Selections

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a man the most concerned about time that I know. That is to say, time which passes, time which urges us on and engages us, and this time which is ours, sometimes so difficult and unjust, the heir to scandals and the carrier of barely perceptible change. When I think of Tahar Ben Jelloun, it is the memory of our stay in Haiti that comes to me, perhaps rightly so, as there, on this island far from France, and at that exceptional time for a Haiti newly returned to democracy, after the drama of Duvalier and the evil era of Jean-Claudism, we were in ideal circumstances to speak together and get to know each other better.

It was hot. At the end of every afternoon, after walking along the burning and violent roads of Port au Prince, we would find ourselves on the hotel patio, in the freshness of an internal garden, drinking tea and talking.

What we said had less importance than the place, this sort of theatre where our friendship was sealed. Like a ritual, Tahar Ben Jelloun stripped off his city clothes and donned his long white jellaba with soft leather Turkish slippers. Emanating from him was an aura of languid dignity that his words and ironical look belied. With his measured gestures, his regular features, and the glistening reflection of the tiles of the old hotel, he looked more like the figure of a Greek philosopher, as I imagine them to be at the time of Anaxagoras or Socrates, when they combined poetry, deed and thought – doesn’t one say of Fez, his home town, that it has been with pride and refinement, the Athens of Morocco? Our presence on this patio, as much as that of the other participants of this meeting, was the proof that something had truly changed in Haiti, and that hope could be born there again.

I had read Tahar Ben Jelloun before finding him again. I loved the fervour of his poetry in Les Amandiers sont morts de leurs blessures [The Almond trees have died of their wounds], the truth of his novels, the portraits of women both weak and powerful like mythological figures, and the world that they depicted, with the sounds, tastes and smells of Morocco, like a festival of the senses, a glorification of life in its mÈlange of suffering and pleasure.
But it is from this meeting, I believe, that our friendship dates, the feeling of belonging to the same family, of sharing the same quest. Thanks to such moments, just like a peaceful break in the violence of history, I was discovering another Tahar, the bearer of a very ancient wisdom, inherited from Moroccan civilisation, born of the vital force of Africa and of Andalusian complexity. His look, his natural elegance, his taste for sharing, the seriousness with which he addressed himself to everyone, gave a particular meaning to these moments, as if we had been invested with a mission of witness. In Haiti, in Port au Prince, capital of the oldest democracy in the world, this mission had meaning.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a poet. He belongs, I would like to say, of course, to that long line which unites Andalusian poetry with the contemporary Arab world, from Ibn Gouzman to Mahmoud Darwish, and one of whose junctures is found in Latin-American literature from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz right up to Xavier Villaurrutia and Octavio Paz. One often asks oneself why, in the Arab world, and to a lesser degree in the Latin-American world, poetry has kept such an importance, such an influence. Without doubt it has to be asked why the West was turned away from this mode of thought.
Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of the rare writers in the French language – with Jean Grosjean – who expresses himself with as much strength and truth in both genres. When I read Moha le fou, Moha le sage, La PriËre de l’Absent, L’Enfant de sable (The Sand Child) or La Nuit sacrÈe (The Sacred Night), what stirs me is the power of the sensations, and this superior logic which commands no other evidence but passion. With these I follow the same structure and texture as in Les Amandiers sont morts de leurs blessures or L’Insu du souvenir or La remontÈe des cendres (The Raising of the Ashes). It is that either voice of Tahar Ben Jelloun is subordinated to the project which was defined years ago by the Mexican poet Jorge Cuesta when he wrote: “Poetry is a method of analysis, an instrument of investigation, similar to dance. Here, the hidden can reveal itself, ideas and bodies can undress.” (Critica, October 1927.)

A poet: a man, who more than a language, has a way of being. If Tahar Ben Jelloun, like Grosjean, is showing us that poetry and the novel cannot be separated, it is because he needs both voices. In his novels, he has time at his disposal. The universe he constructs is precise, oneiric, he invents or refashions myths, invites us to look back into the past. The big question that he poses is of origin, sadness, and joy, all mixed together as in childbirth.
Harrouda, the tales of Premier amour est toujours le dernier, the meditation in Jour de silence ‡ Tanger (Silent Day in Tangier) are nourished by the same substance as the poems of Discours du chameau (The Camel’s Speech), the places of Fez, or even Moha’s final confession. Truth, lucidity to the point of bitterness, and also an explosion of sensations, like the boundaries of an internal continent:

Il est un pays
dit par lueur du temps
‡ l’insu du souvenir
(There is a country
recounted by the gleam of time
without the knowledge of memory)

A poet, a man whose anger sometimes overflows, indignation in the face of injustice and corruption, in the face of modern colonialism, which Florence Nightingale said, more than 100 years ago, was a crime dressed in the clothes of respectability. The indignation which animates most of the novels, from Yeux baisseÈs to L’Homme rompu (English edition: Corruption) or L’Ange aveugle (English edition: State of Absence), takes a prophetic tone in the poems, an avenging accent. In the speech of a Rafah man to his son, protesting about the small piece of ground and the three almond trees destroyed for no reason by the Israeli army. In the poem of September 1970, in the memoire rompue, the corrupted memory, when the calamity of the Palestinian people becomes for the poet a fertile soil, nourished with the blood of young men sacrificed and the tears of mourning girls, and when the anguish of a war without hope opens up onto what Jalal Eddine R°mi called “the dawn of death”.

Poet, novelist, story-teller, philosopher – and my impression gathered in that old Haitian hotel did not betray me – there is all that in the character of Tahar Ben Jelloun. This multiple voice mixes lyricism with mockery, the real with the dream. The indignation never strikes so strongly as in the poem he wrote at the time of the Gulf War, that zone of silence. The French language has the honour of having served the poem of La RemontÈe des cendres, he was the only one to have spoken when everyone in France was silent and bowed their heads.

Ce corps qui fut un rire
br°le ‡ prÈsent
cendres emportÈes par le vent jusqu’au fleuve
et l’eau les reÁoit comme les restes de larmes heureuses
Cendres d’une mÈmoire o_ perle une petite vie bien simple, une vie
sans histoire, avec un jardin, une fontaine et quelques livres.
Cendres d’un corps ÈchappÈ ‡ la fosse commune offertes ‡ la tempÍte des sables.
(This body that was all laughter
is now burning.
Ashes carried away by wind to the river
and the water receives them like the ghosts of happy tears.
Ashes of memory adorned by a very simple little life, a life
with no history, with a garden, a fountain and a few books.
Ashes of a corpse reprieved from an unmarked grave that are offered to the tempests of sand.)

The multiple voice of Tahar Ben Jelloun resonates into the heart of his audience. It speaks also of a love of life, the regret of a scorned childhood, the necessary permanence of memory. What it says, with its words, its roots, its colour, and its light, has become part of ourselves, and we cannot do without it. Never have we had more need for the poet, to give us the hope of brotherhood.

La grenade rouge et juteuse
lourde de grains et de souvenirs
tombe avec la lune
dans les mains des enfants nus.
(The red and juicy pomegranate grenade
heavy with seeds and memories
falls with the moon
into the hands of naked children.)


Translated from French by Margaret Obank