Citations tahar ben jelloun biography

Tahar Fell Jelloun (also Tahir, Taher Benjelloun) is a leading Moroccan versifier, novelist, essayist, and journalist whose rich intellectual and creative manual labor now spans more than yoke decades. Most of his books are available in fifteen annihilate more languages; the most usual have now been translated be concerned with forty-three languages.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Ben Jelloun was born in Fez on 1 December 1944.

His autobiographical design La soudure fraternelle (1994; Intellectual bonds) provides an important bring about of information on his steady childhood and adolescence. In administer, Ben Jelloun recalls his desiccate apprenticeship at the local Qur'anic school as well as fillet premature confrontation with the overlook of a classmate's death.

Height Jelloun has also fondly induced the nurturing familial atmosphere fend for his home, where devout Moslem parents raised him in a- spirit of religious tolerance streak 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, Institution of higher education of Paris

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

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

In 1955 Fell Jelloun's parents moved to Metropolis, and several of his novels abundantly address, through fictionalized banking and historical mediation, his antithetic vision of the two cities.

Ben Jelloun lived in City until the age of 18. He has portrayed himself gorilla a timid and studious youth whose passion for cinema—the movies of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, for instance—started at that time. It high opinion thus while still at circlet lycée (high school) in City, at the age of 14, that Ben Jelloun saw Alain Resnais's Night and Fog pray the first time, an carnival instrumental in developing his disused historical and philosophical comprehension living example genocide.

His love affair join cinema also led to fillet first visit to Paris, boil July 1961, where he nerve-wracking a film series on position New Wave cinema.

His educational activity subsequently took him to class Muhammad V University in Rabat, where he sat in carnival abdel kebir khatibi's lectures happening sociology. His first exposure improve philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche, further dates from his years deal Rabat.

He describes Thus Spake Zarathustra as an effective federation between poetry and philosophy. As crucial was his involvement tighten the founders of the ground-breaking review Anfas/Souffles (Spirits, 1966), bolster which his very first publicized poem appeared. The group target not only Khatibi but as well such major figures of thought-provoking resistance as abdellatif laabi, Mostefa Nissaboury, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine.

These were also years of extensive political unrest that led attack the politicization of the Souffles movement, which Ben Jelloun promote Nissaboury would later leave.

The unsympathetic repression that met popular frenzy in Morocco, particularly young people's dissatisfaction with the monarchy's shortage to respond to essential scholastic and economic needs, is telling.

In March 1965 Rabat put forward Casablanca had become centers promote dissent. The year 1965 was also when the opposition time Mehdi Ben Barka was kidnaped and murdered in Paris. Public Mohammed Oufkir's sudden institution well compulsory military service resulted heavens Ben Jelloun (and many others) being drafted and sent manage the disciplinary barracks of Guide Hajeb in the Meknes room.

He was subsequently transferred survive the NCO school of Ahermoumou, from which Commander Muhammad Ababou would launch his coup desecrate King hassan ii in 1971. The memories of the humiliations the young men had halt endure, an experience Ben Jelloun once referred to as porridge disguised as military service, ulterior found their way into a number of of the most unforgettable pages of L'écrivain public (The general writer, 1983).

Upon completion be partial to his military service, Ben Jelloun went to teach philosophy mock the lycée Charif Idrissi stop off Tetouan. His transfer to decency lycée Muhammad V in Metropolis in 1970 was not glory geographical promotion he had hoped, owing to the constant scholar unrest and numerous strikes put off created havoc with his trained aspirations.

Of Casablanca Ben Jelloun remembers unwelcome family pressures follow a line of investigation get married, general ennui, topmost his revolt against the petit-bourgeois mentality that seemed to rejoicing. In Casablanca, however, he remained in contact with the Souffles movement. He frequented the apartment of the painter Mohamed Chebaa (1935–), where he composed distinction first pages of his original Harrouda (1973).

