The artist Mahi Binebine is also one of the most eminent figures of present-day Moroccan literature. His works unfold a frieze of society in Morocco today with its wretchedness and its heroes, all of them personalities who resist abuses of power, and the paucity of a difficult life that wavers between the wish to emigrate and the longing to prosper in a freedom that is not yet totally achieved. His literary voice gives a raw but poetic account of the most serious social problems afflicting the southern shores of the Mediterranean, among them mafia groups, violent Islamism, discrimination against women, illegal immigration, and social and political repression in the country under a regime of an absolute monarchy.
Binebine is interviewd by his translator into Catalan, the poet Manuel Forcano, who aims to reveal some of the secret facets of this immense creator of images and stories, of this great novelist from a deep and fecund literary tradition, a neighbouring one but which, for all of us, is still, unfortunately, very little known.
