This Blinding Absence of Light

By Tahar Ben Jelloun

This Blinding Absence of Light Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun Publisher: New Press Translator: Linda Coverdale ISBN: 1565847237 Publishing Date: 2002 Pages: 195 Format: Hardcover

Prison narratives from all over the world seem to hold a perennial fascination for readers. Our continent has, of course, produced many by famous authors such as Wole Soyinka, Nawal el Saadawi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o - and a number by South African writers.

Unlike most of these, the French text Cette Aveuglante Absence de Lumière (2001) by the famous Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun (translated into English as This Blinding Absence of Light by L Coverdale (2002), is not an account of the author's personal experiences. Nevertheless, the fact that the author has lived in France for many years and that he has here used his skill to give voice to an almost forgotten atrocity (committed against men like the one whose testimony he used to write this novel - a particularly cruel imprisonment strategy employed during the reign of the father of the present Moroccan king) probably signifies a problematic political relationship with the government of Ben Jelloun's motherland. Indeed, the account of the release of the survivors (near the end of the text) takes note of the attempts by various government representatives to warn the narrator against speaking to the foreign media about his prison experiences. The novel, and the fame it generated (especially in France, where it was first published, as well as in the field of "world English literature" since garnering the richest of all literary prizes, the Dublin Award, last year), eloquently defied that attempt to silence this horrifying history.

One might, then, characterise the novel as a remarkable expression of empathy.

Yet it needs to be added immediately that another noticeable difference between Ben Jelloun's narrative of endurance and the great majority of well-known works of this kind is the fact that the narrator is not a man sustained by political principles, such as those of a freedom fighter or a resistance leader against an oppressive regime. With little fondness for the Moroccan king as ruler (at the time), and without any idealistic belief that a successful take-over by the military would have improved conditions in Morocco - indeed without any real political convictions at all - he is simply drawn into the palace assassination of about a hundred of the king's guests (Hassan II himself escaped unharmed) as a junior officer obeying orders - with only a vague hunch of what the plan was and with no real stake in the outcome. Nor does the narrator fire a single shot during the invasion of the palace.

Initially, the judicial response to the attempted coup seems predictable and fair, if strict: the military men who planned and led it are sentenced to death by firing squad and the junior officers and others (like the narrator) to ten years' imprisonment. But what happens is that after two years of "conventional" imprisonment the narrator and some others (the principle of selection is never made clear) are suddenly removed and placed in a secret, underground dungeon in the middle of nowhere, where they are kept, deliberately, in near-total and nearly uninterrupted darkness for a further eighteen years.

Besides being deprived of light (either natural or artificial), their conditions are atrocious also in being horrifically cramped (the narrator cannot stand upright in his five feet high, ten-and-a-half feet long and five feet wide cell), and in the inmates' being deprived of any healthy, fresh food and of an adequate, clean water supply. Indeed, the narrator suspects that there is a diabolical intention behind these measures: to cause the inmates' deaths, but to do so as slowly and excruciatingly as possible.

And die they do, under these conditions - most of the twenty-three men who are kept in Cell Block B of Tazmamart prison along with the narrator: Hamid goes insane and dies after about six weeks; Driss (who suffers from a wasting disease, untended here) dies after about a year when his body has become so contorted and clenched that he can no longer chew; later Baba dies of the extreme winter cold (none of them is equipped with any proper bedding or a mattress, merely two thin blankets in their cement-floored cells - and they are all thinly clothed); Larbi dies after going on a hunger strike; Mustapha is killed by scorpion bites (untreated); Moh goes insane and dies after a short hunger strike; Atta is reportedly shot during an escape attempt; Abdelkader commits suicide by swallowing something sharp; Majid goes insane and hangs himself in his own clothing; Bourras dies of a pierced bowel resulting from his attempt to treat his desperate constipation without proper instruments or medicine; Sabban is (horribly) devoured by hundreds of cockroaches who eat into an untreated, open wound (a broken arm); Gharbi (whom they nicknamed Ustad because of his Koranic knowledge) dies serenely after wasting away; Abdelmalek loses his mind and dies after accidentally ingesting cockroach eggs; Lhoucine goes insane with despair and starves himself to death; Fellah goes insane and dies because of untreated syphilis; Abdelkarim dies of despair after seventeen years of incarceration; Abdullah dies of gastro-enteritis (also, of course, untreated); Icho and Mohammed both die of tuberculosis, and Abbass dies (a cruel irony!) when his body is unable to cope with the sudden improvement in their food supply - just before their release. At the beginning of their detention in Tazmamart, surviving prisoners are allowed out to bury their deceased comrades - these are rare opportunities to see the sunlight and breathe the open air, but even this "privilege" is soon withdrawn.

