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In Praise of Defeat: Poems
Abdellatif Laâbi is without a doubt the major francophone voice of Moroccan poetry today. Shaped by struggle and the pain of exile, Laâbi’s expressive simplicity reflects both a life worn to the bone and a resilient, embracing spirit. Laâbi’s is a poetry of protest – internally tumultuous yet delicate verse that grapples with political and spiritual oppression. This collection of poems, selected by Laâbi himself, shows the evolution of his style. From the mutilated syntax and explosive verse of his early work to the subtle lyricism and elegant constructions of phrase that characterize him now, Laâbi never ceases searching, demanding, penetrating.
800 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 17, 2017
About the author
Abdellatif Laâbi
106 books62 followersArabic: عبد اللطيف اللعبي
Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco.
Laâbi, then teaching French, founded with other poets the artistic journal Souffles, an important literary review in 1966. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergency of a poetic stand and revival, but which, very quickly, crystallized all Moroccan creative energies: painters, film-makers, men of theatre, researchers and thinkers. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World.
Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" (for his political beliefs and his writings) and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was, in 1985, forced into exile in France.[2]
Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco.
Laâbi, then teaching French, founded with other poets the artistic journal Souffles, an important literary review in 1966. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergency of a poetic stand and revival, but which, very quickly, crystallized all Moroccan creative energies: painters, film-makers, men of theatre, researchers and thinkers. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World.
Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" (for his political beliefs and his writings) and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was, in 1985, forced into exile in France.[2]
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
March 25, 2023
All of it with an air of passing by
as faithfully as migratory birds
and the sadness that gently torments them
between nest and journey
[...]
How could I have believed
that so beautiful a road was a mirage
that so wild a horizon hid chains
that so fine a fruit had a worm
For where was the flaw?
—from "COLLAPSES"
as faithfully as migratory birds
and the sadness that gently torments them
between nest and journey
[...]
How could I have believed
that so beautiful a road was a mirage
that so wild a horizon hid chains
that so fine a fruit had a worm
For where was the flaw?
—from "COLLAPSES"
March 8, 2018
These are mostly long poems of politics and power, imprisonment and violence muffled behind a voice of defiance. It's understated anger, and just when you think the poetry's (or your) emotions have almost reached the point of spilling over, he relieves the pressure with a soft love poem full of tenderness. Laabi reminds me a little of a more political Pablo Neruda. Moroccan Laabi's poetry here is in a bilingual edition translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith and is so beautifully presented that it was a pleasure to hold and read it every day.
January 9, 2021
This is a very difficult poetry collection or a book in general to review. All the poems here is a reflection of Laâbi experiences, the poet's own exile from Morocco and the life that ensues after. Chronologically catalogued, the poems in this collection goes from raw to weary, from violence to despair, and from war to resigned; resigned with the world that moves from one war to another, where they all start to blend in and he wonders sitting in a cafe as an immigrant if this is all there is left to the humanity now. Its incredibly vulnerable moment for this poet and it splits him open, in the open.
His works are banned in Morocco. He writes in French. This collection is an intimate look into his life in exile. For a decade he was imprisoned and tortured for his opinions. His poems that came during early years of his exile are heavily lidded with politics, power and experiences with torture. There is a heart wrenching beauty, honesty in these verses, where the poet opens a window to the times when he was imprisoned and he could hear the screams of his friends.
A collection that has been carefully curated, offered in dual language and there are good number of short essays sprinkled in. A great read, indeed.
His works are banned in Morocco. He writes in French. This collection is an intimate look into his life in exile. For a decade he was imprisoned and tortured for his opinions. His poems that came during early years of his exile are heavily lidded with politics, power and experiences with torture. There is a heart wrenching beauty, honesty in these verses, where the poet opens a window to the times when he was imprisoned and he could hear the screams of his friends.
A collection that has been carefully curated, offered in dual language and there are good number of short essays sprinkled in. A great read, indeed.
August 16, 2016
'In Praise of Defeat' by Abdellatif Laâbi
5 stars/ 10 out of 10
As a poetry lover, it is both embarrassing and exhilarating to 'discover' a poet who is well known in their own country, but about whom I know nothing. One of Abdellatif Laâbi's poems featured recently as Poem of the Week in a national newspaper; I was eager to read this book, in order to find out more about him and his poetry.
The book is a French-English bilingual edition, with Donald Nicholson-Smith as translator. The poems, selected by the author, cover a fifty year period. It opens with an interesting introduction, by Pierre Joris, which puts the Moroccan poet in context.
Many of the poems relate to Laâbi's time and treatment in prison, some graphically. There also many less specific poems, such as 'Good Morning Sun of my Land' and 'Reader in a Hurry'. There are many outstanding poems in this collection. My favourite of all is 'Suns Under Arrest'.
