5/21/2018 Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement (April 2001) | That blinding absence of light

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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 Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.

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
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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

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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
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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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