The drabness of such an existence and the despair-inducing absence of any contact with loved ones or with normal life, the sense of having been deliberately "erased" and forgotten, are communicated by means of a kind of indelible, precise lucidity.

Ben Jelloun succeeds admirably in maintaining an authentic narrative voice - that of a not highly educated but cultured man, a sensitive but ordinary and practical-minded young career soldier who is suddenly forced to acquire all the ascetic virtues of a saint.

These are his survival strategies: prayer as a state of serene resignation; subordination of the body and its terrible discomforts; spiritualising his imagination to achieve occasional mental pilgrimages to the Kaaba in Mecca - "the black stone that cleanses the soul of death" (1). All of these can happen only because he deliberately erases all yearning for loved ones, every detail of the memories of normal existence and all forms of nostalgia.

Because this utterly strict spiritual discipline is necessary to the survival of the narrator, we also learn very little from this text about the conditions of life in Morocco, or of this society's history or politics - we merely catch glimpses of the narrator's decadent and selfish father (a royal favourite, the "companion" of the king), of his brave and selfless mother who raised him and his five siblings as a single parent, of his lovingly indulged but joyously talented youngest brother (his mother's favourite).

The strict regime that the narrator imposes on himself fits into the devices that the prisoners of Block B employ as a group to sustain themselves in prison: one of them (Abdelkarim) is the group's timekeeper - he is able to announce time, day and date with uncanny accuracy; another (Gharbi) is the religious expert who can recite and teach others the Koran. They also give one another instructions in history and geography. The narrator, a natural spiritual leader and guide, becomes, in due course, the group's storyteller - he can and does recite several French classics word for word, but is unable to give his fellow inmates the tales from the Arabian Nights, so he starts making up tales and, to vary the entertainment, later narrates the screenplays of famous American films to his comrades. They also have Koranic instruction sessions and English lessons, since they can communicate (albeit with difficulty) among cells. But the periods of silence, especially at night, are strictly kept - for their sanity's sake. Silence, the narrator tells a newcomer, "can replace the light we miss so much" (122). But "Oh, slowness!" he exclaims at one point. "It was the chief enemy …" (1). He even speculates fearfully that "since they [their jailers] had provided for everything, perhaps they had laid the flooring in the cell so that it would tilt after a few months or years and hurl us into the mass grave already dug right under the building" (4).

The condition of abulia, the sapping or loss of will power, is a great danger for all of these men, yet the narrator soon discovers that "the instinct of self-preservation would not help me survive" (29). He also has to "renounce sadness and hatred" (37) as he freed himself of his memories and of the poison of hope. Deep into his incarceration period, the narrator one day realises that men punished so excessively that they are "killed by suffering and sadness" (78) deserve to go to paradise. This realisation, of a spiritual or moral superiority to their punishers, convinces him that their would-be executioners would not get the better of him. In a beautiful passage, we are told that he

entered silence and immobility. I breathed deeply and invoked the supreme light that dwelled in my mother's heart, in the hearts of men and women of goodwill, in the souls of the prophets, saints, and martyrs, in the minds of those who have resisted and triumphed over misfortune through the sole power of the spirit, the power of inner prayer, which has no goal, which takes you toward the centre of gravity of your own conscience (79).

