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excerpt from UNDERNEATH THE FORGOTTEN POMEGRANATE TREES

I offer the heavens a crown woven from scolopendra!
I offer the heavens my yellow liver and my burnt-out nights!
And to you, I offer my head on a platter.

It was her heart that beat here once, amid this scree of stone,
amid the nopals and euphorbia, their yellowish milk...,
amid the thistles and blazing wildfires of summer
consuming nothing but rock, quartz, and soil, dismayed
by the lengths that hate will go to.

The summer used to make her hair shimmer... Her feet, painted
with henna, put the flowers and the bees both to shame. The cicadas would interrupt their song, simply to grant her safe passage.

Death, braying around me in every direction, shouting out the
names gone to ruin before me, under the pomegranate trees,
stone after stone after stone, next to the riverbed, bereft of
prayer, as dawn exhumes my body, and then disintegrates it.

I shed my shriveled skin in front of this precarious window—
upright, vibrant, an upright serpent, wrapping itself around
her breast, the end of which has brought down the heavens,
ample flesh bathing in the purest, most furious lucidity of it all.

excerpt from the introduction

A fine connoisseur of Rimbaud, Khaïr-Eddine appropriates his “Alchemy of the Word” (“At first it was an experiment. I wrote the silences, I wrote the night, I recorded the inexpressible. I fixed frenzies in their flight.”) to translate his world into its own language. The poet is aware of his expanding the visionary poetics originally put into motion by Rimbaud and the Surrealists, as he once confided to the Mauritian poet Édouard Maunick: “To begin with, had we not the genius of the language and, in spite of all its sentimentality, its combined power of evocation, we could not have yielded anything outside this linguistic force and this unprecedented rhythm, both of which assure us that not one of our texts carries any residues of déjà vu.”

What is essential here is not the seeking out of originality at any cost but the necessity of translating a new language into a reality grasped in fragments and fulgurations, to render the movements of life visible, to make felt all those pulsations and trances capable of overwhelming one’s visionary senses.

In his own words: “To restore life, which is action, you must know how to unearth the right words, to create the adequate formulas and forms, as well as new forces. You must reinvent a universe, starting from diffuse, almost non-existent materials.”

-written by Habib Tengour, translated from the French by Jake Syersak

Praise for Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine

for First Breaths (OOMPH! Press, 2019)

I'm grateful to Jake Syersak for continuing to bring Moroccan poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's work into English. These poems are written with the greatest intensity and urgency. They are angry and political, but they are also deliriously intoxicated with language and its possibilities.

—Johannes Göransson, author of Transgressive Circulation: Essays On Translation

Among the most “intrepid horses” of avant-garde North Africa, midcentury poet Khaïr-Eddine was a vicious, visceral critic of colonialism whose “entranced transmutations” acted as a countervailing cultural force for self-definition and determination. In these early poems written from exile, fluent with delirium, Khaïr-Eddine collapses firmament and abyss, glottal-stopping a psychosomatic j’accuse at once terrifying and glamorous: “pack of jackals” and “blacking out,” “voodoo magic,” “violet ink,” epidemics of “brutal shock” and alchemical ache. In Jake Syersak’s versions—deftly cauterized, now bleeding out—these spasms evoke a triggerhappy seer packing “the pistol-like word,” itching “to take up my work once more.”

—Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun : f/11

Who was Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine? A poet, a Berber, a technician of “guerilla linguistics.” An intercessor to the gods of revolution, Khaïr-Eddine sang the psychoses of his country in its post-colonial and autocratic crises. I know this because of Jake Syersak, who here translates some early and vicious poems from this giant of Moroccan literature. The language of this translator is, like that of the poet, made of antennae: it receives, and gives receipt of, the commotions and collusions of nature, “the secret still-birth(s)” and “geological fears,” the sonic eruptions of peoples in strife and corpses in decay. I am ever grateful for this ongoing work of translation.

—Aditi Machado, author of Some Beheadings and Prosopopoeia

Jake Syersak has rendered the fugitive brilliance of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine by expanding his verbal inclement into English. This being an inclement that positively infects our collective auditory range, verbally scorching the isolate capillaries of monsters who seem empowered by malevolence. Not unlike Césaire, Khaïr-Eddine savages this malevolence by opening to us a kind of neurological revelation. In this translation, the work of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine rises up as a creature from the unexpected torching rational containment via his complex imaginal salivation, so that the Maghreb and by implication sub-saharan Africa gains by his incensement the nobility that magically honours resistance.

—Will Alexander, author of Across the Vapour Gulf

About the Author

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine was born in 1941 near Tafraout, Southern Morocco, of Amazigh heritage. One of the original co-founders of the revolutionary Maghrebi review Souffles-Anfas, alongside Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissaboury, he is today renowned for what he coined his “linguistic guerrilla warfare”: an incendiary, surrealist-inspired, and iconoclastic writing style. The author of numerous volumes of prose, poetry, and drama, his full-length works include Agadir (1967); Corps négatif, suivi de Histoire d’un Bon Dieu (1968); Soleil arachnide (1969); Moi, L’aigre (1970); Le Déterreur (1973); Ce Maroc ! (1975), Une odeur de mantèque (1976), and Résurrection des fleurs sauvages (1981, 1994), among others. He lived in self-exile in France beginning in 1965, returning to Morocco only in 1979. Khaïr-Eddine died in Rabat on November 18, 1995—Independence Day in Morocco.

About the Translator

Jake Syersak is a poet, translator, and editor. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. He is author of the poetry collections Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press, 2022) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Books, 2018). He is the co-translator, with Pierre Joris, of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s hybrid novel Agadir (Diálogos Press, 2020). Forthcoming translations include the Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022) and Proximal Morocco— (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).