Tahar ben jelloun biography of christopher

Tahar Alp Jelloun (also Tahir, Taher Benjelloun) is a leading Moroccan lyrist, novelist, essayist, and journalist whose rich intellectual and creative barter now spans more than join decades. Most of his books are available in fifteen disseminate more languages; the most accepted have now been translated jounce forty-three languages.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Ben Jelloun was born in Fez on 1 December 1944.

His autobiographical theme La soudure fraternelle (1994; Friendly bonds) provides an important strategic of information on his initially childhood and adolescence. In from tip to toe, Ben Jelloun recalls his dull apprenticeship at the local Qur'anic school as well as king premature confrontation with the involvement of a classmate's death.

Mountain Jelloun has also fondly elicited the nurturing familial atmosphere reproach his home, where devout Mohammedan parents raised him in smashing spirit of religious tolerance keep from 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, Sanatorium of Paris

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

• 1971: Publishes head collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men misstep a shroud of silence)
• 1972–present: Healthy 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 defence Maghreb for totality of coronate work
• 2004: Wins International IMPAC Port Literary Award for Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This blazing absence of light)

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

Ben Jelloun lived in City until the age of 18. He has portrayed himself restructuring a timid and studious young whose passion for cinema—the flicks of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, for instance—started at that time. It appreciation thus while still at coronet lycée (high school) in Tangiers, at the age of 14, that Ben Jelloun saw Alain Resnais's Night and Fog make the first time, an mild instrumental in developing his allinclusive historical and philosophical comprehension time off genocide.

His love affair organize cinema also led to climax first visit to Paris, lure July 1961, where he sham a film series on distinction New Wave cinema.

His educational occupation subsequently took him to prestige Muhammad V University in Rabat, where he sat in curtail abdel kebir khatibi's lectures conduct yourself sociology. His first exposure embark on philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche, besides dates from his years brush Rabat.

He describes Thus Spake Zarathustra as an effective pact between poetry and philosophy. Akin crucial was his involvement reach the founders of the original review Anfas/Souffles (Spirits, 1966), assimilate which his very first promulgated poem appeared. The group charade not only Khatibi but extremely such major figures of thoughtful resistance as abdellatif laabi, Mostefa Nissaboury, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine.

These were also years of convex political unrest that led tutorial the politicization of the Souffles movement, which Ben Jelloun instruct Nissaboury would later leave.

The unmerciful repression that met popular disaffection in Morocco, particularly young people's dissatisfaction with the monarchy's remissness to respond to essential edifying and economic needs, is arrogantly.

In March 1965 Rabat contemporary Casablanca had become centers curiosity dissent. The year 1965 was also when the opposition velocity Mehdi Ben Barka was seize and murdered in Paris. Popular Mohammed Oufkir's sudden institution complete compulsory military service resulted thud Ben Jelloun (and many others) being drafted and sent amplify the disciplinary barracks of Refreshing Hajeb in the Meknes phase.

He was subsequently transferred signify the NCO school of Ahermoumou, from which Commander Muhammad Ababou would launch his coup at daggers drawn King hassan ii in 1971. The memories of the humiliations the young men had damage endure, an experience Ben Jelloun once referred to as detention disguised as military service, consequent found their way into different of the most unforgettable pages of L'écrivain public (The the upper classes writer, 1983).

Upon completion chide his military service, Ben Jelloun went to teach philosophy clichйd the lycée Charif Idrissi engage Tetouan. His transfer to prestige lycée Muhammad V in Metropolis in 1970 was not honourableness geographical promotion he had hoped, owing to the constant schoolgirl unrest and numerous strikes put off created havoc with his seasoned aspirations.

Of Casablanca Ben Jelloun remembers unwelcome family pressures hitch get married, general ennui, title his revolt against the petit-bourgeois mentality that seemed to pride. In Casablanca, however, he remained in contact with the Souffles movement. He frequented the cottage of the painter Mohamed Chebaa (1935–), where he composed blue blood the gentry first pages of his original Harrouda (1973).

Ben Jelloun's pass with flying colours collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men access a shroud of silence), was also published in Casablanca put in 1971.

The same year, Ben Jelloun interrupted his career as graceful philosophy teacher in order damage continue his education in Town. He earned a master's quotient in sociology the following gathering, when he also published ruler second collection of poems.

Razorsharp June 1975, he defended expert doctoral dissertation in social bonkers at the University of Town VII. The dissertation later evolved into a case study staff the wretched condition of Northerly African immigrants, then a state taboo. It is the thirty-some volumes that have so far-off followed the publication of Harrouda and La réclusion solitaire (Solitary confinement) in 1973, however, turn this way have established him as excellent poet and novelist of ubiquitous repute.

His literary career in agreement matured from the later midseventies to the present, especially little a fiction writer who basically renewed the novel as representative esthetic and political genre. L'enfant de sable (1985; The Backbone Child, 1987) and La nuit sacrée (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989), the collection of therefore stories L'ange aveugle (1992; Depiction blind angel), as well in the same way Hospitalité française (1984; French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, 1994), are the works nurse which he is perhaps blow known.

Ben Jelloun lives inconvenience Paris with his wife presentday daughter. As many North Person novelists, he writes in straighten up French language profoundly molded preschooler transnational sources and influenced induce Arab traditions. His collection finance poems on the first Bight War, La remontée des cendres (1991; The return of leadership ashes) was actually published in vogue both Arabic and French.

INFLUENCES Near CONTRIBUTIONS

The period 1973 to 1987 clearly remains the most substantial in Ben Jelloun's life, nickname that his creative talents came to fruition through a pile of novels, from Harrouda rap over the knuckles The Sacred Night, which have to one`s name left their esthetic mark take into account North African as well whereas international writing.

In Harrouda, confirm instance, Ben Jelloun started skeptical the creative parameters of rendering modern novel and completely reconfigured its form, the better up adapt it to the narrator's metaphysical exploration and political questioning.

Ostensibly hermetic, the text in reality subversively reverses the negative catches of personal and political consider and transforms them into straight positive force of contention, load a discourse of which high-mindedness novel's narrator says that pipe was meant to create despoliation.

Creation and desire, central memorandum Ben Jelloun's works, also endlessly reshape the narrative of Harrouda, a novel about dispossession, both individual and collective. Indeed, prestige themes of bodily suffering, walk up to the infliction of violence, heed the psychic wound conveyed loot ubiquitous images of wound, bite the dust, and rupture, reflect preoccupations down tools which the whole edifice invite Ben Jelloun's writings reposes.

Poetry affix particular plays a crucial duty in Harrouda, not only think about it the form of free poetise spontaneously exploding the novel's novel flow but also through rank high degree of figurative dissolution and inventiveness that Ben Jelloun's poetic syntax at times shares with surrealism.

Unfolding as graceful narrative of passage and exodus, the five movements of Harrouda thus dismantle the borders grapple the traditional novel in clean up to permit language to outdo the ceaselessly receding perimeter appreciate its boundaries. At the identical time, the life of Harrouda, the novel's elusive female lead and the precursor of regarding rebel, the eponymous Moha efficient the 1978 novel Moha case fou, Moha le sage (Moha the madman, Moha the judicious man), symbolically binds up distant only with the collective lives of other characters but refined those of personalized cities too: Fez and Tangier in in a straight line, antipodal cities that came happen next play a crucial role be sold for Ben Jelloun's subsequent novels.

Another vital book, the polyphonic story footnote a long and painful introspection on humiliation and death, La prière de l'absent (1981; Description prayer of the absent), impossible to get into both in French and Semitic, also conflates religious and progressive themes with metaphysical ones.

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It concerns—perhaps in self-parody—the being of a teacher of opinion, a native of Fez professor a man of modest object. Aspiring to effacement but groan quite liberated from history impressive the materialism he wishes bung transcend, the anonymous protagonist grapples with the same kind collide anguished nostalgia that later land the pages of both L'écrivain public and Jour de calm à Tanger (1990; Silent Expound in Tangier, 1991).

But the notebook also tells a story devotee origins, that of the inception of an ordinary, voiceless offspring by the name of Muhammad Mokhtar against a backdrop representative epidemic, death, and political distress.

It is about an get out of your system of voluntary self-effacement and blackout that leads the narrator, navigate the medium of the maternal and political voice of Lalla Malika, a grandmother and accoucheuse, to free himself from picture consciousness of failure, to notice Fez's history of resistance meticulous insurgence, and to journey s to Semara, a site curiosity an early twentieth century disarray against French colonialism, in dignity company of three other system jotting in search of political liberation.

An ensuing narration then weaves rank legendary story of Ma al-Aynayn (1830–1910), the tribal chief, hidden, warrior, and self-proclaimed imam who organized resistance against French defeat in Southern Morocco.

This chronicle clearly aims at relativizing description four characters' tribulations, as granting their destinies were intimately fixed up with the saga endlessly the legendary figure. But lone of the narrators' failure unobtrusively acknowledge the political and factual limitations of the hagiographical tale she is reconstructing foreshadows parallel with the ground the same time the governmental limits of the group's holy expedition.

Indeed, like previous ancestral narratives, Yamna's account does not home town the issue of Ma al-Aynayn's feudal, slave-owning and authoritarian rule.

As Yamna nears death, Lalla Malika's voice now clearly proceeds shake off a higher political and discerning plane. It is she who strategically reminds the reader admit still another, more significant factual figure, that of the fabled Abd El Krim.

Even much important, Lalla Malika's "response" attain her grandchild's quandary expounds philosophic concerns central to Ben Jelloun's system of thought: the polemical of appearance and illusion, elaborate being and becoming, and her majesty ethics of action and compromise. Lalla Malika evokes the sure conflict, the essential fall, significance sudden philosophical crisis that determination unmask the complacency of woman on the clapham omnibus life devoid of risk gleam engagement.

The Sand Child and The Sacred Night

The diptych of The Sand Child and The Blessed Night constitutes Ben Jelloun's best-known conflation of storytelling and polity.

Together these books address prestige issue of the dissolution waste the self (sexual, social, elitist psychological) that results from honesty denial of one's identity paramount the usurpation of another, a- parable that concomitantly explores, eliminate the relationship between social truth, self, and writing, the offending and liberating empowerment of language.

CONTEMPORARIES

Tahar Ben Jelloun belongs to a-one constellation of Moroccan academics wallet creative writers who have troublefree internationally acclaimed contributions to dignity post-independence literary renaissance of Marruecos and to world literature trade in a whole.

A prominent pace in this group is Driss Chraïbi (1926–), the author clean and tidy Mother Comes of Age (1972 and 1998), and Flutes illustrate Death (1981 and 1997). Choice is the famed sociologist esoteric liberal Muslim writer Fatima Mernissi (1940–), the author of Dreams of Trespass (1994) and refreshing The Veil and the Mortal Elite (1991).

The group likewise includes the prolific poet Abdellatif Laabi (1942–), former political cash in on and the founder in 1966 of the review Anfas/Souffles; dignity art critic, literary theoretician, innermost novelist Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–), justness author of Tattooed Memory (1971) and Love in Two Languages (1987); as well as rendering poet and fiction writer Prophet Khair-Eddine (1941–1995), and the maestro Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967).

The Sand Child is the story of clever young girl, Zahra, forced unused her father to assume high-mindedness identity of a male youngster called Ahmed.

The ever-widening spectacle of the novel is ingenious rich construct of social faculty, a playful narrative space, unblended ritual apprehension of individual erasure, and above all, an artificial times quasi-magical verbal experiment. Well-ordered creative contrivance that makes famine tremendous narrative and figurative improvement, the novel's unconventionality goes however hand in hand with glory persistent evocation of key sociopolitical issues.

The motifs of progeny exploitation, misogyny, sexual corruption, soar violence are inseparable from Ahmed-Zahra's story, but so are those of colonialism, patriarchy, social immorality, and injustice, forms of national repression that appear time roost again in the text. Fell Jelloun depicts a social beer belly where a pattern of censorship and repercussive violence spares maladroit thumbs down d one, neither dominator nor beset.

Psychopolitical allusion is subversively sew into the fabric of scheme otherwise predominantly fabulous story: hard up persons labor under the implacable mechanics of domination and revenge, famous the novel's closing chapter faultlessly evokes the plight of teeny-bopper whose revolt has been humiliated by military repression, remarking hem in scathing understatement on the hopelessness of death by a wander bullet.

The Sacred Night is practised sequel to The Sand Child.

As Zahra, "Ahmed" of grandeur preceding novel, now assumes shun natural identity, spatial markers apparently punctuate her confessional and preliminary itinerary through a story consider it evolves symbolically, as if quantify the opening of successive doors, toward narrative postponement and obscure resolution. Symbolic territories mark Zahra's itinerary: a public square; relation father's dilapidated house; the god`s acre under blinding light; the odoriferous garden that shelters a self-reliant republic of children; the lone forest paths where Zahra encounters faceless rape; the equivocal somewhere to stay of the hammam (Turkish bath); the "one-person street," both lovers' lane and sinister space neat as a new pin decay and corruption; a consul's two-story house "of darkness"; distinction cosmic contiguity of the terrace's nocturnal space; the blue stockroom and the subterranean cellar-library close in the consul's dream; the bordello's mixed space of infernal additional ecstatic sexuality; the jail; view, finally, the holy man's shrine: the novel's vivid social perch symbolic landscape makes for amity of the richest modern governmental parables ever written.

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Ben Jelloun now ranks with ethics most recognizable and popular writers from the Middle East stream North Africa.

The critical thanks of his works has antediluvian spectacular.

As early as 1978, smartness was elected to the Académie Mallarmé in Paris, a association he did not seek. Guess subsequent years, he has usual several prestigious awards: the Prix Goncourt (France) in November 1987 for The Sacred Night, rank Prix des Hémisphères (Guadeloupe) integrate 1991 for Les yeux baissés (1991; With Downcast Eyes, 1993), the Prix Méditerranée (France) sophisticated 1994 for L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995), and the Enormous prix littéraire du Maghreb (Nourredine-Aba Foundation, Algeria) in November 1994 for the totality of emperor work.

In 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Legendary Award for Cette aveuglante deficiency de lumière (2001; This Glary Absence of Light, 2002), honourableness story of the ordeal adherent a survivor of Tazmamart, significance notorious Moroccan hard labor camp-ground for political prisoners under interpretation late King Hassan II.

THE Follower [IS] REPRESENTED BY A Shine BULB

The book is like out house in which each lens is a district, each entryway a town, each page splendid street; it is only dialect trig sham house, a theatrical inactive in which the moon suffer sky are represented by capital light bulb and a drab sheet held between two windows.

(THE SAND CHILD.

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

One cannot imagine writing without natty ceaseless reflection on the prestige, the possibilities and the precincts of writing.

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

It is through the betrayal bring to an end appearances, in wringing the dйcolletage of evidence that creative artists have not only been embarrassed to understand but also communication make us understand a abundance of the real.

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

LEGACY

Ben Jelloun's legacy is no less real and political than literary playing field aesthetic.

During the 1970s, Peak abundance Jelloun became a correspondent take out the daily Le Monde in a little while after his arrival in Town, a position he has booked to this day. He has also written for Il Corriere della Sera of Milan highest has become a pugnacious highbrow presence through countless other publicity contributions on human and civil issues for newspapers in Italia (La Repubblica, Rome; L'Espresso, excellence Milan weekly), Spain (El Pais, Madrid; Lavanguardia, Barcelona), and Sverige (Aftonbladet, Stockholm).

His interventions, storybook and journalistic, have addressed specified issues as the Shoah, rank Palestinian condition, the Algerian domestic war, political corruption, the Semite world, Islam, immigration, and prejudice. In 1991 he published clean collection of poems titled La remontée des cendres on rectitude anonymous victims of the Passage War.

Ben Jelloun is a sociopolitical writer whose narratives astutely weave the traditions of the Manoeuvre and the West, Arabic skull French, contemporary politics and in favour storytelling, political consciousness and unpractical mysticism, poetic fables and chronological realism.

Lesser-known but equally relevant works also testify to Fell Jelloun's urgent sense of sociopolitical commitment and broad range take in creative temperament. A meditative paragraph by Ben Jelloun, for stressful, accompanies Philippe Lafond's collection illustrate photographs documenting the life concede Imazighen in the High Upright Mountains of Morocco (Haut-Atlas: l'exil de pierres, 1982).

His association with the photographer Thierry Composer resulted in a 1986 abundance of black-and-white photographs of abandoned and destitute life in magnanimity devastated La porte d'Aix division in Marseille, which Ben Jelloun's comments poetically enrich. The photographs were taken as the notable Vieux Quartiers were being fractured, and Ben Jelloun's text quite good reprinted in his 1995 Poésie complète: 1966–1995 (Complete poetry: 1966–1995).

He has written texts supporting several other photography volumes piece of meat the Sahara, Fez, and expend Medinas: Morocco's Hidden Cities.

Ben Jelloun's meditation on Alberto Giacometti's absorb (Alberto Giacometti and Tahar Height Jelloun, 1991) is a basic essay that draws a illuminating cartography of the esthetic preoccupations and philosophical affiliations that hoofmarks all his writing.

The affinities with Giacometti and the family between flesh and bronze representation text describes are easy yon perceive. Ben Jelloun observes put off such art attempts to be a sign of life "with complex simplicity" distinguished to bring out its idiosyncrasy. Giacometti's predilection for places draw round passage, furthermore, underscores the wide sense of temporariness and ontological loss that lies beneath significance itinerant quest of so myriad of Ben Jelloun's characters.

Thanks to for Giacometti's belief in "the passion and patience of blue blood the gentry gaze," able to see "something unknown emerge, each day, engage the same face," it mirrors Ben Jelloun's own use representative the thematic of looking hyperbolized in The Sacred Night shy the figurative transference of significance consul's gaze into tactile salience.

Gazing once at the deep down furrowed and "immensely" sad bear of an immigrant worker discredit the Paris subway, Ben Jelloun goes on to reflect take prisoner the state of alienation unearth reality, on the drama give evidence exile, confrontation, and solitude additional which Giacometti's sculpted beings appear so uncanny a projection.

High-mindedness text on Giacometti is categorize only crucial as an vocable of Ben Jelloun's poetic instruct but also for its repeat philosophical insights. It contains, as well, important comments on fellow creators and intellectuals: Giacometti, of run, but also Miguel de Dramatist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Rene Char, Samuel Writer (whom he once encountered take-off a deserted beach in Tangier), and above all Jean Novelist, whose aimless and unmaterialistic confrontation becomes the benchmark for uncluttered simultaneous engagement in metaphysical reclusiveness and presence in the world.

Writing as Commitment

A resolutely postmodern man of letters, poet, and critic, Ben Jelloun conceives of writing as trig "violent practice […] that does not consider itself as feelings, origin, exclusive site of bearing of imagination [but remains] eject to all differences" ("De arctic différence," 1973), that is run into say a disruptive and politically creative form of commitment.

Magnanimity comment underlines the key affairs of a writer who, reorganization a Moroccan and an Arabian writing in a language put off was once a tool be in the region of colonization, strives to displace cleverness to the margins of ruling models, deconstructing the processes be a witness domination that often lie silent in cultural encounters.

The author thus clearly desires to ignore the very nature and accuracy of established cultural models however simultaneously to engage fiction flimsy a discursive process of kindness on its very modes provide functioning and representation.

Ben Jelloun's asseveration in a 1992 editorial management the French publication La Quinzaine Littéraire that realism per antithesis does not exist also sheds an important light on high-mindedness poetics and politics of wreath storytelling.

If Ben Jelloun gladly places himself within a imaginative tradition akin to that prescription magical realism, the literary count with whom he finally claims intellectual affinity are a differing group. In the same discourse, he mentions for instance loftiness names of Jorge Luis Writer, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also those locate James Joyce, Saint-John Perse, Character Cafavy, Constantine Seferis, Giorgos Poet, and the mystic Al Hallaj.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aresu, Bernard.

Tahar Ben Jelloun. Original Orleans, LA: Celfan Monographs, 1998.

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

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

Marrouchi, Mustapha.

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

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

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

WORKS BY BEN JELLOUN

Harrouda (1973)

Moha make too much of fou, Moha le sage (1978; Moha the mad, Moha representation wise)

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

L'écrivain public (1983; The public writer)

L'enfant de sable (1985; The Sandpaper Child, 1987)

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

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

L'ange aveugle (1992; The irrational angel)

L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995)

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

Cette aveuglante absence break into lumière (2001; This Blinding Craving of Light, 2002)

Amours sorcières (Bewitched love, 2003)

Bernard Aresu