Ben Jelloun Research Articles

Narrating Diasporic Religion and Postsecular Identity in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village

Inspired by Western secular literary tradition, many diasporic writers in the Maghreb in general and in Morocco in particular did not include religious or spiritual themes in their literary works, as compared to the valorized ones of race, class and gender. Much of Maghrebian fiction, primarily written by immigrant writers of Islamic background who adopt secular perspectives that are often critical of Islam, has depicted religion, especially Islam, in negative terms. Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of those writers who are criticized for being self-orientalizing authors who ‘prostitute’ their works to their Western audience. But, Tahar Ben Jelloun is misunderstood by the majority of his readers. In this article, using postsecularism and secular spirituality as analytical tools, I will explore the postsecular identity and diasporic religion in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village. Reading the novel from a postsecular perspective and more specifically from a secular spiritual perspective, I will show that Tahar Ben Jelloun is neither self-orientalizing Islam nor celebrating French secularism. Instead, he is upholding postsecular values and diasporic consciousness by negotiating instances of extremism and communalism that mark the failures of both organized religion and Eurocentric secularism. Indeed, Ben Jelloun presents Islam as faith, as a spiritual practice; a diasporic religiosity which is not associated with any political doctrine or organization.

The Turbulence of Postcolonial Displacement, Exclusion and Racism in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les Yeux Baissés

Abstract This article examines the Moroccan-French author, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Les Yeux Baissés, translated as With Downcast Eyes. A winner of the Prix Goncourt, the author narrates the challenges of postcolonial displacement, exclusion and racism in a French multicultural neighbourhood. The novel explores the theme of displacement as one that is two-fold: firstly, it refers to the migration process, while secondly, it foregrounds the socio-cultural dimension of being “out of place” in the diaspora. I delve into the way migrants’ children experience the turbulence of displacement, exclusion, and racism. While engaging with postcolonial theoretical debates, this study considers the representation of migrants’ alienation in the narrative resulting from a lack of French hospitality and acute hostility. As such, this article demonstrates that postcolonial displacement does not enable the homogenization of cultures, but rather reinforces boundaries, at the social and cultural level, in the diaspora.

Monarchy and Politics of Detention in Taher Ben Jalloun's “This Blinding Absence of Light”

Tahar Ben Jelloun's novels are distinguished by their integration of problematic social phenomena into a purely literary form. While this isn't unique to Ben Jelloun's writing style, the author's way of crafting thought-provoking and often revolutionary experimental stories from the material of traditional Moroccan life is, at least in a way extraordinary: his characters experience social difficulties and embarrassments in their lives through the metaphor of a fictional existence of their self-perception. Thus, for example, their search for identity in their social context manifests in their search for self-perception as fictional characters and power struggles in relationships. Their relationship takes the form of a battle for control of the story. Political prisoners associate writing with their quest for freedom. This article therefore focuses on the torture, body and voice representations of Taher Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light (2002). Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory will be used to approach the psychological disintegration of characters in the text following such a Dark Decade experience and will borrow eclectic concepts from interdisciplinary studies; Erving's concept of Goffman's "holistic institution", Elaine Scarry's comprehensive and detailed theoretical definition and analysis of torture, and Judith Herman's study of trauma.

Neurocognitive study of bodily and traumatic memory in a Moroccan novel on Alzheimer’s disease

