This Blinding Absence of Light

"My eyes looked like those of madman, although I haven't lost my mind.  There was also death in my eyes, yet I am alive. I have not accepted having those eyes, there's something frightful in them. ... I'm afraid. And I see fear in the eyes of others.  Maybe I should have prepared myself for that shock. I'll get used to it, in the end."

Cette aveuglante absence de lumière, by Tahar Ben Jelloun

In the 1970's, the Polisario (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro) was founded in the Western Sahara to fight for independence from France.  In 1975, although the International Court of Justice upheld the claim of the native Saharawi people to self-determination, King Hassan II of Morocco organized the so-called "Green March" to recover what was then called the Spanish Sahara from Polisario forces.  Faced with an enormous invading army, Spain, which had been asked to intervene, sued for peace, and the resulting Madrid Agreement divided the disputed territory between Morocco and Mauritania.  The Polisario movement established a government-in-exile in Algeria (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), but the region--as empty and barren as any on earth (with a population of one-half million)--is still governed by Morocco. 

This Blinding Absence of Light is the story--a monologue, a parlay with madness--of Salim, a Moroccan soldier kept for eighteen years at Tazmamart Prison, a literal hellhole, an underground cell into which no light could penetrate, a coffin ten feet long by five feet wide, so cramped that the fifty-eight inmates, each kept in solitary confinement, couldn't stand. Here Salim and his fellow prisoners were kept (barely) alive on starvation rations for nearly two decades until 1991 when twenty-eight survivors were finally freed. 

"For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret."

To call this novel claustrophobic is an understatement--there are voices, but aside from the initial description of the prison cell, with its hole in the floor for excreting and its tiny hole in the ceiling for breathing, there is nothing to look at and no light with which to see, and only the surreally calm words of the narrator to listen to, words whose cadences are incantatory, as if Salim were reading the Qur'an and not narrating the tale of his unimaginable imprisonment. He is, as he says himself, a dead man. In the final chapters, describing his release, Salim speaks of being reborn: his eyes are unfocused, his body is stooped, his teeth are gone, and he cannot walk--the world has moved on, and he sits with his dying mother as Lazarus, come to proclaim not man's resurrection but his inhumanity to his fellow man. 

I've read my share of prison stories: Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle made an indelible impression on me many years ago; Cheever's Falconer, which might be his finest novel, Darkness at Noon with its expose of the Stalin show trials--however, I prefer true stories of incarceration, books like Wilde's De Profundis and the great Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, raw and honest books that deal with injustice, a genre that goes back at least to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. 

But to call Jelloun's fictionalization of Salim's two decades in Tazmamart "prison literature" is like calling Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a travel guide.  This Blinding Absence of Light is a psychological study of a human being in extremis--it asks us to consider not only what a person can endure (and not in a voyeuristic way--the distance between the reader and Salim is too great), but to consider the egregious suffering one man--in this case King Hassan II--can inflict on another.  The men interned at Tazmamart were never accused of a crime, never tried or convicted.  I won't compare their plight to that of the men at Guantanamo since comparisons of suffering are glib and misleading; yet in reading TBAOL one is forced to consider the consequences of long-term incarceration, especially absent any substantive legal process, on both inmates and their jailers. (In TBAOL the guards are as dehumanized as their charges).  The reader is forced to confront both the injustice as well as the horror of Salim's fate as the 6000 plus days of his sentence unfold. What could time have meant?  How could one have lived one day under these conditions?  Only the "blessing" of being allowed an hour above ground to bury the dead marked the eons of Salim's (literal) internment. 

Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Fes, in French Morocco, in 1944.  He received the bilingual, French-Arabic education typical of the colonial period (actually, that's not true: most often the education would be only in the metropolitan power's language, at least until independence).  Jelloun was a teacher of philosophy in Casablanca before moving to Paris in 1971.  He won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for his novel La Nuit Sacrée and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light. He has recently published a controversial account of the "Arab Spring," entitled The Spark.

For further information see Maureen Freely, here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14

This Blinding Absence of Light, trans. by Linda Coverdale, is published by the New Press.

