NEW PRODUCTION 2008 - FOR BREAD ALONE - BILADI ROLLING THEATRE

Stage director: Jean-Baptiste Demarigny
With: Fatima Mhaireg
Music: Benjamin Breda
Show duration: 1 hour

The show does exist in three versions: french, arabic and spanish

Extract

"It was the time of the famine in the Rif. Of drought and war. One night I was so hungry that I did not know how to stop my tears. I was sucking my fingers. I threw up saliva. My mother told me to keep me calm: -- Shut up, we'll emigate to Tanger. There bread is in abundance. You will see, you won't anymore cry for bread. In Tanger people do have enough to eat. Look at your brother Abdelkader, he doesn't cry.
The eyes of Abdelkader: deep and distraught. Watching him in this absence, stopped me to cry. His serenity procured me patience but not for long.
My father, furious, kicked me screaming:
-- Stop it, son of a bitch, you're going to eat, you'll eat before your mother will.
He took me by my arm and threw me on the floor. He gave me a thrashing with rage. My trousers were wet.
We took exile on foot. On the side of the road there were carrion, birds and black dogs. Belly open, torn. The rot.
At night we used to pitch our tent anywhere, where fatigue was becoming unbearable, we heard the howling foxes, and we could see people who quickly buried the victims of hunger where they had fallen. My brother coughed throughout the trip.
-- Tell mam, is my brother going to die too?
-- No, he won't die. He is just sick.
-- But my uncle died.
-- No, your brother will not die.
In Tangier, I didn't find the promised bread mountains. Certainly, in this paradise there was hunger, but people do not die like in the Rif. "

For Bread alone, first chapter.

The naked bread (for Bread alone - le Pain nu)

Mohammed Choukri has learned to write at age 20. He is nevertheless important Moroccan writer of Arabic seaking literature.
What he talks about? His life just a bare life as bread is. The portion of life ranging from the death of his younger brother, killed by his father in a fit of fury, to the day he decided to go to school to learn to read and write. He was 20. And it is an entire country, an entire youth, still current, that appears. Mohammed Choukri writing as he lives. By a direct and enthusiastic way. Without ruling. By the way people live here in Morocco. His legacy, his sources: his people.
This nakedness of writing, this sensuality (in the same way of Genet whom he was a friend or Syrian poet Mohamed al-Maghut), have banned the book in Morocco until a very recent date.
This book is in some ways a novel learning modern in its fragmented form, as the memory itself, and in space: the rural exodus Morocco faces since the 30's. The family of the author had to leave his homeland Rif for the city, pushed by the famine. The result: Tangier, Tetouan, Oran ... The adventures of a young boy who had to provide himself for his needs, who discovered humiliation, poverty and gender. Gentleness and crualty of human beings. And allowed us to discover it. Once more without pathos, with a precious innocence.

''Born on a land cracked, dry and desolate, Mohamed Choukri sooner had experienced the violence of need, the demand of hate and the face of death. Very soon, Mohamed discovered also sexuality. A fear haunted him, that of being raped. For that he preferred to sleep in graveyards, where the living are afraid of the dead and the dead do not rise to threaten "the beautiful kid with pretty little ass". Mohamed Choukri spoke with simplicity of his first sexual experiences, his discovery of the sex of women. (...) He will learn a lot of things in the world of whores, in brothels, cafés, alleys, with thieves, pimps, smugglers, and so on. Such is the life without bread, without tenderness. A text naked. In truth, lived, in the simplicity of the first emotions. It is not a coincidence that the manuscript of this story has been denied by publishers in the arabic world. What Chukri tells is part of this sort of things that shouldn't be told, or at least that shouldn't be wrotten in the books. Prostitution exists. Everyone recognizes that. But talking about it, remains intolerable. It is worse to write about the misery that to live it! '' Tahar Ben Jelloun, preface to the French edition of Pain Nu, Paris 1979.

Mohamed Choukri

Mohamed Choukri was born in 1935 in Beni Chiker, a small village in the Berber Rif near Nador in Morocco.
Raised in a poor family, he fled at the age of 11 and became a street child from Tangier, where he lives in the slums of the city. At the age of 20, he decided to learn to read and write and become a teacher.

In 60 years, in the cosmopolitan Tangiers, he will meet Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams. He began to be published in 1966 (in Al-adab, monthly Beirut). His international success comes with the English translation, by Paul Bowles, Al-khoubz Al-Hafi (Le Pain nu, For Bread alone, Peter Owen editions) in 1973.
The book will be translated into french by Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1980, published in Arabic in 1982 and banned in Morocco from 1983 to 2000.
He died in 2003 at the military hospital in Rabat.

The Show

A novel

For Bread alone is a short novel, not a play. Written in simple and concrete language, it gives the impression of dealing with the matter itself. That is the challenge that we wanted to face: to give spectators a feeling similar to the one we had as readers.
To this goal we have sought to shrinking the text on stage. Instead of it, wherever it seemed possible, we preferred the weight of action or suggestive images.

Photographies Rozenn Quéré

The scene, place of perpetual metaphors.

We worked on the emptyness of stage, which gives to the only actor performance , all the incarnations and meanings.
So the actor's body became the matter of the whole performance.
Because this is what the text deals with: life, conceived as a story of the body needs. From a body caught in the network of social determinism that are poverty, morality, sexuality in the Protectorate of Morocco.
Therefore, the actress, alone on stage, interprets in turn not only all the characters, but also where the text requires, a tree, a flock, the famine.
So goes it also with the rare objects, metaphorised by the use to which they are put. From a floorcloth, we made a chicken, then Mohamed Choukri's little sister , and then again a floorcloth and a honey pie.

A moroccan show

Looking increasingly for a proper theatrical language, we have gone to tre roots of traditional spectacular forms of Morocco. Therefore, the show will sometimes turns into the way the Moroccan popular theatre itself: Halqa, where crowd forms a circle around the actor, as we still found some on the el Jamâa - Fna placa in Marrakech.
And last but not least, one of the axes of work has been picking up, in the Moroccan society, a further understanding of the described situations . To serve us as a matter of gestures and characters that the actress, who grew up in this country, carries with her.