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Abstract
Mohamed Choukri's short story collection Flower Freak teems with social and political themes ranging from extreme poverty, madness, and censorship to violence, exploitation, and political repression. The focus in the present paper is on the title story, which brings to a head the different issues raised by the writer in the other stories of the collection. In fact, simple as it appears to be, the story ushers us into that world with which the writer was obsessed – the underworld of prostitution in which people's moral compass has lost its heading, a world in which the haves inhumanly exploit the have-nots, divesting them of all human dignity by reducing them to commodities at the mercy of the ruthless regulations of a neoliberal market economy. The story maps out the position of this phenomenon within the labyrinth of complex forces at its origin, and then follows the reverberations of its practice on the individual, the surrounding environment, and society at large. By narrowing his Chekhov-like focus, Choukri explores the density of the dramatised moment by cutting through the multiple layers of the dramatised situation in such a way that it appears to interrogate the depicted reality for a moment of truth in which the essence of the drama is revealed, and the whole story is suddenly infused with new significance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. All translations of material cited from Arabic sources are my own.
2. Laroui seems to give voice to a postcolonial awareness around the short story as a means of shaping Moroccan collective consciousness. In El Madini's (Citation1994, 55–59) opinion, one of the reasons why the short story failed to assert itself as a powerful literary genre in its own right is the fact that the long European colonisation of Morocco had repressed social structures into stasis; knowing that everywhere in the world the short story is mostly an artistic expression of middle-class reality, of its difficulties, and crises, Gogol's, Maupassant's, and Chekhov's stories being cases in point.
3. In a letter to Mohamed Choukri (January 24 1975), Mohamed Berrada wrote: ‘writing, after all, grants us a special victory over those manifestations that we refuse in our society and in the world’. In another letter (February 19 1977), he notes:
our tragedy is that we [writers] are like a bullet lodged in the magazine of a gun that is encrusted with rust … I am more than ever convinced that writing, as well as all forms of artistic expression, is a means of understanding the world and its people [and] a compensation to us for deprivation.
4. A ceremony that takes place seven days after a baby is born, and in which the baby is named.
5. For Bread Alone (1973) was considered by Moroccan religious scholars as an offense to morality and Choukri was consequently a target of sustained censorship for about twenty years. In his interview with Hassan Ahmed Birich, Choukri comments on that period as follows:
True, I write with an audacity no one can emulate … If this aspect of my writing offends others, I'm not accountable to those mentalities! They are free; they can criticise what they consider naughty or rude. I'm free to write what I like, and they can read what they like … I was forced to stop writing [between 1973 and 1992] … I was the object of severe censorship: I was boycotted by publishing houses, magazines and newspapers, and it was difficult for me to publish anything either in Morocco or in the Arab world! (Birich Citation1999, 29–38–39)
6. ‘In my writings’, Choukri says, ‘I tried to record for history the cruelty of the circumstances imposed on some social strata that I lived with, and of whose squalid condition I had a first-hand experience' (Birich 11).
7. The scene is a marker of the intergenerational difference in terms of prioritising values.
8. This could explain why some readers find Choukri's work shocking or even immoral. In his letter to Choukri on 13 December 1977, Berrada says:
I understand … the siege fettering you; the present criteria allow the publication of only those writings considered ‘polite’ and ‘politically correct’ … I hope you will come back to us to write about so many things that you, and only you, can write about (Roses and Ash, 18–19).
9. In ‘Flower Freak’, Choukri is talking about the exploited party in the world of prostitution; Bachir’s treatment of Susanna in ‘Bachir Living and Dead’ (same collection) is an excellent illustration of the exploiting party in what Choukri called ‘exploited prostitution’.
10. Poverty is a constant focus in the whole collection. The dehumanising aspect of destitution is explored in depth in ‘Violence on the Beach' and ‘Bald Trees’.
11. Lalla is fully aware of the challenge she is facing to compete with her rivals. Flower Freak, 124–125. Also, cf. to ‘Bachir Living and Dead' for the way prostitutes are exploited by those who buy their services. For a copious depiction of the nasty, risky, and dehumanising aspects of prostitution cf. ‘The Three Mouths’, Choukri, Al Khayma (The Tent). This collection, too, was banned in both Morocco and the Arab world in 1985.
12. In ‘Motherhood' a number of young prostitutes are said to be pregnant, and the only way for them not to fall into contempt is to sell off the newborn babies. ‘Motherhood' thus seems to be an ironic title. The socio-historical context of the story is worth stressing here: Morocco being a conservative society where the religious tradition was held in the highest respect, prostitutes were branded by the vilest disgrace possible.
13. It is significant to note that other Moroccan writers are aware of the conflict of generations in terms of moral values. In Miloudi Chaghmoum's ‘Shadow and Darkness' (1995), and in a moral context that is highly suggestive of Mohamed Choukri's ‘The Flower Freak’, the 56-year-old narrator says that ‘dreaming proves more difficult for this generation than for ours'. Printed in Mohamed Berrada's The Language of Childhood and Dreams, 68.
14. The stories in Choukri's second collection, Al Khayma, are similar to those in Flower Freak in terms of themes, characters, and artistic execution.