Such rarely-achieved peaks of spiritual attainment contrast with terrible moments, as in a dream (or envisioned fear) when he "sees" himself running into his family home, where his mother is calling him, but he cannot reply: "My voice is locked up in my throat. It's a holiday. I am absent. I see all of them. No one sees me" (99).

All the prisoners undergo a great deal of physical suffering; the narrator's circumstances give him dreadful rheumatism as well as near-maddening toothache (he loses more than half his teeth and emerges with a deformed spine, five inches shorter than when he was first imprisoned). "Our bodies," he says, "were rotting limb by limb" (104).

What the few survivors find they have to do is to engage in "rebuilding things with your mind, avoiding the snares of memory", and to fight back by "rebuilding things as if the dungeon were not our last home" (113). They are perpetually stalked by boredom. What they miss most, the narrator decides at one point, is "intelligence" - in the sense of mental stimulation and challenges (171).

As so often happens, it is when the faint promise of their eventual release from prison reaches them that the narrator comes closest to collapsing and that he feels "vanquished by pain and sorrow" and "invaded by evils" to the point of "madness" (173). But when he realises that an attempt is going to be made to "erase" the prison of Tazmamart and what was done to those imprisoned in it, he feels a sardonic disdain towards officialdom and experiences a profound determination: "Ah my memory," he exclaims mentally, "my child who will bear these words across to the other side of my life, beyond the visible!" (179).

When he is eventually discharged, the sight of his own nearly forgotten, deeply marked and now haggard face frightens the narrator himself. His eyes burn with a terrible intensity, his rib cage is deformed and his lung capacity diminished.

At this point the reader needs to recall the brief authorial note preceding the main text to make the nearly unrelentingly harrowing narrative bearable - it informs one of the name of the actual narrator, Aziz, and of the fact that after his release he achieved a new life in which he had a son, young Réda - the "light of his third life".

Sustaining so nearly eventless a narrative over 190 pages and shaping it into a reading experience that is at once harrowing, riveting, and elegant is Tahar Ben Jelloun's great achievement. One feels, too, that he never falsifies the "actual" narrator's (or informant's) spirit or nature, although most of the text must be Ben Jelloun's invention. Yet he devised a living rhythm for the narrative, one that does not misrepresent the emptiness of eighteen years' underground imprisonment, nor (by impression) "shortens" this weary time.

But, of course, human beings will find the markers to set off periods of time from one another. In the narrative of the Tazmamart captivity, the stages of the imprisonment are demarcated for this reader by the appearance of some creatures in the prison: during the early and perhaps most dreadful period, highly poisonous scorpions are deliberately introduced into the dungeon; at a later stage, a hapless dog is actually (insanely!) "imprisoned" in a cell like the human captives (allegedly for having bitten a visiting general) - it slowly goes mad till it, too, dies; at a later stage, a dove that the men name Freedom briefly lives in the prison with them before they release it; and during the final period of their incarceration, a sparrow (Tebebt) becomes the narrator's pet - he learns how to "read" its songs as it "reports on" life in the outside world. At night, "when the cold gnaws at my bones, … when calling for help or screaming is useless," says the narrator, "I remember Tebebt's song … until my suffering has loosened its grip" (125).

In contrast with the gentle sparrow, the man who is the commander of Tazmamart (the "Kmander", as the guards call him) is "stone-cold": one of those people whose "minds and bodies have been carefully drained of all humanity" (133). Hardly better is the narrator's father, who, encountering the narrator some time after his release, acts "as if nothing has happened" (190) - his conduct resembling that of the Moroccan authorities, who attempt to obliterate the scandal of Tazmamart by planting an instant forest of old oak trees over the bulldozed remains of the infamous prison.



LitNet: 06 May 2005

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