Said el Haji
by David Swatling

05-02-2009

listen to 'Ptooey!'

The gulf between emigrant parents and their westernised children is an important theme in stories by Said el Haji. For Radio Books he paints a bleak portrait of a group of disenfranchised Moroccan youth in The Netherlands.

Said el Haji (pictured) was born in Isoefajen, Morocco, in 1976. He moved to The Netherlands with his family at the age of six and grew up in a small town in the south of the country. He studied Dutch literature at Leiden University.

In 2000 his short story Young Hamid won him the El Hizjra Prize for young writers of Arabic descent. El Haji expanded this story about a teenager who begins to rebel against his strict Islamic father into his debut novel published when he was just 24 years old.

Fathers and sons
Critics called De dagen van Sjaitan (The Days of Shaytaan) an ambitious debut. Told in the different voices of the main protagonists, el Haji creates a unique coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, gods and angels, rebellion and loyalty.

In 2002 el Haji presented an experimental television program along with Radio Books author Khalid Boudou. And in 2006 together with another Radio Books author Annelies Verbeke, he edited a collection of stories by promising Dutch and Flemish authors under the age of 35. His second novel Goddelijke duivel (Divine Devil) was also published in 2006 and he is currently working on his third.

Dreams and reality
According to the on-line Urban Dictionary, "ptooey" is the onomatopoetic word for the sound made by spitting, used to indicate disgust. It's the closest translation for the Dutch title of Said el Haji's Radio Books story Tfoe! Perhaps somewhat graphic, it's a common response of the teenagers he portrays to the world around them.

"That's where he lives, on the fourth floor of a block of flats in a neighbourhood of Rotterdam South. Where his window until recently used to look obliquely out at a three-storey building, now there is only a skeleton. One night it was burned down after a junkie had dared another junkie to set it on fire, just like that, for a laugh, to see what would happen.

Hamoes was woken by the noise on the street and saw that the building was in flames. He told his friends some tall stories about the event, he claimed to have roasted a whole sheep above the blazing fire. The truth was, he got a terrible fright, because for a single moment, in that vague state between dream and reality, he believed that he really had landed in Hell."

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Ptooey! by Said el Haji was translated by Michael O'Loughlin.

The series Radio Books is an initiative of the Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren in Brussels, in association with the Flemish radio broadcaster Klara and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.