ABSTRACT
Born in Tafraout, Morocco, in 1941 into a bourgeois family, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine received a French education in Casablanca. As a student, he began to read an array of poetry that included St. John Perse, the French surrealist poets, and Arab poets. For a short time, he was a civil servant for the government before going into temporary exile in France. Khaïr-Eddine belongs to the second generation of Maghreb writers after Moroccan independence. In 1964 he began the poetic manifesto Poésie Tout in Casablanca and later became one of the founders of Souffles in 1966. Souffles, a seminal journal, was a reaction to the disenchantment of Morocco’s decolonization. The euphoria of Morocco’s independence from France in 1956 soon gave way in the 1960s to the riots and strikes of students and unemployed workers. Souffles urged Moroccan artists and writers to collectively become active in the formation of a new national identity and to participate in a cultural revival that would fill the void left by colonization. Khaïr-Eddine’s work, subversive in both form and content, has been referred to as “guerrilla linguistics” (Gontard, 109). He constantly scrutinizes, rejects, and transgresses traditional values and boundaries in his efforts to revitalize literature.
