This extended poetic meditation on the nature of exile and of suffering is dedicated to the poet's family in Paris, London, Meknès and Oujda. The evocation of the dispersal of the immigrant in different lands and to far away cities also makes a fitting epigraph for the themes of solitude, of loss, of remembering around which the text is woven. This is the song of the Moroccan exile, but it is also the song of all exiles and emigrants, the 'orphans' of the world with whom the poem opens.A nostalgia for a childhood and a homeland nonetheless pervaded by poetry, a desire to understand the self and the world, a search for an identity amongst the languages and the cultures that surround him are all reiterated here with an emotive force. D. Kelly