I am extremely pleased to have read this collection. I feel privileged to now know something of Abdellatif Laâbi's life and work.
Thank you to Archipelago Books and to NetGalley for an ARC.
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March 28, 2017This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the January 2017 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
April 30, 2026
‘Write.
When indifference vanishes. When everything speaks to me. When my memory gets choppy and its waves break against the shores of my eyes.
I tear amnesia apart, rise up as an armed and implacable reaper of what is happening to me, of what has happened to me.
Gently my emotions. Gently my distress over what is disappearing. Gently my wild urge to live.’
a stunning tribute to how the art of writing survives all manners of events, catastrophes, political violence, repression. there was something about the style that didn’t work for me but the sections that I resonated with were truly truly gorgeous.
‘Nothing in the world
can force you
to bend the knee
renounce
your human identity
Do not weigh your strength
on the scales of your tormentors’
‘We do not speak
the same language
fortunately
otherwise
how could we converse?’
‘Your moss
recognizes my tree
My tree
gets lost in your forest
Your forest supports my sky
My sky gives you back your stars
Your stars fall into my ocean
My ocean cradles your boat
Your boat reaches my shore
My shore is your country
Your country subdues me
and I forget mine’
February 27, 2017
These are powerful songs of love: love of country, love of the dispossessed, love of a woman, love of culture and language, love of humanity. This is not the blind love of romantics, this is about a deeper love, one that sees with open and critical eyes. one that sees what could be if only the self serving greed of power can be quashed.
Laabi is a voice of dissent. "by yourself you cannot change the world" but must "alter the course of the drift...you can do more than bear witness...raise your voice to call for help..." even if that help does not come for generations, asking those who witness not to despair for worlds have been destroyed before had the darkest of centuries and been reborn.
Laabi was imprisoned and tortured for years because he failed to silence his pleas for humanity. because his words were feared, he survived where other voices were assassinated in the streets for uttering truths. We have seen this through out history when people are oppressed it is the voices who lament injustice, the forgotten who starve and die in the streets because of indifference. These voices that dare to speak out are not tolerated by despots and yet are more essential than bread.
In this collection are a series of poems about his time in prison, he does not have to speak declaratively about the horrors, he alludes to them in his dreams of home in a way that is so powerful that one has to take pause because the pain that is evoked is shattering. 'Talk or be Killed' is a moving poem to Evelyne whose torture shattered body could not continue in this world, but did not talk.
Pardon Madrid is a plea for forgiveness to the terror attack that struck Madrid in 2004, that killed 192 souls and injured over 2000, but was barely covered or noticed by the world. This collection should be known and slowly digested...it is painfully moving yet holds the optimists view of hope and love and the redemption it brings.
Laabi is a voice of dissent. "by yourself you cannot change the world" but must "alter the course of the drift...you can do more than bear witness...raise your voice to call for help..." even if that help does not come for generations, asking those who witness not to despair for worlds have been destroyed before had the darkest of centuries and been reborn.
Laabi was imprisoned and tortured for years because he failed to silence his pleas for humanity. because his words were feared, he survived where other voices were assassinated in the streets for uttering truths. We have seen this through out history when people are oppressed it is the voices who lament injustice, the forgotten who starve and die in the streets because of indifference. These voices that dare to speak out are not tolerated by despots and yet are more essential than bread.
In this collection are a series of poems about his time in prison, he does not have to speak declaratively about the horrors, he alludes to them in his dreams of home in a way that is so powerful that one has to take pause because the pain that is evoked is shattering. 'Talk or be Killed' is a moving poem to Evelyne whose torture shattered body could not continue in this world, but did not talk.
Pardon Madrid is a plea for forgiveness to the terror attack that struck Madrid in 2004, that killed 192 souls and injured over 2000, but was barely covered or noticed by the world. This collection should be known and slowly digested...it is painfully moving yet holds the optimists view of hope and love and the redemption it brings.
November 29, 2025
clear precise gentle and firm. one of the best books i have ever read. Laâbi says in the final essay - writing and the new world disorder (1995) - of this anthology of poetry “For you writing is a sort of prayer begging life to keep visiting you.” and “When there was a death to mourn in your family, or simply a difficult time, your father would prepare a great quantity of loaves that he would then distribute to the poor in every corner of the town. Does not your writing resemble that simple and unostentatious gesture?”
every page awakened a sensation in me that had been dormant. see a brighter green. i got this book at molasses in bushwick w rahaf and when we picked it up it was because the pages we read reminded so much of her voice. now i see so clearly Laâbi this LOVER of women or woman and freedom and writing and poetry and language. i want to know this man, but i feel as if i do in how generous this book is. his writing is a gift, and i am so grateful to have spent the year with his words.
every page awakened a sensation in me that had been dormant. see a brighter green. i got this book at molasses in bushwick w rahaf and when we picked it up it was because the pages we read reminded so much of her voice. now i see so clearly Laâbi this LOVER of women or woman and freedom and writing and poetry and language. i want to know this man, but i feel as if i do in how generous this book is. his writing is a gift, and i am so grateful to have spent the year with his words.
