El Habib Louai is a Moroccan poet, translator, musician and assistant professor of English at Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco. His research focuses on the cultural encounters, colonial discourse and postcolonial theory and he worked the Beats’ archives at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Fulbright grantee. He took creative writing courses at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado where he performed with Anne Waldman and Thurston Moore. His articles, poems and Arabic translations of Beat writers appeared in various literary magazines, journals and reviews such as Al Quds Al Arabi, Al Moutaqaf, Jadaliyya, Arabli Quarterly, Al Jadeed Magazine, Al Arabi Al Jadid, Al Faisal, Al Doha, Middle East Online, Ragged Lion Journal, Big Bridge Magazine, Berfrois, Al Markaz Review, The Fifth Estate, Lumina, The Poet’s Haven, The MUD Proposal and Sagarana. Louai’s Arabic translations include America, America: An Anthology of Beat Poetry in Arabic, Michael Rothenberg’s collection of poems entitled Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story both published by Arwiqa for Translation and Studies, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain published by Dar Al Rafidain, Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus and Other Essays and Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, both published by Dar Al Libiraliya. He also contributed with Arabic translations to Seven Countries: An Anthology Against Trump’s Ban published by Arroyo Seco Press. Louai published two collections of poems: Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar which was a finalist for the 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry.
It Shall Rise Again When we are Gone
You could sketch it all
On a tiny thumbnail,
The story of the Son of Man
We ran out of insurance
served in timely doses by unseen Gods
We ran out of decent chunks of land
we used to grow food
Now we grow pesky briars, brambles
and some basil in worn-out auto-tire casings
we expose to sunlight in balconies of the garden of life
While fish and reefs perish under poisoned waves
While poor animals suffer and die that we may live
Who do we think we are after all?
Nothing but mere Lone Rangers disguised as prophets.
Some gunslingers pretending to be peacemakers.
A vigilante model of justice with many silver bullets?
Haven’t we enough?
Haven’t we abandoned the whole world
for nothing at all?
Haven’t we plucked all the flowers
leaving them crumpled at the curb’s edge?
For what purpose, but the mere greed,
The mere triumphant pleasure of leaving a trace
of what we call human progress
Disguised in shameful disgrace
Then we speak of a common tone
Something we call love
Yet we know nothing of love or its heartaches
We speak of it against our reasons
Because it is all we can do when we fail in old age
We are losing light and it is getting late
When we are gone, when we are done with
The sun shall rise and shed its beams
as it has always done
As if it was the first day of the world!
Under the Yoke of Overdeveloped Consciousness
After the death of his father, my father ended up
in a post-independence Casablanca where
he trimmed bureaucrats' Christmas trees and toiled
in a clothing factory for two or three dirhams a week
He had to send some dough to build a shelter in the village
NOW, he seems to be proud of his only son
I who is deranged by the fake prosperity of my academic position
I drive early in the mornings behind Diesel stinking-buses
& imported French cars to teach Mallarmé,
Rimbaud, Pound, Eliot and Stevens to haggard students with empty bellies
Occasionally, I meet locally known professors in stiff suits,
Clean Zara trench coats and tailored corduroy pants
Strolling in half-deserted corridors discussing Mayakovsky
They like to wear their hair grey without looking older
They still chew on “power to the people,” whoever they might be
They like to drink stale beer in gloomy Medina bars
Late in the evenings, I drift to my bachelor’s apartment
whose rusty keys are always under the mat
I eat cheap macaroni and drink papaya juice to save time
Wishing to avoid any complications of indigestion
I tell myself I have no children of my own to feel sorry for,
but I remember I am the bread-winner of my widowed sister's
I have to make a living that is not properly my own
While I suffer under the yoke of overdeveloped consciousness
The Sounds of War
The anemic skin, the creamed skin, the anointed skin, the skinny skin
cannot shed itself of cuts and scars, scrape and scrape!
Reality is bitter around puffy eyes
And truth is not simple wiser words
You cannot wash the lies and heartbreaks away
Memory shall always remind you,
No victory in the business of death
My grandmother, Hajjah Fatima
Suffered from anemia, but was not amnesiac
She was deaf in her left-ear
She said it was worse than losing insight in times of blight
She never liked the sounds of war
Late in quiet evenings, she would say
The sounds of war always, always
Sound far away till you realize how many were killed
You’d think you’ll never hear about them
But there is the antipathetic presenter
On big plasma screens shoving it up your face
And with that you’ll pretend to forget the sorrows,
the compunctions, the original guilt of Man
The sound of doves at dawn
The sound of little lambs in the backyard
The sound of children tossing daisies at each other in muddy streets
The sound of harvesters’ ballads in the cornfields
The memory of all that will not save you,
Will not help you find peace they say is everywhere
The anemic skin, the creamed skin, the anointed skin, the skinny skin
Cannot shed itself of cuts and scars, scrape and scrape!
