Abstract
Abdellatif Laâbi, the leading Moroccan poet writing in French today, forms part of an honourable and respected literary tradition that derives from France's North African colonial experience. He is perhaps better known outside North Africa as one of Morocco's most prominent political prisoners. His most recent book, Sous le baillon, le poème (‘The Poem beneath the Gag’), from which the poems below have been selected, looks back to his prison experiences and to the political beliefs that led to his arrest in March 1972 for ‘threatening the security of the State’. (The book was published in 1981 in Paris by Harmattan.)