Burning the straits: indignation and hospitality in Ben Jelloun

ABSTRACT

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2006) shines a spotlight upon a society plagued by poverty and corruption, where ‘burning’ refers both to the act of migrants setting sail across the sea, and to that of torching their identity documents to avoid repatriation. The intertwined fates of protagonists Azel and Miguel in their respective homelands of Morocco and Spain capture the dual nature of refuge and endangerment in the concept of hospitality, embodied within their national affiliations and in their fraught same-sex relationship. I follow the course of these voyagers into the unknown, arguing that Ben Jelloun upsets both political and sexual borders to reveal an omnipresent yearning for a better future, born from the flames of indignation. I situate Partir within the context of ongoing struggles around migration, reading it as a quest to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of ethics and hospitality, but of a hospitality that is less focused on guest versus host and is aligned closer with conviviality.

KEYWORDS:

• Tahar Ben Jelloun
• hospitality
• indignation
• migration
• Morocco
• Partir

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Youness Bennani for his insight on Morocco, to Nicholas Huelster for his helpful remarks, and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Desire sets the skin afire for the dying protagonist of Jour de silence à Tanger (1990) in his dreams of an impossible sexual encounter, and fire likewise consumes the body of Mohamed, protagonist of Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu (2011), a fictional account of the true story of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose act of self-immolation in setting himself ablaze also ignited the Arab Spring.

2. All English citations of Partir are from the translation, Leaving Tangier, translated by Linda Coverdale (London: Arcadia Books, 2009).

3. Claudia Esposito’s The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (2014) offers a penetrating transnational perspective on Partir and Ben Jelloun’s broader corpus. She explores Ben Jelloun with Mahi Binebine, and the role of Moha in speaking for the marginalized, as well as the geographical significance of the Strait of Gibraltar: ‘The shores of these nodal points are spaces of human transaction, where bodies are subjected to heightened surveillance and where time comes under suspension; emigrants and immigrants, both clandestine and licit, pass through these places, leaving behind all-too frequent stories of defeat and deferral that are carefully glossed over, or treated as mere statistics, in the everyday practices of nation states.’ (118)

4. Ahmed Idrissi Alami also explores desire in Partir in relation to current youth protesters: ‘Ben Jelloun’s novel explores the repeatedly stunted development of his protagonist who comes to represent both the “ideal” middle class citizen and the typical disenfranchised male youth who, in many ways, can be seen as a forbearer of today’s youth protesters. It is his story, and that of the loosely connected secondary characters in the book, that represents a significant legacy of the postcolonial era within the framework of exposed psycho-sexual traumas in which the body becomes the landscape to be further and persistently abused.’ (2)

5. Hakim Abderrezak (2009) refers to clandestine migrant narratives as illiterature, re-appropriating the idea of illegality to draw attention to characters’ circumvention of criminalizing migratory laws, upsetting the image of Morocco as a touristic haven. He underscores how illiterature might serve as an ‘empathetic sub-genre of literature for a Maghreb shaped by the effects of globalization,’ and bring together limits between different forms of literature: ‘By “burning” the limits between national literatures, illiterature is likely to become a site where Spanish and Francophone Studies of the Maghreb meet. The same prediction can be made for Maghrebi-Italian scholarly encounters.’ (468)

6. Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales (1999) [Welcome to Paradise (2003)] similarly describes the ominous yet alluring presence of Spain as a temptation across the sea. Binebine reveals the stories of seven emigrants awaiting a trafficker’s signal to cross the straits, desperately seeking a better existence, and as with Ben Jelloun’s mythical sea figure of Toutia, Binebine also portrays the legendary and lethal aspects of the sea: ‘Dans mon village, les vieux nous avaient maintes fois raconté la mer, et de mille façons différentes. Certains la comparaient à l’immensité du ciel : un ciel d’eau écumant au-dessus de forêts infinies, impénétrables, peuplées de fantômes et de monstres féroces. D’autres affirmaient qu’elle était encore plus étendue que les fleuves, les lacs, les étangs et tous les ruisseaux de la terre assemblés. Quant aux savants de la grand-place, unanimes sur la question, ils attestaient que le Dieu tenait cette eau en réserve afin de nettoyer la Terre de ses pécheurs au jour du Jugement dernier.’ (9). [Back in the village, the old people were always telling us about the sea, and each time in a different way. Some said it was like a vast sky, a sky of water foaming across infinite, impenetrable forests where ghosts and ferocious monsters lived. Others maintained that it stretched further than all the rivers, lakes, ponds and streams on earth put together. As for the wise old boys in the square, who spoke as one on the matter, they swore that God was storing up the water for Judgment day, when it would wash the earth clean of its sinners.] (1)

7. Camus’ title plays upon the interchangeability of the French word for ‘host’ and ‘guest,’ and is frequently read as the problem of refusing to take sides in the colonial conflict in Algeria. Like Partir, ‘L’Hôte’ begins upon a rocky slope, and tells the story of two men, an (unnamed) Arab prisoner, and a school teacher, Daru, charged with turning the prisoner over to the authorities. Although freed by Daru, the prisoner turns himself in, while Daru’s students denounce him for betraying their ‘brother,’ thus leaving both Daru and the prisoner seemingly condemned to die. The final separation of Daru and the prisoner could be read as symbolic of inevitable exile, but it could also be understood as an affirmation that hospitality might be fully ethical and unlimited.

8. In contrast to Azel’s description of himself as ‘a breadcrumb at the feast,’ Ieme van der Poel (2011) analyzes a shared meal from Hafid Bouazza’s ‘La Traversée’ (2002) that unfolds on a beach in the fictional Moroccan village of Bertollo, which she aligns with Bertolli olive oil as a symbol of longevity and joie de vivre within Mediterranean lifestyle and cuisine. Yet the tragic irony is soon apparent in her foreboding depiction of a young Moroccan family awaiting transport across the Strait of Gibraltar, who share their food with the passeur and two strangers in a gesture of hospitality without limits, even as the demise of this migrant family is imminent. Van der Poel addresses Bouazza within the emergence of the genre of ‘le roman des harragas,’ the Arabic word for the migrant ‘brûleurs,’ who are brought to the foreground in works such as Boualem Sansal’s Harraga (2005), Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), and Ben Jelloun’s Partir.