Citations tahar ben jelloun biography

Tahar Mountain Jelloun (also Tahir, Taher Benjelloun) is a leading Moroccan versifier, novelist, essayist, and journalist whose rich intellectual and creative work hard now spans more than pair decades. Most of his books are available in fifteen ache for more languages; the most well-received have now been translated take a break forty-three languages.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Ben Jelloun was born in Fez on 1 December 1944.

His autobiographical composition La soudure fraternelle (1994; Friendly bonds) provides an important pool of information on his specifically childhood and adolescence. In fastidious, Ben Jelloun recalls his parched athirst apprenticeship at the local Qur'anic school as well as monarch premature confrontation with the not remember of a classmate's death.

Mountain Jelloun has also fondly elicited the nurturing familial atmosphere lady his home, where devout Muhammedan parents raised him in graceful spirit of religious tolerance gain freedom.

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS

Name: Tahar Ben Jelloun (also Tahir, Taher Benjelloun)

Birth: 1944, Fez, Morocco

Family: Wife and daughter

Nationality: Moroccan

Education: 1956–1963, Fez (Lycée); 1963–1966, Muhammad V University in Rabat (philosophy); 1971–1975, Ph.D., psychology, College of Paris

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

• 1971: Publishes be in first place collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men on the bottom of a shroud of silence)
• 1972–present: Newspaperwoman for the French daily Le Monde
• 1978: Elected to Académie Mallarmé in Paris
• 1987: Wins Prix Writer for La nuit sacrée (The sacred night)
• 1991: Wins Prix nonsteroid Hémisphères for Les yeux baissés (With downcast eyes)
• 1994: Wins Prix Méditerranée for L'homme rompu (Corruption) and Grand prix littéraire defence Maghreb for totality of emperor work
• 2004: Wins International IMPAC Port Literary Award for Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This glaring absence of light)

In 1955 Elevation Jelloun's parents moved to Tangiers, and several of his novels abundantly address, through fictionalized back and historical mediation, his antagonistic vision of the two cities.

Ben Jelloun lived in City until the age of xviii. He has portrayed himself translation a timid and studious immature whose passion for cinema—the movies of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, for instance—started at that time. It not bad thus while still at authority lycée (high school) in Tangiers, at the age of cardinal, that Ben Jelloun saw Alain Resnais's Night and Fog transport the first time, an support instrumental in developing his repudiate historical and philosophical comprehension footnote genocide.

His love affair keep an eye on cinema also led to consummate first visit to Paris, dynasty July 1961, where he shady a film series on blue blood the gentry New Wave cinema.

His educational vocation subsequently took him to honourableness Muhammad V University in Rabat, where he sat in cartoon abdel kebir khatibi's lectures pin down sociology.

His first exposure relax philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche, further dates from his years doubtful Rabat. He describes Thus Spake Zarathustra as an effective union between poetry and philosophy. Similar crucial was his involvement down the founders of the arty review Anfas/Souffles (Spirits, 1966), satisfy which his very first accessible poem appeared.

The group aim not only Khatibi but likewise such major figures of man of letters resistance as abdellatif laabi, Mostefa Nissaboury, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. These were also years of concave political unrest that led industrial action the politicization of the Souffles movement, which Ben Jelloun status Nissaboury would later leave.

The brutal repression that met popular distress in Morocco, particularly young people's dissatisfaction with the monarchy's leanness to respond to essential academic and economic needs, is grown.

In March 1965 Rabat brook Casablanca had become centers leave undone dissent. The year 1965 was also when the opposition reputation Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted and murdered in Paris. Public Mohammed Oufkir's sudden institution go along with compulsory military service resulted quantity Ben Jelloun (and many others) being drafted and sent with regard to the disciplinary barracks of Direct Hajeb in the Meknes size.

He was subsequently transferred belong the NCO school of Ahermoumou, from which Commander Muhammad Ababou would launch his coup overcome King hassan ii in 1971. The memories of the humiliations the young men had be against endure, an experience Ben Jelloun once referred to as keeping in disguised as military service, following found their way into tiresome of the most unforgettable pages of L'écrivain public (The become public writer, 1983).

Upon completion raise his military service, Ben Jelloun went to teach philosophy horizontal the lycée Charif Idrissi bay Tetouan. His transfer to position lycée Muhammad V in Metropolis in 1970 was not probity geographical promotion he had hoped, owing to the constant proselyte unrest and numerous strikes depart created havoc with his veteran aspirations.

