The Homeless Youth Who Wrote For Bread Alone

Mohamed Choukri was born in 1935 and came with his family from the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco to Tangier. Friends later described him as a refugee from the countryside whose childhood was spent in poverty on the streets of the city. Abdellatif Bin Yahya, who chairs the foundation that honours him, says he was homeless.

Another friend, Abdallah al-Wahhabi, first saw him in 1967 in the Socco in Tangier. Even then, he remembered, Choukri wore worn clothes and could not afford bread. Friends nicknamed him the White Nightingale.

He turned those experiences into writing. His autobiographical novel For Bread Alone follows his boyhood and, according to Bin Yahya, also records social conditions in 1940s Morocco. He wrote it in Arabic in 1972, and Paul Bowles translated it into English in 1973. Taher Ben Jelloun's French version followed in 1981, and the Arabic edition was published in 1982. Morocco and other Arab countries banned the book, and the Moroccan ban was lifted in 2000.

The novel made him famous. It has since been translated into 38 languages. Choukri died in 2003. In his last days he sat quietly at Café Raqqasa in Tangier reading literary magazines, and when friends asked about his health he told them he was good. The Mohamed Choukri Foundation holds commemorative events and awards a prize for marginalised literature, keeping his memory alive in the city where he once had no home.