Mohammed Bennis

Mohammed Bennis Poems

In love, you yield and you're miserable.
In love, you die many times and you're pleased.
...

A white Bird
A breath condenses
...

This ink transports me to the heights of my breath
transports me there in triumph
...

4.

Tent erected
and the night around Her
...

I'm the Andalusian living between the pleasures of lovers' renion
And the rattles of separation.
...

6.

This face works to send its rites to sleep
it smoothes out the laughter
...

Don't ask him anything
about the pathways
...

Majestic disquiet
then jets of shadow
...

9.

This death will remain unknown
to the nomad cloud
...

Shattered places
and the breeze
...

11.

With these doubts
that illuminates us
...

12.

Out of a stain comes writing
stain left by the wing of death
...

13.

That palm tree
is a psalmody
...

14.

Now if I had
what I do not have
...

Time urges me to enter
your house at the dawn
...

With your eyes, man, sweep her eyes away
And enjoy them in isolation
...

Again I set my hand down,
Set my eyelids down, upon you
...

Clouds
passing
...

19.

Ringing bells reverberate in my bosom
Many a sun strayed like me
...

No road leads me to Jerusalem
No road save words of dust.
...

Mohammed Bennis Biography

Mohammed Bennis is a Moroccan poet and one of the most important poets of the Modern Arabic Poetry. He was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1948. He contributes energetically to the modern Arabic poetry and he enjoys since the 1970s, a particular status in the Arab culture. Muhsin J. al-Musawi writes about him: “The Moroccan poet Muhammad Bennis’ articulations tend to validate his poetics in the first place, to encapsulate the overlapping and contestation of genres in a dialectic that takes into account power politics whose tropes are special. As a discursive threshold between Arab East and the Moroccan West, tradition and modernity, and also a site of contestation and configuration, Muhammad Bennis Self-justifications may reveal another poetic predilection, too. Bennis first attended Koranic School, and he attended the public primary school in 1958, at the age of ten. From an early age, he is interested in literature, particularly lyric poetry. He pursued his university studies in literature at the Faculty of Letters and Human sciences-Dhar Mehraz, Fez, where he obtained, in 1972, the Bachelor of Art degree in Arabic Literature. At the Faculty of Letters and Human sciences of Rabat, Mohammed V-Agdal University, Bennis supported, in 1978, his thesis of PhD supervised by Abdelkébir Khatibi on the “Phenomenon of Contemporary poetry in Morocco”. And, at the same Faculty, he defended, in 1988, a doctoral thesis, supervised by Jamel-Eddine Bencheikh, on “Modern Arabic poetry, structures and mutations”. Bennis published his first poems in 1968 in Al Alam Newspaper in Rabat. In 1969, he sent his poems to the poet Adonis who then published them in n°9 the review Mawakif. Ma Qabla al Kalam; (Before Words), Bennis’ first collection of poems was published in 1969. He settled in 1972, in Mohammedia, where he begun teaching Arabic language. Since 1980, he has been professor of Modern Arabic Poetry at the Faculty of Letters and Human sciences of Rabat, Mohammed V-Agdal University. Author of around thirty titles (poetry, prose, essay, and translation, among them, thirteen poetry collections, the poetic works (2 volumes), studies on Moroccan poetry and Modern Arabic poetry), Bennis published in numerous newspapers and reviews all over the Arab World. Some of his poems and texts have been translated and published in collective works, reviews and newspapers in Europe, the United States and in Japan. From 1995, poetry collections and books of him have been translated and published into French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and Macedonian. He writes on painting. Some of his works are realized, by painters, in the form of books and folio volumes, in Morocco, Europe, the United States and in Japan. Kitab al-Hobb (The Book of Love), which was realized in 1994 with the Iraqi painter Dia Azzawi, is the testimony of a common adventure. Turned to the dialogue and the opening, Mohammed Bennis participated in many international meeting on poetry and culture. He had, also, translated works from French language, among which included The Wound of the Proper Name, Abdelkébir Khatibi, The Rumor of the air, collected poetry works of Bernard Noël, Tomb of Ibn Arabi, followed by 99 Stations of Yale, poetry collections and The Malady of Islam, three of Abdelwahab Meddeb, A Throw of the Dice poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, published in a bilingual edition in common with Isabella Checcaglini and Bernard Noël at Ypsilon Éditeur in Paris, in 2007, and Archangélique of Georges Bataille in 2010. He interested in literature, and above all poetry, in his first years at college. His university study was in the Faculty of arts at Fes. Turning toward dialogue, he translates from French