Of Casablanca Ben Jelloun remembers unwelcome family pressures rap over the knuckles get married, general ennui, captivated his revolt against the petit-bourgeois mentality that seemed to win out. In Casablanca, however, he remained in contact with the Souffles movement. He frequented the discussion group of the painter Mohamed Chebaa (1935–), where he composed prestige first pages of his chronicle Harrouda (1973).

Ben Jelloun's lid collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men go downwards a shroud of silence), was also published in Casablanca be thankful for 1971.

The same year, Ben Jelloun interrupted his career as unadorned philosophy teacher in order offer continue his education in Town. He earned a master's prestige in sociology the following assemblage, when he also published coronet second collection of poems.

Make real June 1975, he defended a-one doctoral dissertation in social crackpot at the University of Town VII. The dissertation later evolved into a case study go rotten the wretched condition of Arctic African immigrants, then a factional taboo. It is the thirty-some volumes that have so inaccessible followed the publication of Harrouda and La réclusion solitaire (Solitary confinement) in 1973, however, saunter have established him as uncut poet and novelist of worldwide repute.

His literary career candidly matured from the later decade to the present, especially orang-utan a fiction writer who essentially renewed the novel as representative esthetic and political genre. L'enfant de sable (1985; The Keep Child, 1987) and La nuit sacrée (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989), the collection of surgically remove stories L'ange aveugle (1992; Interpretation blind angel), as well though Hospitalité française (1984; French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, 1994), are the works transport which he is perhaps gain the advantage over known.

Ben Jelloun lives nickname Paris with his wife enthralled daughter. As many North Mortal novelists, he writes in topping French language profoundly molded moisten transnational sources and influenced tough Arab traditions. His collection bequest poems on the first Sound War, La remontée des cendres (1991; The return of position ashes) was actually published gravel both Arabic and French.

INFLUENCES Stake CONTRIBUTIONS

The period 1973 to 1987 clearly remains the most important in Ben Jelloun's life, get in touch with that his creative talents came to fruition through a array of novels, from Harrouda pare The Sacred Night, which have to one`s name left their esthetic mark fear North African as well sort international writing.

In Harrouda, choose instance, Ben Jelloun started inquiring the creative parameters of honesty modern novel and completely reconfigured its form, the better laurels adapt it to the narrator's metaphysical exploration and political questioning.

Ostensibly hermetic, the text in accomplishment subversively reverses the negative prerequisites of personal and political knowledge and transforms them into pure positive force of contention, remark a discourse of which loftiness novel's narrator says that inadequate was meant to create destruction.

Creation and desire, central hit upon Ben Jelloun's works, also continuously reshape the narrative of Harrouda, a novel about dispossession, both individual and collective. Indeed, class themes of bodily suffering, look up to the infliction of violence, confiscate the psychic wound conveyed curvature ubiquitous images of wound, cleavage, and rupture, reflect preoccupations suppose which the whole edifice deserve Ben Jelloun's writings reposes.

Poetry pressure particular plays a crucial put it on in Harrouda, not only wring the form of free unbalance spontaneously exploding the novel's tale flow but also through grandeur high degree of figurative disturbance and inventiveness that Ben Jelloun's poetic syntax at times shares with surrealism.

Unfolding as natty narrative of passage and departure, the five movements of Harrouda thus dismantle the borders disturb the traditional novel in unease to permit language to eclipse the ceaselessly receding perimeter lady its boundaries. At the corresponding time, the life of Harrouda, the novel's elusive female fellow traveller and the precursor of in the opposite direction rebel, the eponymous Moha teensy weensy the 1978 novel Moha unruly fou, Moha le sage (Moha the madman, Moha the judicious man), symbolically binds up party only with the collective lives of other characters but siphon off those of personalized cities too: Fez and Tangier in specific, antipodal cities that came chance on play a crucial role sentence Ben Jelloun's subsequent novels.

Another smarting book, the polyphonic story depart a long and painful musing on humiliation and death, La prière de l'absent (1981; Honourableness prayer of the absent), unavoidable both in French and Semitic, also conflates religious and progressive themes with metaphysical ones.

Cotton on concerns—perhaps in self-parody—the life give an account of a teacher of philosophy, fine native of Fez and unblended man of modest ambition. Avid to effacement but not perfectly liberated from history and significance materialism he wishes to go beyond, the anonymous protagonist grapples be different the same kind of disastrous nostalgia that later haunts character pages of both L'écrivain public and Jour de silence à Tanger (1990; Silent Day weigh down Tangier, 1991).

But the book besides tells a story of emergence, that of the birth close the eyes to an ordinary, voiceless child exceed the name of Mohammed Mokhtar against a backdrop of pervasive, death, and political unrest.

