Souffles–Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio (review)

'Let's not talk about the West. Let's talk about us.' This was Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane's reply when asked, in a 1969 interview in the Moroccan journal Souffles, to comment on African cinema's rebellion against Western culture. The injunction says as much about the journal as it does about Sembene; for it would not be hyperbole to suggest that Souffles, published in French in Rabat between 1966 and 1972 (with its Arabic counterpart, Anfas, between 1970 and 1972), managed to do exactly that: set up a radical 'third-worldist' forum, before being unceremoniously crushed by the iron fist of Hassan II. Its growing support at home of Berber and Sahrawi causes was but the start of its perceived threat to the king during Morocco's années de plomb of the 1970s. Souffles—and to a lesser extent Anfas—has thus managed to carve out, in the four decades since its demise, a rare position: that of radical, avant-garde journal that compromised with no one nor any ideology. Indeed, despite its increasing Arabism, Souffles and its luminaries—Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun—were either imprisoned by the Moroccan state or forced into exile, as the journal became critical of governments across the Arab world failing to challenge Israel's control of the Middle East following the 1967 Six Day War. Whether inspired by Césaire and Fanon, the American Black Panthers, or anti-colonial revolt in sub-Saharan Africa and Vietnam, Souffles managed to pack a large punch, in its short lifespan of six years and barely sixteen issues, that resonated across the developing world. Linked with the Tricontinentale, which emerged from Havana, Souffles also attempted to unite the newly decolonized countries of the Maghreb; and, naturally, it was the French language that largely dominated the horizons of all those who graced its pages. Given the dramatic events of the Arab Spring of 2011, an anthology of texts and images from Souffles is timely; and the editors and translators have served the journal well: in the selection, in the skill of the various translators (seventeen in total, some of whom, such as Jennifer Moxley, are published poets), and in the contextualization. The selection is wide in generic terms: essays, opinion pieces, and manifestos; poems and paintings; reviews and interviews. So, respectively, the anthology presents highlights such as Laâbi's defence of Driss Chraïbi's novel Le Passé simple (Paris: Denoël, 1954); René Depestre's critique of Negritude; Abraham Serfaty on Moroccan Zionism; poetry by Mohammed Khaïr-Edine, Etel Adnan (Franco-Lebanese poet and the only woman contributor to Souffles), and lesser-known arabophone poets; 'action paintings' by Mohammed Melehi; an interview with Jean-Marie Serreau on radical theatre; and Ben Jelloun's review of Khatibi's 1968 essay on the novel (Le Roman maghrébin (Paris: Maspéro, 1968)). The anthology is divided into four chronological sections with brief Introductions contextualizing Souffles's tortuous navigation through postcolonial politics and poetics. However, in these days of 'transnational' precepts of Global French, it is the resolutely internationalist spirit of Souffles that dominates, especially in relation to Palestine. The demise of Arab nationalism has left a space for (an often sectarian) Islamism; if we ignore the 'Communist hypothesis' at the centre of Souffles we hand the initiative to the continuing Western imperialism in the region, the very creator of the sectarianism destroying the Middle East.