Language as a whole is threatened.

Not only the video but also quotes from an interview with Moroccan poet (writing in Arabic) Mohammed Bennis:


Language as a whole is threatened. Threatened with becoming abbreviated to simple things for political or economic discourse.

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It is possible for us to notice when we watch the news that all newscasts have the same language, whereas poems do not all have the same language. So, there is the language of profit. The language of poetry, however, is in opposition to this profit, and it does not enter into the logic of the market. For this reason it preserves meaning. And it leaves human experience, through language, as a live experience.


A bio of Bennis is here. The whole interview is here on the website for the journal Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, which is out of London and dedicated to publishing Arabic literature in translation. Here is a link to a bilingual version of a poem of Bennis.

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