Abdellatif Laâbi - The Eye and the Night

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ABDELLATIF LAÂBI—THE EYE AND THE NIGHT
Translated by Howard Slater
Published October 2026
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Available for the first time in English translation, The Eye and the Night was Abdellatif Laâbi’s explosive debut book. Written in Rabat between the popular uprisings of 1965 and the Six Day War of 1967, and first published in 1969 during Laâbi’s involvement with the radical anti-colonial journal Souffles-Anfas, Laâbi’s itinéraire”, a poetic novel or poem in prose, combines Surrealism’s spirit of revolt with the influence of Arabic literary, oral and musical traditions, the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague and Third Cinema with the soaring songs of Umm Kulthum, their tales of enormous feeling and impossible love.
From Casablanca to Hiroshima to Franco’s Spain, The Eye and the Night takes places in the squares of public defiance and the shadows of clandestine revolutionary gathering. At once novel, poem, pilgrimage and escape route, it is a classic of Francophone decolonial literature comparable to Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal and Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse Arabe. And it is living proof that, as Laâbi writes in his most recent collection, “poetry is invincible”. Published with new introductions by scholar Khalid Lyamlahy and translator Howard Slater, a glossary, and a 1982 preface by Abdellatif Laâbi.

Jamil Buthayna, Majnoun Laïla, necklaces of migratory doves.
Al Hallaj suffering the Truth and his millionth pyre [...]
Pass. This night is ours. Our final test.
ABDELLATIF LAÂBI (عبد اللطيف اللعبي) is one of the most important authors to have emerged from the Arab world in the twentieth-century. A founder member of the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas (1966-1972), a radical journal which played a key role in a renaissance of left-wing, anti-colonialist, and internationalist Maghrebi culture, he was imprisoned and tortured for “crimes of opinion” when the journal was banned in 1972. Released in 1980, he went into exile in France in 1985, where he has published numerous books of poetry alongside plays, novels, essays, children’s books and translations, and been awarded numerous honours, including Commander of the Order des Arts et des Lettres, the Alain Bosquet Prize, the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie, the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie, and the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Culture and Creativity.

HOWARD SLATER is a writer and translator and former mental health support worker whose work has appeared in small press magazines, independent publishing initiatives and websites since the early 1980s. The author of Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings (Mute, 2012) and Anti-Wall (Kudaorg, 2017), he was the editor of Break/Flow and a founder member of the radical history archive May Day Rooms, London. 
 
A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, illustrated, 168 pages.

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