The Punishment

by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Linda Coverdale (Translator)

Overview

An innocent man’s gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century despot

In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the narrator’s traumatic experience, written with a memoirist’s immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began secretly to write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300243024
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Tahar Ben Jelloun is an acclaimed Moroccan‑born French novelist, poet, and essayist. His many works include Racism Explained to My Daughter,The Sand Child, and the IMPAC Award–winning This Blinding Absence of Light, also translated by Linda Coverdale. Linda Coverdale is an award‑winning translator who has translated over seventy-five books.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface vii

Off to El Hajeb 3

Last Moments of Freedom 17

Akka 23

Medical Exam 29

Punished by His Majesty 33

Heavy Stones out in the Sun 35

Maneuvers in the Rain 41

Mohammed V Hospital 53

An Evening chez Ababou 63

The Convoy 67

Ahermoumou 75

On Sophisticated Brutality 81

Daily Life 87

Liberation Yes, Liberation No 97

On the Outside 117

June 5, 1971 127

The Surprise 131

Translator's Notes 139

Translator's Afterword 147

Editorial Reviews

Exacting in both personal and historical detail . . . fluid, understatedly pristine language and expert structure . . . Not for nothing is Ben Jelloun regularly a Nobel Prize finalist . . . A masterly and important evocation of brutal political repression.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2020

"I invented nothing," says Morocco-born, French-based author Ben Jelloun (This Blinding Absence of Light) in an interview about this book quoted by adept translator Coverdale in her preface. Chronicling his 1966 arrest while peacefully protesting King Hassan II's corrupt regime and placed with nearly 100 other young men in a brutal military camp, this work is classed as fiction, and if it's exacting in both personal and historical detail, the fluid, understatedly pristine language and expert structure make it exemplary literature. (Not for nothing is Ben Jelloun regularly a Nobel Prize finalist.) Camp inmates are harshly made to understand the importance of obedience and devotion to king and country; as war heats up with Algeria, they are sent to another camp in preparation for becoming cannon fodder. The narrator survives by inwardly reciting Rimbaud and beginning a lifetime of writing poetry, his "only weapon against these barbarians." VERDICT A masterly and important evocation of brutal political repression.

Library Journal

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