George Ovitt (5/18/13)

Fate Must Bend to Desire

Mohamed Choukri--For Bread Alone

Years ago, in college, when someone put a copy of Naked Lunch into my hands and (reluctantly) I read it, I thought that Burroughs had lived the most depressing life I could imagine.  I'd read Sartre on Genet and all of Rimbaud's works in French, and made my way through a couple of Kerouac's drug-addled books (I found them tedious, but no one else did, so I wondered at my tastes), but no life I had read until Burroughs' ever seemed unimaginably painful and pointless--the willful acts of self-degradation depicted in his hallucinatory and often arresting prose never appealed to me; my rebellions were tame and mostly wholesome compared to those of the poètes maudits who were so popular in certain American intellectual circles in the 1960's.  Though I did have a picture of Rimbaud above my desk in my college dorm, it was Henry Miller's Rimbaud I admired--Time of the Assassins was a favorite book--Rimbaud as outlaw poet rather than criminal and drug addict and hustler.

Though I am seldom drawn to wholesome books--cheery stories of family life and triumphs over adversity don't constitute my regular fare--I haven't read anything in years that compares for sheer horror to Mohamed Choukri's For Bread Alone, first published in 1972 as Al Khubz al-Hafi.

This autobiographical novel kept me awake for a couple of nights, not the reading of it, but mulling over the miracle of Choukri's life, the fact that he endured miseries almost unimaginable--endured them and overcame them, insofar as one can ever truly overcome suffering. Told in dispassionate, flat, non-judgmental, and stoical style, For Bread Alone can hardly be thought of as a story of "overcoming adversity"--the ending is neutral, even pessimistic ("What shall I become? A devil most likely.")  I'd call the book a novel of "provisional survival" at best, or a story of the dogged desire to live as told by one of North Africa's most esteemed writers.

Choukri was born into almost unimaginable poverty in Morocco.  Eight of his brothers and sisters died of malnutrition.  In a harrowing scene that I haven't been able to forget, Choukri's father strangles one of Mohamed's brothers to death--"He twists the small head furiously." Dysfunctional hardly fits the case here--Mohamed's father is a sadist and a madman, someone Mohamed must avoid at all costs.

Mohamed does what he must to survive soul-crushing poverty--"I can steal from anyone who uses me"--he becomes a thief, a street prostitute, a kif smoker, a drunk, a criminal, an "outlaw," though the term makes no sense in a world in which there are no laws except the struggle for life.  Mohamed works when he can, but there is seldom work; he drifts from one desperate situation to another--it is as if his life is lived entirely in terms of "bread alone" and without any of the volition we ordinarily associate with human existence.  Here is a taste of Mohamed's world--he is sixteen or seventeen years old at this moment in the story:

  "My mother now gave birth to another girl, whom she named Zoha, after the one who had just died. A rat bit her on the hand one  night and she died too.
   My father had a habit of stealing up behind me in the street and seizing my shirt collar. Then with one hand he would twist my arm behind my back, while with the other he would beat me until the blood ran.....One morning I sat in a café smoking kif with two pickpockets. We decided to work together that day in order to spend a night of debauchery at the brothel. We went to the Plaza Nueva where the crowd was densest. It was not long before I felt the furious grip of my father's hand on the back of my neck...."

One would not think of For Bread Alone as a "political" book, but it is that.  Mohamed comes to politics in the way that poor people most often do, through direct experience of injustice.  Imprisoned during the independence riots of 1952, Mohamed is introduced to classic literature in Arabic, and to a vocabulary that will eventually allow him to begin to take control of his life:

   "Zailachi [a fellow inmate] took out a small pencil and set to work writing on the wall.
   'What are you writing?' I asked him.
   'I'm writing two lines of a poem by Abou el Qacem Chabbi. He was from Tunis.'
   'And what did he say?'
   'Here's what he says:
   If some day the people decide to live, fate must bend to that desire
   There will be no more night when the chains have broken.
   'Do you understand?'
   'No, but it's magnificent. What does it mean?'
   ...
   'It means that if a man or a country is enslaved and decides to tray and get free, Allah will help. He says: the dawn will respond and the chains will break because men will make it happen.'"

Zailachi opens Mohamed's eyes to the plight of colonized North Africa; but more importantly, he shows Mohamed the way to free himself from his past. 

Mohamed Choukri (1935-2003) was born in the Rif mountains near Nador in Morocco.  His life until age twenty is described in For Bread Alone, (1972) a book Choukri wrote with the encouragement of Paul Bowles, who became a supporter and translator of Choukri's work.  Choukri wrote in classic Arabic rather than in darija, the dialect of Tangier.  He became friends with Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs and other western writers resident in Morocco.  He wrote another volume of his life's story, translated as Streetwise, as well as stories and plays.

For Bread Alone is published by Telegram Books, trans. by Paul Bowles, with the brief introduction by the translator. 

http://www.telegrambooks.com/archives/telegram/telegram_books

George Ovitt (4/21/13)