AbstractBackgroundPerson‐centered care in dementia focuses on empowering patient’s wellbeing and quality of life. In this context, Ben Jelloun’s novel About My Mother (2016) addresses multiple issues related to social justice, hegemony, ageism, and women’s health conditions by combining literary, fictional autobiography and factual biography in a critical period of Moroccan colonial and post‐colonial history. We will study Lalla Fatma as a prototype carrying a triple burden: early traumatic events of life, weight of tradition, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).MethodText mining was used for lexical‐semantic analysis and to develop patterns of themes across the novel’s corpora. A neurocognitive approach has been used to describe gendered aesthetics, antero‐retrograde amnesia, traumatic and bodily memory.ResultTheoretical framework from Tulving descriptions of noetic and autonoetic memory disorders have been used to classify Lalla Fatma amnesia. Alzheimer’s disease is an incentive to adopt the narrative of filiation and reconstruction that brings into life distant memories. Ben Jelloun’s novel gives the subjectivity “insight of disease” more time and space in order to express all states of memory in a stream of consciousness until its abolition. Moreover, the question of the genesis of psychogenic‐organic memory disorders through early trauma in the life of Lalla Fatma could favor a triple stress at a physiological level “a declined global health,” a microstructural level “microaggressions from her caregivers,” and macrostructural level “the trauma of the colonial past and successive widowing”.ConclusionThis study characterized AD using a mixture of fictional and factual autobiography. The anguish of successive widowing may reactivate psychic traces and an intrapsychic conflict between the desire of Lalla Fatma to preserve the lost object “body and memory” and the weight of society “culture and tradition”. The person‐centered care was successfully implemented thanks to the involvement of multiple caregivers around the main character.

Neurocognitive analysis of topographical memory disorder in Alzheimer’s disease from fictional autobiography

AbstractBackgroundTopographical disorientation is very common in Alzheimer’s disease as dementia worsens; however, it is often one of the earliest manifestations. This study examined whether fictional autobiography might be a source for analyzing linguistic features in terms of toponomy and neurocognitive aspects of topographical disorientation in Lalla Fatma, a patient with Alzheimer’s disease. Additionally, we investigated how the toponymy of old, current, and new names overlapped in the novel About my Mother (2016), which was written by the Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun.MethodThe neurocognitive approach followed the taxonomy described by Aguirre and D’Esposito (1999) to determine the clinical subtype that best described topographical disorientation or spatial agnosia from Lalla Fatma’s discourse. Text mining and toponymic approaches were used to develop patterns of spatiotemporal themes across novel corpora coupled with computational analysis (T‐Lab plus 21).ResultIn Ben Jelloun’s narrative, the overlapping of Tangier and Fez creates a temporal framework to remap memories that have been trapped between the walls, ramparts, and fortresses of imperial Moroccan cities. Lalla Fatma’s house in Tangier seems to have been neglected, similar to her dilapidated and lost memories. The house involves seeking self and identity in a physical and material reality that is subject to spatiotemporal disorientation. It was also a trigger for expressing the present moment of melancholy and nostalgia aggravated by Lalla Fatma’s declining health and mental status. According to the taxonomy by Aguirre and D’Esposito (1999), two types of topographical disorientation have been found in the novel (landmark agnosia and anterograde disorientation)ConclusionThis study provides evidence suggesting that fictional autobiography should be investigated cross‐culturally in terms of linguistic and neurocognitive aspects in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.

Pain, Agony, and Trauma in the Characters of ‘Toba Tek Singh’ and ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’

‘Toba Tek Singh’ is an Urdu Short story written by Saadat Hassan Manto and ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is a French Novel Written by Taher Ben Jelloun. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was perhaps written in 1954 and published in 1955 whereas ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ was written in 2001. There is more than four decades span between both works of literature. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is pure fiction but ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is although a novel but based on a true story or narration of a prisoner who spent eighteen years of his life in one of the worst prisons of the documented history. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is written in the third person whereas ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ is narrated in the first person. This research will be referring here to a 2002 translation of ‘This Blinding Absence of Light’ by Linda Coverdale in English. ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is a fictitious character who is a patient in a lunatic asylum. Before suffering from the mental illness ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was a landlord and during the partition of India, his village and his lands go to a Muslim majority country i.e., Pakistan. This research intends to study the effects of the pain, agony, and trauma on the psyche of the characters here.