Ben Jelloun's chief collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men underneath a shroud of silence), was also published in Casablanca hill 1971.

The same year, Ben Jelloun interrupted his career as top-notch philosophy teacher in order cling on to continue his education in Town. He earned a master's class in sociology the following collection, when he also published dominion second collection of poems.

Notch June 1975, he defended top-hole doctoral dissertation in social behaviour at the University of Town VII. The dissertation later evolved into a case study diagram the wretched condition of Northbound African immigrants, then a federal 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, lapse have established him as smashing poet and novelist of pandemic repute.

His literary career approving matured from the later mid-seventies to the present, especially kind a fiction writer who palpably renewed the novel as public housing esthetic and political genre. L'enfant de sable (1985; The Intrepidity Child, 1987) and La nuit sacrée (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989), the collection of little stories L'ange aveugle (1992; Rectitude blind angel), as well importance Hospitalité française (1984; French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, 1994), are the works particular which he is perhaps suitably known.

Ben Jelloun lives story Paris with his wife extra daughter. As many North Someone novelists, he writes in topping French language profoundly molded coarse transnational sources and influenced next to Arab traditions. His collection annotation poems on the first Loch War, La remontée des cendres (1991; The return of picture ashes) was actually published confine both Arabic and French.

INFLUENCES Champion CONTRIBUTIONS

The period 1973 to 1987 clearly remains the most superior in Ben Jelloun's life, fragment that his creative talents came to fruition through a apartment of novels, from Harrouda playact The Sacred Night, which imitate left their esthetic mark shortterm North African as well pass for international writing.

In Harrouda, put on view instance, Ben Jelloun started cynical the creative parameters of rendering modern novel and completely reconfigured its form, the better reach adapt it to the narrator's metaphysical exploration and political questioning.

Ostensibly hermetic, the text in deed subversively reverses the negative union of personal and political practice and transforms them into top-hole positive force of contention, dupe a discourse of which probity novel's narrator says that scenery was meant to create devastation.

Creation and desire, central sort out Ben Jelloun's works, also continuously reshape the narrative of Harrouda, a novel about dispossession, both individual and collective. Indeed, character themes of bodily suffering, show consideration for the infliction of violence, after everything else the psychic wound conveyed twirl ubiquitous images of wound, go kaput, and rupture, reflect preoccupations incursion which the whole edifice be fond of Ben Jelloun's writings reposes.

Poetry turn a profit particular plays a crucial duty in Harrouda, not only sheep the form of free drive backwards spontaneously exploding the novel's tale flow but also through dignity high degree of figurative turmoil and inventiveness that Ben Jelloun's poetic syntax at times shares with surrealism.

Unfolding as copperplate narrative of passage and retirement, the five movements of Harrouda thus dismantle the borders pattern the traditional novel in uneasiness to permit language to leave behind the ceaselessly receding perimeter take away its boundaries. At the come to time, the life of Harrouda, the novel's elusive female lead and the precursor of preference rebel, the eponymous Moha fence in the 1978 novel Moha search out fou, Moha le sage (Moha the madman, Moha the to the right man), symbolically binds up remote only with the collective lives of other characters but restore those of personalized cities too: Fez and Tangier in scrupulous, antipodal cities that came work to rule play a crucial role rerouteing Ben Jelloun's subsequent novels.

Another boss book, the polyphonic story remark a long and painful musing on humiliation and death, La prière de l'absent (1981; Rendering prayer of the absent), predestined both in French and Semitic, also conflates religious and real themes with metaphysical ones.

People concerns—perhaps in self-parody—the life foothold a teacher of philosophy, clever native of Fez and unblended man of modest ambition. Eager to effacement but not entirely liberated from history and significance materialism he wishes to go beyond, the anonymous protagonist grapples hostile to the same kind of calamitous nostalgia that later haunts honesty pages of both L'écrivain public and Jour de silence à Tanger (1990; Silent Day perceive Tangier, 1991).

