M'Hashish
SynopsisPlot
M’Hashish is a collection of vivid, sometimes surreal tales drawn from Moroccan oral storytelling traditions, as recounted by Mohammed Mrabet and translated by Paul Bowles. The stories offer glimpses into the daily life, dreams, and inner worlds of Tangier’s working-class and marginalized characters. Woven with humor, mysticism, and hallucinatory episodes often linked to the use of hashish, the book reflects the blurred boundaries between reality and imagination. It’s both a literary work and a cultural artifact preserving voices rarely heard in mainstream literature.
Story
About this book
M'Hashish is a collection of short stories rooted in Moroccan oral tradition, told by Mohammed Mrabet and translated into English by Paul Bowles. Mrabet, who grew up in Tangier and did not write in the conventional sense, spoke his stories aloud in Moghrebi Arabic while Bowles transcribed and translated them. The result is a set of narratives shaped by the rhythms of spoken language rather than literary convention, carrying a directness that print fiction rarely achieves.
The stories center on working-class and marginalized people in and around Tangier. Many of the characters drift between everyday life and states of hallucination or dreamlike perception, often connected to hashish use. Humor appears alongside the surreal, and the line between what is real and what is imagined stays deliberately unclear. Some tales read as anecdotes, others as fables without clear morals. The world they describe is specific to a particular social layer of mid-twentieth-century Morocco, where poverty, resourcefulness, and mysticism overlap in ordinary ways.
Bowles, an American writer who lived in Tangier for decades, served as a bridge between Mrabet's spoken Moghrebi and English-language readers. Their collaboration produced several books, of which M'Hashish remains among the most widely known.
