Madman of the Rose

When one’s life is a kind of practice of tragedy, and one is obligated to practice this as long as one is alive, is what Mohamed Choukri’s short story collection (Majnoun of the Rose) says, and he does so with characters that acquire a representative dimension of a broad popular law, and each character has his own dream and seeks to achieve it, and they are characters whose position ranges from indifference and pretense to initiative and action at the end of each story. The threads from which the novelist weaves his stories end up drawing a secret geography of the city and its subsoil in reference to (the Maghreb space), these threads, Choukri spins from the climate of the Hashemites or from the world of the homeless. The story begins with spontaneity that makes the recipient believe that he is narrating an incident from “different incidents” that he saw in the countryside or read in the newspaper and reformulated. But this illusion is quickly dispelled by the brightness of surprising words and intense phrases laden with connotations and meanings, transporting the reader to a fictional world framed and unified by those threads scattered in the various stories that remain tied to their “reality,” crowded with their objects, as is the case in the story (The Coffin), whose hero is an artist who is granted a wish by a man who loves coffins to draw him in a painting with the coffin. He takes the initiative to buy a coffin and puts it in his house, and in turn, in the middle of every night, “practices his psychological sleep. He enters the coffin wearing a shirt and trousers, barefoot, then closes its lid on him. The coffin has holes in its sides and in its lid. A living dead, and you are not living and dead. This is what he says when he gets up from his bed and enters his studio to work…” In this sense, Mohamed Choukri gives an expressive form to reality and a new composition to things, through braiding them (i.e. giving a dialectical character to what he captures scattered and the reality of things becomes a dreamed reality, an imagined reality, a possible reality and an impossible reality at the same time).