Unwanted literature : a case of the Moroccan writer Muḥammad Šukrī

The history of books that were rejected, condemned, banned or censored in various parts of the world for political, social, religious or sexual reasons is very long. Whereas, however, people in the West have learned to value controversial literature despite its contentious or provocative content, the societies in the Middle East still have problems with accepting certain sorts of literary works. There are many publications in the Arab World that sum up to a category I call unwanted literature because the conservative society in which they were produced doesn’t want to accept them as their own heritage. One of the most recent and striking examples of such divergence of opinion between the Western and Eastern readers are the works of the Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri and especially his autobiography al-Ḫubz al-Ḥāfī published in 1973 in English translation by Paul Bowles as “For Bread Alone” long before the Arabic version could appear.