Early Years
Mohamed Choukri was born in the Rif more precisely Had, Bni Chiker during a famine, in a poor family with many children and a violent father. His mother tongue was the Riffian (a Berber dialect). Because of poverty, his family migrated to Tétouan and then to Tangier. As a child Choukri survived thanks to a variety of jobs, serving in a French family in the Algerian Rif, or guiding sailors who arrived in Tangier, where he learned Spanish. His life was surrounded by prostitutes, thieves, smugglers and especially a tyrannic and violent father. Choukri accused him of murdering his young brother, Kader, as well as his wife. After a family dispute, he left his family at the age of 11 to live in Tangier. There, he was a homeless child, a petty burglar, an occasional smuggler and a prostitute. At the age of 20, he met someone who changed his life.
Read more about this topic: Mohamed Choukri
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Uncle Matthew’s four years in France and Italy between 1914 and 1918 had given him no great opinion of foreigners. “Frogs,” he would say, “are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.””
—Nancy Mitford (1904–1973)