Saturday, Aug 07, 2004
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a deeply moral writer, in the mould of Albert Camus. The two men share some obvious similarities: both were born into poor families; their mothers were illiterate; each moved from North Africa to Paris in search of literary success - in Camus' case from Algeria, in Ben Jelloun's, from Morocco. Each wrote in French after receiving a colonial French education and both supplemented their literary careers as crusading journalists. Ben Jelloun describes his vocation as "that of the critical observer denouncing what is wrong".
And, like Camus, he has been recognised in his lifetime; at 59 he has already considerably outlived Camus, who died at 46. In June, he beat off the likes of William Boyd and Paul Auster to win the Impac Dublin Literary Award, which carries a prize of E100,000. His winning novel This Blinding Absence of Light - written from the perspective of a prisoner who survived 18 years locked up in Morocco's notorious underground Tazmamart prison - was commended by the judges for its "beauty and clarity of language". As was the case when he won France's Prix Goncourt in 1987 for his novel The Sacred Night, and Le Prix Maghreb in 1994, Ben Jelloun became the first writer of North African origin to win the Impac, an award voted for by libraries all over the world. He is spoken of as a future Nobel Prize winner. It remains, however, a curious irony that he has never been honoured in his native Morocco.
This is because his novels - more than 20 to date - have probed the hidden, less than salubrious side of Moroccan society, be it corruption (Corruption), gender inequality (The Sand Child and its sequel The Sacred Night), police brutality (Moha le Fou, Moha le Sage), prostitution (Harrouda), or in the case of This Blinding Absence of Light, imprisonment. Ben Jelloun was inspired to write the latest novel after spending three hours talking to one of the Tazmamart survivors, Aziz Binebine, a former lieutenant in the Moroccan army. Unwittingly, some might say naively, Binebine participated in the bloody 1971 coup to topple Morocco's then king, Hassan II. He, along with other rebel troops, invaded the king's birthday party at the royal palace at Skhirat near Rabat, causing the death of 98 guests.
Hassan II escaped and exacted a terrible revenge. Binebine and 58 other insurgents were arrested and eventually imprisoned in the Tazmamart penal colony in the Moroccan desert. For the next 18 years, locked up in tiny, lightless cells half-buried under the ground, Binebine and his fellow inmates fought to exist on a diet of bread and water. Finally, international pressure came to bear and, in 1991, Binebine and 27 other survivors were freed.
It is the kind of story to which one imagines Ben Jelloun would have been instantly attracted, with its elements of social injustice and eventual redemption. But in a long talk we had last month, a few days before he collected the Impac award, Ben Jelloun explained that, at least initially, he was uncomfortable with the idea of narrating this murky episode in Morocco's not-so-distant past. "I wasn't sure if I wanted to write the book because it was not something I'd lived myself and I felt people would not understand my motivation for writing it. I wrote it because I was asked to by Aziz and his brother."
Ben Jelloun was - rightly - concerned that Moroccans would demand to know why he hadn't spoken out earlier about Tazmamart: it's been a recurrent criticism levelled against him in his own country. "I didn't have the kind of information that Aziz later passed on to me: no Moroccan did," he says. "The official opposition, neither the communists nor the socialists, spoke out about Tazmamart, not once. I had read an article but that was about it. I didn't feel equipped to talk about something I knew so little about. I spoke and wrote about repression in general, but nothing in particular. I also had my mother who was ill in Morocco and I did not want to do anything that might cut me off from her because I was looking after her right up to her death. I was prudent for personal reasons, which for me are a lot more important than to appear like some kind of hero. Nobody has the right to give me a lesson about what I should and shouldn't have done. I have written things which were a lot more courageous a long time before this affair."
This type of pent-up anger goes a long way towards explaining Ben Jelloun's ambivalent relationship with Morocco - and why his books often read like critiques of his homeland. Listening to Binebine's story, Ben Jelloun was reminded of his own - less testing - period in captivity. In 1965, as a 21-year-old philosophy student in Rabat, he became involved in a revolt against syllabus changes and experienced at first hand Hassan II's steely intolerance. "We demonstrated because we were to have no more Nietzsche, no more Marx. They crushed the activists by sending us to an army disciplinary camp for 18 months."
The common practice under Hassan II was that prisoners were not told the length of their sentence: they served, quite literally, at the king's pleasure. "Hope was a lie with sedative properties. To overcome it we had to prepare for the worst every day. Those who didn't understand this sank into a violent and fatal despair," writes Ben Jelloun in This Blinding Absence of Light - a passage mined from his own experience. In previous work, Ben Jelloun has had a tendency to distort his characters to the point of grotesqueness. This is not the case here. Every character, from the most craven prison guard to the most pious inmate, has a human dimension, however stunted, that is wholly believable.
It was during Ben Jelloun's own internment that he first began to write. He would sneak off to the toilets and scribble down poetry that he later got published in Souffles (Breaths), the only avant- garde magazine in Morocco. "I wrote in secret, which instilled in me a certain seriousness that was very important in my development as a writer." Was it this experience of repression, I asked, which drove him to write? "Yes, otherwise I would have led the easy, comfortable life of a petit bourgeois. I would most likely have become a teacher. The camp hardened me and developed in me a potential I otherwise wouldn't have had. I'm not recommending it," he smiles, "but sometimes misfortune can be a good thing" - adding, in a hoarse whisper, that "still, at 20 years old it wasn't fun to feel like you'd had two years of your life stolen from you."
Born in Fez in 1944, Ben Jelloun moved with his family to the seaside city of Tangier at the beginning of the 1950s. His father ran a corner shop, his mother looked after the house. "My father read a lot of history and the newspapers. I always saw him reading. My brother and I learned to read very young, it was our only distraction."
Reading - and Tangier itself. Ben Jelloun describes the city as "curious, full of people who seem to have come straight out of a story book". He was not, however, the type to be sharing a joint with the likes of Paul Bowles and Allen Ginsberg, two American writers who could often be found waxing lyrical - and stoned - in Tangier. He was already observing, looking to the future. Ginsberg, Bowles and the other expatriates were interesting to him only in that they would later serve as subjects in whom the French newspapers for which he wrote were interested. He moved to France in 1971, ostensibly to continue his studies at the Universite de Paris, where he read social psychology, but more importantly, to be closer to the French newspapers and publishing houses. He began writing regularly for the French daily Le Monde.
Both in his journalism and in his novels, Ben Jelloun has always had a nose for the global audience. His articles are translated and appear in various European newspapers; his books have been translated into 44 different languages and are invariably bestsellers in France. Such success has led to griping in Morocco, where critics often accuse him of exoticising Moroccan life to appeal to a western readership. This was particularly true around the time Ben Jelloun won the Prix Goncourt for The Sacred Night, a novel about a girl whose father, desperate for a son and heir, raises his daughter so that everyone believes she is a boy. The novel had aspects of the fantastic, but its serious purpose was to remind his readers of how meagre the rights of women are in Morocco - and how difficult it is for them to exist, sexually, on their own terms. "Morocco is a country that lives its sexuality in a hypocritical and hidden way. As a writer I am interested in showing what really goes on. This causes considerable debate among Moroccans, some of whom ask me: why do you say such things about us? I respond by telling them: it's the truth. You do things in secret - and my desire is to show what really happens."
An exile still, Ben Jelloun nonetheless sees his native country changing. He is an enthusiast for King Mohammed VI, the late Hassan II's son - whom he describes as "a great man. He has done two things that were revolutionary: the first was to recognise and recompense the victims who suffered at the hands of his father; the second was to improve conditions for women. He is modern, someone who loves his country and who wants it to progress." For Ben Jelloun it is the ultimate proof that the sins of the father need not necessarily be visited on the son.
This Blinding Absence of Light
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
The New Press Pounds 14.99, 195 pages
By TOBIAS GREY
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