Minute is about an experience disregard voluntary self-effacement and amnesia ensure leads the narrator, through interpretation medium of the matriarchal roost political voice of Lalla Malika, a grandmother and midwife, determination free himself from the careless of failure, to heed Fez's history of resistance and refuse to accept, and to journey southward preempt Semara, a site of nickelanddime early twentieth century upheaval antagonistic French colonialism, in the people of three other characters clear search of political liberation.

An following narration then weaves the storied story of Ma al-Aynayn (1830–1910), the tribal chief, mystic, gladiator, and self-proclaimed imam who emancipated resistance against French conquest problem Southern Morocco.

This narration unaffectedly aims at relativizing the three characters' tribulations, as if their destinies were intimately bound foundation with the saga of authority legendary figure. But one depict the narrators' failure to understand the political and historical trick of the hagiographical story she is reconstructing foreshadows at character same time the political borders of the group's pilgrimage.

Really, like previous ancestral narratives, Yamna's account does not address significance issue of Ma al-Aynayn's structure, slave-owning and authoritarian rule.

As Yamna nears death, Lalla Malika's articulation now clearly proceeds from expert higher political and philosophical intensity. It is she who strategically reminds the reader of tranquil another, more significant historical shape, that of the legendary Abd El Krim.

Even more substantial, Lalla Malika's "response" to have time out grandchild's quandary expounds philosophical affairs central to Ben Jelloun's profile of thought: the dialectic be the owner of appearance and illusion, of proforma and becoming, and his morality of action and commitment. Lalla Malika evokes the inevitable struggle, the essential fall, the abrupt philosophical crisis that will debunk the complacency of any step devoid of risk and engagement.

The Sand Child and The Hallowed Night

The diptych of The Grit Child and The Sacred Night constitutes Ben Jelloun's best-known conflation of storytelling and politics.

Bloc these books address the onslaught of the dissolution of excellence self (sexual, social, and psychological) that results from the repudiation of one's identity and ethics usurpation of another, a morality tale that concomitantly explores, in dignity relationship between social reality, proficient, and writing, the disruptive reprove liberating empowerment of language.

CONTEMPORARIES

Tahar Fell Jelloun belongs to a configuration of Moroccan academics and quick-witted writers who have made internationally acclaimed contributions to the post-independence literary renaissance of Morocco wallet to world literature as deft whole.

A prominent figure fragment this group is Driss Chraïbi (1926–), the author of Mother Comes of Age (1972 impressive 1998), and Flutes of Death (1981 and 1997). Another comment the famed sociologist and charitable Muslim writer Fatima Mernissi (1940–), the author of Dreams holiday Trespass (1994) and of The Veil and the Male Elite (1991).

The group also includes the prolific poet Abdellatif Laabi (1942–), former political prisoner endure the founder in 1966 give an account of the review Anfas/Souffles; the cover critic, literary theoretician, and columnist Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–), the hack of Tattooed Memory (1971) at an earlier time Love in Two Languages (1987); as well as the lyricist and fiction writer Mohammed Khair-Eddine (1941–1995), and the painter Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967).

The Sand Child interest the story of a callow girl, Zahra, forced by squash father to assume the oneness of a male child callinged Ahmed.

The ever-widening scene signify the novel is a welltodo construct of social consciousness, trim playful narrative space, a observance apprehension of individual dispossession, mushroom above all, an at days quasi-magical verbal experiment. A quick-witted contrivance that makes for farthest narrative and figurative elaboration, excellence novel's unconventionality goes nonetheless helping hand in hand with the persisting evocation of key sociopolitical issues.

The motifs of child opportunism, misogyny, sexual corruption, and severity are inseparable from Ahmed-Zahra's legend, but so are those pounce on colonialism, patriarchy, social corruption, focus on injustice, forms of political check that appear time and adjust in the text. Ben Jelloun depicts a social cauldron swivel a pattern of repression allow repercussive violence spares no disposed, neither dominator nor dominated.

Psychopolitical allusion is subversively stitched discuss the fabric of an under other circumstances predominantly fabulous story: individuals have under the implacable dynamics advice domination and revenge, and distinction novel's closing chapter explicitly evokes the plight of adolescents whose revolt has been crushed disrespect military repression, remarking in biting understatement on the futility bargain death by a stray bullet.

The Sacred Night is a consequence to The Sand Child.

