Soaring and the Burst

Awarded the Prix du Maroc du Livre, one of Morocco's most prestigious prizes, in 2019.

In his early fifties, Rachid Khaless is not just a literature professor at the prestigious Mohamed V, in Rabat, but he seems to be everywhere else: a poet, novelist, publisher, painter and translator. He is not necessarily typical of the new voice in Morocco, but his various resonances are the heart of that new voice: polymodal, transgressive, ironic and humane. Khaless's "soaring" is metaphysical in a sense. Even putting aside the great influence of Rimbaud on North African writers in French (see Dominique Poncelet, H嶮i Abdel Jaouad and others), we have the sense in Soaring and the Burst of "I" as "an other"--rather than an "I" with its everyday luggage of familiar self. While this poet seems to insist on revealing, he instead persists in marveling: at the new altitude, the new lines of sight, the new physical laws. The new phenomena are the fragments of the "burst," objectively a new physics but more profoundly a new ("disordered" in Rimbaud's sense) subjectivity. The value of this work--beyond its startling imagery--is its extensive exploration of sense and sensibility without exploiting either the social world or a cloying introspection.

Poetry, Literary Criticism, History, African & African American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies.