SOURCE: Marrouchi, Mustapha. “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 4 (winter 1990): 71-83.

[In the following essay, Marrouchi traces the development of the character Zahra in La Nuit sacrée and examines how the novel deconstructs traditional notions of gender and colonization.]

We're finished with it, with the struggle against exile. Our tasks are now those of insertion. No longer the stupendous generality of the scream, but the thankless inventory of the country's particulars.

(Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais 285)

For many readers, La Nuit sacrée revolves around the blurring of boundaries between orality-writing, prose-poetry, reality-fantasy, realism-allegory, Bâtin-Zahir,¹ and presence-absence. Adapting a narrative to such symbiotic relationships reflects the fact that the author himself is at the crossroads of several cultures, and the novel's heroine is a good expression of this dialectics of belonging and rejection. Both mediator and androgyne, living on the margins of the village female collective, Zahra is a complex character whose place in the narrative proves to be ambivalent; in addition, Ben Jelloun offers several well-drawn portraits of other characters. In this essay, I will first examine the evolution of Zahra's role and then her self-affirmation as a subject (sujet) having passed through various stages before reclaiming her wijdanha.²

Traditionally, the Goncourt literary prize—awarded regularly since 1901—honors a novel with a wide audience, i.e., a novel that is not particularly interesting in terms of narrative technique. If one is to judge by a few recent Goncourt recipients such as Dominique Fernandez's Dans la main de l'ange (1982) and Frederick Tristan's Les Egarés (1983), the members of the Goncourt jury have relatively little regard for novelists who transcend the framework of the traditional novel as it has evolved in the West during the course of centuries, culminating in the Balzacian model. In other words, a “good” novel in France is considered to involve the study of character analysis in a realist context, as if neither Joyce nor Faulkner had ever existed. Nor even the “nouveau roman” in France.³ Interestingly enough, Ben Jelloun is not at all part of this tradition.

Ben Jelloun's technical skill has never been more apparent than in La Nuit sacrée, in which his use of narrative forms demonstrates his modernity as well as his participation in a centuries-old tradition. Ever since the publication of Moha le fou, Moha le sage in 1980, Ben Jelloun has drawn attention to the self-representational narrative act by taking recourse to elements borrowed from traditional culture. For this reason, his narrative is rooted in an orality that is still very much alive in the Maghreb today, that of the storyteller and the Halqua.⁴

La place était déserte. Comme une scène de théâtre elle allait petit à petit se remplir. Les premiers à s'y installer furent les Sahraouis, marchands de toutes les poudres: épices, henné, menthe sauvage, chaux, sable et d'autres produits magiques moulus et raffinés. Ils furent suivis par les bouquinistes. Ils étalèrent leurs manuscrits jaunes et brûlèrent de l'encens. Et puis il y avait ceux qui ne vendaient rien. Ils s'asseyaient par terre en croisant les jambes et attendaient. Les conteurs s'installaient en dernier. Chacun avait son rituel. Un homme grand, sec et mince, commença par dénouer son turban; il le secoua; du sable fin en tomba. Cet homme venait du Sud. Il s'assit sur une petite valise en contre-plaqué et tout seul, sans le moindre auditeur, se mit à raconter.

(13)

[The square was deserted. Like the scene of a play, it would gradually fill up with people. The first to settle in were the Sahrois, merchants who sold all sorts of powders: spices, henna, wild mint, lime, sand, and other ground and refined magical products. They were followed by the book sellers who spread out their yellowed manuscripts and burned incense. And then there were those who had nothing to sell. They sat down on the ground, crossed their legs and waited. The story-tellers arrived last. Each had his own ritual. A tall man, dry and thin, began by unwinding his turban; he shook it, and fine sand fell out. This man came from the South. He sat on a small, laminated suitcase, and all alone, without a single listener, he began to tell a story.]

This technique culminates in L'Enfant de sable where no less than six story-tellers share in recounting the story, which for this reason becomes allergic to itself in the end by virtue of its display of its own fictional essence.⁵ This technique reappears in La Nuit sacrée, the sequel to L'Enfant de sable, the return to the narrative space of the Jamâa El Fna square in the first several pages of this novel allows the author to integrate a veritable critique of the narrative—a critique that calls to mind the most extreme experiments of American Post-Modernism in what is currently defined as metafiction.⁶ As the story-teller without listeners summons the crowd in order to create his Halqua, or circle of listeners, he is showing us that the narrative relationship is above all a relationship of desire. Every narrative establishes itself as a locus of desire. A different story-teller, who removes a whole series of diverse objects from his trunk (a cane, old photographs, English shoes), draws attention to the referential dimension of the story and to the search for verisimilitude on the basis of real signs. In the dispute that opposes a woman story-teller and her public, one can see how a subversive narrative can disrupt the euphoria that traditionally characterizes the narrative pact and how it can disappoint listeners who are seeking no more than a mere entertainment.

The desire to depict the workings of the story by displaying its inner mechanisms is doubly interesting. In the first place, Ben Jelloun shows us that a narrative statement is above all the construction (or a “montage”) of a fiction. However, we are living in a world of narratives (advertisements, political speeches, cartoons), and it is dangerous to abandon one's self to what Jean Ricardou calls “the euphoria of the narrative” (31). It consequently becomes difficult to criticize Ben Jelloun for not “portraying” reality according to a widespread ideological assumption which fails to recognize that literature does not reflect like a mirror. It does not reproduce reality: it produces something new. The other interesting fact about this technique is that it permits for all sorts of modal shifts. In La Nuit sacrée, the reader moves from the fairy tale (in the chapter entitled “A Very Beautiful Day”) to a utopia (“The Perfumed Garden”), from realism to allegory, and from the sentimental novel to fantasy narrative.

Another remarkable aspect of Ben Jelloun's narrative technique is a spatial (as opposed to chronological) structuring of events that gives his novels the appearance of symbolic itineraries. Whether in the case of Harrouda, La Prière de l'absent, or La Nuit sacrée, the spatial montage of the narrative evokes a ritual initiatory path, at the end of which, and after having undergone many trials, the young person finally attains initiation into a higher realm of knowledge. This is how the child in La Prière de l'absent learns what true liberty is:

De l'autre côté de la nuit, Yamna parlait à l'enfant: Nous approchons des sables. Ta grand-mère, Lalla Malika disait: “La liberté, c'est d'abord la dignité. Pour atteindre cette forme essentielle de liberté, il faut nous affranchir de cette morale de l'intérêt et de l'égoïsme.”

(165)

[At the end of the night, Yamna was speaking to the child: We are approaching the sands. Your grandmother Lalla Malika used to say: “Above all, liberty is dignity. To attain this essential form of liberty, we must free ourselves from a morality of greed and selfishness.”]

In La Nuit sacrée, three types of events occur during the itinerary: 1) dysphoric encounters that originate in aggression (Zahra's rape and her later excision); 2) euphoric encounters that derive from generosity (the gradual substitution of a frank, trusting relationship between Zahra and the Consul for the sadistic relationship of domination that linked between the Consul and l'Assise); and 3) the process of exchange. Thus, the love affair that develops between the blind Consul, who is subject to the tyranny of l'Assise, and Zahra, who has recently been freed from all constraints, remains ambiguous in the eyes of the reader. In fact, the Consul's blindness has fostered in him a rich tactile and emotional life, whereas Zahra, who can see, only knows reality in the form of falsehood, violence, and aggression. If she liberates the Consul from his servitude, he enables her to discover tenderness and true love:

J'avais déjà quitté ma Djellaba et ma robe. Doucement je m'approchai du lit et déboutonnai le saroual du Consul. Je laissai la faible lumière allumée et j'enjambai son bassin. Lentement je le laissai pénétrer en moi, mettant mes mains sur ses épaules pour l'empêcher de changer position. Il jouit très vite. Je restai sur lui, sans bouger, attendant qu'il retrouvât son énergie. L'érection revint peu après et ce fut prodigieux. Mon manque d'expérience était pallié par l'absence de pudeur ou de gêne. Le désir dirigeait instinctivement mon corps et lui dictait les mouvements appropriés. J'étais devenue folle. Je découvrais le plaisir pour la première fois de ma vie dans un bordel avec un aveugle! Il était insatiable. Tout se passa dans le silence. Je retenais mes râles. Il ne fallait pas qu'il se rendît compte de la supercherie.

(126)

[I had already taken off my djellaba and my dress. Quietly I approached the bed and unfastened the Consul's trousers. I left the dim light burning, and I straddled his hips. Slowly I let him penetrate me, placing my hands on his shoulders to prevent him from changing position. He climaxed very quickly. I remained on top of him without moving, waiting for him to regain his energy. His erection returned in a short while, and it was prodigious. My lack of experience was alleviated by the absence of modesty and embarrassment. Desire instinctively guided my body and commanded it to make the appropriate movements. I had lost my senses. I was discovering pleasure for the first time in my life at a brothel with a blind man! He was insatiable. It all happened in silence. I held back my gasps. He must not realize the trick that was being played on him.]

The entire allegory in the novel arises from this reversal of values surrounding the visible and invisible. What one sees is often no more than a world of deceptive appearances. Truth is beyond the visible, and blindness can lead to great insight. This is why Zahra, during her imprisonment, wears a blindfold to obliterate immediate reality and to attain a more genuine knowledge. “One only sees well with the heart; the essential is invisible to the eyes.” These are the words that the fox speaks to the Little Prince in Saint-Exupéry's story (22). This is the core of the symbolic message that can be drawn from the structural arrangement of events during the itinerary of Ben Jelloun's narrative.

One must also recognize how the wealth of the imaginary is brought into play in La Nuit sacrée. If Ben Jelloun draws inspiration from the collective imaginary of a Maghrebian culture in which one finds a hodge-podge of elements borrowed from the Koran, the worship of Saints, Muslim mystics (e.g., Ibn Al-Farabi, Abu-Allaa Al Maari), and popular traditions (e.g., the story-teller and the Halqua), certain obsessive images plunge us into his personal mythology and his own hallucinations. Commenting on women's breasts, he noted in an interview with André Rollin that “I've always been obsessed with breasts. I admit it. I'm very fond of breasts, breasts of all sorts. There are those that can be held in the palm of a hand … but as for me, I like to get lost in them. Perhaps I'll write … an anthology of breasts” (139). But isn't writing characterized precisely by its neurotic nature? In this light, there are two elements that define the imaginary of Ben Jelloun: death and sex. The morbid side of his imaginary can be found in eerie places such as cemeteries—a truly haunting theme in Ben Jelloun's work (“The cemetery was guarded by a cat that doesn't appear at all,” says one of the characters in La Prière de l'absent)—sordid alleyways, the shed in which the bodies of the “forgotten” were decomposing. He brings to life Fellini-like characters who reappear from one work to the next: deformed, infirm, marginal, perverse humanity … beings “broken” during the search for their own identity.

With regard to sexual images, which have often been misinterpreted in Ben Jelloun's writings, they derive from an existential anguish that becomes obvious in the castration complex from which several of his characters suffer. For this reason, sex is always linked to violence in his novels: it involves the patriarchal phallus as a violator of women and a threat to the son's virility (circumcision anxiety)—“I was in my father's arms, and he offered me, legs spread slightly apart, to the circumciser. I still see the blood, the swift but skilful motion of my father, whose hand was bleeding. As for me, I too had spots of blood on my thighs, on my white trousers” (114)—or whether it involves the obscene, extravagant, irreverent image of the female sexual organs.⁷ In this regard, it would be interesting to examine some of his female protagonists (Harrouda, Yamna, l'Assise) for allusions to the ambivalent, mythological figure of Aïcha Kandisha, who clearly illustrates male anguish in the face of the devouring female sexual organ. This is also true of the graffiti that, in one of Zahra's nightmares, links the image of the father with a female sexual organ adorned with teeth. This phantasmagorical relationship between death and sexuality stems, I believe, from a fundamental anxiety—“time being merely an illusion of our anxieties”—and it is one of the key elements in the imaginary of Ben Jelloun.

As Abdelkébir Khatibi has so perceptively observed in Maghreb pluriel:

Du point de vue de ce qu'on appelle encore le Tiers Monde, nous ne pouvons prétendre que la décolonisation a pu promouvoir une pensée radicalement critique vis-à-vis de la machine idéologique de l'imperialisme et de l'ethnocentrisme, une décolonisation qui serait en même temps une déconstruction des discours, qui participent, de manières variées et plus ou moins dissimulées, à la domination impériale, qui est entendue ici également dans son pouvoir de parole. Oui, nous ne sommes pas arrivés à cette décolonisation de pensée qui serait, aù-delà d'un renversement de ce pouvoir, l'affirmation d'une différence, une subversion absolue et libre de l'esprit.

(47-48)

[From the point of view of what is still called the Third World, we can not claim that decolonization has succeeded in advancing a way of thinking that is radically critical vis-à-vis the ideological machine of imperialism and ethnocentrism, a decolonization which at the same time would also be a deconstruction of discourses which participate in various more or less hidden ways in the imperialist domination, understood in this case as the power of the word as well. Yes, we have not yet attained the decolonization of thought which, above and beyond a reversal of this power, would constitute the affirmation of a difference, an absolute and free subversion of the mind.]

In the above remarks, Khatibi is giving expression to an immediate personal experience. He is placing himself in the situation of what Albert Memmi calls the “dominated man.”⁸

This observation broaches a vital issue in the history of the Maghreb. What remains to be done is to situate, within its historical context, the decolonization of the mind transcribed in La Nuit sacrée, where the real subject announces itself in the prolonged, uninterrupted absence of an anonymous heroine, a woman who in everyday life reverses the order of the night. For in the real of the world where the characters evolve, the “everyday” is a night—“a round place.” One must know how to move in the realm of darkness. In the novel, Zahra crosses boundaries, throws off an equal number of restraints, and creates for herself a face that is not veiled, but masked. It is not a question of anarchy, but of the freedom to think, to act, to move about, and to believe. In all of Ben Jelloun's writings, there is a character who denounces fanaticism. And because “intolerance is intolerable,” Ben Jelloun is particularly shocked to see Islam corrupted by politics and placed in the service of oppression.

J'aime le Coran comme une poésie superbe [dit le Consul], et j'ai horreur de ceux qui l'exploitent en parasites et qui limitent la liberté de la pensée. Ce sont des hypocrites. D'ailleurs, le Coran en parle … “Ils se font un voile de leurs serments. Ils écartent les hommes des voies du salut. Leurs actions sont marquées au coin de l'iniquité” … Des croyants fanatiques ou des impies. Qu'importe, ils se ressemblent et je n'ai aucune envie de les fréquenter.

(79)

[I love the Koran as superb poetry [the Consul says], and I detest those who exploit it like parasites and who restrict freedom of thought. They are hypocrites. Besides, the Koran speaks about them … “They veil themselves in oaths. They cause men to stray from the paths of salvation. Their actions are marked by iniquity” … Fanatical believers or heretics, they're all the same, and I have no desire to associate with them.]

What is imperative for the novelist is to denounce and to deconstruct the characteristic features of fanaticism. “Intelligence is an understanding of the world.” In La Nuit sacrée, the author cites this statement by André Gide. Must one therefore refuse to understand? Ben Jelloun replied to this question in an interview with Philippe Gaillard: “Not at all, but I do not trust anyone who is capable of understanding everything. I don't wish to glorify the obscure and the incomprehensible. However, in life, nothing is simple. Human relationships are complex” (44). Another of the writer's protagonists notes that appearances are the most perverse masking of the truth. One must mistrust what is clear, what is obvious at first glance.

What is clear and simple, but magical, is Ben Jelloun's language. His choice of words is meticulous, and his sentences are written in fragments, but he obviously refuses to elaborate his writing for the sake of writing. In short, it is as if Ben Jelloun has been unaffected by the fashions of French literature. Gratuitous literary games are the antithesis of his work as a writer. About reading Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, he notes that “I saw that this literature was not at all for us and that it was a literature of crisis. Not a crisis of writing … but a crisis of relationships with the world” (Rollin 140). For that matter, Ben Jelloun refuses to acknowledge the influence of any contemporary writer on him. “My last two novels,” he contends, “have an original novelistic form. Original? That is not the right word! Different perhaps. In any case, it has nothing to do with Camus or Proust … It's my own way of telling a story” (Rollin 139). The influence he does acknowledge is that of a film director, Luis Buñuel.⁹ In this relationship, one discovers Ben Jelloun's desire to communicate in a simple manner, without making concessions with regard to form or substance: “this is the most difficult thing to do; for the novelist as for the filmmaker, it is the work of an entire lifetime” (Rollin 138).

In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi comments that “deconstruction, as a disruption of Western metaphysics and as practiced by Derrida, in his own unique fashion, has accompanied decolonization in its historic evolution” (47). Even here we notice several effects of the conjunction between deconstruction at the center and decolonization on the periphery, a hardly accidental relationship. Indeed, doesn't La Nuit sacrée emphasize the combined force of these two obligations from the point of view of the formerly colonized subject? His choice between disorder and rupture as topi suggests the various fronts where a de-constituting takes place under the guise of a self-discovery.

En sortant de prison—j'avais bénéficié d'une réduction de peine, je pleurais. J'étais heureuse parce que mes yeux étaient baignés de larmes. Cela ne m'était pas arrivé depuis fort longtemps. Mes larmes étaient heureuses parce qu'elles coulaient d'un corps qui renaissait, un corps qui était de nouveau capable d'avoir un sentiment, une émotion. Je pleurais parce que je quittais un monde où j'avais réussi à trouver une place. Je pleurais parce que personne ne m'attendait. J'étais libre.

(186)

[Upon leaving prison (I had benefited from a reduced sentence), I cried. I was happy because my eyes were bathed in tears. That had not happened to me for a very long time. My tears were happy because they flowed from a body that was being reborn, a body that was once again capable of a feeling, of an emotion. I was crying because I was leaving a world where I had found a place for myself. I was crying because no one was waiting for me. I was free.]

However, deconstruction can not occur in a vacuum. It must be accompanied by an active nationalist “prise de conscience,” which must occur within the context of steps taken by those intellectuals who, across the centuries, never ceased recounting the history, the culture of the Maghreb. Ben Jelloun is speaking about this tradition when he says: “I owe the act of writing to my mother … She never told me to ‘write!’ but she told me so much about herself, about her sorrows, … that I felt as if I were her messenger” (Rollin 138).

La Nuit sacrée is also a novel constructed entirely upon disorder and ambiguity. This is true of its principal theme, of course, but as far as the androgyny that Ben Jelloun depicts is concerned, it is perhaps no more than the reflection of another duality: a North African who is attached by all his roots to an Arabic people and culture, he is also a writer who has chosen to express himself in the language of the Other and who, in turn, uses this borrowed language as a weapon to liberate his people. The form of the novel itself is transformed, perverted, by this dialectic of belonging and rejection, where one finds something of the tale, chapters that are veritable songs, sentence rhythms and linked images that are more reminiscent of poetry than of simple narration.

In doing this, Ben Jelloun challenges the aggressors of women in his country, but this challenge demands an elaboration of the terms used in the confrontation or, to borrow Foucault's terminology, “power-knowledge-pleasure” as it oppresses women.¹⁰ However, it is useful to draw attention at this point to the fact that pleasure is not simply disruptive, something produced by the other—the Maghrebian man—to distort or to perturb the subjugated object; it is rather a vital auxiliary that sustains relationships of power between a so-called superior masculine sex and another that is not even referred to by its proper noun, “hia.”¹¹ Persecuted, continually placed on the defensive, Maghrebian women internalize their complexes, neuroses, and emotional wounds. Hence, only Zahra knows that she has been raped.

La nuit tomba en quelques minutes. Je sentis l'homme s'approcher de moi … Il me prit par les hanches. Sa langue parcourait ma nuque, puis mes épaules; il s'agenouilla. Je restai debout. Il embrassa mes reins … Avec ses dents il dénoua mon seroual. Son visage en sueur ou en larmes était plaqué contre mes fesses … D'un geste brusque il me mit à terre. Je poussai un cri bref. Il mit sa main gauche contre ma bouche. Avec l'autre il me maintenait face à terre. Je n'avais ni la force ni l'envie de résister. Je ne pensai pas, j'étais libre sous le poids de ce corps fiévreux. Pour la première fois un corps se mêlait au mien … La nuit était noire. Je sentis un liquide chaud et épais couler sur mes cuisses. L'homme poussa un râle de bête … Son corps lourd me tenait collée au sol. Je glissai ma main droite sous mon ventre. Je palpai le liquide que je perdais. C'était du sang.

(62)

[Night fell quickly. I felt the man approach me … He grabbed me by the hips. His tongue wandered across the back of my neck, then my shoulders; he knelt down. I remained standing. He kissed my loins … With his teeth he unfastened the cord holding my pants. His face, bathed in sweat or tears, was pressed against my buttocks … With a brutal movement he threw me to the ground. I let out a brief cry. He placed his left hand over my mouth. With the other, he held my face to the ground. I had neither the strength nor the desire to resist. I wasn't thinking; I was free beneath the weight of this feverish body. For the first time, another body was mingling with my own … The night was black. I felt a thick, warm liquid running down my thighs. The man uttered a guttural, beastlike sound … His body pinned me to the ground. I slipped my right hand under my belly. I touched the liquid that was seeping out of me. It was blood.]

The discovery of the body is accompanied by the discovery of the couple, whose idealized representation in the Arabic novel contrasts starkly with a daily reality that is dominated by family structures and the enigma of relationships between the sexes. Women writers from the Maghreb have already offered a detailed critique of their society and the historical conditioning that has taken place in it. I am thinking above all about Fatima Mernissi and her works Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society and Le Harem politique, which were extremely controversial when they first appeared. I am also thinking about Fadela M'rabet and her essays, “La Femme algérienne” and “Les Algériennes,” which inaugurated a period of self-examination from within their own traditions, a self-examination that not only calls these traditions into question, but also interrogates the modern use of power in post-colonial Maghreb.¹²

According to Assia Djebar, her works such as Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement translate the polyphonic memory of the Maghrebian woman “but from which language? From Arabic? From dialectal Arabic or from women's Arabic, which would be the same as underground Arabic?” (7). Djebar evokes the heroines of Maghrebian history: Messaouda, Al-Kahina (the Queen-Mother of Berbers), Jamila Boupacha, and (I would add) Ben Jelloun's Zahra. What is interesting is that the heroine Zahra belongs to the contemporary generation, that of a modern Maghreb. Her revolt is thus directed not only against the former colonial masters, but also against the authority figures of today—the ruler, the father, the brother, and sometimes even the son.

La Nuit sacrée, whose theme can be summarized in a single sentence—“My aunt is a man”—bears witness to a troubling universe, a universe where disorder is commonplace, a universe where one must look at the gaps, where one must not, as Ben Jelloun would say, conceal the drama.¹³ This novel is also a new spiral in a work that dispensed with beginnings and endings, a work where past, present, future lose their distinctions, a work that subtly imprisons time in its spiral rings rather than laying itself out along time's linear continuum. Critics have suggested that Ben Jelloun's narrative is simultaneously Oriental and Western. Others, perhaps more well informed, have alluded to a form of thought characteristic of Arab philosophy. And still others have compared his narratives to the endless tales spun by Arabic story-tellers. But why shouldn't Ben Jelloun borrow his material from a variety of sources? Scholarly or popular, effective and natural, his technique is invariably subtle and reminds one that Ben Jelloun is above all a poet—a poet of the highest order, one for whom dream and reality, history and myth, mundane clichés and intricate thoughts are equally worthy of contributing to the creation of a new language, of a new life.

Notes

1. In L'Enfant de sable, le Troubadour aveugle identifies two coins: one is called Bâttène, the other Zahir. He then defines the latter in the following terms: “Vous savez bien ce que signifie ce mot: l'apparent, le visible. C'est le contraire du bâttène, qui est l'intérieur, ce qui est enterré dans le ventre. … Je sais, pour l'avoir noté par écrit, que le Zahir est le fond d'un puits à Tétouan, comme il serait, selon Zotenberg, une veine dans le marbre de l'un des mille deux cents piliers la mosquée de Cordoue” (175-76). This, I think, is an important finding. It may not tell us what Ben Jelloun is driving at, but it can help to register how in the eleventh century in Andalusia there existed a remarkably advanced school of Islamic philosophic grammarians, whose literary quarrels anticipate twentieth-century debates between structuralists and generative grammarians, between descriptivists and behaviorists. Among the group were three linguists and theoretical grammarians, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Jinni, and Ibn Mada'al-Qurtobi, all of whom worked in Cordova during the eleventh century, all belonging to the Zahirite school, all antagonists of the Bâtinist school. Batinists held that meaning in language is concealed within the words; meaning is therefore available only as a result of an inward-tending exegesis. The Zahirites—their name derives from the Arabic word for clear, apparent, and phenomenal; Bâtin connotes internal—argued that words had only a surface meaning, one that was anchored to a particular usage, circumstance, historical and religious situation.

   It is not necessary to describe this theory in detail. It is useful, however, to indicate that both le Troubadour aveugle in L'Enfant de sable and le Consul in La Nuit sacrée are private and introspective. They both see the world from a hidden angle, beneath words. Moreover, le Consul may be said to represent the Bâtin, whereas Zahra (note how the name derives from Zahirite) judges the world from the outside only; what is visible on the surface is what counts. In this regard, she may be said to represent the Zahir. Whether Ben Jelloun knows of the difference that separates the two schools, we are not sure. One thing we may venture to advance is that his theory as to the creation of the three characters, le Troubadour aveugle, le Consul, and Zahra, seems to fit perfectly in the picture. I am indebted to Edward Said for the formulation of some of the remarks in this note (For more details on the matter, see The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983, 35-37) and to Thérèse Michel for drawing my attention to the passage in L'Enfant de sable. There is a clear, somewhat schematic account of the problematic as to Bâtin/Zahir in Anis Fraitha, Nathariyat fil Lugha (Beirut: Al-Maktaba al Jam'iya, 1973). The polemical point between the Zahirite and the Batinite schools is to be found in Ar-rad' alal' nuhat, ed. Shawki Daif (Cairo, 1947). The original text dates from 1180.

2. In La Nuit brisée, Fethi Benslama supplies a useful definition for the concept of wijdan. He states: “Wijdan is the affirmation of being (l'être) in regard to self and others. It is both an awakening and a presence that ties the individual to his surroundings” (23).

3. One example of the “nouveau roman” is Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie. It has often been said that the “New Novel” killed the concept of the novel's protagonist. In this regard, I cite Anthony Burgess: “The great tradition of French fiction appears dead to me. The person responsible for this is Robbe-Grillet … Indeed, since the end of the war, French literature has given the world only two characters: Astérix and Obélix, who are typically Rabelaisian. Without characters, there is no novel” (35).

