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Tahar Ben Jelloun, celebrated today as a novelist and public intellectual, began his literary journey not with fiction but with verse. Poetry, he has long maintained, is the genre closest to his heart—his creative foundation, and the lens through which he first engaged with the world’s complexities. For Ben Jelloun, poetry was not simply lyrical or expressive—it was radical, confrontational, and deeply embodied. His early works from the 1960s and 70s, published in influential Moroccan journals such as Souffles (Breaths) and Integral, set the tone for his lifelong interrogation of injustice, identity, and power.
At the heart of this early poetry is a visceral concern with the body—particularly the sexualized, wounded, or exiled body—as a site of symbolic and literal struggle. Through this lens, Ben Jelloun offers a critique of both postcolonial Morocco and the immigrant experience in France, embedding sharp political commentary within sensual, often shocking imagery.
Poetry as a Weapon Against Silence and Oppression
Ben Jelloun’s early poems read as social manifestos cloaked in poetic form. They confront inequality, authoritarianism, and cultural decay with fierce urgency. What distinguishes his work is the metaphorical deployment of the body—not as a neutral subject of desire, but as a landscape upon which political violence and cultural alienation are enacted.
In “Asilah se maquille” (Asilah Puts on Make-Up), for instance, he portrays the Moroccan fishing village of Asilah as a prostituted woman, manipulated and adorned by the corrupt bourgeoisie and wealthy European tourists. The image is deliberately provocative, exposing the exploitative forces of gentrification and the commodification of tradition.
Another haunting poem, “Hommes sous linceul de silence” (Men Under a Shroud of Silence), presents the immigrant experience through violent bodily metaphor. The Arab immigrant becomes a violated figure—raped, silenced, and emasculated. Such imagery is not gratuitous; it is a scream against marginalization, an attempt to force confrontation with the suffering that society prefers to ignore.
The Transition to Prose: Harrouda and the Shock of the Body
In 1973, Ben Jelloun made his prose debut with Harrouda, a novel that blurred the lines between narrative and poetry, and exploded conventional literary expectations. The book begins unflinchingly with an exploration of female genitalia, plunging the reader into a dreamlike—and often disturbing—world of erotic violence, childhood memory, and fragmented identity.
Seen through the eyes of a young boy, the women in Harrouda—his mother and the titular prostitute—become emblems of both desire and shame. They are not mere characters, but psychological landscapes marked by trauma, purity, and cultural repression. Sexuality is presented as both source of fascination and symbol of degradation.
What scandalized and fascinated readers was not just the subject matter, but the style. Harrouda collapses poetry and narrative into one another, mimicking the disorientation of memory and desire. Ben Jelloun doesn’t simply tell a story—he constructs an immersive hallucination, where words drip with bodily meaning.
Cityscapes as Bodies, and Bodies as Cities
In Harrouda, space itself becomes symbolic. Ben Jelloun doesn’t use cities as passive backdrops, but as active characters in his narrative. Fez emerges as a symbol of tradition and repression, Tangier as a playground of vice, and an unnamed utopian city—perhaps imagined, perhaps prophetic—stands as a vision of future liberation.
This symbolic use of geography echoes his treatment of the body. Just as bodies carry history, pain, and longing, so too do cities reflect the moral, political, and spiritual state of their inhabitants. Both are mutable, contested terrains.
Moha le fou, Moha le sage: Shattering the Singular Voice
Ben Jelloun’s 1978 novel Moha le fou, Moha le sage (Moha the Mad, Moha the Wise) further radicalizes his literary project. Here, he introduces the idea of narrative plurality through the character of Moha, a madman who becomes a mouthpiece for multiple voices—those of the oppressed, the invisible, and the excluded.
Madness is no longer pathology—it becomes resistance. In a world where official discourse is monolithic and repressive, madness opens space for subversion and multiplicity. Moha’s body becomes a channel for collective experience, his speech a polyphonic challenge to state-imposed unity.
Geographically, the novel resists clear location. Its settings shift between Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, underscoring a deliberate deterritorialization of identity. Ben Jelloun disrupts not just political borders but narrative logic itself.
La Prière de l’absent: Memory, Madness, and Mysticism
Ben Jelloun’s 1981 novel La Prière de l’absent (The Prayer of the Absent) continues his exploration of madness and the fragmented self, but adds a mystical, almost spiritual dimension. The story follows three misfit characters—Yamna, a fading prostitute; Sindibad, a beggar with amnesia; and Boby, a man who wants to become a dog—on a surreal quest through Morocco.
They are guided by disembodied ancestral voices, tasked with educating a voiceless child from a hidden world. As they journey from Fez to the desert south, memory and prophecy merge, and the body once again becomes the vessel through which cultural loss and recovery are enacted.
Though less structurally experimental than Harrouda or Moha, La Prière de l’absent deepens Ben Jelloun’s thematic concerns. The novel is an elegy to forgotten knowledge, erased voices, and the mystical roots of Moroccan culture—especially as they reside in marginal bodies.
Conclusion: Writing Through the Body
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s early literary output is inseparable from the body—its suffering, its pleasure, its political entanglement. Whether in poetry or prose, the body functions as both metaphor and message, surface and depth. It is the terrain upon which the author inscribes trauma, memory, resistance, and desire.
These works not only challenged taboos within Moroccan society but also redefined what literature could do. By fusing poetic language with fragmented narratives, and by refusing to separate the sensual from the political, Ben Jelloun crafted a unique aesthetic—one that continues to resonate in discussions of postcolonial literature and North African identity.
In giving voice to the voiceless and form to the formless, Ben Jelloun’s early work reminds us that literature is not only about storytelling—it is also about embodiment, about writing with the full weight of history, flesh, and silence.
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