Rabat – Ahmad Jawad, the playwright who set himself on fire in front of the Ministry of Culture in Rabat on Monday, died today from the burns he sustained in the incident.
The artist passed away at the Ibn Sina Hospital in Rabat where he was taken after he set himself on fire, according to converging news reports.
The man had poured a flammable substance on his body in the middle of the street and set himself on fire. Passersby rushed to rescue him as he lay on the ground burning in front of the ministry’s building.
After being rescued with a fire extinguisher, he was taken in an ambulance to the Ibn Sina Hospital to receive treatment.
Immediately after the incident, the ministry identified him and added that he retired in October 2021, claiming that “he enjoyed all the rights guaranteed to him by law.”
Shortly after however, reports emerged that the person in question was driven to his actions by low living conditions in his retired life. Converging reports said Jawad was receiving a measly MAD 1,800 ($177) salary during his retirement, making it difficult to pay for life’s necessities amid rising prices.
He had also protested the ministry’s refusal to support some of his theatrical works, which would have provided him better ways to alleviate some of his financial concerns.
Jawad’s financial situation had become so dire that he was forced to take to social media and beg to provide his children with food and medicine.
“Whoever knows this artist, please lend him a hand as he suffers from very bad circumstances, especially after the government’s decision to prohibit theatrical shows,” he wrote on a Facebook post accompanied by his picture. “I am pleading, Mr. Minister. Who will buy me medicine and feed my children?”
The post was an open letter directed to Morocco’s Minister of Culture Mehdi Bensaid, also calling on him to appoint officials who have a love and respect for the arts, and “not someone who hates art and despises artists.”
Jawad entered the world of theater in the 1970s, in the heyday of the artform in Morocco. He started his career in Oujda, where he would decades later protest to protect the city’s theater hall from getting demolished.
His works include plays like The Turtle, Him, and May God Have Mercy on Mi Tammou. In 2016, he presented A Lesson in Love, a play which he went on a hunger strike to get funding for.
The playwright’s passing has caused a wave of grief and sadness in Morocco’s artistic community.
“May God have mercy on Ahmad Jawad. I lost in him a brother and a friend,” Moroccan writer Yassin Adnan wrote on Facebook. “And we all lost in him a cultural activist who gave a lot from within the Al-Osra club which he turned during several years into one of the most important national cultural clubs.”
The writer added that Jawad’s self-immolation “exposes the fragility of the artistic and theatrical sector in our country, as well as a horrifying obstacle in communication between the field’s authorities and its members.”
It has also re-ignited a debate among the Moroccan public on the living conditions that many in the country are experiencing, and the ongoing inflation crisis that has left many unable to afford basic necessities.
Jawad’s death put the position of art and artists in the spotlight again, with many smaller theatrical productions and writers failing to get the support and funding that bigger names often obtain.
