2 books by Ahmed Bouanani
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Overview: The filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011) was born in Casablanca. When Bouanani was sixteen, during the final days of the colonial era, his father, a police officer, was assassinated—a tragedy that the artist returned to in his work for the rest of his life. Bouanani studied film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris for three years before returning to Morocco and going on to direct several classics of North African cinema. Most of his movies had their genesis in poems, and he published three collections during his lifetime, as well as the novel The Hospital, also appearing in English for the first time with New Directions. Never keen to publish, Bouanani left behind a trove of additional manuscripts.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
The Shutters by Ahmed Bouanani, Emma Ramadan (Translator)
In this collection of prose, prose poems, and verse, The Shutters reconstructs vivid scenes of Morocco and its history, weaving and winding through antiquity, myth, and a fictional present; through cemeteries, battlefields, and sordid streets; through heaven and hell, the sky and the earth, and the shutters of his ancestor’s home. Bouanani’s poetry contains a vast inventory of references to the Second World War, the Rif War, the Spanish and French protectorates, dead soldiers, prisoners, and poets screaming in their tombs with mouths full of dirt—all of it bearing the brutal imprint of colonization, written in an imposed language with a “strange alphabet.” But what is perhaps most palpable in his writing is the violence inflicted on Morocco by its own government during the time period now referred to as les années de plomb—the years of lead. Fighting against the destruction of Moroccan cultural memory, Bouanani claws back through this forgotten landscape, plunging into the void to bring forth a heritage that was suppressed but not annihilated. In his words, “These memories retrace the seasons of a country that was quickly forgetful of its past, indifferent to its present, constantly turning its back on its future.”
Bouanani was hesitant to publish much of his work during his lifetime, leaving behind chests full of hundreds of unpublished manuscripts when he died. All nearly lost in a devastating apartment fire, Bouanani’s works are now finally appearing for the first time in English.
The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani, Anna Della Subin (Introduction), Lara Vergnaud (Translator)
A tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic
“When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears.
Like Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann’s The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.
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