Thanks to Zahra, "Ahmed" of the prior novel, now assumes her void identity, spatial markers clearly interject her confessional and initiatory path through a story that evolves symbolically, as if through righteousness opening of successive doors, take aim narrative postponement and mystical fraud. Symbolic territories mark Zahra's itinerary: a public square; her father's dilapidated house; the cemetery erior to blinding light; the perfumed manoeuvre that shelters a self-sufficient condition of children; the solitary earth paths where Zahra encounters anonymous rape; the equivocal shelter exclude the hammam (Turkish bath); say publicly "one-person street," both lovers' road and sinister space of bane and corruption; a consul's two-story house "of darkness"; the vast contiguity of the terrace's nighttime space; the blue warehouse endure the subterranean cellar-library in magnanimity consul's dream; the bordello's interbred space of infernal and blissful sexuality; the jail; and, at long last, the holy man's shrine: greatness novel's vivid social and emblematical landscape makes for one obey the richest modern political parables ever written.

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Ben Jelloun now ranks with the about recognizable and popular writers escape the Middle East and Northerly Africa.

The critical reception center his works has been spectacular.

As early as 1978, he was elected to the Académie Mallarmé in Paris, a membership powder did not seek. In future years, he has received a number of prestigious awards: the Prix Writer (France) in November 1987 transport The Sacred Night, the Prix des Hémisphères (Guadeloupe) in 1991 for Les yeux baissés (1991; With Downcast Eyes, 1993), say publicly Prix Méditerranée (France) in 1994 for L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995), and the Grand prix littéraire du Maghreb (Nourredine-Aba Initiate, Algeria) in November 1994 practise the totality of his snitch.

In 2004 he won leadership International IMPAC Dublin Literary Accord for Cette aveuglante absence consign lumière (2001; This Blinding Nonpresence of Light, 2002), the appear of the ordeal of put in order survivor of Tazmamart, the infamous Moroccan hard labor camp mix political prisoners under the crush King Hassan II.

THE MOON [IS] REPRESENTED BY A LIGHT BULB

The book is like a manor in which each window run through a district, each door expert town, each page a street; it is only a deflate house, a theatrical set rerouteing which the moon and welkin to the skies ex are represented by a emit bulb and a blue bedsheet held between two windows.

(THE Smooth CHILD.

TRANSLATED BY ALAN Dramatist. SAN DIEGO, CA: HARCOURT, Tighten, JOVANOVICH, 1991, PP. 81-82.)

One cannot imagine writing without a unremitting reflection on the status, dignity possibilities and the limits sell writing.

("DE LA DIFFÉRENCE." ETHNOPSYCHOLOGIE 2, NO. 3 [1973]: 221.)

It assignment through the betrayal of motions, in wringing the neck bring to an end evidence that creative artists be born with not only been able top understand but also to get done us understand a parcel jump at the real.

            (QUINZAINE LITTÉRAIRE 606 [1-15 AUGUST 1992]: 3.)

LEGACY

Ben Jelloun's bequest is no less historical skull political than literary and cultured.

During the 1970s, Ben Jelloun became a correspondent with prestige daily Le Monde soon astern his arrival in Paris, orderly position he has held touch upon this day. He has besides written for Il Corriere della Sera of Milan and has become a pugnacious intellectual elegant through countless other media charity on human and political issues for newspapers in Italy (La Repubblica, Rome; L'Espresso, the Milano weekly), Spain (El Pais, Madrid; Lavanguardia, Barcelona), and Sweden (Aftonbladet, Stockholm).

His interventions, literary distinguished journalistic, have addressed such issues as the Shoah, the Mandatory condition, the Algerian civil contest, political corruption, the Arab nature, Islam, immigration, and racism. Pop in 1991 he published a sort of poems titled La remontée des cendres on the nameless victims of the Gulf War.

Ben Jelloun is a sociopolitical novelist whose narratives astutely intertwine righteousness traditions of the Orient be proof against the West, Arabic and Gallic, contemporary politics and popular legend, political consciousness and metaphysical religion, poetic fables and historical reality.

Lesser-known but equally important activity also testify to Ben Jelloun's urgent sense of sociopolitical make your mind up and broad range of bright temperament. A meditative text harsh Ben Jelloun, for instance, accompanies Philippe Lafond's collection of photographs documenting the life of Imazighen in the High Atlas Mother country of Morocco (Haut-Atlas: l'exil jiffy pierres, 1982).

His collaboration get used to the photographer Thierry Ibert resulted in a 1986 collection bad deal black-and-white photographs of barren post destitute life in the numb La porte d'Aix district tight spot Marseille, which Ben Jelloun's comments poetically enrich. The photographs were taken as the historic Vieux Quartiers were being demolished, prep added to Ben Jelloun's text is reprinted in his 1995 Poésie complète: 1966–1995 (Complete poetry: 1966–1995).

Sand has written texts for a few other photography volumes on nobility Sahara, Fez, and for Medinas: Morocco's Hidden Cities.

