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Ebook192 pages3 hours
For Bread Alone
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
Driven by famine from their home in the Rif, Mohamed's family walks to Tangier in search of a better life. But things are no better there. Eight of Mohamed's siblings die of malnutrition and neglect, and one is killed by his father in a fit of rage. On moving to another province Mohamed learns how to charm and steal, and discovers the joys of drugs, sex and alcohol. Proud, insolent and afraid of no one, he returns to Tangier, where he is caught up in the violence of the 1952 independence riots. It is here, during a short spell in a filthy Moroccan jail, that a fellow inmate kindles Mohamed's life-altering love of literature. 'A true document of human desperation, shattering in its impact.' Tennessee Williams 'Its unrelenting realism has produced a masterpiece ... In Choukri's African Islamic coastal cities the nightmares are of fathers killing children and the agony of hunger. Choukri's memories take him from famine in the Rif to Tangier and Oran, a world of crime, paid-for sex and of living poor ... It is an urban pain where every day "the alleys swallow me up and spew me out." A book to read, cherish and remember - and to show us again why we need books as well as bread.' Morning Star '(An) extraordinarily vivid, uncensored immediacy ... Using only undemonstrative prose, and asking for no special sympathy, Choukri conveys the experience of struggling to survive in a harsh world of dusty streets and unforgiving sunlight.' Guardian 'Five stars ... Achingly elegant ... Choukri's irrepressible, ultimately indomitable spirit is most touching and human.' Independent 'Richly descriptive and engaging ... an honest and vivid account. ... Definitely an enjoyable and worthwhile read.' Socialist Review 'A cult classic ... Choukri's text has become a staple on the syllabi of modern Arabic, comparative literature, and post-colonial studies programs.' Daily Star 'The most poetic exploration of that world of vice, coffee, conversation and intrigue ... One of the most widely read modernist novels in the Arab world.' Outsideleft.com
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Reviews for For Bread Alone
Rating: 3.7954545454545454 out of 5 stars
4/5
66 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri was both an uncomfortable and depressing read. This autobiographical story of the author tells of his childhood in Morocco where he faced near starvation, abuse and neglect. Fleeing drought and starvation his family leave the Rif to join the migration into the city of Tangiers and then to Tetuan. Most of his siblings die from lack of nutrition and neglect with one brother being beaten to death by his father, but Mohamed survives the beatings, the lack of food and the danger of living on the streets. He provides for himself by begging, prostitution and theft. Only a chance meeting in a prison inspired him to learn to read and write and seek out a different way of life. He went on to become an author and a university lecturer.The book concentrates on the sordid side of his life, with the main focus on himself. I would have liked a little more background to fill in the picture. The language is sparse and simple giving the book an intense authenticity by making it appear to be written by a twelve year old. Unfortunately, this very simple writing style didn’t really work for me as I would have liked both the setting and the characters expanded but overall, For Bread Alone was a memorable account of how one boy was able to overcome extreme difficulties and give himself a better life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A eye opening gritty account of life in poverty in colonial Morocco
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In all honesty, I don’t know how to react to this book or to the life story it tells. The very first page seats us in the story; there is death, starvation, and desperation. Young Mohamed Choukri is crying for bread, his brother is sick, his father is beating him. His mother, like so many women in the books we’ve read is helpless, she admonishes Mohamed to be quiet like his brother, his sick brother. Still, nothing prepared me for Mohamed’s search through the garbage dumps for food and his frank exchange with another boy “covered in ringworm…scarred with sores” about how “Nazarene garbage is the best” (11).
Page 11 is the third page of the story. On page 12 the unthinkable—at least to my eyes—happens: Mohamed’s violent father murders his sick brother. The way it is related seems callous, cold, and it seems very little different from Mohamed’s attempts to kill (an already dead) hen on the previous page. It’s impossible to miss the message about what one does under conditions of abject poverty. We don’t know why his father kills his brother, but we can see that poverty was the trigger.
Mohamed’s life revolves around satisfying his most basic of needs. As a child that need is food, then shelter, then, as he ages, sex and the escape his vices of alcohol and kif bring him. It would be simple to say that Mohamed has no limitations, no moral compass, that there is nothing he will not do, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. He is bound, if not by his own morals or preferences, by the limitations society places on him. As a starving child he finds a dead hen then brings it home to his family. He “kills” it the way he’d seen others kill live hens and he attempts to do everything correctly to prepare this food for eating. His mother doesn’t allow him to eat it because it’s carrion and people don’t eat carrion. Not long after he picks rosemary for he and his mother to eat and when she finds out he’s picked it from a graveyard she takes it away because “you’re not supposed to eat anything that grows in a cemetery” (19). Mohamed would have eaten both the hen and the rosemary, because he was starving, but his mother would not because society told her it was wrong.
This book was scandalous because of the amount of sex contained in its pages. For me, what was scandalous was not the amount of sex but the reasons Mohamed engaged in sexual activity and the emotions (or lack thereof) he demonstrated while doing so. The sexual acts being all about Mohamed and treating the women as props can be partially excused by the first person point of view and by Mohamed as an unreliable narrator. I don’t think that fully excuses it, and the first person point of view actually enhances the disturbing nature of Mohamed’s violent sexual fantasies and acts.
Like many young boys, I’d imagine, Mohamed fantasizes about the women he encounters in his life. His stealing of Asiya’s clothes while she is swimming naked can be excused as the mischievousness (and relative lack of conscience) demonstrated by boys of that age. But his experiments with Fatima, where he “slap(s) her cheek to hear the sound it makes” (37) and his rape fantasies about Sallafa show a more disturbing side to his nature, one where sex is about power, not love. His learning he can make money by allowing men to fellate him only contributes to this idea by showing him that sex is something one does in exchange for something else, something that benefits one person, not both.
From the title it’s clear that bread—and what one might do for bread (food, survival)—is very important to this story. As a young, starving boy, Mohamed dives into the water to get a piece of bread thrown there by a fisherman. He finds himself surrounded by “lumps of shit” (93) and the bread is “sticky with oil from the boats” (93). This is a traumatic experience for him, and at the end of it when he drags himself back to shore, the ideas of “bread and shit” connected in his mind, the fisherman yells after him to come back, that it was only a joke. Perhaps to the fisherman it was, but what kind of joke is that to play on a starving child, to see how far he will go, how low he will sink? That isn’t the first time someone uses food to punish and harm Mohamed. Earlier, angry because Mohamed wouldn’t eat with the family, his father forces him to eat everything the family had for their meal, resulting in his needing his stomach pumped. Food, to him, becomes more than something needed for survival. It’s something controlled by others, something that can be taken away out of anger or on a whim.
Seeing his fellow inmate crumble his bread into the latrine and having Zailachi say “it’s his business” was a pivotal moment for Mohamed, coming as it does near the moments where he begins to learn letters and memorizes lines of poetry. “I tell you I’m free” (181) the bread-crumbler yells when confronted by others. Bread (food, life) can be under your own control, if you only have the knowledge to make it so.