of her short stories. Her writing has often been considered autobiographical but as Moroccan critic Muḥammad Muʿtaṣim argues, in her literature, she goes beyond the autobiographical, telling “the sufferings of a Moroccan family (…) who didn’t know the meaning of education, nor truth, nor a decent life”. Muʿtaṣim, Muḥammad, “Kitāba bi-l-rūḥ wa-l-ǧasad”, 2006, 164. However, her work has been reduced to simplistic interpretations and criticism, because of the excessive attention given to the explicit way in which she deals with sexual violence and female sexuality. In a similar vein, Choukri’s works tell a lot more than just his life but, sometimes, the autobiographical component and the sexual harshness of his narrative can overshadow other essential elements.
al-Ḫubz, 33.
From his first job at a café where he earned 30 pesetas a month, which his father obtained for him, the former Spanish currency is found throughout the books of Choukri.
Chukri, “Raíces”, 167.
By the way, the Saqi edition of Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ did not know what to do with the Spanish word churro and it was transformed into al-qurrūs written using the Arabic alphabet. In Moroccan, the Arabic churro has become chorro, nowadays used to refer to several varieties of churro, since the art of churro cooking remained in Morocco, where together with old advertisements of churrerías of the Protectorate times you can still find new churrerías. In El invierno de los jilgueros, Riffian Spanish author Mohamed El Morabet also mentions the churro and the narrator states that “in the cafés of Tetouan there are always churros.” El Morabet, Mohamed, El invierno, 2022, 129.
In fact, Choukri’s own literary language is marked by his knowledge of different languages. His native language was Riffian and he learned to speak Moroccan dāriğa and Spanish at the same time to communicate during his childhood in Tangier and Tetouan. In addition, he learned to read and write both in Spanish and Arabic simultaneously. According to Rojas-Marcos, this complex linguistic background has marked Choukri’s linguistic style, characterizing his literature to the point that “his rupture with the canon didn’t only concern the chosen topics, but he broke, he tore apart, the issue of the language of creation.” Rojas-Marcos, Mohamed Chukri, 57.
López Enamorado, María Dolores, “Muḥammad Šukrī”, 1998, 71.
Šukrī, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, 145–154.
Meaning a Communist or a Republican in the Spanish political arena.
Šukrī, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, 50.
أحيانا، لا أجد ثمن شراء دفتر فألتقط الأوراق البيضاء المستعملة لأكتب عليها دروسي. اذا هي تلك التي يُلَفُّ فيها الشروس فالكتابة تنعدم في بقع الزيت. كلمة هنا وكلمة هناك. أتسلى بهذا الزخرف. أحيانا يتكون على الصفحة نوع من التشكيل الصبياني.
In other works by Moroccan authors, such as Le pays des autres (The Country of Others), Moroccan Francophone writer Leïla Slimani tells another of those stories related to food in the colonial context. The story recalls that when the rationings of the interwar period arrived in French colonial Morocco: “the French had the right to twice as much as Moroccans. He had heard that chocolate was not given to indigènes under the excuse that it was not part of their eating habits.” Slimani, Leïla, Le pays des autres, 2020, 212.
Ibid.
Ibid., 52–3.
الأشياء الثمينة يملكها النصارى. كنا نأكل الرغيف الجاف والبيض المسلوق الذي بدأت تفوح رائحته المغثية.
Chukri, “Raíces”, 170.
Chukri, “Raíces,” 167.
Aziza, Mimoun, “La década trágica”, 1997, 237.
Aziza, Mimoun, La sociedad rifeña, 2003, 20.
Ibid., 171.
Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo, Al sur de Tánger, 2022, 112.
Šukrī, al-Ḫubz, 96–97.
وحدك ستأكل كل هذا الطعام. وحدك. (…) بعد اليوم لن تعاف ما يُقدَّمُ لك من الطعام. (…) حتى الجيفة لن تعافها من الطعام.
Fernández Parrilla, Gonzalo and Cañete, Carlos, “Spanish-Maghribi”, 2019, 126.
Šukrī, Zaman al-aḫṭāʾ, 139.
Aziza, La sociedad rifeña, 177.
See De Madariaga, María Rosa, Los moros, 2015. In 2021, Youssef El Maimouni published for the first time a historical novel where the main character was one of those recruited Moroccans in the Spanish Civil War, Cuando los montes caminen.
Rahman, Hunger, 22.
Rahman, Hunger, 23.
Ibid., 210.
ماذا كتبوا أيضا عني في هذه الورقة؟ في استطاعتهم أن يكتبوا عني ما يشاءون مادمت لا أستطيع أن أقرأ ما هو مكتوب في تلك الورقة. لا أجرؤ أن أطلب منهم أن يأتوا لي بمن يقرأها لي قبل أن أوقعها.
Ibid., 4.
يُخرج الحيَّ من المَيت. (…) يخرجه من بطون الجائعين ومن صُلْبِ المتعيّشين على “الخبز الحافي”.
Chukri, “Raíces”, 169.
This article is part of the research project “Heterotopías en los imaginarios de las relaciones entre España y Marruecos”. Referencia: PID2022-139973OB-I00.