Tahar Ben Jelloun

UNESCO Courier, August-Sept, 1991

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan poet and novelist who spans two cultures, Arab and French. in 1987 he became the first Arab writer to win France's most prestigious literary prize when his novel La Nuit sacree was awarded the Prix Goncourt.

An English translation of La Nuit sacree appeared in 1989 under the title The Sacred Night, and several of his other works have been published in English, including The Sand Child (1987) and Silent Day in Tangier 1991).

Alert to the hopes and sufferings of Arab men and women and to the stirrings of freedom in the world at large, Tahar Ben Jelloun here talks about his work and the commitment to truth and justice from which it springs.

* Let's start at the beginning. You are an Arab writer who writes in French. why?

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents. I am a Moroccan, an Arab My culture is Arab, Islamic, but it was in French, the language of the former colonial power, that I spontaneously expressed myself when I began to write. This is a paradox which stems from a historical situation. Morocco, which was a French Protectorate from 1912 to 1956, managed to be receptive to French culture without losing any part of its identity. I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers. ActuaUy, what I express in French could very well be expressed in any other language.

All the same, the faa that I do not use the language of my people perhaps means that I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language, the language of the Qur' an-which naturally intimidates me--would not allow me to take. On the one hand there are taboos and prohibitions; on the other there is my own sense of propriety. It is difficult for us to ill-treat the Arabic language.

* Do you mean that the language of tradition, of unchanging values, is your mother tongue, whereas to break new ground and explore other directions, you need to express yourself in a foreign language?

* Yes, it helps and liberates the imagination. For many people, poetry is working with words, with language. It is hard to imagine a poet who expresses himself in a language other than that of his people. But there is another conception of poetry, which is, for me, a broader and more accommodating one. For me poetry is a situation-a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history. Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other, it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world. It does this through images, through a musical universe. And this universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

* Precisely. What kind of adaptation bas there been between the French language and your universe and between your universe and the French language?

* There has been no adaptation, but rather a marriage, a kind of cohabitation that I have entered into with French and which means that I give this rather Cartesian language another feel, another memory. I introduce it into a world to which it could never otherwise have been admitted. If you send a French sociologist, researcher or journalist to Morocco, he will not see the kind of things that I see as a result of my deep involvement as an Arab and a Moroccan. The French investigator will not see these things or be able to express them.

In a sense, we Arab writers who write in French are the ones who offer hospitality to the French language! Not only do we adopt it, we invite it home, we transform it, we take it to places where it is not accustomed to go. Sometimes it gets lost, but so much the better since it's a language which is somewhat too rigid except when it is taken in hand by great poets like Mallarme, Baudelaire or Rimbaud. Jean Genet transformed French to a beautiful rebel princess. But few French poets have done with the language what poets like Kateb Yacine or Aime' Cesaire, two great franco-phone poets, have done. These are writers who have gone very far creatively, experimentally, and as craftsmen of the language.

* Different images? Different sounds?

* Above all a different manner. Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words. The genius of an Aime' Cesaire is to know how to choose words with fantastic precision and to marry them in such a way that they produce unexpected images. By doing this he creates new insights into meaning which are surprising and sublime. This is beauty, something that cannot be explained away technically. Beauty is first and foremost an emotion. When I read Aime' Cesaire's Cashiers d'un retour au pays natal for the first time, I was spellbound. The same thing when I discovered Kateb Yacine's Nedjma. Perhaps my sensibility steers me towards these writers who are out on their own.