Eland publishers are proud to reissue this inspiring novel. First published in French in 1999, it is as relevant today as it was then and on a subject rarely out of the news. Mahi Binebine is one of Morocco’s leading literary voices and artists.
A writer, says Binebine, is ‘a sponge’ forever soaking up ‘rumours, passed-down tall tales and family lore.’ Like any good storyteller, Mahi Binebine is a magpie; constantly foraging the streets of Marrakech, newspapers, and what happens in his own life, for stories he might weave into his hypnotic tales. As a young boy he would cross the Djemaa el Fna on his way to school. It was then that Mahi first witnessed the lives of the artists making their living on the square: snake charmers, street performers, merchants, beggars, migrants, and the legendary Moroccan figure of the storyteller.
Born in 1959, Binebine grew up as the sixth of seven children in the neighbourhood of Riad Zitoun. He wanted to drop out of school to pursue music, but his mother steered him towards education by sending him to a notoriously strict boarding school in Rabat. After graduating, Binebine left Morocco for Paris, where he met the Spanish author, Agustín Gómez-Arcos, who told him that he had ‘plumé’, or natural literary flair. Six months later, Binebine handed Gómez the draft of a first novel, The Sleep of the Slave, which won the Mediterranean Prize for Literature.
Binebine later moved to New York City to pursue literature and art. Much like his writing, Binebine’s painting, masks, drawings and sculptures focus on suffering. In 1994, the Guggenheim began to acquire Binebine’s artwork for its permanent collection.
The book which Eland is now publishing, Cannibales, translated into English under the new title, Welcome to Paradise, tells a saga of human trafficking. Binebine’s young protagonist and his cousin find themselves amongst a small group of migrants attempting to make the dangerous crossing from North Africa to Europe in a small boat over the Straits of Gibraltar. They risk their lives for the imagined paradise of ‘life in the West’ where, unbeknownst to them, they’ll learn to ‘be nobody: another shadow, a stray dog, a lowly earthworm, or even a cockroach.’
Binebine lives in Marrakech with his family. He has written twelve novels and has just finished another, this time about his mother. A modest man, in interviews as in life, he is continually laughing and dismissing his world-wide recognition as nothing but sheer luck. It was luck, he says, that he met Agustín Gómez-Arcos and it was luck that he happened to sit next to a friend of the curator of the Guggenheim. Perhaps it is luck that he also possesses an almost supernatural talent for the art of storytelling.