A Palace in the Old Village
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5 Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front party, is a reactionary who supports sweeping restrictions on immigration. In the first round of voting in the French presidential election of 2002, he unexpectedly beat Lionel Jospin, the main left candidate, which meant that the deeply unpopular Jacques Chirac then ran against the even more unpopular Le Pen as the lesser of two evils, and won. (Sample election slogan: “Vote for the crook, not the fascist.”)
6 The Makhzen is the governing elite in Morocco, a feudal institution something like the Russian nomenklatúra. This untouchable network of important men in finance, the military, the police, and government, as well as tribal leaders and the royal family, revolves around the king, who is still all-powerful in Morocco. The present king’s father, Hassan II (reigned 1961–99), adopted a market-based economy (with underwhelming success) and allowed the institution of some mechanisms of parliamentary democracy (which the conservative king essentially ignored). Opposition to Hassan’s despotic rule was ruthlessly repressed: many dissidents were exiled, jailed, or killed. In his novel This Blinding Absence of Light, Tahar Ben Jelloun describes the secret underground prison, a series of six-by-three-foot cells, in which men unwittingly involved in an attempted coup spent twenty years in utter darkness; the few survivors were freed when the outside world discovered and voiced outrage at such cruelty. King Mohammed VI presents himself as an enlightened ruler battling poverty and corruption, a (modest) champion of women’s rights and democracy. His economic reforms have seen some progress, and Morocco’s dismal human rights record has improved, but the old problems of repression and abject poverty remain. The king remains a dictator in almost complete command of a country without any real separation of powers or government accountability.
7 “Al-Baqara” (“The Heifer”) is the second sura; it sums up the teaching of the Koran and takes its name from a brief reference to Moses, who tells his reluctant people that God commands them to sacrifice a cow. The parable of the heifer illustrates the inadequacy of blind or reluctant obedience, for when true faith is lost, empty compliance means nothing, and the soul begins to die.
8 “Marriage for pleasure” is a Muslim tradition that permits temporary religiously sanctioned sex: a marriage contract is drawn up for a period ranging from an hour to a year, without any commitments or religious ceremony. When the time limit is up, the “marriage” automatically dissolves.
9 Jamaa al-Fna is the vast square at the heart of the old city in Marrakech, an open-air market and arena for festivals, street performers, storytellers, diviners, dancers, musicians, peddlers, and hustlers of all kinds. After dark, dozens of food stalls spring up and the square becomes even more crowded.
10 A ryad (Arabic for “garden”) is a traditional Moroccan home built around an interior garden and modelled on the Roman villa. Many of these newly fashionable ryads have been renovated or converted into restaurants or hotels.
11 The Berbers are the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Africa. Today the largest number of Berbers is in Morocco; the northeastern highlands of Algeria and Tunisia are home to a Berber people called the Kabyles. Some Berbers speak Arabic as well as French in the post-colonial Maghreb, but many speak only Tamazight and often face discrimination. Berbers tend to live in less-developed rural areas and can be considered “backward” by Arabs.
12 Islamic invaders began settling southern Spain in 711, and travellers in Andalusia still marvel at the surviving wonders of their civilisation, but by 1238 wars of reconquest waged by Christian rulers had reclaimed almost all of Muslim Spain from los moros. In 1492, the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs) drove the last sultan of Granada into exile, ending Moorish rule in Spain.
13 The shahada is the profession of faith: “Ach hadou anna la ilaha illa Llah, Mohammed rassoulu Llah” (I affirm that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet). A person may become a Muslim simply by reciting the shahada, with sincerity, in front of witnesses.
14 On October 27, 2005, two French boys of North African descent were electrocuted while hiding in an electrical substation from the police. Parisian suburbs heavily populated by Arab and African immigrant families erupted in rioting that spread throughout France, and there were similar incidents in 2006 and 2007. The government initially adopted a law-and-order response to the violence, which it linked to illegal immigration and the separatist practices of Islam, but the rioters were overwhelmingly native-born youths, and their motives were more complex. In the 1950s and ’60s, after France’s African empire collapsed, many guest workers flooded into the country from her former colonies, settling mainly just outside Paris to work at industrial jobs that have now grown scarce. Crowded into ugly housing projects and urban slums, and attending often second-rate schools, the children and grandchildren of these large African and Arab communities must cope with high unemployment and discrimination. Although the original immigrants indeed found a better life in their adopted country (and could usually return home if necessary), their French-born descendants have few ties to the old country, and while many second- and third-generation immigrants have fit successfully into French society, others in this growing minority do not yet feel truly accepted by their own nation.
15 In the West, a jinn is usually thought of as a “genie in a bottle,” but in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology and in Islamic culture the Jinn are a race of supernatural creatures lower than angels, capable of assuming human or animal form and influencing mankind for good or evil. Jinns are invisible to humans unless they choose to be seen by them. Although the Jinn live in their own societies like humans (they eat, marry, and while they may live for hundreds of years, they do die), like angels the Jinn have no substance: whole communities can live comfortably on the head of a pin or cosily in a vast desert waste. They like water and tend to live by creeks and in wells and washrooms, cemeteries and old ruins. They are touchy creatures, however, and it is dangerous to intrude on their territory, even by accident.
16 The popular approach to mental and much physical illness in Morocco derives both from the Berber traditions of animism, which attribute magical powers to nature, and from the tenets of Islam. In Moroccan sorcery, spiritual power both benign and malignant can reside anywhere—a tree, a bird, a glass of tea—as the natural property of the object, or it can be placed there by human agency. It can be unleashed at random (a traveller tripping on a stone) or can target a specific person. It can also attack without physical contact, via jinns or the evil eye, harming a victim through the envy of other people even without their conscious will.
The Sufis brought Islamic mysticism to Morocco in the twelfth century, and their holy men, the marabouts, acted as intercessors between mankind and the spiritual realm. One of them, Bouya (Father) Omar, gained fame in the sixteenth century by interceding with the Jinn for their human victims and arranging compensation for the spirits’ grievances (through animal sacrifices, Koranic readings, prayers, offerings at a marabout’s grave). Today a holy man’s tomb is likewise called a marabout, and there are many of these simple, white-domed structures throughout Morocco. The marabout of Bouya Omar, not far from Marrakech, is particularly popular with people afflicted by mental illness.
About the Author
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN was born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Repubblica, El País, and Panorama. His novels include The Sacred Night (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt), Corruption, The Last Friend, and Leaving Tangier. Ben Jelloun won the 1994 Prix Maghreb, and in 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light.
LINDA COVERDALE has translated more than sixty books, including Tahar Ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel This Blinding Absence of Light. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she won the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
Copyright
First published in 2011
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bsp; by Arcadia Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB
This ebook edition first published in 2011
Originally published in French by Gallimard, 2009
Translation from French © Linda Coverale, 2011
All rights reserved
© Tahar Ben Jelloun, 2009
The right of Tahar Ben Jelloun to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–1–908129–06–2