12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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That blinding absence of light
-- Tazmamart Cellule 10 (Tazmamart Cell 10), Ahmed Marzouki, Paris: Editions Paris Méditerranée; Casablanca: Tarik Editions, 2000. pp334;
-- Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (That Blinding Absence of Light), Tahar Ben Jelloun, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001. pp229
In July 1971, Ahmed Marzouki, then an officer cadet in the Moroccan army and 30 years later the author of Tazmamart Cell 10, a prison memoir, took part in an abortive coup d'état against King Hassan II of Morocco. Troops invaded the king's birthday party at the royal palace at Skhirat near Rabat, causing the death of 98 guests. King Hassan, however, escaped. One year later, Hassan again outwitted his enemies, this time defeating a coup attempt ordered by Mohamed Oufkir, the minister of defence. The royal plane being attacked by military aircraft on its way back from a visit to France, it is said that King Hassan grabbed the aircraft's controls and told the attackers by radio that "the tyrant is dead." It was only later when the plane had been allowed to land that the plotters realised their mistake. Such stories go some way towards explaining Hassan II's remarkable staying power; by the time of his death in July 1999 he had reigned for nearly four decades. However, the simultaneous publication in France and Morocco of Marzouki's memoir of the 18 years that he and 58 other officers and men spent in solitary confinement in tiny, pitch-black cells at the Tazmamart penal colony in the Moroccan desert fills in the detail of the cruelty inflicted by the regime on those attempting to overthrow it. Moreover, in his novel That Blinding Absence of Light, the well-known Franco-Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun has reconstructed Marzouki's story from conversations with Aziz Binebine, another former prisoner at Tazmamart. This novel similarly bears witness to the terrible suffering inflicted on the detainees.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Marzouki was completing his studies at the Ahermoumou Royal Military College, now renamed Ribat Al Khair, under the direction of the charismatic Lieutenant-Colonel M'hamed Ababou, the college's commander, when he and his fellow cadets received orders to participate in a special military exercise, the exact nature of which was withheld from them. "Your mission," he was told, "is to surround the buildings at Skhirat, which have been occupied by subversive elements, and to close off all exits. No one is to escape, and, in the event of force being used, do not hesitate to open fire." Marzouki and his fellows carried out their orders, not realising until their later arrest that they had been taking part in a coup attempt involving troops from Ahermoumou and elsewhere. As the soldiers invaded the palace grounds and golf course, rounding up servants and guests as they did so, Ababou kept up the fiction of an anti-subversion exercise, crying out "For the king and against the traitors" as he led the attack.
The coup attempt failed, and Marzouki's narrative really begins with his ensuing trial and imprisonment. The former, he says, was a farce. "The favouritism, the regionalism, the completely arbitrary character [of the sentences handed down], was again in evidence. Nevertheless, I could not then have imagined, for those who had been given sentences of three years or more, that these would come to mean absolute horror." At first sent to the military prison at Kenitra, where they received reasonable treatment, in August 1973 Marzouki and his fellows were taken, at two in the morning, in secret and without any warning, to the newly constructed penal colony of Tazmamart in the Moroccan desert. Here they were put in cells measuring three metres by two metres, each of which had no windows and was kept in darkness. Though the majority of the prisoners had received sentences of between three and 10 years in prison for their part in the Skhirat coup attempt (Marzouki received five), all were kept in these conditions for the next 18 years, their existence denied by the state and any form of communication with the outside world being refused. Of the 58 men imprisoned at Tazmamart, 28 were once again able to see daylight upon their eventual release in 1991, the rest having died in the interim as a result of official neglect, madness, and the absence of even minimal standards of medical care.
The prison colony consisted of two large cell-blocks, Building One and Building Two. Each building contained 29 cells, numbered from one to 29 in Building One and from 30 to 58 in Building Two. A two-metre wide corridor ran the length of each building, separating the cells. Marzouki dwells on the arrangement of the cells and the disposition of the buildings, since where a detainee was placed had an important bearing on his survival. Cell 15 in Building One, for example, was "strategically important" because its occupant, situated at a corner, was in a position to relay information around the building. More grimly, the prisoners in Building Two had less chance of survival since as a result of its location the building was more exposed to the harsh winters and burning summers that the detainees had to endure than was the more sheltered Building One. Ground water tended to accumulate in Building Two, making hygiene difficult. Building Two, Marzouki says, also had fewer officers, making it difficult to keep up the morale necessary for survival. Only six prisoners survived Building Two, as against 22 in Building One. Marzouki was in Building One, Cell 10.
Parts of Marzouki's memoir have already been published in the French review Les temps modernes in 1993, and he was encouraged to write it not only, he says, to bear witness to the suffering that he and his fellows endured during their 18 years in the darkness, but also as a tribute to the chiefly European activists who, he believes, put the pressure necessary on the Moroccan authorities firstly to admit the existence of Tazmamart (the site has now been redeveloped) and secondly to ensure the prisoners' release. The book contains much that will, unfortunately, be familiar from other prison memoirs, and Marzouki several times compares his experience to that of westerners held hostage in the Lebanon during the 1980s. He dwells on the importance of morale to survival and on the kind of spiritual change that can come as a result of such extreme suffering. However, he also comments at length on features of Moroccan society that, he believes, contributed to his lengthy imprisonment. These include what he describes as an excessive deference to authority, something which, when coupled with a general lack of transparency, apparently eased official denials of Tazmamart's existence and facilitated Marzouki's illegal detention there.