Moslem Women in Paris on Novel of Tahar Ben Jelloun: Les Yeux Baissés

Abstract. This article aims to describe the cultural conflicts occurred by Maghreb immigrants in Paris, especially female immigrants who have various conflicts, due to the difference perception of women both in Maghreb and in France. As a qualitative research, this research instrument is the researchers themselves with data from the novel Les Yeux Baissés by Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Maghreb author living in Paris. The data were then analyzed using the Semiotic theory of Roland Barthes: the novel is considered as a sign to be interpreted. The results of the study indicate that the cause of the conflicts is the differences in tradition, race, and religion. These differences make them feel “unaccepted” in France. Therefore, Moslem women in Paris have two types of cultural identities: Identity of being (the mother of Fathma, the main character) and Identity of becoming (Fathma, the main character). Besides, these Maghebian immigrants belong to the diaspora’s group: First, the Essentialists, diaspora who closed themselves off, just carried on their traditions, culture and religion as they did back home. Second, whom adopt the French culture, religion, and way of life. Third, those with 'floating' traits: born in France, do not know the cultural traditions of their hometown, only know French culture which “does not accept them”. Therefore it can be said that the ‘floating’ generation needs a 'special place' that is neither the culture of their parents, nor the culture of France, and that third place can be called a 'place of transit'.Keywords: Maghreb Diaspora, Moslem Women, Cultural Conflict, Place of Transit

Narrativizing what cannot be told: The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun as a liminal trauma narrative

ABSTRACT This article examines The Sand Child (L’enfant de sable) by Tahar Ben Jelloun as a liminal trauma narrative. The novel is discussed as an attempt to narrativize trauma. Although trauma resists narrativization, it is in these manifestations of failure that the essence of the narrative is sought. Its liminality (fragmentation, openness, intertextuality, and inconclusiveness) results from Ben Jelloun’s intention to convey the difficulties of expressing a trauma. Thus, the oral context of the novel’s communicative situation, the rivalry of raconteurs (narrators), is described as a hypoleptic practice that results in commoning; that is, creating a community of storytellers and listeners/readers. The article also rethinks the relationship between text and reader through trauma theory to highlight the ethical responsibility of a reader who bears witness to a protagonist’s trauma. The protagonist’s reluctance to work through the trauma is regarded as a manifestation of resistance to cultural expectations, especially gender role models.

Negotiating spaces of fear in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s migrant writing

This article examines how dystopic Moroccan urban societies generate a culture of fear that produces the fantasy of fleeing and how this fear sustains the dynamic acts of nomadism. It deploys postcolonial utopianism and psycholinguistics to study how Ben Jelloun’s ‘postmodern nomads’ and exilic subjects negotiate the spaces of fear in Labyrinthe des sentiments and Partir. The essay goes further to show how these psychosocially alienated characters use attitudinal lexemes to indexicate the fearful episodic memories of their original and foster loci. In both novels, repressed fear remains an essential catalysing element for the psycholinguistic construction of the utopian imagination for the desired spaces of Europe. Social dreaming is, nevertheless, the cord that binds illusion with reality and transforms the postcolonial subject’s fear into faith for a better tomorrow. The study concludes that Ben Jelloun’s migrant writing illustrates migrant and exilic subjects who negotiate all spaces of fear that are gendered, transcultural and transnational.

Bodies for Sale: Sex Tourism in Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved (2015)

Bodies for Sale: Sex Tourism in Nabil Ayouch’s Much Loved (2015)

Le système kyriarkal à l’épreuve de l’abjection chez Tahar Ben Jelloun et Assia Djebar

Cet article examine ce que nous caractérisons comme l’abject carcéral (abject kyriarkal) dans Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (2001) de Tahar Ben Jelloun et « La femme en morceaux » (1997), conte tiré d’Oran, langue morte d’Assia Djebar. Ces deux ouvrages francophones, sous le paradigme théorique ultra-contemporain du système kyriarkal tel qu’il se manifeste dans la fiction théorique de Behrouz Boochani (No Friend but the Mountains, 2018) et dans les travaux de son traducteur Omid Tofighian, nous permettent de nous interroger sur la relation entre l’indicible et l’abject, sur la contamination de l’abjection à l’instance générique de ces deux ouvrages, ainsi que le rapport espace-temps chez Djebar et Ben Jelloun. Il sera particulièrement question de la manière dont l’indicible se positionne vis-à-vis de la langue coloniale ; de la textualité de l’abject—et d’une tentative de création d’un texte-prison—ainsi que du territoire ambigu que partagent la prison et l’abjection où être et non-être se confrontent, et où l’espace liminal entre la subjectivité et l’altérité domine.

