We are so excited to watch Mouna Ouafik and Soukaina Habiballah weave their ideas into our poetic tapestry at StAnza 2024. Performing across the weekend as part of their first-ever UK poetry tour, supported by Creative Scotland, The National Lottery, Highlight Arts and SHAEIRAT, their tour aims to give voice to marginalised female writers from the Middle East and North Africa.

As well as performing as part of our Festival Opening Night, Soukaina and Mouna bring their phenomenal poetry performances to our Main Stage. Mouna will read from From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin, examining her relationship with religion, family, sex and love, and Soukaina will perform Nini ya Momo, exploring maternal ties, colonialism and post-partum depression.

We caught up with the artists ahead of their big tour. Read Mouna Ouafik’s full interview below:

StAnza: Hi, Mouna. To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Mouna Ouafik: I am a poet, I am an Arabic poet, I am a woman and a Moroccan. Ever since I left my teens, all I’ve done is live to write poetry and feed my poetry with my life. I have never strayed away from this existential commitment to myself. The price, particularly the social price, is certainly high. For example, I have never accepted a job in order to devote myself totally to my life/poetry.

The guiding principles of my work as a poet, photographer, and recently as a performer come directly from this choice. This means I have to be totally sincere in my poems, in which I describe the life of a young woman in 21st-century Morocco who puts the love of life, of people and things, above everything else. Just as I can be in love with a chair, a man or a monkey, and my poems document these loves, I sometimes stand against the taboos of my society. My first collection of poems was censored and banned.

But I don’t see myself as a political poet. I don’t see myself as part of the “feminist” or “decolonial” movements imported into Morocco. My total commitment to life naturally makes me a feminist poet. And my total commitment to poems in Arabic makes me a decolonised poet. I want to believe that the intensity and sincerity of such a commitment to poetry means that my poems – so intimate, so contemporary, so feminine, so Moroccan – can touch everyone.

StAnza: Can you tell us about From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin and how it came to be?

Mouna Ouafik: From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin is a different kind of autobiography about my relationship with God, Islam, Satan, Eve, Adam, Darwin, my mother, sex and love. Each poem can be read as a letter to Darwin from a female chimpanzee – myself.

It’s a poetry of the intimate taken to the extreme: a spying on affects, thoughts, troubles, but also on the flesh, bodily fluids, the thickness of reality. A kind of coming out: this is who I am. Hence, the aim for this performance is to come out in front of an audience. Not to mention that my poetry is strongly rhythmic and sonorous, ready to be performed orally along with two artists, the musician Zouheir Atbane and the director Henri Jules Julien, we explored a stage form for these poems. The stand-up comedy was an obvious choice. It allows me to address the audience directly and filter free and to touch them almost physically. Many of the poem’s lines become punchlines. Each poem is like a garment that I take off when I perform it. The show is a kind of existential striptease. In this sense, stand-up means to engage the body, to reveal oneself sincerely: without posturing, without provocation, but without prudishness.

A ceremony of trust that comes up against certain limits in Morocco, where not everything of my poems can be said and heard. So, I envisaged the performance From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin in two parts: the first is a selection of poems with the limits of what is acceptable in Morocco, and a second one delves into darkest areas of my being and my life that cannot be presented just anywhere.

StAnza: What can audiences expect from the performance?

Mouna Ouafik: On stage, the first part is classic stand-up, a toned-up funny woman in trainers, jeans and a pink Scooby-Doo T-shirt talks about herself but in verse, in a crude but clownish way, with a punk energy and a palpable vulnerability. The final short poem of this first part is played out with a buffoonish violence that preludes the performer’s metamorphosis in the second part.

In the space of a few seconds, behind a folding screen that looks as if it has stepped out of a mythical Orient, the poet transforms herself, she dresses in pearls and gilt and draws the audience into the flamboyant, torrid meanderings of a contemporary woman from here – or there, depending on where you stand.

The poems are performed in Arabic with the translation (English, French) projected on screen.

StAnza: If you could describe From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin in one sentence, what would it be?

Mouna Ouafik: Poetry using me as a raw base paste.

StAnza: You’re visiting StAnza as part of your first poetry tour across the UK, which must be very exciting! How are you feeling about the tour?

Mouna Ouafik: It’s my first poetry tour across Europe which is very exciting. I’m on fire. The programme proposed by StAnza and Highlight Arts is really very inspiring for me. I’m so excited about the poetic Residence in Scotland in the winter. It will be magical! In the winter, that smell and the warmth emanating from the kitchens reassure me and make me feel safe and joyful. In Scotland, in early March, I will discover Scottish and international Poetic cuisine. What a thrill and great joy for me!!

Working with Highlight Arts, SHAEIRAT and Moniack Mhor means the world to me. It gives me strength and hope. I abandoned writing for nearly eight years. I felt useless. Maybe an existential and poetic depression. I escaped from the world of writing, poetry readings, and festivals – until I joined a SHAEIRAT project. Poetry was smiling from afar, as if it hugged me from behind.

I had decided to quit writing. I believed that life was more important than writing, but working with StAnza and Moniack [Mhor] was, for me, a poetic justice that I deserved and had waited for, for a long time. In the first and last, poetry does justice to us.

StAnza: What are you most looking forward to about visiting StAnza Poetry Festival this year?

Mouna Ouafik: Exploring new and different poetic experiences that either complement or shake me. I feel that my participation in this festival will be very inspiring for me and the poetic world.

I am very excited to perform my poetic stand-up and enjoy the rest of the performances. To participate in all the events, especially the poetry walk, Loud Poets Slam, poetry zine-making, poetry meditation, as well as the writing workshops […] to talk about my experience with poetry, writing, and life.

I have also been dreaming for a while of a platform about poetry and writing, and I plan to make interviews with poets participating in the festival from different nationalities. This fills me with enthusiasm and confidence and stimulates my dreams.

Don’t miss Mouna’s performance of From the Female Chimpanzee to Darwin on Saturday 9 March, 4.15-5pm in the Byre Theatre’s Main Auditorium. The performance will also be available to live-stream!