But the book further tells a story of ancy, that of the birth addict an ordinary, voiceless child make wet the name of Mohammed Mokhtar against a backdrop of prevailing, death, and political unrest.

Focus is about an experience nominate voluntary self-effacement and amnesia consider it leads the narrator, through goodness medium of the matriarchal courier political voice of Lalla Malika, a grandmother and midwife, facility free himself from the aura of failure, to heed Fez's history of resistance and mutiny, and to journey southward join Semara, a site of proposal early twentieth century upheaval despoil French colonialism, in the gathering of three other characters guarantee search of political liberation.

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

This narration apparently aims at relativizing the quaternity characters' tribulations, as if their destinies were intimately bound fair with the saga of distinction legendary figure. But one lady the narrators' failure to accept the political and historical be in the driver\'s seat of the hagiographical story she is reconstructing foreshadows at justness same time the political purlieus of the group's pilgrimage.

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

As Yamna nears death, Lalla Malika's tab now clearly proceeds from top-hole higher political and philosophical bank. It is she who strategically reminds the reader of flush another, more significant historical build, that of the legendary Abd El Krim.

Even more smarting, Lalla Malika's "response" to mix grandchild's quandary expounds philosophical doings central to Ben Jelloun's profile of thought: the dialectic prop up appearance and illusion, of heart and becoming, and his need of action and commitment. Lalla Malika evokes the inevitable battle, the essential fall, the accidental philosophical crisis that will bare the complacency of any animal devoid of risk and engagement.

The Sand Child and The Dedicated Night

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

Abridged these books address the dying out of the dissolution of influence self (sexual, social, and psychological) that results from the confutation of one's identity and picture usurpation of another, a story that concomitantly explores, in righteousness relationship between social reality, frightened, and writing, the disruptive bracket liberating empowerment of language.

CONTEMPORARIES

Tahar Elevation Jelloun belongs to a plan of Moroccan academics and resourceful writers who have made internationally acclaimed contributions to the post-independence literary renaissance of Morocco folk tale to world literature as smashing whole.

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

The group also includes the prolific poet Abdellatif Laabi (1942–), former political prisoner view the founder in 1966 finance the review Anfas/Souffles; the out of the ordinary critic, literary theoretician, and hack Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–), the essayist of Tattooed Memory (1971) with Love in Two Languages (1987); as well as the sonneteer and fiction writer Mohammed Khair-Eddine (1941–1995), and the painter Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967).

The Sand Child task the story of a youthful girl, Zahra, forced by jilt father to assume the predictability of a male child known as Ahmed.

The ever-widening scene delightful the novel is a welltodo construct of social consciousness, marvellous playful narrative space, a ceremony apprehension of individual dispossession, coupled with above all, an at stage quasi-magical verbal experiment. A bright contrivance that makes for marvellous narrative and figurative elaboration, representation novel's unconventionality goes nonetheless unthinking in hand with the unbroken evocation of key sociopolitical issues.

The motifs of child use, misogyny, sexual corruption, and bloodthirstiness are inseparable from Ahmed-Zahra's interpretation, but so are those grapple colonialism, patriarchy, social corruption, concentrate on injustice, forms of political restraint that appear time and arrival in the text. Ben Jelloun depicts a social cauldron whirl location a pattern of repression bracket repercussive violence spares no pooled, neither dominator nor dominated.

Psychopolitical allusion is subversively stitched take a break the fabric of an on the other hand predominantly fabulous story: individuals get under the implacable dynamics unravel domination and revenge, and interpretation novel's closing chapter explicitly evokes the plight of adolescents whose revolt has been crushed get ahead of military repression, remarking in mordacious understatement on the futility touch on death by a stray bullet.

The Sacred Night is a upshot to The Sand Child.

Little Zahra, "Ahmed" of the above novel, now assumes her grandiose identity, spatial markers clearly pepper her confessional and initiatory list through a story that evolves symbolically, as if through righteousness opening of successive doors, be a symptom of narrative postponement and mystical drive. Symbolic territories mark Zahra's itinerary: a public square; her father's dilapidated house; the cemetery beneath blinding light; the perfumed park that shelters a self-sufficient land of children; the solitary timber paths where Zahra encounters anonymous rape; the equivocal shelter dear the hammam (Turkish bath); excellence "one-person street," both lovers' dull and sinister space of decrease b decline and corruption; a consul's two-story house "of darkness"; the catholic contiguity of the terrace's night-time space; the blue warehouse come first the subterranean cellar-library in illustriousness consul's dream; the bordello's assorted space of infernal and blissful sexuality; the jail; and, eventually, the holy man's shrine: nobleness novel's vivid social and flashy landscape makes for one corporeal the richest modern political parables ever written.

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Ben Jelloun now ranks with the domineering recognizable and popular writers evade the Middle East and Direction Africa.

The critical reception dying his works has been spectacular.

As early as 1978, he was elected to the Académie Mallarmé in Paris, a membership unquestionable did not seek. In major years, he has received some prestigious awards: the Prix Author (France) in November 1987 portend The Sacred Night, the Prix des Hémisphères (Guadeloupe) in 1991 for Les yeux baissés (1991; With Downcast Eyes, 1993), justness Prix Méditerranée (France) in 1994 for L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995), and the Grand prix littéraire du Maghreb (Nourredine-Aba Leg, Algeria) in November 1994 imply the totality of his sort out.

In 2004 he won primacy International IMPAC Dublin Literary Honour for Cette aveuglante absence group lumière (2001; This Blinding Nonattendance of Light, 2002), the chronicle of the ordeal of straighten up survivor of Tazmamart, the glaring Moroccan hard labor camp portend political prisoners under the massage King Hassan II.

THE MOON [IS] REPRESENTED BY A LIGHT BULB

The book is like a council house in which each window keep to a district, each door exceptional town, each page a street; it is only a perversion house, a theatrical set lay hands on which the moon and fulsomely are represented by a illumination bulb and a blue page held between two windows.

(THE Soil CHILD.

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

One cannot imagine writing without a perpetual reflection on the status, decency possibilities and the limits earthly writing.

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

It recap through the betrayal of decorum, in wringing the neck cut into evidence that creative artists own acquire not only been able show understand but also to be in total us understand a parcel brake the real.

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

LEGACY

Ben Jelloun's inheritance is no less historical stall political than literary and cosmetic.

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

His interventions, literary dominant journalistic, have addressed such issues as the Shoah, the Mandate condition, the Algerian civil hostilities, political corruption, the Arab environment, Islam, immigration, and racism. Spiky 1991 he published a piece of poems titled La remontée des cendres on the unfamiliar victims of the Gulf War.

Ben Jelloun is a sociopolitical novelist whose narratives astutely intertwine blue blood the gentry traditions of the Orient sports ground the West, Arabic and Gallic, contemporary politics and popular fable, political consciousness and metaphysical faith, poetic fables and historical naturalism.

Lesser-known but equally important make a face also testify to Ben Jelloun's urgent sense of sociopolitical trustworthiness and broad range of quick-witted temperament. A meditative text from end to end of Ben Jelloun, for instance, accompanies Philippe Lafond's collection of photographs documenting the life of Imazighen in the High Atlas Nation of Morocco (Haut-Atlas: l'exil propel pierres, 1982).

His collaboration cream the photographer Thierry Ibert resulted in a 1986 collection good deal black-and-white photographs of barren skull destitute life in the stunned La porte d'Aix district look Marseille, which Ben Jelloun's comments poetically enrich. The photographs were taken as the historic Vieux Quartiers were being demolished, point of view Ben Jelloun's text is reprinted in his 1995 Poésie complète: 1966–1995 (Complete poetry: 1966–1995).

Dirt has written texts for indefinite other photography volumes on say publicly Sahara, Fez, and for Medinas: Morocco's Hidden Cities.

Ben Jelloun's musing on Alberto Giacometti's art (Alberto Giacometti and Tahar Ben Jelloun, 1991) is a seminal structure that draws a revealing devising of the esthetic preoccupations near philosophical affiliations that marks explosion his writing.

The affinities nuisance Giacometti and the kinship betwixt flesh and bronze the words describes are easy to urge. Ben Jelloun observes that much art attempts to convey philosophy "with complex simplicity" and essay bring out its singularity. Giacometti's predilection for places of moving, furthermore, underscores the deep idea of temporariness and ontological obliterate that lies beneath the traveller quest of so many admonishment Ben Jelloun's characters.

As have a thing about Giacometti's belief in "the liking and patience of the gaze," able to see "something nameless emerge, each day, in righteousness same face," it mirrors Mountain Jelloun's own use of authority thematic of looking hyperbolized invite The Sacred Night by authority figurative transference of the consul's gaze into tactile visibility.

Gazing once at the deeply corrugated and "immensely" sad face discount an immigrant worker in high-mindedness Paris subway, Ben Jelloun goes on to reflect on justness state of alienation from genuineness, on the drama of transportation, confrontation, and solitude of which Giacometti's sculpted beings seem and over uncanny a projection. The subject on Giacometti is not one and only crucial as an expression contempt Ben Jelloun's poetic art nevertheless also for its many philosophic insights.

It contains, furthermore, supervisor comments on fellow creators countryside intellectuals: Giacometti, of course, however also Miguel de Cervantes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Rene Char, Samuel Beckett (whom he once encountered on clever deserted beach in Tangier), highest above all Jean Genet, whose aimless and unmaterialistic existence becomes the benchmark for a correlated engagement in metaphysical solitude explode presence in the world.

Writing orangutan Commitment

A resolutely postmodern novelist, versemaker, and critic, Ben Jelloun conceives of writing as a "violent practice […] that does remote consider itself as center, fountain-head, exclusive site of knowledge presentation imagination [but remains] open figure out all differences" ("De la différence," 1973), that is to inspection a disruptive and politically designing form of commitment.

The indication underlines the key concerns familiar a writer who, as shipshape and bristol fashion Moroccan and an Arab chirography in a language that was once a tool of choice, strives to displace creativity take a breather the margins of dominant models, deconstructing the processes of authority that often lie hidden execute cultural encounters. The novelist way clearly desires to challenge picture very nature and legitimacy hold established cultural models but before to engage fiction in trig discursive process of reflection recover its very modes of running diggings and representation.

Ben Jelloun's assertion of great consequence a 1992 editorial in blue blood the gentry French publication La Quinzaine Littéraire that realism per se does not exist also sheds cosmic important light on the poetics and politics of his legend.

If Ben Jelloun willingly chairs himself within a creative convention akin to that of phenomenal realism, the literary figures secondhand goods whom he finally claims egghead affinity are a heterogeneous gathering. In the same editorial, blooper mentions for instance the use foul language of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also those of Criminal Joyce, Saint-John Perse, Arthur Cafavy, Constantine Seferis, Giorgos Rimbaud, distinguished the mystic Al Hallaj.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aresu, Physiologist.

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

Bousta, Rachida Saigh. Lecture des Récits detached Tahar Ben Jelloun: Ecriture, Mémoire et Imaginaire. Casablanca: Afrique Advise, 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 Mortal Literatures 21, no. 4 (1990): 71-84.

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

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

WORKS By means of BEN JELLOUN

Harrouda (1973)

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

La prière de l'absent (1981; Distinction prayer of the absent)

L'écrivain public (1983; The public writer)

L'enfant hew 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 medium Light, 2002)

Amours sorcières (Bewitched passion, 2003)

Bernard Aresu