My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.

My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.