Punishment

The punishment was amazing. I waited fifty years to be able to author this book. * * * "I was punished because I pretended, quietly, peacefully, for a little democracy. For months, I was nothing but a registration number, number 10366. One day, I regained my freedom, after I had lost hope of that. I finally managed, as I dreamed, to love, travel, write, and publish many works. But writing 'The Punishment,' and the courage to return to that story, and find its words, took me nearly fifty years." With these words, Tahar Ben Jelloun concludes this autobiographical novel about the experience of imprisonment, humiliation, and suffering. The memoir tells the story of ninety-four students — Tahar Ben Jelloun one of them — who were imprisoned for nineteen months under Hassan II’s rule, as punishment for peaceful protests in the streets of major Moroccan cities in March 1965. Those students found themselves, after a few months, imprisoned inside barracks, under the pretext of military service, under the control of officers loyal to General Oufkir, tasked with "re-educating them," subjecting them to torture, humiliation, and mistreatment, and leading them into dangerous maneuvers under absurd pretexts. Their suffering only ended with the beginning of a military coup, the Skhirat coup on July 10, 1971, when they were released without any explanation. Tahar Ben Jelloun recounts the details of those long months that marked him at age twenty, nourished his awareness, and secretly shaped him into a writer. After the masterpiece "That Bright Darkness," he returns with this exciting autobiographical novel to tell us "in the present tense, in a realistic style, without embellishment, and without adjectives. He narrates things as they happened at the time, day by day, without knowing what will happen tomorrow." Number of pages: 208 Publisher: Arab Center Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun