Beyond the Barbed Wire

Finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2020

Winner of an English PEN Award

Introduced by Jim Moore, with an interview by Christopher Schaefer.

Beyond the Barbed Wire is a selection of work by Morocco s greatest living poet. Abdellatif Laâbi's poetry and literary activism has inspired a generation of writers and thinkers, and it resulted in his decade-long imprisonment. This volume gives a career-spanning overview of Laâbi's poetry, from the late 1960s to the 2010s. It includes a generous selection of the prison-writings of the 1970s, poems that speak from beyond the borders of what is human, as the poet writes, a hinterland of physical and emotional torture, in which hunger strikes are the only weapon we've left. Among these is a poem addressed to the poet's cell, which is right here / inside me / like a second body , and another written piecemeal to friends on the outside and later reassembled. Beyond the Barbed Wire pays testament to the human need to speak in the face of censorship, that epic of silence. These poems, Laâbi's bitter fruits of the murderous twilight, renew the possibility of a poetry that is genuinely urgent, necessary: a poetry of anger, anguish, love, wit, and hope, touched by a philosopher's vision and perspicuity. The book includes an interview with the poet in which he discusses his practice, his views on education, his beliefs about a poet s duty, the influence of his parents, and his optimism. With Laâbi's renewed prominence in the Moroccan intellectual scene following the Arab Spring, and with a new generation of artists and activists looking to him as a source of inspiration, this book shows why Laâbi is more than Morocco's leading poet, but also a guiding cultural and political force.



Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles, or Breaths, a widely-inf luential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi's most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes (Collected Poems) in 2009, and the Académie française's Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish and English. Laâbi himself has translated into French the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mohammed Al-Maghout, Saâdi Youssef, Abdallah Zrika, Ghassan Kanafani, and Qassim Haddad.