4. Halqua means a “round table.” In Maghrebian countries, the market is held outdoors and is called a souk; it attracts not only merchants but story-tellers, poets, and troubadours as well. The presence of the Halqua is vital to the narration of events; it is the space within which the story is reflected. Thus, in La Nuit sacrée the Man from the South succeeds in forming his own Halqua: “And then there were those who had nothing to sell. They sat down on the ground, crossed their legs and waited” (13).

5. In L'Enfant de sable the six story-tellers are: the teller devoured by his own sentences, the man with female breasts, the woman with the poorly shaved beard, Salem, Amar, and Fatouma. Ben Jelloun himself is subject to all that exists beyond the limits of the margins. One notices a certain obsession on the part of the author for characters whose raison d'être is to belong, despite the conflicts that pit them against society as a result of their social, moral, psychological, or other defects.

6. Linda Hutcheon defines metafiction in the following way: “When the term postmodern is used these days to refer to fiction, it generally signifies metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way, self-referential and auto-representational” (301). See also Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (34-52).

7. Ben Jelloun denies that female excision is practiced in the Maghreb. “I must make it perfectly clear that there is no female excision in the Maghreb; it simply isn't done there. There is no female excision in Islam; it is expressly forbidden. It is a practice that has been imported from Africa. In the terrible world of my heroine, it belongs to the realm of her nightmares. Even so, this allows me to write that excision can exist in an act of extreme violence … but not in a sociological tradition as is the case in certain African nations. When I wrote this scene, I was terrified.” See the interview with Rollin (139).

8. In Dominated Man, Albert Memmi expresses his belief that “The Black, the Colonized, the Worker, the Jew, Woman, and the Servant” are all dominated beings.

9. See Gwynne Edwards's The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel: A Reading of His Film and Buñuel's film Un Chien andalou.

10. For a full discussion of Foucault's theory about “power-knowledge-pleasure,” see his Histoire de la sexualité: I, La Volonté de savoir (95-113).

11. In North Africa, the pronoun “hia” refers to the wife and “houa” to the husband. Therefore, the husband and wife refer to each other by these pronouns and not by their first-names. This situation calls to mind Simone de Beauvoir's point of view in Le Deuxième sexe, where she states that “Every coming together of a man and a woman is obscene to the extent that it creates a relationship of power, the goal of which is to subjugate, to take advantage of, and to consume what the woman can offer. The man's role should be limited to that of a person whose mere presence is to give the woman pleasure” (123).

12. It is interesting that Mernissi's Le Harem politique was banned in Morocco because of its content. But in comparison with the Muslim world's obsession with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Mernissi did not particularly suffer as a result of this censorship. Le Harem politique is a sociological study about the relationship between the Prophet and his wives and female followers. Foucault's concept of “power-pleasure” may well be relevant to an understanding of this text.

13. The phrase “My aunt is a man” is of Egyptian origin. Ben Jelloun explains: “An Egyptian woman came to see me at the end of a lecture in Rouen and said to me: ‘I have a story for you, my aunt is a man.’ She did not say anything more about it. This sentence really stuck in my head. I wrote a synopsis for a screenplay that I proposed to Souhil Ben Barka, who at the time was busy with Amok. Then I took it up again a year later as a book.” See his interview with Zakya Daoud (60).

Works Cited

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Beauvoir, Simone de. Le Deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Modern Library, 1968.

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. L'Enfant de sable. Paris: Seuil, 1985. The Sand Child. Trans. Alan Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt, 1987.

———. Moha le fou, Moha le sage. Paris: Seuil, 1980.

———. La Nuit sacrée. Paris: Seuil, 1987. The Sacred Night. Trans. Alan Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.

———. La Prière de l'absent. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

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Edwards, Gwynne. The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel: A Reading of His Films. London: Marian Boyars, 1982.

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Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society. Revised. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987.

———. Le Harem politique. Le Prophète et les femmes. Paris: Albin Michel, 1987.

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Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Le Petit Prince. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. New York: Harcourt, 1971.