A New Book Shows Sies Marjan’s Colors Haven’t Faded
The last time Sies Marjan visited a bookseller, she came away with a few copies of a new book in her bag. The following year, she went to another place for a sale, again leaving with a few books. Now, after spending years waiting and hoping for a new book to be published, she’s in for a pleasant surprise.
Sies Marjan, creator of several websites that document the lives of young Moroccan women and their families, has written a book of poetry for children titled “Somewhere, Somewhere. In The Rain.”
It’s a book of poems and stories that’s designed specifically for children and will have “no adult content,” according to Amazon.com.
It’s “beautiful and lyrical,” said Marjan, who grew up in the West Virginia mountains and still spends her summer in that area. She’s a member of a new generation of young Moroccan poets who can “express themselves more fully,” she said, than those who wrote the traditional folk poetry of the region.
“In a sense, this is my attempt to revive the kind of poetry that was once spoken out loud by the Moroccan women,” said Marjan, who first traveled to Morocco in 2001, before embarking on her writing career in 2002, when she went to a book shop in Paris to buy a paper copy of a poem.
“I left with a paper copy of ‘In The Rain.’ I have no idea when they went into the shop, but I still have the book, and I still have the poem,” Marjan told The Independent. (You can order copies of “Somewhere, Somewhere. In The Rain.” at Amazon.com.)
“I was just a kid in the mountains, I didn’t even know what a poem was,” Marjan recalled. “But they taught me how to read and write, and I went to school for about four years before I quit.”
Marjan got her degree in literature from the International Institute of Islamic Cultures, but after working for a while as a poet and translator, she wanted to take a
