This Blinding Absence of Light. By Tahar Ben Jelloun

This Blinding Absence of Light

Tahar Ben Jalloun. Translated from French by Linda Coverdale.

Penguin Books. First published 2001.

This book is based on the true life experiences of a Moroccan student soldier, here called Salim, who, in 1971, almost innocently (in that he did as ordered, and had no part in the decision to rebel or in the planning of the rebellion), took part in a failed coup again King Hassan II. Along with many others, he was condemned to living burial for 18 years in an underground prison situated in the Moroccan desert. No light was allowed into the cells, day or night. The food was meager, barely enough for sustenance. The water foul, and in quantity just sufficient to assuage thirst, with very little left over for any washing. There were no drugs and no medical help even for the common ailments. The place was vermin infested, sometimes deliberately introduced by the guards as a measure of control or punishment. There was no way to clean oneself, and the cells, and the prisoners themselves, were soon stinking of human refuse. In these circumstances, some, a few, a very few of the prisoners managed to keep their minds intact and survive, until they were released nearly twenty years later. This is the fictionalized story of one of them.

Salim is the son of one of the King's courtiers. As the father bows and scrapes his way to positions of greater and greater privilege in the palace, he abandons his family, consisting of a wife and a few children. Salim joins the army as a cadet soldier, and is ordered into an attack on the palace. The attack fails, most of the attackers are killed, and the surviving officers captured and executed. The captured soldiers are imprisoned, first overground, in the prison in the desert, and then, when, presumably, the political heat becomes too much for the monarchy to bear, underground in dungeons completely devoid of light, the existence of which are entirely deniable to the country and to the world. Now begins the eighteen-year ordeal under conditions that rats would find difficult to survive. Salim is put in a cell block containing 13 others, in separate cells. The prisoners can communicate by shouting to each other, and a weird fellowship grows. Each of the prisoners has his own idiosyncrasy, and expresses a personality, inasmuch as any such individuality is possible in that literal hell-hole. One of them, for example, keeps the time, and announces it at regular intervals. Another is desperately scared of scorpions, and the guards frequently threaten to introduce them into his cell. A third is a snitch. And Salim himself remembers books he has read and narrates them to his block-mates, or recites passages from the Koran. Over the years, the prisoners die, one after the other, to unimaginably horrible deaths. One of them, for instance, is disgusted with fouling his own cell and decides to hold back. In a few days he becomes so terribly constipated that he tries to get relief by poking a metal rod up his anus. He punctures himself and bleeds to death. Another is brought in with a gangrenous arm. But before he can be killed by the gangrene, he is eaten alive by cockroaches attracted to the wound. With each death, the others in the cell block are put to work. At the best of times, the guards make them prepare the corpse for burial with all religious rites and recitations, and the prisoners are allowed a few brief minutes outside in the yard, where the burial takes place. The empty cell is then cleaned out. In many cases, the corpse is just dragged away, and thrown into an unmarked grave, thereby adding the horror and scandal of irreligion to the ordeals of the believers among the survivors. Of the thirteen in the cell-block, just three survive to the end, when after twenty years, in an unexplained act of random mercy, hinted as being due to international pressure, the prisoners are 'pardoned' and set free. Just three of thirteen, only twenty-eight out of fifty-eight in the entire prison. The prison is razed to the ground, and denied as ever having been there. The survivors are given some time to recuperate under medical care, and sent back to their families, many of whom had given them up for dead.

A brilliant book, it recalls to my mind a few other such prison narratives, both fictional and political that I have read - 'The Count of Monte Cristo', 'Shantaram'. In spirit, narrative style and integrity it is closer to 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch', as well the briefer pieces  'In the Penal Colony' by Kafka and 'A Hanging' by George Orwell. 'This Blinding Absence of Light' is well-written. It certainly is not entertaining light reading, nor is it meant to be such. But the narrative flows well, and though the events described are by turns depressing, disgusting or just plain horrible, the book itself is not so. It is easy, and even 'good' to read. It demonstrates that it may be possible to survive even the worst of fates, though it does not make a song and dance about the greatness of the human spirit, or such banalities. The horrible deaths of more than half the prisoners, and the emptiness of the lives to which the survivors return, these realities overshadow any triumphant feelings at having undergone the ordeal without succumbing.

There are many quotable passages. Here's one of them: 'Passing the time! That was our main occupation, apparently. Time, however, did not move. This amused me and made no sense. Like boredom. We had become creatures of boredom, packages stuffed with boredom. Boredom smelled like cemeteries when the stones are wet. It skulked around us, chewed on our eyelids, scratched our skin and burrowed into our bellies.' The thing about the book is that the description this 20 years of 'boredom' is anything but boring.