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This Blinding Absence of
Light Moroccan-born writer,
Tahar Ben Jalloun, recently won the Impac Dublin Award, world’s
richest prize of euros 1,00,000, for his novel This Blinding Absence
of Light. Published in French last year, the novel now appears in a
forceful English translation.
It
could be a coincidence, albeit a welcome one, that protests
against the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the American occupation army
emerged at the same time as the Moroccan-born writer, Tahar Ben Jalloun,
received the Impac Dublin Award, world’s richest prize of euros
1,00,000, for his novel This Blinding Absence of Light. Published
last year, the novel now appears in a forceful English translation. Set
in an underground desert prison for political detainees, the novel
evokes the horrors of prisoners’ lives in the same way as the recent
media images of Abu Gharib revealed the excesses of the occupation
soldiers. That the victims of state terror in both cases are Arabs adds
a deeper poignancy to the situation Born in Fez, Morocco, Jalloun has
been living in Paris since 1961, "in order to write freely",
distanced from the repressive regime of King Hassan II. In this respect,
he is no different from other writers of the Maghreb (such as the
Algerian Assia Djebar), who are still not available to Arab readers
because of their anti-monarchist and anti-fundamentalist views. Though
Ben Jalloun has written impressive novels that have won him prestigious
awards (The Sacred Night, Children of Sand among them), it
is This Blinding Absence of Light, particularly its current
timeliness, that has put him among a rare group of writers who have
transformed documentary records of prisoners’ lives into richly
endowed fiction. One thinks of Solzhenitsyn, Julius Fucik and Vaclav
Havel in this group. The present book is based on true stories of a
concentration camp outside the Moroccan capital in which King Hassan
imprisoned his enemies under appalling conditions. From 1976, when a
leftist coup failed, to 1991, when the camp was opened, many prisoners
died of disease, maltreatment and sheer exhaustion from long neglect.
Ben Jalloun interviewed the few survivors, "living cadavers",
as he called them, and wrote of their experiences in highly charged
prose that has retained its power to disturb even in translation. The
nameless narrator is an ex-army lieutenant who survives the destruction
of his inmates. For him, as for others, the camp is "living
hell" where tortures are inflicted day and night and people die
bereft of the dignity that death confers on other occasions. "He
was letting himself to die" he says of one inmate Moh, "since
he had stopped eating quite a while ago and was not feeding his
mother". Karim, the timekeeper of the cells, dies unsung. So does
Rushdie, victim of his own grandiose illusions. Of Majid, the narrator
says unsentimentally, "he was the only one who hanged
himself." While the camp reeks of death, paranoia, brought on by
extreme loneliness and despair, claims many a victim. Even the laughter
is forced: "the laughter of despair has a colour and`85 made us
more miserable." Several inmates have visions and dreams; the
narrator always thinks of his mother back home, others of their siblings
who they had seen 20 years ago. Only the narrator manages to see his
family after his release, further accentuating the deprivations of the
prison life. Ben Jalloun has written a novel whose grimness reverberates
long after we have read it through. He has unmasked the lie behind all
power. |
