Grilled Fish
Abel Azrali
Outskirts Press, Inc.
Parker, Colorado
79 pages, paperback
ISBN: 9781432755171
$14.95
The prospects for impoverished, unschooled, unskilled young men the world over have not changed much since

1651, when English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan termed their lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. With the exception of the modern anodyne presented by a readily available and relatively inexpensive supply of hashish, the lives of young Moroccan men in the 1970s as depicted in Abel Azrali’s Grilled Fish match Hobbes’ grim description-prediction exactly.

Grilled Fish, a fictionalized account of a young man’s attempts to escape his and his friends’ perceived destinies, takes the reader on a path as convoluted as any of the alleys that wind through the section of Casablanca, Morocco known as the Medina where grinding poverty offers the teenage protagonist, Saed, and his friends little hope and no encouragement for finding a way out of their dead-end existences.

Saed, pulled out of school and forced to work in his father’s fish shop when the 79-page novella opens, tries desperately to escape his miserable environment. He has heard from friends and relatives that “the North”, i.e., Europe, offers the chance for a better life. Seeking to be a good citizen and emigrate legally, he tries to obtain a passport, but finds that doing so will enmesh him in a bureaucracy as nightmarish as any devised by Kafka. His attempts to find work on the port’s docks first offer another possibility: stowing away on a ship bound for Europe, but this plan, too, comes to nothing.

In the course of his wanderings, Saed meets an old man who describes the sort of nightmare suffered by many under the world’s totalitarian regimes: arrest and imprisonment on unspecified charges and beatings and torture for refusing to “confess” to an unspecified crime and the Grilled Fish from whom the novel takes its title, a decrepit old man serving as an example of what Saed and his friends will grow up to be–if they aren’t killed on the street, die of alcohol or drugs or vanish into one of the government’s prisons. Meanwhile, Saed’s friends and acquaintances congregate on doorsteps and in tea shops, spending what little money they are able to beg, borrow, steal or earn on drugs and alcohol. By the end of the novel, Saed’s options have become even more limited. “He’d already made up his mind to leave, unaware he was about to slide into an endless darkness, through a world of fear, hatred and distress, not knowing he was stepping into an area made, not for him, but for hyenas, wolves and human pit bulls.”

Like his creation Saed, Abel Azrali, in real life A. Azzam-Rehali, grew up in the old section of Casablanca known as the Medina. He received his early education at local elementary schools, junior highs, and Lycee Moulay Idriss 1st where he obtained his Baccalaureate Degree in 1981. In September 1981, he joined Hassan 2nd University, School of Arts and Human Sciences, majoring in English Language and Literature. While in college, he wrote, directed and co-produced two plays. In the early 1980s, he came to the United States. He attended a CUNY college in New York City, then joined TCI College of Technology where he obtained a degree in electronic engineering. In addition to this book, he has other yet-to-be-published writings in French, English and Arabic, mainly poems and short stories. He is currently a resident of Astoria.