Yahia Marrakech (Long Live Marrakesh), Hans Werner Geerdts, Marrakesh: Les Infréquentables, 2005. pp93 Asia was the first stop, followed by Mesopotamia and North Africa, where Marrakesh has held on to Hans Werner Geerdts, an 85-year-old German writer who has devoted his life and work to the search for knowledge. The author of a reference work in the study of script ( Inanna, 1992), Geerdts perceives the world around him in terms of lines, forms and letters, shaped by the bodies of people writing their own visual stories. These he attempts to capture through his writings and his art. In Yahia Marrakech, the artist's line- and-ink illustrations are intertwined with the tales he tells in words. The two, if not always factually connected, are at least logical extensions of each other: indeed, this collection of tales conjures up a world that is as complex as that of Dickens, but one rendered in a minimalist Zen style through a perspective adopted by the author from his sojourn in Japan. Geerdts now spends his octogenarian years in Morocco's famous Jamaa Al-Fna square in Marrakesh, imbibing the sights and sounds of lives in the process of being lived. These lives, existing in public space, Geerdts translates into signs in his depictions of crowds of people that are never the same from one instant to the next: a mass of flesh and bone, of nerves and emotions, swirling in a continuous regeneration of human energy. The illustrations in the book, the author's most important to date, should perhaps be viewed from a slight distance, or even from the detached vantage point of a Buddha, as some have gone so far as to describe the book's German writer. Unfortunately, to the keen reader, the mistakes in the present edition, translated from German into French, may present a challenge, preventing the kind of complete immersion required for full enjoyment. However, despite such occasional rocks strewn in the stream of one's concentration, the general flow retains its force, perhaps on condition that one imagine oneself among the crowds of Jamaa Al-Fna. No single tale, embodied in a character in this collection, lasts longer than a glance, one's gaze continuously shifting from one part of the whole to the next. The narrator's point of view is that of a spectator. Crouched under a striped umbrella, his eyes roam over the spectacle taking place in a cultural space that UNESCO has designated as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity . This international recognition, and the celebration of Jamaa Al-Fna that it entails -- the matter of Geerdts' fascination -- will help protect the heaving mass of story-tellers, nut and date vendors, snake charmers, cross-dressers, fortune-tellers, astrologers, herbalists, belly-dancers, Gnaoua musicians, henna artists and human pyramids that burst into life in the square with the setting of the sun. Paul Bowles, American author of The Sheltering Sky, called it "probably the most fascinating open square in the world", seeing in it a continuation of over 10 centuries of jugglers and fire eaters, of folklore, customs, rituals and traditional medicine, and, specifically, of the story-tellers who have retained the oral traditions of the region and are perhaps still more central to its culture than is the written word. The lives Geerdts recounts in Yahia Marrakech, in his fragmentary, crowd-observing manner, feature djinns and human cunning as much as complicity and honour, a blanket of superstition underlying both. Though they document reality, his narratives have the simplicity of fairy tales, skinning form off from content in order better to scrutinise the necessities of life. The translation successfully captures Geerdts' language, which is laden with synonyms, repetitive expressions and thematic variations. Indeed, this recurrence of words and meanings parallels the composition of the author's visual art, motifs in both cases being repeated and generating a dynamic of their own -- towards a state of Zen perhaps, a loss of self to a mystical sense of the whole. With Geerdts' initiation to the practice of Zen came the sister discovery of calligraphy and Sumi painting, which for him is an art of tactile expression, or depiction of the experienced moment in its immediate temporal and spatial reality. Settled in Marrakesh, Geerdts' Sumi paintings capture the crowds around him, the author putting his reed and China ink to any surface that can retain the lines, sometimes even to wheat sacks and other found materials. As is often the case in mystical expression, ordinary perceptions of time are lost, or, rather, time's passing no longer bears a threatening charge. Geerdts (or Gee, as he sometimes refers to himself) leaps off the train of the first world to cross his legs in the open square, his fascination with the crowds of Jamaa Al-Fna resulting in thousands of ink paintings creating the art of "Foulisme", from the French foule, or