[In the following review, Mahjoub examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Cette aveuglante absence de lumière.]

In July 1971, a group of army officers attacked the palace at Skhirat on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in an attempt to usurp King Hassan II. After the failed coup d'état, the leaders, all high-ranking personnel, were executed and the soldiers and junior officers imprisoned. Fifty-eight of them were blindfolded and taken secretly to Tazmamart in the Moroccan desert. More than half of them died there. Conditions in the prison were unbelievably brutal. The inmates were locked in tiny cells, three metres by one and a half and so low that it was impossible to stand upright. There was a hole in the floor and air vents in the cement walls and that was it—they lived, as the title of Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This Blinding Lack of Light) suggests, in almost complete darkness.

The fact that the novel is based on a true story undoubtedly adds to its poignancy and impact; it is harrowing to read, but it is also moving and gripping while remaining detached. Writing in a spare, unhurried style, Ben Jelloun has abandoned many of the lyrical attributes of early novels such as L'Enfant de sable (1985) and its sequel, La Nuit sacrée (1987). This novel has an immediacy and an urgency which are surprising in an account of an eighteen-year spell in prison.

Ben Jelloun's narrator, Salim, claims not to have known that he was taking part in a coup until the attack on the Skhirat palace was under way; like the other soldiers, he thought he was on a military exercise. The Moroccan authorities were unconcerned about this detail, as they were about the fact that the men were kept in Tazmamart long after their sentences had been served. Nobody knew of their existence at Tazmamart. Once they left the official prison at Kénitra, they vanished. Their relatives were told they were dead. As far as the State was concerned, they were as good as buried alive in their cement “coffins”. Tazmamart was an endless night from which no one was expected to emerge.

At the start, there are twenty-three men with Salim, in block B, and, as the novel progresses, they are gradually whittled down to four. Almost every other chapter marks the death of one character or another. It is to Ben Jelloun's credit that we feel for all of them, the good, the bad and the bewildered. Each character seems to represent a reaction to this horror that we might recognize in ourselves. The prisoners speak to one another in the darkness, their voices traveling from cell to cell. They impose their own sense of order to divide up the day. They take on roles; one is a specialist in the Koran, another is the “speaking clock”. Salim is able to recite poems and novels that he read in his “first life”, as well as describing films he has seen, changing the details to suit a Moroccan environment. The physical endurance required to deal with the severe lack of nutrition, medical aid, contact with the outside world, and the presence of cockroaches and scorpions is only one part of a battle to survive. More important is the need to maintain a psychological balance. To this end, anything that might induce feelings of longing, or thoughts of injustice, vengeance, hatred, love, has to be purged.

Cette aveuglante absence de lumière has caused great controversy both in France and Morocco. Ben Jelloun's informant, Aziz Binebine, a survivor of Tazmamart, has accused the author of taking advantage of him—although he admits that he liked the novel, and a contract eventually signed between him, Ben Jelloun and the publishers has granted him a 50 per cent share of the author's rights. Other (non-fiction) accounts of life in Tazmamart have been published since the prison closed down, and last year, in the Moroccan daily al Itihad al Ishtiraki, the serialization of a former inmate's account of his time in the prison tripled the newspaper's circulation. More recently, another prisoner, Ali Marzouki, has published his own account of his time there.

It is in the face of these first-hand accounts that Ben Jelloun's motives have been questioned. Why this novel now? Why write a novel at all? And why did the novelist not speak out earlier, when the prison was still in service? Why wait until nine years after it closed down, and after the death of King Hassan II? Ben Jelloun is known as an outspoken critic of the Western media and politicians, whom he has accused of complacency and silence in the face of racism, atrocities committed in Algeria, the war in Chechnya and the plight of the Palestinians. It is perhaps this which has made him an obvious target. He has lived in France for thirty years, and his work has brought him a good deal of success—a fact that was recognized by King Hassan II, who sent the author his “paternal” congratulations when he won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for La Nuit sacrée. In 1981, when the first news emerged from Tazmamart, giving rise to a human-rights campaign led by Christine Daure, the wife of the opposition leader Abraham Saferty, Ben Jelloun did not comment. Recently he has explained his silence in the simplest of terms; like everyone else, he says, he was afraid of confronting the King. He had family in Morocco who might suffer as a result of a public denunciation from him.

Whatever his motives, it is difficult to argue that Ben Jelloun wrote this novel solely for reasons of material gain. His books are very successful. L'Auberge des pauvres sold 90,000 copies. His book on xenophobia, Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille, published in 1999, sold 400,000. Bowing to international pressure, the Moroccan Government finally admitted, in 1992, that Tazmamart “did once exist”; it was bulldozed and destroyed after the last prisoners were released. All traces of that unending night have now been erased, and the prison has entered the realm of myth and legend. All that remains is the testimony of the few survivors. Tahar Ben Jelloun does not claim that his novel is anything other than a fictional account of one man's struggle to survive in the face of extreme duress. He admits, also, that certain details—such as the prisoners being let out of their cells for the funeral of the other inmates—have been added for dramatic effect.

After eighteen years of being locked up in the dark, it is hard to say how accurate any true account might be. Memory, Salim tells us, is death, stressing how important it is to be able to forget certain things, and to remember others. Recital, whether it is of a novel by Balzac or a passage from the Koran, becomes the linchpin that holds the human spirit together. In some ways, this gives the novel an added poignancy; perhaps a fictional account of that incredible ordeal is the closest to the truth we can ever get.