Flower Freak: how things fall apart in Mohamed Choukri's short stories

Mohamed Choukri's short story collection Flower Freak teems with social and political themes ranging from extreme poverty, madness, and censorship to violence, exploitation, and political repression. The focus in the present paper is on the title story, which brings to a head the different issues raised by the writer in the other stories of the collection. In fact, simple as it appears to be, the story ushers us into that world with which the writer was obsessed - the underworld of prostitution in which people's moral compass has lost its heading, a world in which the haves inhumanly exploit the have-nots, divesting them of all human dignity by reducing them to commodities at the mercy of the ruthless regulations of a neoliberal market economy. The story maps out the position of this phenomenon within the labyrinth of complex forces at its origin, and then follows the reverberations of its practice on the individual, the surrounding environment, and society at large. By narrowing his Chekhov-like focus, Choukri explores the density of the dramatised moment by cutting through the multiple layers of the dramatised situation in such a way that it appears to interrogate the depicted reality for a moment of truth in which the essence of the drama is revealed, and the whole story is suddenly infused with new significance.