crowd. Another crowd that comes to mind through reading the narratives in Yahia Marrakech is that of the birds in Fariduddin Attar's Mantiq Al-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds) -- the 13th century Persian Sufi poet's celebrated verse account of the search for divine wisdom. Geerdts' narratives have something of this search, and in the crowds he finds the human body, snap shot in motions of dance or gesticulation, these bodies becoming letters of the alphabet and merging signifier and signified in a quasi-mystical manner. The present edition of Yahia Marrakech, published in Morocco by Les Infréquentables, is generous with the writer's "Foulist" illustrations, which accentuate the author's poignant unification of words and lines and project circle within circle of human tales in their dual expressiveness. Arab voices and the pen I had never heard of Editions Les Infréquentables before I was introduced, in quite an impromptu moment at the office, to Abdel-Ghaffar Souiriji, editor, translator and co-founder of the young Moroccan publishing house. I had never heard of Genet having been published in Arabic either. In retrospect, this very fact seems to encapsulate what Les Infréquentables is all about. Souiriji brought to us, in person, awareness, knowledge and familiarity with texts, the existence of which had eluded us thus far. This is precisely the role Les Infréquentables has designated for itself upon its foundation in 2002: to make accessible texts which are not. My guest shifted occasionally, clearly not having been the focus of a journalist too many times -- or was it modesty? Souiriji is an extremely translucent man; he speaks in sincerity, engaging in any number of side discussions with really quite candid fascination, unperturbed by the dialogue's turns leading farther and farther away from the topic of the publishing house. After all, it's all about people -- whether he presents them to readers as hitherto inaccessible authors, or shares a cup of Turkish coffee with them over the subject of feluccas, mid-interview. At the French Institute in Marrakech, only two months ago, writer Juan Goyttisolo was able to introduce his book Paysage de guerre sur fond de Tchétchénie (Warscape on a Chechen Background) to the Moroccan public through readings of passages in Arabic and French, thanks to Souiriji's co-translation of the Spanish original, published by Les Infréquentables. In his hands are a number of slim volumes he gifts to me: Jerôme Laurent Robert Lee's 1955 play Inherit the Wind translated into Arabic, Hans Werner Geerdts' Yahia Marrakech and Journal d'un Flâneur translated from German to French and, last but certainly not least, Jean Genet's Le Funambule followed by L'Enfant Criminel translated and published into Arabic -- for the first time in history. The homosexual leanings of Genet's works had rendered them inaccessible -- infréquentables -- to the Arab public to date. But the times, they are a-changing, and such unforgivable gaps in the circulation of human thought are what this translator and his publishing house seek to bridge. Souiriji is always on the move. He travels back and forth between Arab countries in search of literary talent, of new pens that have daring and honest things to say. "Egyptian women have interesting voices -- they are far more outspoken than their Arab counterparts, and yet they manage to retain a femininity in their literary expressiveness that is equally unrivalled. They truly are unique in the Arab world," Souiriji confirmed on his last visit to Cairo, punctuated by round-the-clock meetings with writers, translators, and friends of friends. He may just get as lucky as in December of 2003, when he returned from a visit to Iraq with the work of seven authors to be published by Les Infréquentables. Most importantly perhaps, Souiriji seeks to make accessible Francophone Moroccan writers to his countrymen. His sense of brotherhood is instantly apparent, and his patriotism almost like a primal instinct: that a Moroccan writer should produce texts of merit and be unreadable to more Moroccan readers than the average person might expect, is almost like a national insult as far as he is concerned. And so the last text he offers me is one that holds special pride of place: Mohamed Kheireddine's originally French On ne met pas en cage un oiseau pareil. Translated to Arabic by Souiriji and printed by Les Infréquentables as Al-Hudhud Al-Taliq (The Liberated Hoopoe), it is the writer's last journal, dated August 1995, four months prior to his death. Two manuscripts were found and published in one volume, becoming Kheireddine's only posthumous work, as decisively stated by his son Alexandre in the preface. From Morocco and to Morocco thus returns an author of the land. To honour literature, to honour Morocco, and to honour human fusion -- that's what Les Infréquentables is all about. By Injy El-Kashef
