Great African Reads discussion

This thread is for discussions of our Nov/Dec 2022 read of For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri - with NO SPOILERS (there is a thread with spoilers allowed too) - so feel free to discuss book editions, availability, expectations etc. - when you get into the book, please join us in the spoiler thread! 

It’s interesting that Mohamed Choukri wrote this memoir of his early years when he was within eyesight of age forty, a time when adults benefit from a reminiscence bump. This increase in the proportion of autobiographical memory focuses on our youth and adolescence, a time when our brains encode strong and lasting memories that support our developing self-image. Scientists writing for the Australian Academy of Science remind us that long-term memory is not immutable but can alter with each recall, blend with similar memories or present experiences.

I have undergone this exercise in thinking about this book for one reason: why is there such a pervasive and gratuitous prurient theme? It lends a coarse-grained texture to this otherwise moving and tragic autobiographic story. It makes sense that a man approaching forty would integrate the virility of his youth, and for that, we cannot judge. My complaint is that we have barely time to absorb moving moments of Choukri’s personal history and the cultural, political, and socioeconomic environment in which he grew up before being hit with another wave of salacious detail. This is one reason he was such a controversial figure. The other is that his story disrespected the pathological tyrant called his father.

It is harrowing to read Choukri’s description of his father, a despot who terrorizes his family for no other reason than coming home disappointed. When Choukri’s little brother is sobbing from hunger, his father kills the boy by breaking his neck then kicks the mother in the face for crying. His father will later tell Choukri, “I wish I knew why I hate you so much.” Choukri will retaliate by imagining—and imagination is the only power he has against his father—that he kills him with a gun, “the lead cooling off in his heart and brain.” In his fantasy, Choukri sees his father trembling in the throes of death, “as my hands tremble when I sit down to eat at his table.” He will think: “The man is dead now. My father is dead. This is the way I’ve always wanted to kill him.”

Choukri will eventually leave his father’s home to get away from his cruelty and abuse. He arrives in the city with nowhere safe to sleep but a graveyard, no money, no food, starving as he had been when his brother was murdered. The risk of losing what meager pesetas he manages to scrounge, and of rape and murder, are constant threats. At one point, he will wonder what it means that he sleeps “in the corner of a family grave” and that he lets a man molest him for money. He must answer these questions but does not know how to. “I thought the meaning of life was living it. Did Allah mean to make the world like this with such disorder and confusion? Ought I to go on accepting this life as it comes up each day, or not?

He will work on these questions as he finds connections with men who lead the same dissolute and reckless life as he. When he reaches age twenty, one bright light will shine on his wretched life: the hope for literacy. Chourki’s associations with his past are what they are, but I would have preferred less cycling of libidinous detail. The story would have been stronger without it, if not a different version of the mutable recollection of self-image.