Foreword by Simon Njami

Musa the Mad, Musa the Wise.

We, however, start from the beginning.We are poor, we have unlearned how to play. We have forgotten it, our hands have unlearned how to dabble. (Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia)(1977)

Ernst Bloch would have loved to meet Hassan Musa. Bloch who already - in The Spirit of Utopia - sadly noted the helplessness into which human society was sinking. The hand of Hassan Musa has not stopped dabbling. The spirit of Hassan Musa has not forgotten how to play. But to play, you must have this ironic distance that allows you to laugh at anything, with anyone. You have to look at the world through the eyes of a fool or a child, because: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V Scene V) Macbeth is not a fool, of course. And unlike the truth merchants who pollute our minds, the stories he tells are serious stories. But instead of making them out to be axioms, he tells tales. Because the fool is a humble being who doesn’t want to impose anything on anyone. Musa has not forgotten the greatness of small hands, the modesty of artisanal work that any dabbling entails. And through this dabbling, it is our contemporary world that Musa examines closely and repeatedly, with very ancient techniques.

I love – and it makes me smile – to put him under the guardianship of three women. Three women who, like the stories he reveals to us, are real, because someone created them. Musa would be a Penelope who would weave the thousand and one nights of all time and all geographies, with Ariadne’s thread. The three myths together give a particular resonance to this work; Scheherazade, Penelope and Ariadne, were working against time. Or at least they tried to alter it, each with the weapons in her possession. To make a heterochrony on which their lives depended. That same time is at play in the work of Musa and the events or characters he sketches, be they Obama or Putin, are transformed by his eye, to characters of contemporary fiction to which our humanity is subjected. It is to another fool that I am taken by this work which, beyond its form, is an ontological reflection on our future: Moha. And like Tahar Ben Jelloun’s character, Musa could say, "I am naked before men and before this age, facing the sea, facing the fire that threatens you, me the wise man, the lost man, the man possessed by djinns (but who we dare not lock up because I have secret links with all the magicians of India and of the countries buried beneath the lands), me, I am ashamed and I don’t know what more to do than to undress in this bank and show you the scabies on my skin, this scabies is my shame for you and I'm afraid, afraid not for my little life which slept a century and woke up in time, but I'm afraid to see you hanged at the dawn of all massacres, you will hang each other because you will not know from where comes the wind that drives you to craziness that will carry you away like laughter in the winter nights ..." (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Moha the Fool, Moha the Wise)

Simon Njami

A writer, curator, novelist and art critic. He was the curator of the exhibition Africa Remix (between 2004 and 2007), showed at Centre Pompidou, Paris. His ongoing exhibition The Divine Comedy, including Myriam Mihindou and Hassan Musa, is held in Frankfurt (Museum für Moderne Kunst), Washington, Savannah and until 2016 in Madrid, Venice, London, and Harare.