Death of journalist Said Fatmi: death of a solitary leader

Said Fatmi is dead. The former journalist for Al Bayane and L'Opinion passed away last Friday in a hospital in Rabat. A solitary death, as often happens to journalists. A death that also raises questions. Of the kind: what makes press people, they who have always been right in the middle of the event, die in the shadows of oblivion in general indifference?

The revenge of the insistent on the instant, no doubt. Most of the big names who had represented the existing over the course of their pens these last thirty years have ended up alone on the road of life, whose procession goes its way without a look for those who had been its zealous companions. Abdellatif Bennis, Majid Smaili, Abdelhai Aboulkhatib, Boudali Stitou, Ahmed Aalam, Ali Bouhadar, Bouchaib Zaanouni... so many names of servants of the machine to tell time, today disappeared and forgotten. Who then said that the written word remains? That person certainly did not know what they were saying.

Said Fatmi died as he had chosen to live: as a solitary wolf uncomfortable in society and who only feels happy at the spectacle of the vastness of this Atlantic Ocean which is familiar to him and which lives, breathes, and whose wave beats like a heart. This ocean that saw him grow up and that he saw shrink as the rental buildings supplanted his parents' low house in the Akkari district. So, faced with this obstacle to the daydreams of a fundamentally solitary leader – he was an influential member of the student youth – Said left for the side of El Harhoura where the sea still rubs shoulders with men. He was like that, Said: if something came to displease him, off he went. He had done it a first time by leaving Russia where he was a student, to present himself at the doors of the Institute of Journalism in Rabat in the middle of the school year. Throughout his life, he would remain silent about this episode of his curriculum. Perhaps he, who always knew how to see far, had already glimpsed what only the fall of the Berlin Wall revealed to everyone.

Said Fatmi died as people die who are convinced that words are not enough to say the world and, a fortiori, to remake it. He left us as usual: by leaving at the moment when we expected it the least. Those who knew him know that something displeased him. The rare friends who took the trouble to accompany him to his final resting place provided proof that Said always saw correctly. The sea no longer rubs shoulders with men, and the latter no longer have a heart.

Provider / Source : Ahmad Al Ahmadi, Menara.ma