January 16, 2021
A (talented) francophone left-dissident Arab writes poems in a style more like the American beats than anything else I can think of. Probably more deserving of 4 stars, but the style just sticks in my craw.
October 8, 2020
In Praise of Defeat: Poems of Abdellatif Laâbi by Abdellatif Laâbi is an anthology of the poets work from 1965 through 2014. Laâbi is a Moroccan poet, born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco. He is one of the founders of the artistic journal Souffles. It was considered as a meeting point of some poets who felt the emergence. It was banned in 1972, but throughout its short life, it opened up to cultures from other countries of the Maghreb and those of the Third World. Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for "crimes of opinion" and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was, in 1985, forced into exile in France.
Here is a man who was a revolutionary with the pen instead of the gun. His work not only landed him in prison, but he continued to write while imprisoned. Of all the poems in the collection, the poetry from his imprisonment is the most powerful. He writes of the torture of the innocents and yet he writes of the prison torturer as a person who wonders if he can support his wife and five children and how much food prices will rise and what the late rains will so. He is a normal man until he starts his job.
Write, write, write is Laabi's message from prison even though that is exactly what put him in there. Write in a cell 1.3 meters by 2.3 meters which part is blocked by a concrete bed. A small window, a squat toilet, and iron door with a sliding slat, and the luxury of a small wooden shelf make up the poet's world. It is a dismal life even without a trip to see the torturer. Yet, from this existence, the writing gains strength:
Then we started to talk as the world around us became more real, as poetry made us more human, as our people by virtue of its struggles provide us with a livable nation, and as we ourselves awoke to the meaning of commitment.
“Chronicle of the Citadel of Exile
They banned my poems
My name
They exiled me to an island
of concrete and rust
they placed a number
On my back…
“Four Years”
From the 1993 collection The World’s Embrace “The Poem Tree” tells of the extinction of poetry:
From time to time the memory of men gets saturated. At that point they jettison the most cumbersome and make room for the novelties that so infatuate them.
He compares poetry in the modern world to a tree unable to move, but resilient to efforts to manipulate it. The tree provides different fruits in different seasons -- some sweet and others venom. It protects itself from predators with its own thorns. But unlike the novelties of the world, cell phones, gaming consoles, and video entertainment on demand, this is living breathing art that has set its roots and fights to survive in the world.
Laâbi work is in the original French on the left side of the book and English on the right. Donald Nicholson-Smith does a superb job of translating the work to English. I can not vouch for the structural portion of the translations, but in relaying the message, art, and the emotion of the original it would be difficult to find any better translation. Without this translation, Laâbi’s work would most likely not have an English speaking audience. A great collection of poetry and struggle lasting over fifty years. It remarkable that in the modern world that such repression can be fought and exposed with poetry and not violence.
Here is a man who was a revolutionary with the pen instead of the gun. His work not only landed him in prison, but he continued to write while imprisoned. Of all the poems in the collection, the poetry from his imprisonment is the most powerful. He writes of the torture of the innocents and yet he writes of the prison torturer as a person who wonders if he can support his wife and five children and how much food prices will rise and what the late rains will so. He is a normal man until he starts his job.
Write, write, write is Laabi's message from prison even though that is exactly what put him in there. Write in a cell 1.3 meters by 2.3 meters which part is blocked by a concrete bed. A small window, a squat toilet, and iron door with a sliding slat, and the luxury of a small wooden shelf make up the poet's world. It is a dismal life even without a trip to see the torturer. Yet, from this existence, the writing gains strength:
Then we started to talk as the world around us became more real, as poetry made us more human, as our people by virtue of its struggles provide us with a livable nation, and as we ourselves awoke to the meaning of commitment.
“Chronicle of the Citadel of Exile
They banned my poems
My name
They exiled me to an island
of concrete and rust
they placed a number
On my back…
“Four Years”
From the 1993 collection The World’s Embrace “The Poem Tree” tells of the extinction of poetry:
From time to time the memory of men gets saturated. At that point they jettison the most cumbersome and make room for the novelties that so infatuate them.
He compares poetry in the modern world to a tree unable to move, but resilient to efforts to manipulate it. The tree provides different fruits in different seasons -- some sweet and others venom. It protects itself from predators with its own thorns. But unlike the novelties of the world, cell phones, gaming consoles, and video entertainment on demand, this is living breathing art that has set its roots and fights to survive in the world.
