'This Blinding Absence Of Light' (4)

is like the prison it describes,
not a place for the weak of constitution,

it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.

But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...

Chapter 9, page 38

'Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats away at you from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end. I had go through this ordeal to understand something that simple. I remember an instructor at the school in Ahermemou who was a bad man, spiteful and gloomy. He had yellow eyes. The colour of hate. One day, he did not come to class. We learned that he was in hospital for a long stay. i don't recall what happened to him, but people said that he had been bewitched by a maountain woman whose daughter he raped.'.