This Blinding Absence of Light
by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale
195pp, New Press, £14.99
On July 10 1971, 1,000 Moroccan soldiers were herded into trucks and taken to the palace of Skhirat, where King Hassan II was celebrating his 42nd birthday. Upon arrival, their commanding officers instructed them to find and kill him. Almost 100 guests lost their lives in the ensuing bloodbath, but the king survived. Those deemed responsible were dispatched to Kenitra, a prison known for its harsh conditions. However, most of those imprisoned were unwitting and unwilling participants in the coup and many had not fired a shot.
On a sultry August night two years later, 58 of them were again herded into trucks and taken to the remote desert hellhole of Tazmamart; here they were thrown into underground cells 10ft long and 5ft wide, with ceilings so low they were unable to stand, and with just enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death for years. Each tomb had an air vent and a tiny hole in the floor that served as the lavatory. They were crawling with cockroaches and scorpions the men could hear but not see. There was no medical attention, no exercise, and no light. The only time they were allowed out was to bury one of their friends.
Thirteen years would pass before the outside world found out that Tazmamart existed. It would take another five years of international campaigning to shut it down. There were only 28 survivors. By 1991, most had lost up to a foot in height. Survivors were warned not to talk to the western press, but in Tahar Ben Jelloun the authorities have an enemy more formidable than 1,000 foreign journalists. Novelist, essayist, critic and poet, winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt and the 1994 Prix Maghreb, Jelloun was born in Fez in 1944 and emigrated to France in 1961. This Blinding Absence of Light, for which he and his excellent translator have won this year's Impac prize, is based on the testimony of a former inmate of Tazmamart, and it defies any expectations you might have built up from the story above. It refuses the well-meaning but tired and ultimately dehumanising conventions of human rights horror journalism; it is not a political tract.
Although it unmasks the liars, killers and torturers responsible for Tazmamart, it refuses to dwell on them. Although it is told in the first person, it is not an autobiography. Although it is technically a novel, it is a novel stripped, like its subject, of all life's comforts.
What we're left with is Salim's voice, a voice all the more magnificent for being draped in darkness. Some have found echoes of Beckett in the lucid, pared-down prose, and certainly there is something Beckettian about his limited environment and studied hopelessness. But that he has renounced hope for a higher purpose is clear from the opening lines: "For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret."
This is the language of Islamic mysticism. Salim is not religious when he arrives in Tazmamart, but his situation is the real version of the spiritual hell that Islamic mystics describe in metaphor. He escapes from his torments by following in their footsteps, imagining his way as far into his mind as his slowly decaying body will allow. He knows his reverie is over when he can smell the stench.
The narrative follows a winding and treacherous path: inspired solitary departures end in unspeakable degradation. Horrible deaths alternate with inspired collective efforts to stay alive. Karim becomes the talking clock to give a shape to their endless night. Ustad sings them verses from the Qur'an. One man recounts the plots of every film he's ever seen, another invents games to play with imaginary cards. But do not approach this book if you want your heart to be warmed. The most disturbing scene comes when Salim is released to an airy room with a comfortable bed. This is not a tribute to the human spirit, but one man's attempt to illuminate another man's truth.
For there are two intelligences at play here - Salim's and the author's. The voice of Tazmamart is never imprisoned by its jail. It is free to travel anywhere, and it travels light. It makes revelations of grave importance, but never gravely. It is, despite its dark materials, a joy to read.
· Maureen Freely is the translator of Orhan Pamuk's Snow (Faber).
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