Tahar Ben Jelloun, Writer

Cafe Babel has an interesting article on writer, Ben Jelloun, born in Fes in 1944. Educated in French studies, he became a philosophy professor at Tétouan and then left Morocco in 1971 to live in the French capital to do a thesis in psychology.

“I had not been educated in the ‘arabisation’ of philosophy and the teaching of Islamic thought instead of, and in place of, universal thought. That is why I left. For this reason I do not feel as though I am a writer in exile. Even though there have been difficult periods, I have never felt that I could not return; that the doors of my native country had been closed for me.”

IIlegal immigration is at the heart of a new book by Ben Jelloun and is the pretext for the ‘slow descent to hell’ of its hero Azel, a Moroccan exile in Barcelona. Whereas the deaths of illegal African immigrants on the barbed wire of the Spanish enclaves, widely covered by the media last September, reminded Brussels of the urgent need to find an effective solution to the immigration problem, Bell Jelloun laments that “a true community policy was not defined in any other way than in terms of exclusion and repression.”

In his view, certain European states manage immigration issues better than others. “Sweden, for example, has a good attitude, notably because it does not have historical links with the countries of Africa.”