The leading Maghrebian author, Tahar Ben Jelloun, attended this year’s Poetry Africa festival in Durban. He spoke to Stephen Gray
Stephen Gray: How did you come to choose French above your home language?
Tahar Ben Jelloun: I was born in Fez in 1944, in a modest and fairly traditionalist family, with Arabic as my home language. But Morocco, as you know, had been colonised by France and Spain since 1912 – France in my area of the north. When I first went to school and right up to independence, the education was Franco- Arabic, 50:50. There wasn’t a moment when I actively chose French as my literary language, but in those days if you wanted to succeed, French it had to be. After independence in 1956 an Arabisation policy was introduced, but that didn’t really touch my generation.
SG: When did you begin writing?
TBJ: There I have an exact answer – in 1965, when I was a philosophy student in Rabat, involved in a revolt against syllabus changes. We were to have no more Nietzsche, no more Marx. To crush the activists, we were sent to an army disciplinary camp for 18 months where we were so harshly treated I began to write in protest – clandestinely, in the privacy of the toilets. Those were the poems that open my new Complete Poems (1966 to1995). To keep studying more liberally I had to leave for France.
SG: You have become a leading figure of Maghrebian literature in France, where nowadays one in five citizens is of overseas origin.
TBJ: Yes, but at first there was no public for it there. The critics treated us writers from Morocco, Tunisia and especially Algeria, with in all a French- speaking population of 70- million, as just poor and marginal. But friends helped, particularly on Le Monde. By force of circumstance I became both a journalist and a novelist, making my works full of information, but also carefully done. My first big success, the 1976 book that is called Solitaire in English, came because I launched the theme of the African migrant labourers in France. With Sacred Night in 1985, which won me the Prix Goncourt, I broke other taboos as well: there it was about the sexual limitations on an Arab woman’s desires, which, in that society, have to be kept hidden.
But I’ve seen how women live in my country, and that, too, must be described. It’s a matter of doing justice in my work to the lot of immigrants, women, children and so on. I also write about other issues, like how poverty lowers human dignity. So I became a spokesman as well as a best- selling novelist.
SG: Do you consider yourself essentially French, Arab or even African?
TBJ: I’m not African, as some Arabs from the east of Africa are. But I’m not really Arab either, because in Arabic culture one may not raise scandalous issues as I do, especially in respect of one’s fathers. If anything, I’m really a Mediterranean: that is my world.
SG: Your recent book, which translates as Racism Explained to My Daughter, is a runaway success in Europe in many languages. How did this dialogue come about?
TBJ: Well, as a real discussion with my own 10-year-old. I tried to explain the whole of racist history to her, in simple terms. As you know, France is a very racist country, but it also has a very strong anti-racist tradition indeed. And I explain that learning to live with others is a part of the fight against all racism everywhere. Children are wonderful; they’re not racist, unless they’re taught to be. But we can all learn to vote with the anti-racists.
SG: How do you relate to Africa south of you?
TBJ: Firstly, in Morocco there has always been little cultural exchange across the Sahara and, apart from Senegal, this is my first time in real Africa. I’ve never really cultivated an African interest. But secondly, as a part of the Francophone world, and I am on the president’s high council for francophone affairs, I do relate to many other similar figures – Amin Maalouf from Lebanon, Edouard Maunick from Mauritius are examples. We have become what the French like to call their mt – ques – their resident foreigners.
SG: What is your main theme as a writer so situated?
TBJ: I think my message is that culture must always run both ways. It doesn’t make sense to valorise French culture without valorising your local one equally. These exchanges aren’t one-way; some Beur work in Paris is also very popular now, you know.
SG: So there’s no direct line between you as a story-writer and the great classic Thousand and One Nights, as some fanciful scholars like to think?
TJB: I had to teach it recently, for the first time, at New York University – and I must say, although it is quite beautiful I found it racist! And misogynist! I try to make sure that my texts should no longer be like that. It has to be the same for you in your long story of arriving at such hope: you have to get racism not only out of your heads, but out of your texts as well, not so?