Laâbi work is in the original French on the left side of the book and English on the right. Donald Nicholson-Smith does a superb job of translating the work to English. I can not vouch for the structural portion of the translations, but in relaying the message, art, and the emotion of the original it would be difficult to find any better translation. Without this translation, Laâbi’s work would most likely not have an English speaking audience. A great collection of poetry and struggle lasting over fifty years. It remarkable that in the modern world that such repression can be fought and exposed with poetry and not violence.
April 30, 2017
Amazing, but with 800 pages, I need a bit to process!
October 1, 2020
At his best, Laabi reaches Whitmanesque heights, spieling out extended poems about his life and that of his people. This is a hefty tome, 800+ pages long, with French on one side and an English translation on the other, and you have to slog through a lot of verbiage. I don't know if it is the English translation, or that Laabi is writing in French rather than Berber or Arabic or whatever language would be his native tongue, but there are sections, particularly in his early political poems, where the images struck me a bit too simple, more Abba than Nabokov. And some of the late poems lacked the urgency of his other stuff. But at his height, like in sections of "Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis" or "Casablanca Spleen," Laabi fuses language and purpose like few others. Really beautiful stuff, and a unique voice.
June 16, 2019
The only thing that withholds my full endorsement is the sometimes overly Romanticizing / simplifying role of women in his poems. I think of one line that was, effectively, "language has become so much more feminine," within the context of critique.
These poems are large and tremendous, though. Producing insights into the self, the self-restrained, and the self-as-citizen that I've yet to read before. I don't think Laâbi would introduce himself as a citizen, though. It just doesn't seem like a thought he would have - his poems seem to depict an allegiance and loyalty to the idea over anything else.
"Poems Falling From the Train," "The Sun is Dying," "In Vain I Emigrate," "Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis," and "My Dear Double," were my favorites from the collection.
These poems are large and tremendous, though. Producing insights into the self, the self-restrained, and the self-as-citizen that I've yet to read before. I don't think Laâbi would introduce himself as a citizen, though. It just doesn't seem like a thought he would have - his poems seem to depict an allegiance and loyalty to the idea over anything else.
"Poems Falling From the Train," "The Sun is Dying," "In Vain I Emigrate," "Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis," and "My Dear Double," were my favorites from the collection.
May 28, 2025
trying to bridge the gap between sensitivity and violence. the writing is often amateurish and kitsch. still an interesting perspective of a Moroccan radical on love, violence and revolution
September 4, 2026
"What are you doing here reader?...Are you here to cry or to laugh? ... Don't you have anyone else to talk to?" Your years-long isolation and loneliness are your deliberate choice my friend.
February 6, 2017
Start to finish, this is a beautiful, impressive collection. It spans the radical Moroccan poet's entire career and is curated by himself. Laabi's poems pull his entire personhood out from within his body and splays it for page after page after page, giving the reader the full breadth of it—ranging from romantic idealism (a sweetness), to the inherent political idealism that come with mapping out the meanings on and within one's body.
I read most of this collection out load, by myself, and what a goddamn pleasure it was.
I read most of this collection out load, by myself, and what a goddamn pleasure it was.
May 2, 2017
Abdellatif Laabi is one of the most famous of the Moroccan poets who wrote in French and whose work can be considered roughly postcolonial in both its political fervor and in its searching explorations of identity, power, and history. Here we have a massive collection of his major poems from 1965 to very nearly the present, brought together by the poet and his translator Donald Nicholson-Smith together. With characteristic attention to detail and integrity, independent press Archipelago Books has published In Praise of Defeat in a handsome en face edition, meaning that the original French text appears facing Nicholson-Smith's translation -- a feat of generosity and courage by both Archipelago's publisher Jill Schoolman and Nicholson-Smith, who has said publicly that he welcomes and actively wants to enable reader second-guessing. Since the selection was made by the poet himself, this is a book that currently exists in English only. The result is a major event in the history of francophone literatures of Africa and a survey of a body of poetry that is by turns scarifying, lyrical, ardent, and ferocious.
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June 20, 2017I bought this book after hearing Laabi and his translator read at the 2017 Griffen Prize Short List readings. It is is a wonderful collection that, to my ears, is expertly translated. Laabi's style reminds me very much of Alan Ginsburg - in addition to his great themes of exile and oppression, Laabi writes with passion and empathy for those who have suffered under tyrannical regimes. Newcomers to Laabi's work might find it helpful to begin with the poem written in response to the Madrid terrorist attack of 2004. My compliments to Archipelago Books for creating such an attractive book for what is a very fair price. I can't believe that I will read a more powerful collection of poetry in 2017 and 'In Praise of Defeat' without hesitation to other readers.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews