Jake Syersak
Photo courtesy of Jake Syersak
Bio
Jake Syersak is a poet, translator, and editor. His works of poetry include Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press 2022) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Books 2018). He has translated four books by Moroccan Francophone author Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, most recently Proximal Morocco (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). His first translation, Agadir (Diálogos Press 2020), was nominated for the 2021 National Translation Award and a subsequent translation, I, Caustic (Litmus Press, 2022), received supported in the form of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia. He currently lives in Olympia, Washington.
Project Description
To support the translation from the French of the novel The Unearther by Moroccan author Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. The Unearther follows an unnamed narrator who, having returned abroad from France to his home country of Morocco, and having suffered the worst forms of industrial labor and poverty, is condemned to death for digging up and consuming previously interred human corpses. The novel follows his recounting how witnessing the actions of those in power, who consume human lives by more socially acceptable means (via excessive labor, industrialization, militarization, political and religious exploitation, etc.) inspired his cannibalistic lifestyle. The novel is at once an eye-opening take on the immigrant experience and scathing indictment of Western values.
I’m convinced that at some point in everyone’s academic career, they come to the sudden realization that the things they do and say have the potential to impact their discipline, and perhaps the world, for years to come. For me that moment came in the form of translating Khaïr-Eddine. To bring his work into English, I soon discovered, was also to bring a largely unknown (at least to the Anglophone world) but hardly insignificant piece of African, Moroccan, and Surrealist history into existence in the English language and, consequently, the larger body of world literary history into sharper focus.
Khaïr-Eddine is representative of authors inspired by revolutionary transnational Surrealism—particularly acclaimed poet Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial brand. Unfortunately, North African authors of the Maghreb region inspired by the transgressive poetics and decolonization efforts of Césaire and his Négritude comrades-in-arms are often mysteriously absent from Western record. Translating Khaïr-Eddine’s work into English is one step in remedying that omission. Furthermore, it is an aggressive step toward restating the important role Surrealist work has played in empowering international artists around the world to question, test, and dismantle oppressive power structures.
My hope for translations of Khaïr-Eddine’s work does not begin and end on the page. My hope is that people who gain access to his work in English also gain access to the context in which that work was originally produced. Throughout 1960s and 1970s Morocco, avant-garde and transgressive art became a rallying point around which a whole generation fought back against repression and injustice. Inspired by the possibilities of radical art, they organized other artists, cultivated a polemics, founded periodicals and presses to advocate their cause, sought international solidarity, ultimately restructured society for the better, and inspired future generations to do the same.
My hope is that translating Khaïr-Eddine—both this work as well as future work—serves as a humble introduction to that. To know something as possible is the first step.
About Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine was born in 1941 near Tafraoute, Morocco, and was of Arab Amazigh (Berber) heritage. Widely regarded as one of the most influential avant-garde intellectuals and writers of the Maghreb region of North Africa, he was especially renowned for his "linguistic guerilla warfare," a Surrealist-inspired literary style which engages post-colonial Moroccan society. He was forced into self-imposed exile to France in 1965 for his radical political views. In France he suffered extreme poverty and racism and returned to Morocco in 1979. The Unearther is about a working-class Moroccan whose hardships—particularly as an immigrant miner living in the slums of industrialized France—drive him to consume exhumed human corpses as a means of survival.