] - 1997) was a Moroccan

Morocco

Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 musician and author, especially well known as the front man of the group Nass El Ghiwane

Nass El Ghiwane

Nass El Ghiwane are a musical group established in 1971 in Casablanca, Morocco. Their song "Ya Sah" appears in the film The Last Temptation of Christ and on the associated album Passion – Sources. The group, which originated in avant-garde political theater, has played an influential role in...

. The leader was since the beginning the singer and bendir player, Omar Sayed.

Laarbi Batman was very much influenced by the music style of the Moussems (festivals) of his native region Abda oulad El masnaoui, he used to go to as a child. Loving words and rhymes, he was known to never put away his pencil, as he conceived writing as a way of life and an art in itself. As such, he was always ready to write down his thoughts, any events, and inspirations for a poem or a song. Among his many achievements, there is a 21,000 verses poem project Al houmam Al houssam, which took him his entire life to write, but that was only around 17,000 verses at the time of his death.
The famous song Essiniya (The tray) had a particular story to it, very significant to the sense of curiosity and flair of this vision. It is the story of Ba Salem, a beggar who went through Hay Mohammadi, in Casablanca

Casablanca

Casablanca is a city in western Morocco, located on the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Grand Casablanca region.Casablanca is Morocco's largest city as well as its chief port. It is also the biggest city in the Maghreb. The 2004 census recorded a population of 2,949,805 in the prefecture...

 crooning the first verses of "Essiniya": walli macheftouni rahmou alia, bahr el ghiwane my dkhaltou belâani.... Laarbi, who listened to the first strophes from his window, invited him in and had a long conversation with him. This is how the famous song was composed.

Diagnosed already in the end of the 1980'es with lung cancer, he lived since then on agonies due to "the cronyism of a certain medical profession" as he puts it in the second party of his autobiography El alem (The Suffering). Outside the group, he was also an actor and a writer of both literature and plays, talents that would make him the emblematic face of the musical group. "What had hit me in this man was his constancy; he was exactly the same in Hay Mohammadi, his neighborhood, or in the Club Med of Agadir, in the middle of the tourists, or in the Cannes film festival, where we had gone together to represent our movie "El hal" (Trances, feature-length film redrawing the career path of the group), Batman remained such as we knew it ", says Ahmed El Maânouni, the film director.

His 2-parts long autobiography, Arrahil (The Trip) and Al-Alem (The Suffering) published in Arabic, is an evidence of life, seen through the eyes of a misunderstood and despised genius. Since his death, his brother Rachid replaced him as leader of Nass El Ghiwane, paying tribute to him at the beginning of every appearance of the group with the song Ghir Khoudouni (Just take me away). To this date, Rachid says he still receives condolences from people deeply touched in their heart by Laarbi's death, considered to have happened too early as he was only 50 years old then.