Reality is bitter around puffy eyes
Truth is not simple wiser words
You cannot wash the lies and heartbreaks away
Memory shall always remind you,
No victory in the business of death
Some Want the World as it is to become Eternal
Some want
The world as it is
To become eternal
While they doodle
In the margin of a life begetting death
Every single day, being is being
Merely a result of an event
I am pestered by semi-finished resort hotels
I have seen them everywhere
They are all alike
Every time I thought I’d enjoy
An interval of lucidity with myself
In a journey to the edge of the world
They show to blur my vision
Soon we will have more tourists than travelers,
Soon will have more wasteful luxury,
Soon will have more junior executives with prestigious badges
There are too many of them here now,
They came on private jets from Kafkaville
They still seek exotic lands, some tropic hellholes
With brown and dark-skinned fellas creeping on them
They are after buried treasures in deserted shrines,
Gold, diamonds, drugs, pussies and asses
Or something they call the secret of life
Some want
The world as it is
To become eternal
Those who came last grapple with a different reality, so grim
Then grab the goods and hightail it home
How much should I care about this conundrum?
How much does home care cost?
I am still looking for “socialism with a human face”
I abhor the pieties of bourgeois decorum
I still seek liberation from consumerism
The shackles of gender abuse, religious zeal, and military nationalism
I still believe reason can save me from self-inflicted tutelage to
false beliefs in authority and traditions
I am against the prophets of deceit, empty promises,
Unconditional charity to scapegoat immigrants
I strive to finish the month
Put some processed cheese in my white loaves,
Treat myself to some papaya juice and look through the window
I still hope to write novels that would not please, but tease
Those who avoid the cold look of the real,
My heroes and heroines will not be young, beautiful and tanned,
They will not “glance at the vermouth bottle briefly
while pouring the juniper distillate freely"
They will not have fast cars,
They will not spend holidays in Cote d’Azure
They will receive paychecks and deposits
in fragmented time distilled from their lives
The fatigue shall overtake them,
As they head towards similar failures
Some want
The world as it is
To become eternal
For the Amazigh People Struck by the Earthquake
They will not be able to arise
On their first morning
In their newly built adobe house
They will not be able to gaze out the window
At the barn on the left,
At the Argan trees on the right
At the fissured minaret in the bleak distance
As there will be no house, no window
There will be no untended gardens overgrown with weeds
There will be no vegetable or fruit patches to irrigate
There will be no agoras for virtuosos to chant at
There will be no carnivals for peddlers to sell their wares at
There will be no tracks to ancestral shrines
There will be no corn, wheat or oat fields beyond the walls
There will be no walls adorned with warm welcomes
There will be no fences opening onto the scrublands
There will be no trails to the bush
There will be no beating around the bush
There will be some traces and much debris
There will be some survivors sifting through the debris
There will be tears in the remaining trails
Many will be walking dumb-stricken, many will be drifting
Humans and their objects shall flicker in the void
The Trade of Delusive Impostors
Isn’t this a menagerie where we have been
hiding from each other,
in disguise, in fear of hidden deities fond of
exhibitionism and atonement
We are but a herd of wild animals foreign to each other,
We like to pretend we aren’t in nature anymore
So, we build walls between us as we go and say
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We like to think we are the masters of fire,
We like to burn trash and eat sardines from cans,
We like to stand near the shed
& throw grain to overexcited chickens
We like to tease the rabbit out of its hiding place
for the lingering wolves and whining dogs
When Aissa decides to open up to his friends,
they sold him out to the weekly market crowds
When Youssef spoke frankly to his family,
they deprived him of a land that survived
in his mother tongue and flavors he craves
When Ayoub was explicit with his spouse,
She abandoned him
When Brahim decides to confess to the Imam,
He was charged with unbelief
When Moussa spoke with sincerity to the authority,
He was sentenced to ten years in the dungeon
What are we supposed to do
on the surface of these flat lands?
Shall we create personas and wear masks,
Anticipate and deceive by telling pleasing lies
We like to hear and laugh at our follies,
Should we still believe the universe revolves around us?
Is God a central government or
The soul of the soul of this world of ours?
Have we been inducted into the secrets of the trade
Of delusive impostors?
