Prison literature is generally a category on it's own in the book world. From well before the secretive sexual fabulism of The Marquis de Sade through to the profoundly Christian outlook of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress there is a history of epistolary books and first hand accounts where a prisoner or person in forced retreat relates their daily thoughts over time. Or through hindsight they recall what their prison was like including descriptions of the life they wanted to have, but could not have.
One such unread book on my shelf is 'The Prison Diary of Albie Sachs'. Even Jeffery Archer has written a prison diary about his relatively short, relatively comfortable, time in prison. By their nature these accounts concentrate on small events and changes in microcosmic settings because the world of freedom of choice is beyond the author. The more oppressive the prison the smaller the changes the authorities permit the prisoners to focus on.
If ever you were told that student politics is a dangerous hobby, then in the wealthy liberal West you would not believe it. In the wealthy West student politics are almost a mandatory time to put some distance in values between themselves and their parents, often using the latest technology and jargon. The most oppressive aspect of student living is the levels of student debt they will be tempted to accept. But for anyone living under an absolute ruler, whether president, dictator, or king, then student politics is some sort of toxic forbidden fruit. The idealism of student politics attracts the young partly because they cannot 'read' or interpret the political signals the way the adults around them can. The adults play out a sort of student politics the young can't interpret. The dictator remains God, the parents become the snakes and the students are cast as Adam and Eve.
So it was that Tahar Ben Jelloun was one of a small group of students who took part in a large-scale palace coup against the rule of King Hassan II on the 10th July 1971, the date of the king's 42nd birthday. If you want to read more about the coup please put 'Skhirat Coup d'etat' into the search engine of your choice and follow what comes up. Tahar Ben Jelloun ended up in a no tech high security prison run by the Moroccan secret police for eighteen years.
This book is his recollection of his life in that prison, it details his attempts at being a good Muslim in spite of the paucity of his surroundings, the dirt floors to the jail cells, the constant odour of disinfectant, the very poor starchy food, the being allowed out only for the funeral of yet another prisoner and then not being able to take the sunlight, and so many other privations. The author's biggest battle was his trying to not remember life when he was free, because the memories were too painful for him to recall and stay sane with. As he saw with other prisoners, insanity was the quickest route to death. And in that place insanity was as going to be a horrible death, the worst death was a slow death from being stung by scorpions that were released into the prisoners cell by the guards.
There are short bursts of light and shade in the book, times when he briefly recounts how and where he grew up, recounts some of the simplicity and beauty of life with his mother and sisters that he knew when he was free. But they are understandably rare.
It is a book of very short chapters, thirty nine chapters over 190 pages, with three pages of glossary at the end. That said, it still has to be read v-e-r-y--s-l-o-w-l-y otherwise you skip over some detail that it is an act of compassion towards the author to absorb slowly and meditate upon.
The prisoners have to have group discipline and have to have group activities. So prayers hold the group together, as much as the story telling does. No author's stories seem more apt for group sharing than the writings of Albert Camus, who I never particularly thought of as anti-empire in his writings and yet the toughness of what is required for existential self reliance his writings are apt for the population of a prison where the government wants not to know who the prison governor is, much less who the guards and the prisoners are.
When I looked up how well known this book has become I was surprised at how it has travelled and how many languages it has been translated into. I liked it that much that I found that many of the paragraphs were self contained enough to read well on their own, so on my blog I put up a series of the paragraphs on my blog, each of them linked from the first quote from the book onward Anyone who is interested can read the sequence from the following link https://woodenlodge.
The last three years of his imprisonment prove the grimmest. Those are the years in which the prisoners' collective resolve crumbles, before the author's resolve also crumbles, which tests the resolve of the reader, to keep on reading. These are the times in the writing when the author feels most broken and unrepairable as a person. They happen when he knows that the wider world knows he exists and where he is. But this knowledge comes to him in the most frustrating and most intangible of ways. This is when it felt right to him to think 'If I am ever released will I be able to feel it?'
It is a cliche to say that the last hour before the light comes is when the dark is at it's most concentrated. In this most exceptional book and story it is true. Eventually the surviving prisoners are all moved. Their prison, place of slow torture and starvation is bulldozed and palm trees hastily planted over the site, as if it were an oasis. Each surviving prisoner is slowly rehabilitated so they can eat regular food, appear to be relatively normal, and their pasts are officially erased.
Only the look in the former prisoner's eyes remains immune to rehabilitation/reform, there the mark of having been imprisoned and tortured remains. The author finds some sort of temporary peace through being reunited with his mother who for being elderly is somewhat still, her stillness is good for both of them.
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