For Bread Alone

The novel relates the tragedy of a person whose circumstances forced him to remain in the darkness of illiteracy until he was twenty. His youth drifted in a world of misery, where violence alone strengthened the daily exiles. All of that happened in a crushed environment under the pressure of colonialism and the spread of poverty, hunger, ignorance, and epidemics, where eating from trash bins and sorcery rituals such as drinking blood with the intention of healing were the norm. The mother of the protagonist used to resort to the "shawafat" and light candles on the tombs of the saints to become closer to God so that her husband would come out. His mother was forced to sell vegetables and fruits in the city's markets, while Shukri was subsisting from the trash bins of the rich Christian Europeans, not the trash bins of the Muslim Moroccans, which were poor, according to him. Through it, the boy coexisted with morally wrong individuals and groups. The protagonist in the novel grew up in a family in which the father's role was unjust and cruel, taking snuff and cursing God. The violence the son grew up around leads to his spiritual, moral, and ethical destruction and makes him reject the traditional family system in which the father is positioned at the top. By doing so, the protagonist seeks to destroy the father's symbolic position and destroy his authority, which is the cause of his misery. He felt dissatisfied with his mother's laughter with his father. "Damn all fathers if they are like my father." "I hate people who look like my father." His intense hatred for his father prompted him to replace his patriarchal society with a feminine one, and a tendency for violence and revenge was born, "in my imagination, I don't remember how many times I killed him." When his father was beaten in front of him, this scene was a consolation for him.[4]

He fled the countryside to Tangier, encountering foreigners, prostitution, drugs, and living in the underworld. The narrator chased women throughout his life, starting with bestiality, passing through Asia, Fatima, Sulafa, and the prostitutes. He lived this way to the extent that he became a professional prostitute. Shukri came to the city by force and not by choice while his father was on the run from Franco's army, and he was arrested and imprisoned for two years, which he spent between Tangier and Asilah. In the port of Tangiers, Shukri sold cigarettes and drugs to foreigners and led American soldiers to European brothels.[5][6]

For the Arab reader, the title of this novel refers to subsistence life, because bread is not intended in itself. However, the writer's friend, novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, chose to translate Shukri's title with an intermediate title for the Francophone reader: (French: "Le Pain Nu"), meaning "naked bread". "Bread," as Tahar Ben Jellon sees it through his French title, maybe a "meal alone."[8][9]