Mohamed Choukri - Learning How To Read and Write

Learning How To Read and Write

He met someone who helped him learn how to read and write Classical Arabic, a strange language for him, and different from Moroccan Arabic and Berber which he spoke. He decided to leave Tangier in 1956 (year of the independence of Morocco) and went to Larache, entering a primary school at the age of 21. He entered the Ecole Normale and became a schoolteacher. Back in Tangier in the 1960s, he continued to go to bars and brothels and began to write his personal story in Arabic with explicitness and detail. His explicitness about some of his sexually tinted experiences was largely condemned by religious and conservative forces in Morocco and abroad.

Choukri grew to literary fame through his daring writings and his association with American writer and composer Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier for decades. Bowles and Choukri worked together on the translation of For Bread Alone in 1973, and Bowles arranged for the novel to be published in England by Peter Owen.