Cyjanofobia: Sinobrody od Perraulta do Ben Jellouna

The story of Bluebeard belongs to the fairy tales written by Perrault, which in later times have seen almost countless travesties – in literature, film, opera and others. This article attempts to make a comparative analysis of three French-language literary versions of Bluebeard – from the early classics (Charles Perrault), through the classics of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Anatole France), to modern times (Tahar Ben Jelloun). The reasons for the fear present in the story have changed over the centuries, from fear for one’s own life to fears related to the disturbance of the social order.

Silenced Tongues, Speaking Bodies: The Representation of Postcolonial Bodies in Incarceration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light

This paper examines the representation of postcolonial bodies in incarceration in postcolonial Morocco in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light. This representation is explored in light of two different literary theories and concepts: Julia Kristeva’s “abject bodies”, and Arthur Frank’s “disciplined bodies”. The first concept “abject bodies” mirrors the postcolonial oppressive regime’s desired representation of the political detainees’ bodies as raw and primitive, loathsome and excluded, and dehumanized and desexualized. Such degrading representation triggers feelings of humiliation, estrangement, denial, and alienation on the part of the prisoners, creating an identity crisis and a self and other dilemma. However, the second concept “disciplined bodies” serves as a tool of resistance, since the prisoners introduce a counter-representation of their bodies that defies the one prescribed and depicted by the state. By practicing self- control and regimentation over their bodies, the prisoners are able to reach a state of spiritual transcendence through their permeable bodies, a state that helps them escape their corporeal reality of suffering and abjection into the sublime ethereal realms of meditation, emancipation, renewal, inspiration, and ultimate power.

Corps, culture et société: une lecture de L’enfant de sable et La nuit sacrée de Tahar Ben Jelloun

This article aims to study the vision of Tahar Ben Jelloun towards the body through which the social and cultural situation of the Maghreb countries is clarified. The Moroccan author charges the body with the Arab-Muslim tradition, with male domination and culture, with the erasure of women in society. Hadj Ahmed Souleïmane, in a country that favours men, after having had seven daughters, he feels dishonoured, castrated, finally to repair this evil and rehabilitate his honour, he makes his daughter a boy, from birth, who will be the man of the family, his heir, not only of material goods but essentially of the values of masculinity and patriarchy. He manipulates both his daughter’s body and her way of thinking, teaching her how to become a man according to tradition, also inspecting her body, her reactions and her actions. The body is thus polysemous, through which we understand Ben Jelloun’s vision of gender, culture, family education, society, the male/female relationship and religion. Ben Jelloun uses the body for subversive reasons in order to deconstruct society’s vision of the body, of the values and culture that determine society. In his work, the body thus consists in condemning and denouncing.

Différentes sources d’inspiration dans l’oeuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi

In the article the author analyses various sources of inspiration noticeable in the works of Ananda Devi. Considering the writer’s background, her native island of Mauritius, a multi-ethnic multi-lingual and multi-cultural island, various cultural inspirations are noticeable in her works. The author of this article focuses on the novelist’s prose and analyses the cultural references rooted in Indian, European, African and Creole cultures. The aim of this analysis is also to describe the intertextual relations that exist between some of Ananda Devi’s texts and the works of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Arthur Rimbaud or Malcolm de Chazal, T. S. Eliot, Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee. In the analysis, the author draws on the research of Homi Bhabha and Gérard Genette.

