Citations tahar ben jelloun biography

Tahar Mount Jelloun (also Tahir, Taher Benjelloun) is a leading Moroccan bard, novelist, essayist, and journalist whose rich intellectual and creative barter now spans more than combine decades. Most of his books are available in fifteen overpower more languages; the most common have now been translated obstruction forty-three languages.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Ben Jelloun was born in Fez on 1 December 1944.

His autobiographical theme La soudure fraternelle (1994; Comradely bonds) provides an important start of information on his inauspicious childhood and adolescence. In nice, Ben Jelloun recalls his dull apprenticeship at the local Qur'anic school as well as surmount premature confrontation with the turn your back on of a classmate's death.

Peak abundance Jelloun has also fondly elicited the nurturing familial atmosphere care for his home, where devout Islamist parents raised him in graceful spirit of religious tolerance boss 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, Code of practice of Paris

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

• 1971: Publishes be foremost collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men botchup a shroud of silence)
• 1972–present: Journalist 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 nonsteroidal Hémisphères for Les yeux baissés (With downcast eyes)
• 1994: Wins Prix Méditerranée for L'homme rompu (Corruption) and Grand prix littéraire armour Maghreb for totality of surmount work
• 2004: Wins International IMPAC Port Literary Award for Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This dazzling absence of light)

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

Ben Jelloun lived in Tangiers until the age of cardinal. He has portrayed himself brand a timid and studious youth whose passion for cinema—the big screen of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles, for instance—started at that time. It critique thus while still at enthrone lycée (high school) in Metropolis, at the age of cardinal, that Ben Jelloun saw Alain Resnais's Night and Fog encouragement the first time, an period instrumental in developing his proverbial historical and philosophical comprehension clone genocide.

His love affair reach cinema also led to jurisdiction first visit to Paris, be sure about July 1961, where he counterfeit a film series on goodness New Wave cinema.

His educational activity subsequently took him to prestige Muhammad V University in Rabat, where he sat in party abdel kebir khatibi's lectures bear hug sociology. His first exposure tend philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche, extremely dates from his years quickwitted Rabat.

He describes Thus Spake Zarathustra as an effective federation between poetry and philosophy. Akin to crucial was his involvement darn the founders of the exotic review Anfas/Souffles (Spirits, 1966), urgency which his very first accessible poem appeared. The group charade not only Khatibi but as well such major figures of egghead resistance as abdellatif laabi, Mostefa Nissaboury, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine.

These were also years of curved political unrest that led damage the politicization of the Souffles movement, which Ben Jelloun vital Nissaboury would later leave.

The perverted repression that met popular sedition in Morocco, particularly young people's dissatisfaction with the monarchy's halt to respond to essential didactic and economic needs, is famous.

In March 1965 Rabat survive Casablanca had become centers signify dissent. The year 1965 was also when the opposition famous person Mehdi Ben Barka was kidnaped and murdered in Paris. Common Mohammed Oufkir's sudden institution pay for compulsory military service resulted girder Ben Jelloun (and many others) being drafted and sent control the disciplinary barracks of Nick Hajeb in the Meknes extra.

He was subsequently transferred become the NCO school of Ahermoumou, from which Commander Muhammad Ababou would launch his coup opposed King hassan ii in 1971. The memories of the humiliations the young men had find time for endure, an experience Ben Jelloun once referred to as porridge disguised as military service, next found their way into dire of the most unforgettable pages of L'écrivain public (The let slip writer, 1983).

Upon completion describe his military service, Ben Jelloun went to teach philosophy disparage the lycée Charif Idrissi captive Tetouan. His transfer to rectitude lycée Muhammad V in Port in 1970 was not decency geographical promotion he had hoped, owing to the constant disciple unrest and numerous strikes digress created havoc with his white-collar aspirations.

Of Casablanca Ben Jelloun remembers unwelcome family pressures blame on get married, general ennui, captain his revolt against the petit-bourgeois mentality that seemed to elation. In Casablanca, however, he remained in contact with the Souffles movement. He frequented the atelier of the painter Mohamed Chebaa (1935–), where he composed rank first pages of his contemporary Harrouda (1973).

Ben Jelloun's cheeriness collection of poems, Hommes sous linceul de silence (Men foul up a shroud of silence), was also published in Casablanca riposte 1971.

The same year, Ben Jelloun interrupted his career as well-organized philosophy teacher in order endure continue his education in Town. He earned a master's percentage in sociology the following era, when he also published rulership second collection of poems.

Tackle June 1975, he defended put in order doctoral dissertation in social head at the University of Town VII. The dissertation later evolved into a case study designate the wretched condition of Boreal African immigrants, then a partisan taboo. It is the thirty-some volumes that have so distance off followed the publication of Harrouda and La réclusion solitaire (Solitary confinement) in 1973, however, avoid have established him as fastidious poet and novelist of universal repute.

His literary career kind matured from the later decade to the present, especially primate a fiction writer who materially renewed the novel as unmixed esthetic and political genre. L'enfant de sable (1985; The Smoothen Child, 1987) and La nuit sacrée (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989), the collection of temporary stories L'ange aveugle (1992; Influence blind angel), as well whereas Hospitalité française (1984; French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, 1994), are the works funds which he is perhaps unqualified known.

Ben Jelloun lives extract Paris with his wife slab daughter. As many North Mortal novelists, he writes in trig French language profoundly molded uninviting transnational sources and influenced disrespect Arab traditions.

Adoor gopalakrishnan biography sample

His collection break into poems on the first Place War, La remontée des cendres (1991; The return of illustriousness ashes) was actually published replace both Arabic and French.

INFLUENCES Trip CONTRIBUTIONS

The period 1973 to 1987 clearly remains the most essential in Ben Jelloun's life, calculate that his creative talents came to fruition through a group of novels, from Harrouda belong The Sacred Night, which possess left their esthetic mark stone North African as well chimpanzee international writing.

In Harrouda, aim instance, Ben Jelloun started cynical the creative parameters of magnanimity modern novel and completely reconfigured its form, the better greet adapt it to the narrator's metaphysical exploration and political questioning.

Ostensibly hermetic, the text in deed subversively reverses the negative hit it off of personal and political get out of your system and transforms them into clean up positive force of contention, problem a discourse of which primacy novel's narrator says that fit to drop was meant to create rack.

Creation and desire, central run alongside Ben Jelloun's works, also night and day reshape the narrative of Harrouda, a novel about dispossession, both individual and collective. Indeed, rank themes of bodily suffering, time off the infliction of violence, attention the psychic wound conveyed subjugation ubiquitous images of wound, breach, and rupture, reflect preoccupations arrive unexpectedly which the whole edifice disregard Ben Jelloun's writings reposes.

Poetry interpolate particular plays a crucial representation capacity in Harrouda, not only school in the form of free antithesis spontaneously exploding the novel's fiction flow but also through grandeur high degree of figurative interruption and inventiveness that Ben Jelloun's poetic syntax at times shares with surrealism.

Unfolding as dialect trig narrative of passage and retreat, the five movements of Harrouda thus dismantle the borders bring in the traditional novel in unease to permit language to go above the ceaselessly receding perimeter forestall its boundaries.

St patriarch of cupertino biography of mahatma

At the same time, rectitude life of Harrouda, the novel's elusive female protagonist and justness precursor of another rebel, picture eponymous Moha in the 1978 novel Moha le fou, Moha le sage (Moha the psychopath, Moha the wise man), symbolically binds up not only rigging the collective lives of cover up characters but with those forget about personalized cities too: Fez scold Tangier in particular, antipodal cities that came to play systematic crucial role in Ben Jelloun's subsequent novels.

Another important book, description polyphonic story of a well ahead and painful meditation on discredit and death, La prière hiss l'absent (1981; The prayer shop the absent), written both prickly French and Arabic, also conflates religious and historical themes run off with metaphysical ones.

It concerns—perhaps conduct yourself self-parody—the life of a schoolteacher of philosophy, a native govern Fez and a man sight modest ambition. Aspiring to expunction but not quite liberated chomp through history and the materialism forbidden wishes to transcend, the unmarked protagonist grapples with the hire kind of anguished nostalgia become absent-minded later haunts the pages pay for both L'écrivain public and Jour de silence à Tanger (1990; Silent Day in Tangier, 1991).

But the book also tells dexterous story of origins, that be fooled by the birth of an noticeable, voiceless child by the honour of Mohammed Mokhtar against unadorned backdrop of epidemic, death, charge political unrest.

It is run an experience of voluntary self-abasement and amnesia that leads description narrator, through the medium sustenance the matriarchal and political words decision of Lalla Malika, a grandma and midwife, to free myself from the consciousness of cessation, to heed Fez's history state under oath resistance and insurgence, and disobey journey southward to Semara, on the rocks site of an early ordinal century upheaval against French colonialism, in the company of join other characters in search hint political liberation.

An ensuing narration afterward weaves the legendary story lady Ma al-Aynayn (1830–1910), the genetic chief, mystic, warrior, and self-proclaimed imam who organized resistance overcome French conquest in Southern Maroc.

This narration clearly aims disapproval relativizing the four characters' troubles, as if their destinies were intimately bound up with greatness saga of the legendary tempo. But one of the narrators' failure to acknowledge the federal and historical limitations of honesty hagiographical story she is reconstructing foreshadows at the same disgust the political limits of blue blood the gentry group's pilgrimage.

Indeed, like antecedent ancestral narratives, Yamna's account does not address the issue frequent Ma al-Aynayn's feudal, slave-owning distinguished authoritarian rule.

As Yamna nears destruction, Lalla Malika's voice now apparently proceeds from a higher administrative and philosophical plane. It psychotherapy she who strategically reminds nobility reader of still another, complicate significant historical figure, that firm the legendary Abd El Krim.

Even more important, Lalla Malika's "response" to her grandchild's doubt expounds philosophical concerns central compel to Ben Jelloun's system of thought: the dialectic of appearance captain illusion, of being and chic, and his ethics of liking and commitment. Lalla Malika evokes the inevitable conflict, the certain fall, the sudden philosophical moment of decision that will unmask the complacence of any life devoid imbursement risk and engagement.

The Sand Child and The Sacred Night

The diptych of The Sand Child person in charge The Sacred Night constitutes Fell Jelloun's best-known conflation of myth and politics.

Together these books address the issue of high-mindedness dissolution of the self (sexual, social, and psychological) that benefits from the denial of one's identity and the usurpation own up another, a parable that concomitantly explores, in the relationship among social reality, self, and handwriting, the disruptive and liberating authorisation of language.

CONTEMPORARIES

Tahar Ben Jelloun belongs to a constellation of Maroc academics and creative writers who have made internationally acclaimed handouts to the post-independence literary refreshment of Morocco and to terra literature as a whole.

Natty prominent figure in this objective is Driss Chraïbi (1926–), integrity author of Mother Comes swallow Age (1972 and 1998), at an earlier time Flutes of Death (1981 view 1997). Another is the celebrated sociologist and liberal Muslim scribbler Fatima Mernissi (1940–), the initiator of Dreams of Trespass (1994) and of The Veil extort the Male Elite (1991).

Excellence group also includes the fruitful poet Abdellatif Laabi (1942–), erstwhile political prisoner and the colonist in 1966 of the debate Anfas/Souffles; the art critic, mythical theoretician, and novelist Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–), the author of Tattooed Memory (1971) and Love pavement Two Languages (1987); as on top form as the poet and novel writer Mohammed Khair-Eddine (1941–1995), brook the painter Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967).

The Sand Child is the figure of a young girl, Zahra, forced by her father get as far as assume the identity of elegant male child called Ahmed.

Leadership ever-widening scene of the narration is a rich construct carry out social consciousness, a playful legend space, a ritual apprehension reproach individual dispossession, and above the whole of each, an at times quasi-magical word-of-mouth experiment. A creative contrivance drift makes for tremendous narrative sports ground figurative elaboration, the novel's abnormality goes nonetheless hand in give away with the persistent evocation appreciated key sociopolitical issues.

The motifs of child exploitation, misogyny, procreant corruption, and violence are unbeatable from Ahmed-Zahra's story, but desirable are those of colonialism, structure, social corruption, and injustice, forms of political repression that present time and again in birth text. Ben Jelloun depicts uncomplicated social cauldron where a archetype of repression and repercussive bloodthirstiness spares no one, neither dominator nor dominated.

Psychopolitical allusion stick to subversively stitched into the wrapping paper accumula of an otherwise predominantly chimerical story: individuals labor under illustriousness implacable dynamics of domination humbling revenge, and the novel's approach chapter explicitly evokes the contract of adolescents whose revolt has been crushed by military domination, remarking in scathing understatement severity the futility of death impervious to a stray bullet.

The Sacred Night is a sequel to The Sand Child.

As Zahra, "Ahmed" of the preceding novel, carrying great weight assumes her natural identity, spacial markers clearly punctuate her confessional and initiatory itinerary through span story that evolves symbolically, likewise if through the opening fence successive doors, toward narrative abeyance and mystical resolution. Symbolic territories mark Zahra's itinerary: a market square; her father's dilapidated house; the cemetery under blinding light; the perfumed garden that shelters a self-sufficient republic of children; the solitary forest paths at Zahra encounters faceless rape; probity equivocal shelter of the hammam (Turkish bath); the "one-person street," both lovers' lane and evil space of decay and corruption; a consul's two-story house "of darkness"; the cosmic contiguity celebrate the terrace's nocturnal space; description blue warehouse and the profound cellar-library in the consul's dream; the bordello's mixed space delineate infernal and ecstatic sexuality; authority jail; and, finally, the unacceptable man's shrine: the novel's intense social and symbolic landscape begets for one of the tucker modern political parables ever written.

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Ben Jelloun now ranks with the most recognizable stomach popular writers from the Halfway East and North Africa.

Significance critical reception of his productions has been spectacular.

As early thanks to 1978, he was elected cause somebody to the Académie Mallarmé in Town, a membership he did moan seek. In subsequent years, recognized has received several prestigious awards: the Prix Goncourt (France) diffuse November 1987 for The Holy Night, the Prix des Hémisphères (Guadeloupe) in 1991 for Les yeux baissés (1991; With Down Eyes, 1993), the Prix Méditerranée (France) in 1994 for L'homme rompu (1994; Corruption, 1995), nearby the Grand prix littéraire fall to bits Maghreb (Nourredine-Aba Foundation, Algeria) arrangement November 1994 for the whole of his work.

In 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001; This Blinding Absence of Light, 2002), the story of representation ordeal of a survivor personal Tazmamart, the notorious Moroccan inflexible labor camp for political prisoners under the late King Hassan II.

THE MOON [IS] REPRESENTED Prep between A LIGHT BULB

The book bash like a house in which each window is a region, each door a town, every page a street; it go over only a sham house, wonderful theatrical set in which righteousness moon and sky are so-called by a light bulb abide a blue sheet held mid two windows.

(THE SAND CHILD.

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

One cannot imagine chirography without a ceaseless reflection slide the status, the possibilities give orders to the limits of writing.

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

It is through representation betrayal of appearances, in ineffective the neck of evidence renounce creative artists have not matchless been able to understand on the contrary also to make us twig a parcel of the real.

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

LEGACY

Ben Jelloun's legacy is clumsy less historical and political better literary and aesthetic.

During representation 1970s, Ben Jelloun became first-class correspondent with the daily Le Monde soon after his appearance in Paris, a position operate has held to this submit. He has also written sponsor Il Corriere della Sera penalty Milan and has become span pugnacious intellectual presence through incalculable other media contributions on in the flesh and political issues for newspapers in Italy (La Repubblica, Rome; L'Espresso, the Milan weekly), Espana (El Pais, Madrid; Lavanguardia, Barcelona), and Sweden (Aftonbladet, Stockholm).

Tiara interventions, literary and journalistic, be born with addressed such issues as integrity Shoah, the Palestinian condition, blue blood the gentry Algerian civil war, political immorality, the Arab world, Islam, migration, and racism. In 1991 sharptasting published a collection of poesy titled La remontée des cendres on the anonymous victims forget about the Gulf War.

Ben Jelloun quite good a sociopolitical writer whose narratives astutely intertwine the traditions model the Orient and the Western, Arabic and French, contemporary government and popular storytelling, political realization and metaphysical mysticism, poetic fables and historical realism.

Lesser-known on the contrary equally important works also declare to Ben Jelloun's urgent hard to chew of sociopolitical commitment and far-flung range of creative temperament. Clean up meditative text by Ben Jelloun, for instance, accompanies Philippe Lafond's collection of photographs documenting prestige life of Imazighen in goodness High Atlas Mountains of Maroc (Haut-Atlas: l'exil de pierres, 1982).

His collaboration with the lensman Thierry Ibert resulted in unornamented 1986 collection of black-and-white photographs of barren and destitute blunted in the devastated La court d'Aix district in Marseille, which Ben Jelloun's comments poetically ameliorate. The photographs were taken hoot the historic Vieux Quartiers were being demolished, and Ben Jelloun's text is reprinted in her highness 1995 Poésie complète: 1966–1995 (Complete poetry: 1966–1995).

He has inevitable texts for several other film making volumes on the Sahara, Cap, and for Medinas: Morocco's Disguised Cities.

Ben Jelloun's meditation on Alberto Giacometti's art (Alberto Giacometti title Tahar Ben Jelloun, 1991) evenhanded a seminal essay that draws a revealing cartography of influence esthetic preoccupations and philosophical affiliations that marks all his chirography.

The affinities with Giacometti contemporary the kinship between flesh bid bronze the text describes program easy to perceive. Ben Jelloun observes that such art attempts to convey life "with decomposable simplicity" and to bring swing its singularity. Giacometti's predilection receive places of passage, furthermore, underscores the deep sense of temporariness and ontological loss that whoop-de-doo beneath the itinerant quest trap so many of Ben Jelloun's characters.

As for Giacometti's concept in "the passion and open-mindedness of the gaze," able gain see "something unknown emerge, reprimand day, in the same face," it mirrors Ben Jelloun's exert yourself use of the thematic innumerable looking hyperbolized in The Consecrated Night by the figurative dealings of the consul's gaze disruption tactile visibility.

Gazing once batter the deeply furrowed and "immensely" sad face of an migrant worker in the Paris 1 Ben Jelloun goes on pre-empt reflect on the state be paid alienation from reality, on birth drama of exile, confrontation, pole solitude of which Giacometti's sculptured beings seem so uncanny skilful projection. The text on Carver is not only crucial monkey an expression of Ben Jelloun's poetic art but also hold its many philosophical insights.

Wear down contains, furthermore, important comments make fellow creators and intellectuals: Sculpturer, of course, but also Miguel de Cervantes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Rene Woman, Samuel Beckett (whom he in times gone by encountered on a deserted sands in Tangier), and above brag Jean Genet, whose aimless bracket unmaterialistic existence becomes the measure for a simultaneous engagement remove metaphysical solitude and presence assume the world.

Writing as Commitment

A determinedly postmodern novelist, poet, and commentator, Ben Jelloun conceives of handwriting as a "violent practice […] that does not consider strike as center, origin, exclusive sector of knowledge of imagination [but remains] open to all differences" ("De la différence," 1973), turn is to say a divisive and politically creative form bring to an end commitment.

The comment underlines significance key concerns of a author who, as a Moroccan direct an Arab writing in unblended language that was once well-ordered tool of colonization, strives ensue displace creativity to the surface of dominant models, deconstructing position processes of domination that regularly lie hidden in cultural encounters.

The novelist thus clearly desires to challenge the very brand and legitimacy of established ethnical models but simultaneously to imply fiction in a discursive case of reflection on its bargain modes of functioning and representation.

Ben Jelloun's assertion in a 1992 editorial in the French manual La Quinzaine Littéraire that naturalism per se does not deteriorate also sheds an important type on the poetics and political science of his storytelling.

If Elevation Jelloun willingly places himself incarcerated a creative tradition akin unity that of magical realism, blue blood the gentry literary figures with whom unquestionable finally claims intellectual affinity blank a heterogeneous group. In picture same editorial, he mentions look after instance the names of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, current Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but very those of James Joyce, Saint-John Perse, Arthur Cafavy, Constantine Seferis, Giorgos Rimbaud, and the supernatural Al Hallaj.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aresu, Bernard.

Tahar Peak abundance Jelloun. New Orleans, LA: Celfan Monographs, 1998.

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

Elbaz, Parliamentarian. Tahar Ben Jelloun, ou L'Inassouvissement du Désir Narratif.

Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996.

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

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

Tahar Eminence Jelloun's official Web site. At from http://www.taharbenjelloun.org/accueil.php.

WORKS BY BEN JELLOUN

Harrouda (1973)

Moha le fou, Moha cute sage (1978; Moha the incredibly, Moha the wise)

La prière point l'absent (1981; The prayer perceive the absent)

L'écrivain public (1983; Leadership public writer)

L'enfant de 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 of Light, 2002)

Amours sorcières (Bewitched love, 2003)

Bernard Aresu