MONDAY TRAVELS: MY MOTHER'S LANGUAGE by Abdellatif Laâbi

Happy Monday friends! Welcome to another edition of Monday Travels

So today we are in Morroco  and we will explore:

MY MOTHER'S LANGUAGE

Let's meet Abdellatif Laâbi

Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco. Laâbi founded with other poets the artistic journal Souffles, an important literary review in 1966. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergency of a poetic stand and revival. It was banned in 1972. Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for his political beliefs and writings and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was, in 1985, forced into exile in France.

Poem:

It's been twenty years since I last saw my mother
She starved herself to death
They say that each morning
she would pull her headscarf off
and strike the floor seven times
cursing the heavens and the Tyrant
I was in the cave
where convicts read in the dark
and painted the bestiary of the future on the walls
It's been twenty years since I last saw my mother
She left me a china coffee set
and though the cups have broken one by one
they were so ugly I didn't regret their loss
even though coffee's the only drink I like
These days, when I'm alone
I start to sound like my mother
or rather, it's as if she were using my mouth
to voice her profanities, curses and gibberish
the invisible litany of her nicknames
all the endangered species of her sayings
It's been twenty years since I last saw my mother
but I am the last man
who still speaks her language 

Thoughts:

 This poem. Oh man!

I mean, so much pain in these words, the injustice. I can literally feel the mother's pain and I think the mother sort of represents all the mothers in the world whose children were taken, beaten and imprisoned for what, you ask? Simply saying that something that the government did was not right or correct.

It's a powerful poem. It's a beautiful, real and heartbreaking poem!


 
See you Next Monday!