language texts into Arabic, and participated in Arabic and International poetry festivals. In addition to his literary work, Bennis has been active on a politico-cultural level. In 1974 he founded the magazine “Al Thaqâfa Al Jadida” (The new Culture), which played an active role in the cultural life of Morocco until it was closed dawn by the Moroccan government in 1984 after unrest in Casablanca. In 1985 together with university professors and writers, he established the publishing house “Dar Toubkal”. He was also the driving force behind the funding of The House of Poetry in Morocco in 1996 and became its president from 1996 to 2003. He addressed in 1999 a call to UNESCO for an International day of poetry. The UNESCO declared Mars 21 as International day of Poetry. Since 1969 he published about 30 collections of verse and essays in Arabic. Many poems of him was translated and published in French, Spanish, English, Deutsche, Italian, Swedish, Catalonian, Portuguese, Japanese, Slovenian and Macedonian. Several of his collections of poems have already been translated into French, Spanish and Italian and Turkey. He acted as editor of the Attakafa El Jadids periodical He served on the judging panel for the 2008 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Bennis has also performed with the Sufi group the Hmadcha Ensemble. Mohammed Bennis is a poet of interrogation and adventure. He has been concerned, from the start, about the interrogation on Moroccan poetry and Arab culture in contemporary Morocco. Among his famous essay books is one titled Hadathat al-Sou’al (Modernity of interrogation) (1985) . This interrogation allowed him to open the way towards the modernity and the freedom and became the mark of its poetics and cultural route. In time, it has taken a radical dimension, to embrace the poetry, the culture, the modernity and the freedom. Bennis's relationship to French culture is ambivalent. While he rejects the ideology of francophone policy (which for him represents a form of colonizing globalization), he does hold the French language in a very high regard: “As a modern Arab poet, I am committed to French culture and its modernity. The French language was the home of a poetic revolution and it gave my Arabic language a poetic strength, more valuable than any of other modern languages.” Thus he is attached to the modernization of the language, to the freedom of expression based on the fundamental values of modernity. He has followed since youth the tracks of “the poets which made of the human life, in its secrets as in its fears and its illuminations, their space of writing.” His poetry, which grounds itself, at once, on the measure and the trance, is the creative union of two cultures: the ancestral Arabic culture, between the Middle East, Andalusia, Morocco, and the international culture. Mohammed Bennis sees awarding the Morocco Book award in 1993 for his collection Gift of the Void, the French translation (Le Don du vide) of which by Bernard Noël in association with the author is appeared in 1999 to L’Escampette Publishing house, in Bordeaux, and the Italian translation by Fawzi Al Delmi is appeared in 2000, under title He Dono Del Vuoto, in Edzioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, in Genoa, and Luis Miguel Cañada's Spanish translation in 2006, under title El Dono Del Vacio, with Antonio Gamoneda's frontispiece, in Ediciones del directs del mediterraneo in Madrid. For the same collection, in its Italian translation, the Primio Calopezzati of the Mediterranean literature was awarded to him in 2006. The French Le prix Grand Atlas of translation (Rabat) was awarded to him in 2000 for its poetry collection Between two Funerals translates into French by Mostafa Nissabouri and published in L’Escampette Publishing house, in Bordeaux in 2003. He also received el Primeo Feronia International for the literature (Italy) in 2007, Al Owais Awards (Dubai) for its whole poetic work was awarded in 2008, the Maghreb Culture Prize (Tunisia) in 2010, and Premio Letterario Internazionale Ceppo Pistoia (the international literary prize Ceppo de Pistoia) in 2011 for its book Il Meditteraneo e la parola, published in 2009 in a translation of Francesca Corrao and Maria Donzelli, at Donzelli Editore in Rome. Bennis was awarded the Prix Max Jacob at a ceremony in Paris 2014)

The Best Poem Of Mohammed Bennis

Love Is Supreme Ruler

In love, you yield and you're miserable.
In love, you die many times and you're pleased.
In love, you obey.
In love, the forbidden is abolished
Likewise, the despicable
The smutty, the interdicted.

There are no alliances in love,
No choices.
Love is a lethal command.
So give way to the time of its conquest
And take a path
Prepared by your loss.
On the basis of experience, I tell you that in
my youth I loved a blond slave girl of mine,
and since then I have never deemed any
black-haired woman beautiful, and my father
was much the same.

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