Mohamed Mrabet

Biography

Mohamed Mrabet did not write his first book: he told it. Paul Bowles switched on the tape recorder, Mrabet spoke in Moghrebi Arabic, Bowles translated into English, and in 1967 “Love with a Few Hairs” came out in New York. Mrabet himself neither reads nor writes; out of that telling came fourteen books.

He was born on 8 March 1936 in Tangier, then an International Zone, into a family of the Ait Ouriaghel tribe of the Rif; his real name is Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajam. At four his father put him into a Koranic school, in 1943 into a state school. From 1946 to 1950 he carried clubs at the Royal Tangier Golf Club, then fished. In 1956, at the Café Central in the Petit Socco, he met an American couple, Russ and Anne-Marie Reeves; they leased the Hotel Muneria, Mrabet worked for them as a barman for three years, and in 1959 he went with them to New York for several months. He later reworked this story in his autobiography “Look and Move On” (1976).

Back in Tangier in 1960, he returned to fishing, began to draw (his earliest known drawing is dated 1959) and became friends with Jane and Paul Bowles. Bowles was struck by the way he told stories, and from the sixties until 1992 taped and translated them: “M’Hashish” (1969), “The Lemon” (1969), “The Boy Who Set the Fire” (1974), “Hadidan Aharam” (1975), “Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins” (1976), “The Big Mirror” (1977), “The Beach Café” and “The Voice” (1980), “The Chest” (1983), “Marriage with Papers” (1986) and “Chocolate Creams and Dollars” (1992), which Philip Taaffe illustrated. The books have been translated into many languages, French and German among them; the “Collected Stories” came out in 2004 in Fez, in French “Le poisson conteur” appeared in 2006 with Eric Valentin, and “Mémoires fantastiques” in 2011. In the West his name is usually linked with Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams, and it seems to me that this is unfair to the stories themselves.

His drawings, dense, filling the whole sheet, in felt-tip and ink, are compared with Miró and with the work of his contemporary Jilali Gharbaoui; they were shown in 1970 in New York and at the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, in 1988 in Lyon, in 1989 at the Cavin-Morris gallery in New York, in 1991 in Brussels, then in Tangier, Ifrane, Asilah, Douai, Charleston, Tarifa, at the Instituto Cervantes in Tangier (2003) and at the Hotel El Minzah (2007). He is counted among a small group of Moroccan masters who emerged immediately after the departure of the colonial authorities.

He still draws and exhibits from time to time, most often in Spain and in Tangier, where he lives.