By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring

Ben Jelloun’s Ethics and Aesthetics

Translating an author of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s stature demands that I know his ethical and aesthetic priorities, which, in turn, calls for thinking beyond the strictly biographical. French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio said: “Tahar Ben Jelloun is a man the most concerned about time that I know. That is to say, time which passes, time which urges us on and engages us, and this time which is ours, sometimes so difficult and unjust” (Le Clézio 2000, 3). Ben Jelloun penetrates the superficial veneers of social practice to expose violence and injustice; he has firmly established himself as a writer who speaks for the socially marginal. Le Clézio calls Ben Jelloun, “the bearer of a very ancient wisdom, inherent from Moroccan civilization” (Le Clézio 2000, 4). He admires Ben Jelloun’s natural elegance, his taste for sharing, and the seriousness with which he addresses himself to his audience. I too see Tahar Ben Jelloun as a humanist who often writes about the socially marginal and lends his voice to those who cannot speak, mostly to people of modest means.

During the Arab Spring revolts in 2011, Ben Jelloun went to the International Literature Festival in Berlin to talk about writers’ ethical and aesthetic responsibilities. Katherine Sanders translated Ben Jelloun’s remarks from the French in her brief essay, “Translating the Invisible with Tahar Ben Jelloun.” The festival’s keynote speaker, Ben Jelloun said, “We write out of the darkness that surrounds us.” He believes that “to write about the world is to attempt to understand it better.” He thinks it is important to listen to one’s own people. For him, listening means being…

willing to report the words and translate the silence of all those who hope and wait for someone to appear out of obscurity and tell the world of their suffering and to portray their future…. We need the novel not only to explain the world to us, but also to accompany our historical times… we must write more than ever… beautifully, powerfully, even if humankind increasingly wallows in a pseudo-reality, in mediocrity, and in ugliness. (quoted in Sanders 2011)

In a world full of injustices, writers have a responsibility to be honest, yet doubt and imagination are also a part of literary works. “Ben Jelloun emphasized his opinion that both doubt and imagination need to be part of literature because they are part of life” (Sanders 2011). Ben Jelloun has doubts about Bouazizi’s self-immolation being the main and only provocation of revolts in Tunisia. He has doubts that Bouazizi killed himself only because of police violence. By Fire flows from Ben Jelloun’s moral imagination as an instrument of inquiry about the various levels and sources of pressure the historical Mohamed Bouazizi suffered.