Class Warrior—Taoist Style: (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the most important writers and thinkers to emerge from North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Though not widely known beyond the Francophone world, Khatibi’s critical and creative works speak to the central concerns of postcolonial and postmodern life. Offered here in English for the first time, his long poem from 1976, Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste is a wildly inventive, transgressive, and important text. Class Warrior delivers a kind of free-verse Marxist handbook, written with the energy, movement, and style of a highly idiosyncratic Taoism. Matt Reeck’s compelling translation captures the stylistic and thematic beats of Khatibi’s verse, rendering the deceptively simple language of the original without losing its extraordinary layers and complexities. The introduction provides biographical context and an overview of Khatibi’s poetics of the orphan, a subject position that seeks to avoid authenticating notions of origins and that is also constantly restless and forever questing. This is a rich text for contemporary readers of poetry, as well as scholars of postcolonial theory.

About the Author :
Matt Reeck is the translator of Mirages of the Mind and has won Fulbright, NEA, and PEN/Heim grants.

Review :
"This elegant, gripping translation of Abdelkébir Khatibi's evocative text compels readers to contemplate complicated questions of class, language, love, and identity in poetic terms that sing of the orphan voyage and embrace the possibilities of difference."--Alison Rice, author of Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb "This elegant, gripping translation of Abdelkébir Khatibi's evocative text compels readers to contemplate complicated questions of class, language, love, and identity in poetic terms that sing of the orphan voyage and embrace the possibilities of difference."--Alison Rice, author of Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb "Khatibi's postcolonial poetics are both experimental and urgently militant; his fusion of Deleuzian nomadism (and even Sufism) resonate with the work of Edmond Jabès. The translation carries across the force of crystalline poetic koans and stands beautifully on its own. In an era witnessing the chasm of inequality yawning ever more widely around the planet and the subsequent throbbing pulses of each new crisis in immigration, this text is a manifesto for those wary of manifestos but also desperate for fighting words."--David Fieni, SUNY Oneonta "Oscillating playfully between the violence of his early poetic texts and the poised reflections of his mature essays, Class Warrior: Taoist Style offers a rare view of the genesis of Khatibi's oeuvre."--Olivia C. Harrison, author of Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization