Tahar Ben Jelloun (review)

Tahar Ben Jelloun, by Bernard Aresu. CELFAN Edition Monographs. New Orleans: Department of French and Italian, Tulane U, 1998. 68 pp.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is without doubt one of the most prolific and important Maghrebian contemporary writers. Poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, he skillfully blends in his writings fact and fiction, literacy and oracy, past and present, and East and West, creating multidimensional works that can be read and interpreted on several levels. The present monograph by Bernard Aresu is yet another interpretation of Ben Jelloun's works, providing a novel insight into them.

Written as one long essay, Aresu's monograph is divided into several sections. Starting with a biographical introduction, Aresu goes on to give a cursory appraisal of Ben Jelloun's poetry (10-12) before moving to the novels that are presented here in chronological order. Aresu describes Harrouda, Ben Jelloun's first novel, published in 1973, as "a simultaneously fictional, historical, (auto)biographical, political and theoretical narrative" (14). He shows how Ben Jelloun's "humanitarian commitment" (11), for which he has become globally known, is evident from his earliest writings to the later ones on which his fame rests, including the Prix Goncourt-winning novel La nuit sacrée and its prequel, L'enfant de sable, two parables of "sexual politics" (25). Aresu explores the themes that characterize Ben Jelloun's writings, among them "wounded childhood," "silenced woman" (15), solitude, displacement, and alienation, both individual and collective. He frequently draws on his Maghrebian and Arab heritage, yet the message conveyed in his novels is a universal one, as Aresu stresses, where Ben Jelloun's voice "transcends its own insular vision [. . .] to make room for a language of human solidarity with (other) displaced, exiled communities" (19).

The last two sections of the monograph deal with the novels of the 1990s, beginning with Jour de silence à Tanger and Les yeux baissés, two asymmetrical plots of family dramas in exile" (46). Aresu says of Les yeux baissés that it "can be read as a liberating narrative, as discourse of emancipation from patriarchal domination" (50). The last novel discussed is La nuit de l'erreur, published in 1997, which "draws on imagination, dream and superstitious lore [. . .] and merges again the traditions of the tale and the novel" (60). Aresu's descriptions of all the works he surveys offer the reader eye-opening revelations. He points out the various influences that have inspired Ben Jelloun, from Moroccan folk literature to the Arabian Nights, as well as the works of individual writers like Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, and Jorge Luis Borges. Ben Jelloun has also been influenced by Sufism, as can be detected in some of his novels, particularly La nuit de l'erreur. Aresu, however, does not explore this aspect nor does he dwell on elements drawn from Arab culture and Arabic literature that are in evidence in most of Ben Jelloun's works, including his plays, which are not mentioned here. These, however, are only minor points in an otherwise highly absorbing work that is a welcome addition to the vast corpus of works on one of the most enigmatic and talented writers today.