This is an outlier on the list. No matter how much I might tell myself my tastes are wide-ranging and catholic, I am drawn to stylists—and Mohamed Choukri is not that. Sometimes his sentences, at least as they’re rendered in English, read like bullet points, as though style were the enemy. ‘Flower Crazy’ deploys multiple perspectives to contrast Tangier’s public persona with Choukri’s home territory—the city’s impoverished underbelly.
To this day it is possible for a foreigner to go for a short walk in Tangier and encounter people for whom she has no reliable points of reference—individuals whose weatherings and eccentricities have been sculpted in circumstances beyond her ken. Choukri’s fictions are monuments to these people. He depicted them without a trace of judgement or superiority—because he was one of them. Unusually for a writer, he learned to read at the age of twenty, while in prison, following a childhood and youth I suspect most of us would rather not think about, let alone experience. I could have chosen any story by him—his value (and appeal) as a writer transcends the individual works.
First published in Arabic in 1979. Choukri’s complete short stories are now collected in Tales of Tangier, Yale University Press, 2023
A Personal Anthology 