Abdellatif Laâbi’s Casablanca Spleen

Abstract

In January 1972, the thirty-year old Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi was arrested by his country’s security services and brutally tortured. Student demonstrations in his support ensued, which eventually forced the authorities to release him, only to re-arrest him a month later, when he was sent to Casablanca’s Moulay Cherif Detention Centre. Originally detained without being charged, Laâbi took part in a series of hunger strikes alongside other prisoners before finally being granted a trial in August 1973, at which point he was condemned to an eight and half year sentence at the infamous Kénitra penitentiary. His crime? Distributing political pamphlets. During his stay in Kénitra as prisoner number 18611, Laâbi would produce a body of work that would later be recognized as some of the twentieth century’s finest political poetry, alongside that of Pablo Neruda and Nâzım Hikmet.