Ethics, Politics and Poetics

In this study Sophie Rigolot Adamson examines how Tahar Ben Jelloun, one of the most prominent Francophone Moroccan authors of our time, reconciles politics and poetics as he makes way for the voices of Maghrebi culture. She focuses on three works that represent a largely diversified and ambiguous geopolitical space: Harrouda (1973) and the cultural tensions between ancestral and modern Morocco; La Réclusion solitaire (1976) and the psycho-physical drama of migrant workers in multicultural France; L'Ange aveugle (1992) and the tragic consequences of organized crime in Southern Italy. Close readings of these wide-ranging texts reveal Ben Jelloun's profoundly ethical world view as mediated through a highly charged poetic language. Complex issues of identity, language, and culture are nourished by literary expressions and an abundance of parentheses, ellipses, blanks, and hyphenated text. Ethics and poetics dramatically reinforce one another, preventing simplistic politics and moralizing from taking over. Adamson's study is prefaced by an unpublished creative assessment by Ben Jelloun himself.