Disability in Moroccan Literature: Nabil in Au Pays, Tahar Ben Jelloun

The present paper is an attempt to explore the representations of disability and People with Disabilities (PWD) in the Moroccan novel Au Pays by focusing on one character, Nabil, a trisomic child, and exploring how he is seen through the lens of his society. Sometimes seen as a gift from God and other times as a burden, Nabil epitomizes other people with disabilities who live in societies as outcasts. The analysis showed that the exclusion of PWD is the result of the continuous association of disability with abnormality and the inability to understand and thus accept difference. This association eventually yields disabled societies, which further constribute the systematic exclusion of PWD.

Identity and its Reflection in the Novels With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Refugee by Ahmad Mallah

Tahar Ben Jelloun's With Downcast Eyes and Ahmad Mallah's Refugee are among the successful novels that deal with the phenomenon of migration and subsequent identity and identity crisis with complete realism. Not only do these writers seek to criticize their traditional societies by addressing social issues, but they also uncover the dark and hidden chambers of human existence with a critical perspective. Since the characters in both novels can represent a wide range of immigrants who have voluntarily or inevitably been forced to leave their homeland, the study of these two novels can be a clear example of the identity crisis and the cracks that immigrants fall into while facing their second homeland and the new world. This article will try to adopt a descriptive-analytical approach through the characters of these two novels and the situations in which they are placed, to draw and study identity construction and gaining identity and also a correct understanding and then researching the challenges that these people face.

La déconstruction de la virilité : une lecture de l’œuvre de Tahar Ben Jelloun à la lumière des Mille et une nuits

The aim of this article is to explore the deconstruction of virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s short stories in the light of The Thousand and One Nights. In these two texts, virility turns out to be a social construct that organizes the society in which men continue to show themselves to be superior and dominant over women. However, the appearance of rebellious women on stage turns the situation upside down by questioning male domination. Scheherazade and Badoure, in The Thousand and One Nights, Zahra in The Sand Child, deconstruct male power. Indeed, if the fight of Scheherazade is limited to language, thus saving his sisters from the barbarism of Schahriar, that of Zahra, also relates to language, but is distinguished by acts of emancipation demonstrating a modern feminism, thus deconstructing the controversial feminism assumed by Scheherazade.

L’expérience de la migration en France ou la quête de l’éthique cosmopolite. Analyse du roman Soleil amer de Lilia Hassaine

This article shows the consequences of migratory movements in France throughout the twentieth century, as well as the proposals for improvement from the perspective, of current critics such as Bertrand Badie (2008), Tahar Ben Jelloun (1984, 2009), François Jullien (2008, 2012) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009, 2015). Within this framework, the construction of a cosmopolitan ethic is imposed (Cortina, 2021) able to articulate the dialogism offered by contemporary intercultural literature written by women (Alfaro, Sawas et Soto, 2020; Alfaro, 2022). In this context, the novel Soleil amer published in 2021 by the French writer of Algerian origin, Lilia Hassaine, describes the migration problems in France for four decades and the consequences experienced by an Algerian family in which the cultural parameters North vs South come into confrontation and where tradition vs progress generate disagreements. There-fore, we will evoke in this article an analytical reflection around social integration.

Ben Jelloun’s Point of View on Racism in the Essay Le Racisme Expliqueé À Ma Fille

Moroccan literature has been growing since the 1950s, when Morocco was still under French occupation. The big themes that commonly appear in Moroccan literature are the issues of colonialism and racism. One Moroccan writer whose work speaks a lot about racism is Tahar Ben Jelloun. This article aims to analyze one of Ben Jelloun's works entitled Le Racisme expliquée à ma fille. The essay discusses a father and his 10-year-old daughter about racism and what makes people became racist. In the essay, some words are in bold, and these words are mostly phenomena or social events related to the dark history of world civilization due to racism. This study used a qualitative method by using Genette's focalization theory and opposition theory by Greimas markers. The analysis results show that the concept of racism in this essay is conveyed through the father's focalization even though the essay's form is a question and answer between the father and daughter. The selection of forms of dialogue with father and daughter figures can be seen as a narrative strategy to convey the implicit meaning to combat racism. Anti-racism education in the family is Tahar Ben Jelloun's reflection on solutions to racism in the world.