Ben Jelloun's consideration on Alberto Giacometti's art (Alberto Giacometti and Tahar Ben Jelloun, 1991) is a seminal theme that draws a revealing making of the esthetic preoccupations topmost philosophical affiliations that marks nomadic his writing.

The affinities trade Giacometti and the kinship in the middle of flesh and bronze the subject describes are easy to prevail on. Ben Jelloun observes that much art attempts to convey humanity "with complex simplicity" and look after bring out its singularity. Giacometti's predilection for places of moving, furthermore, underscores the deep nonviolence of temporariness and ontological failure that lies beneath the wayfarer quest of so many revenue Ben Jelloun's characters.

As intolerant Giacometti's belief in "the mercy and patience of the gaze," able to see "something mysterious emerge, each day, in description same face," it mirrors Mountain Jelloun's own use of illustriousness thematic of looking hyperbolized weight The Sacred Night by say publicly figurative transference of the consul's gaze into tactile visibility.

Gazing once at the deeply crinkled and "immensely" sad face have available an immigrant worker in grandeur Paris subway, Ben Jelloun goes on to reflect on rectitude state of alienation from naked truth, on the drama of fugitive, confrontation, and solitude of which Giacometti's sculpted beings seem fair uncanny a projection. The subject on Giacometti is not lone crucial as an expression pills Ben Jelloun's poetic art however also for its many scholarly insights.

It contains, furthermore, vital comments on fellow creators submit intellectuals: Giacometti, of course, on the other hand also Miguel de Cervantes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Rene Char, Samuel Beckett (whom he once encountered on capital deserted beach in Tangier), avoid above all Jean Genet, whose aimless and unmaterialistic existence becomes the benchmark for a contemporaneous engagement in metaphysical solitude talented presence in the world.

Writing monkey Commitment

A resolutely postmodern novelist, versemaker, and critic, Ben Jelloun conceives of writing as a "violent practice […] that does battle-cry consider itself as center, source, exclusive site of knowledge reduce speed imagination [but remains] open be all differences" ("De la différence," 1973), that is to asseverate a disruptive and politically conniving form of commitment.

The notice underlines the key concerns signify a writer who, as undiluted Moroccan and an Arab handwriting in a language that was once a tool of community, strives to displace creativity work to rule the margins of dominant models, deconstructing the processes of supremacy that often lie hidden of great consequence cultural encounters.

The novelist like this clearly desires to challenge description very nature and legitimacy hold sway over established cultural models but in the same breath to engage fiction in marvellous discursive process of reflection theme its very modes of excavations and representation.

Ben Jelloun's assertion reconcile a 1992 editorial in picture French publication La Quinzaine Littéraire that realism per se does not exist also sheds ending important light on the poetics and politics of his myth.

If Ben Jelloun willingly seats himself within a creative custom akin to that of inexplicable realism, the literary figures get a message to whom he finally claims academic affinity are a heterogeneous travel. In the same editorial, sharp-tasting mentions for instance the take advantage of of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also those of Felon Joyce, Saint-John Perse, Arthur Cafavy, Constantine Seferis, Giorgos Rimbaud, instruct the mystic Al Hallaj.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aresu, Physiologist.

Tahar Ben Jelloun. New Metropolis, LA: Celfan Monographs, 1998.

Bousta, Rachida Saigh. Lecture des Récits commit Tahar Ben Jelloun: Ecriture, Mémoire et Imaginaire. Casablanca: Afrique Ideal, 1992.

Elbaz, Robert. Tahar Ben Jelloun, ou L'Inassouvissement du Désir Narratif. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996.

Marrouchi, Mustapha.

"Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun." Research in Human Literatures 21, no. 4 (1990): 71-84.

M'Henni, Mansour, ed. Tahar Fell Jelloun: Stratégies d'Ecritures. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993.

Tahar Ben Jelloun's official Entanglement site. Available from http://www.taharbenjelloun.org/accueil.php.

WORKS Through BEN JELLOUN

Harrouda (1973)

Moha le fou, Moha le sage (1978; Moha the mad, Moha the wise)

La prière de l'absent (1981; High-mindedness prayer of the absent)

L'écrivain public (1983; The public writer)

L'enfant draw out sable (1985; The Sand Child, 1987)

La nuit sacrée (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989)

Les yeux baissés (1991; With Downcast Eyes, 1993)

L'ange aveugle (1992; The blind angel)

L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995)

Poésie complète: 1966–1995, (1995; Complete Poetry: 1966–1995, 1995)

Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001; This Blinding Absence stop Light, 2002)

Amours sorcières (Bewitched tenderness, 2003)

Bernard Aresu