Negative Body followed by History of a Good Lord

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (trans. Jake Syersak & Zachary Anderson)

Published in 1968, Moroccan-born writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s second full-length collection—Negative Body followed by History of a Good Lord—comprises a diptych of two equally genre-defying works. From the dream-like vignettes of Negative Body to the vertiginous blend of theater, poetry, and fiction that make up History of a Good Lord, the work stands as a testament to his bold credo that “there are no poems or novels anymore—there is writing.” Together, they form a single narrative tour de force, continuing Khaïr-Eddine’s trademark onslaught against the intertwined authoritarian forces of God, the king, and the father.

“Jake Syersak brings his translator’s bravura to bear on Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s guerrilla warfare with and against the French language. In a feat of lexical precision and alliterative cadences, a voice ‘composed in the likeness of thunder’ strives to ‘unlearn the viaticums of violence’. In rebellious screams and hallucinatory dreams, it conjures the landscapes of an Amazigh childhood to exorcise history’s assaults – colonial trauma, the tyranny of the state, the pangs of exile –, for ‘only the earth / remembers / and howls / what terror is brooding / beneath’ and ‘never once / did our ancestors offer asylum to kings.’”—Omar Berrada

"Who was Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine? A poet, a Berber, a technician of 'guerilla linguistics.' An intercessor to the gods of revolution, Khaïr-Eddine sang the psychoses of his country in its post-colonial and autocratic crises. I know this because of Jake Syersak, who here translates some early and vicious poems from this giant of Moroccan literature." —Aditi Machado