The Punishment

Description

The punishment was terrible. I waited fifty years to be able to write this book.

“I was punished for demonstrating, calmly and peacefully, for a little democracy. For months, I was nothing more than a registration number, number 10366. One day, after I had lost all hope of ever seeing it again, I regained my freedom. I was finally able, as I had dreamed, to love, to travel, to write, and to publish many works. However, writing ‘The Punishment,’ daring to return to that story, and finding its words, took me almost fifty years…” With these words, Tahar Ben Jelloun concludes this fictionalized memoir about an experience of imprisonment, humiliation, and suffering.

The biography tells the story of ninety-four students—Tahar Ben Jelloun among them—who were imprisoned for nineteen months under Hassan II’s rule as punishment for peacefully demonstrating in the streets of major Moroccan cities in March 1965. A few months later, these students found themselves imprisoned in barracks under the pretext of military service, under the yoke of officers loyal to General Oufkir, tasked with their “re-education.” They were subjected to torture, humiliation, and mistreatment, and forced into dangerous maneuvers under absurd pretexts. Their ordeal ended only with the beginning of preparations for a military coup, the Skhirat coup of July 10, 1971, at which point they were released without explanation.

Tahar Ben Jelloun recounts the details of those long months that shaped him in his twenties, nurturing his consciousness and secretly creating him as a writer. Following his masterpiece, “That Blinding Darkness,” he returns with this compelling autobiographical novel, telling us “in the present tense, in a realistic style, without embellishment or adjectives, recounting events as they unfolded, day by day, without us knowing what tomorrow holds.”