Beat Generation Impact On Moroccan Youth

  " I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull. " Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Two years ago I was quite depressed, I had been undergoing a rough breakup, my mood was very suicidal in away, nihilist to an extent until I discovered Allen Ginsberg and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. By the time I had an online friend ho had this middle-aged bearded man on his facebook cover picture, with a link to HOWL, I was raging with curiosity to discover more about the mysterious hippie, he looked so free, independent, and careless, my friend later on advised me to read Howl, the first time I was taken by the Jazzy Rhythm, later on while I was confiding my misery to my friend, he said that I should listen to the recorded Howl, and read it along out loud, and feel the words running through my veins.

Beat Generation or Beat Movement is the result of political, economic and literary frustration, it is a generation that sought liberation from all these constraints, and wanted to get rid of formal ways of dealing with poetry, they were politically engaged, and most of them were drop outs, or jobless. Beat stands for weary, and it also connotes a musical sense, a spiritual movement. Inclusiveness of the beat generation. Popular culture.

the beat generation relationship with the hippie movement. Basically, the hippies are the result of the beat generation, the term hip was first used by Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Also, both movements share the same values which are love, peace, and liberation. The hippies wanted to alienate themselves from the standard American way of living, and the protested by dropping out of society, by living in communal groups, or the cult of traveling or going into the wilderness. Actually wilderness represented the primitive, natural, and authentic way of living they felt they needed in order to feel spiritual and meaningful, on the hand one can easily notice the second hand store clothes, the unshaved beards and long haired males and females in addition to the spread of naturist culture and behavior, on the other hand the hippies and beat generation engagement were all against the modern destructive consumerist culture and the Vietnam war, most hippies were vegetarians or vegans, and the hippies are the ones to invent and celebrate Earth Day for the first time. To conclude both the hippies, and Beatniks were a result of the political sphere and decisions of America, and are a reaction against war, capitalism, and climate destruction.

Allen Ginsberg, at least for me, is the main figure of the beat generation, and his poetry is universal, prophetic, and timeless. Discovering the poems of Allen Ginsberg for the first time felt like salvation, like I was redeemed, and the fact that he and I don’t share the same culture, nor language just shows the universality of his poems, the generation described in his poems is not only the American generation of the fifties, it is every generation living under a capitalist, consumerist, violent, and unjust regime, it is every generation living In a culture of conservatism, homophobia, and exclusiveness in general.

In my country, Morocco, more young people are turning to the beatnik culture without knowing it, at least most of them don’t know it yet. First reason I see is the influence of the Beat Generation on American pop culture, music and film mainly, for example the movie Into The Wild is widely appreciated among youngsters, actually every year hundreds if not thousands of Moroccans hitchhike through the woods and mountains of Morocco, or go the Essaouira Festival, which is an a Gnaoua festival where you can notice the crazy long hair, and afro haircuts, hippie way of dressing, in addition to the drug use during the festival, two examples of the effect of the beat generation in Morocco is Anass Yakine, a young Moroccan who dropped out of university to spend two years walking around the country and who is now quite a popular figure in Morocco, second example is Djebli Club, an ecological commune located in Mokrisset, near ouazzane City, which has became last year a popular destination for people with alternative or beatnik minds. Second reason for turning to beatnik values is to escape injustice, violence, and intolerance committed both by the state, and the traditional Moroccan society.

Showing the influence of the Beat generation on American society is best done from a literary perspective. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, William Carlos William, Jimi Hendrix and a lot of the modern and postmodern literary and artistic figures of America used to frequently visit Tangier, in fact Paul Bowles lived his last fifty years in Morocco, and he had a huge impact on a generation of writers and musicians, mainly on a distinguished Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri.

Mohamed Choukri in his first book “For Bread Alone”, which he wrote in jail and later on collaborated with Bowles to translate into English, tells us the story of his family who was driven by famine from Rif to Tangier when he was still a kid, to find himself later on homeless, a kid to face a big crowded city such as tangier. For Bread Alone depicts the underground or the rough aspect of the Moroccan society, it brings in controversial and sensitive topics that were for ages hidden under the rug, such as prostitution, homelessness, homosexuality, and famine, it also deals with the political context of the 40s and 50s. For Bread Alone was described by Tennessee Williams as, “A true story of human desperation, shattering in its impact”, in fact the two authors were close friends, and there is a collection of there correspondences available.

As Howl, when For Bread Alone was published in 1972 it was hugely attacked, specially after it was published in classical Arabic in 1982. You can compare Mohamed Choukri’s masterpiece to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road in terms of tone, both of them were written and expressed in slang and underground culture, both depict the immediacy of experience which carries with it moving emotions.

In the near future I will get into details and analysis of beat generation poetry and literature, and also some of the Moroccan postmodern writers as a sequel to this introductory article.