Modern Amazigh Poetry: Selected Poems : Mohamed Ouagrar

By Mustapha Akhoullou

This book consists of a collection of poems originally composed by the outstanding Amazigh poet Mohamed Ouagrar and which I have translated to English from the Berber language. Ouagrar's poetry is essentially concerned with themes of love, identity crisis, Amazigh dasein, and meaning in the postmodern condition. Deeply engrossed in the aesthetics of traditional Amazigh poetry and music and wholeheartedly open to the new trends in world poetry, Ouagrar's poetry immerses its readers in a world of unceasing dialectic between the forces of the traditional and the ones of the modern; it is essentially an ongoing struggle between the ethos of the old and the demands of the new that his poetry tries to embody. As some critics purport that he is a wholesale modernist, a cautious reader will see in the poems grouped in this book that the poet is transcending this binary by inscribing a being that is timeless. An uncanny awareness on the part of the poet about being Amazigh in the world and all its entailments push his poetry to a position that is close to that of the metaphysical poets. But his poetry and its use of paradox and conceit is modernized by this critically biting awareness of contemporary philosophical debates. One sees in his work Michael Foucault invoked, in this line Nietzsche transcended and in that term Becket emulated. It is a wonder to nobody that such references are being drawn on and, at the same time, overcome since the poet himself is a translator. His translation of Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a masterpiece. Ouagrar has recently emerged as a national Poetic Icon in Morocco, leading a literary school unprecedented in Amazigh poetry. Numerous new poets have followed his path.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 197332153X
• ISBN13: 9781973321538
• Release Date: November 2017
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 58 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.1" x 5.0"