Ironically, it was because one of the detainees, Lieutenant M'barek Touil, had an American wife whom he had met on a Moroccan army training course in the United States that conditions at the camp improved, at least for Touil. Nancy Touil refused to accept official stonewalling, eventually causing the American ambassador to intervene on her husband's behalf. "It's probably the stupidest thing I ever did," Marzouki quotes Zemmouri, another prisoner, as saying. Well-known for his good looks, "during his training in the United States, he had met a lot of young American women who would have jumped at the chance of marrying him." Unfortunately, Zemmouri had turned them all down. More seriously, Marzouki is bitter at a system in which, he says, "the value of a Moroccan citizen compared to an American was similar to that of the [Moroccan] dirham compared to the dollar."
Similarly, Marzouki believes that the prisoners' eventual release in 1991 would not have come about had it not been for years of pressure applied by international human-rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, and by campaigning French journalists, such as Gilles Perrault and Christine Daure-Serfaty, herself married to Abraham Serfaty, a member of the Moroccan opposition and a prisoner elsewhere for 18 years. This aspect of the book has led to accusations of a lack of "patriotism" being levelled against Marzouki and of his damaging his country's reputation abroad, charges that Marzouki vigorously denies.
Charges have also been levelled against That Blinding Absence of Light, Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel based on Tazmamart, though these are of a different kind. Ignace Dalle, a French journalist who introduces Marzouki's account of his years spent at the penal colony, comments on the fact that Tazmamart, the existence of which was denied for years, is now "all the rage, a leading Moroccan writer having woken up and used it as the framework for his last work after having 'debriefed' one of the survivors." Marzouki himself told the French newspaper Le Monde that "Tahar Ben Jelloun didn't write a thing on behalf of the detainees at Tazmamart. He always remained silent. Why is he so bothered about it today?" Ben Jelloun has said that he wrote the novel following requests that he write on the subject from others, and that a part of his earnings from the novel will be paid to Moroccan human-rights organisations.
For his part, Aziz Binebine, whose autobiographical material provided the basis for Ben Jelloun's novel, comments that the novel "is Tahar's, even if it has been much inspired by me and by my story.... He has traced a spiritual path [in the novel] that is intimately his own." In fact, Ben Jelloun has used the story of Tazmamart as an opportunity to write a work of fiction that dwells on the place of memory and of remembered narratives of all kinds in his characters' lives, particularly in the life of his first-person narrator, now that they have been denied direct contact with the world or face-to-face contact with each other.
As such, That Blinding Absence of Light will appeal to Ben Jelloun's wide readership in France, Morocco and elsewhere, who have come to expect such introspective examination from the novelist. His new novel, told against a background of atrocious suffering, is similarly one about solitude, and of the mental space remaining to the narrator as his physical power of movement recedes. Ben Jelloun has written on this theme before, and it is one that is identical here with the strength that can come from interior exile. One does not need to find an external vantage-point from which to criticise the shortcomings of the social or political environment, Ben Jelloun would seem to be saying. Effective resistance can come from within, in even the unlikeliest places and triggered off by the most incongruous memories, since such memories can come to the rescue of the present and hold out the promise of a better, possible world.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
Few inches from death
Whole pages from Balzac or from Victor Hugo would come to me in a confused rush when I was tired.... and to lose that interior power would have meant the prison cell closing in around me, the walls pushing together, the ceiling descending. I had to react, to hold on to the capacity to imagine distant, imaginary worlds.... I hold out both my arms sideways: I touch the walls. I raise them above my head while sitting down: my fingertips are five centimetres from the ceiling. I have to push the walls back. I push at them with my palms. I get up, and, squatting on the floor, try to push up the ceiling as if it were a stopper on a bottle, repeating this movement for days at a time....Perhaps the abstract problem of memory can be solved by pushing up against something concrete, against the space of my imprisonment. If I can put my mental library in order I will be saved, and the walls will no longer oppress me. If I can escape mentally by conjuring up the characters from novels, there won't be the same problem of space.
There weren't many books in my mental library, but there was one that I had read when preparing the entrance exam for the Morocco Civil-Service College (an exam I failed by one mark): Camus's L'etranger. What a joy, what a pleasure it was to rediscover those pages where each phrase, each word was so loaded with meaning. For a good month I told the story of L'etranger to my companions...I was familiar with Camus, and I took pleasure in recalling passages from the novel. This gave the book a supreme importance, going far beyond its crime-based plot. A novel told out loud in an abyss, a few inches from death, won't have the same meaning or ramifications as a novel read on a beach or in a meadow in the shadow of cherry trees.
... Like a whisper, I heard someone repeat sentences from the novel's first page: "Mother died today, or perhaps yesterday, I don't know which. I received a telegramme from the nursing home: 'Mother dead. Funeral tomorrow. Yours faithfully.' That means nothing. Perhaps it was yesterday."
Another voice continued:
"Today I am going to die. Or perhaps tomorrow. I don't know which. My mother will never receive a telegramme from Tazmamart, and there won't be any yours faithfully either. That means nothing. Perhaps it was yesterday."
Yet another voice:
"Okay, so I fired four times at a dead body, the bullets thudding into it and not coming out. It was like giving four sharp raps at misery's door."
From That Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
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