Description
An illustrated artist's memoir of the motivations, feelings, ideas, figures (including Samuel Beckett and Walter Benjamin), travels, and love affairs that have influenced his life.
The writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of “a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea,” but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as Uncertain Manifesto. The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody black-and white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’s as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past.
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
About the Author
Abdellatif Laabi is regarded as one of the most important contemporary Moroccan writers, publishing many volumes of poetry, as well as several novels and plays since the late 1960s. Laabi has consistently criticized the authoritarian and theocratic regimes of the Maghreb with an outspoken incisiveness that has led to the closure of his seminal literary journal Souffles as well as his eight-year imprisonment from 1972-1981. His work has been banned and marginalized by the Moroccan government, however Laabi's writings have been increasingly visible and influential on the international scene. During Laabi's imprisonment his cause was championed by Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, and he was awarded the Prix de la Liberté, PEN Club, and the Prix International de Poésie.
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