Search results for ""author tahar ben jelloun""

Per què som racistes? Per què tenen por els racistes? Què és el colonialisme i quines conseqüències té? Som racistes de naixement? Tahar Ben Jelloun desenvolupa hàbilment la resposta -no sempre fàcil- a totes aquestes preguntes, i el resultat és un llibre clar, senzill i valent que els nens agrairan d'haver llegit i els adults no haurien d'oblidar mai.

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El castigo cuenta el calvario, el de diecinueve meses de detención, de noventa y cuatro estudiantes castigados por haberse manifestado pacíficamente por las calles de las principales ciudades de Marruecos en marzo de 1965. Con la excusa del servicio militar, estos jóvenes fueron encerrados en cuarteles donde, bajo la vigilancia de suboficiales del entorno del general Ufkir, sufrieron vejaciones, humillaciones y maltratos. Estos acontecimientos se insertan en la represión de los denominados años de plomo durante el reinado de Hassan II. Tahar Ben Jelloun, uno de los estudiantes represaliados, cuenta en primera persona lo que fueron aquellos largos meses que marcaron para siempre sus veinte años, alimentaron su conciencia y secretamente lo hicieron escritor. El castigo nos impone una reflexión sobre la fragilidad de la libertad.

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Mohamed Limmigri, un emigrante marroquí, está a punto de jubilarse después de pasar años realizando distintos cometidos en una fábrica de coches francesa. La idea de dejar el trabajo le provoca un difuso malestar. Es el momento de hacer balance de toda una vida, también es la hora de las desilusiones. Hombre comedido, paciente y anónimo, musulmán piadoso y buen trabajador, sin ambiciones y sin estudios, llegó a Francia cuarenta años antes con su Corán pegado al corazón, su única seña de identidad. Recuerda cómo tuvo que adaptarse a un país que no es el suyo y en el que se aprecia una preocupante intolerancia xenófoba. Reflexiona sobre el equilibrio y sosiego que encontró en la religión islámica, y cómo ésta se ha degradado en desviaciones fanáticas y violentas. Pero sobre todo lamenta que su familia se haya desestructurado y el no haber sabido educar a sus hijos para que no perdieran sus señas culturales y religiosas. La afligida nostalgia del pasado le lleva a regresar a su aldea nata

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In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story, Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971, took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of Morocco. With sixty others Salim was incarcerated in a secret prison complex in the Moroccan desert: he was to remain there for nearly twenty years. In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Ben Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him, Salim tells stories to keep sane - from the suras of his beloved Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest, most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for meaning and understanding, never desert Salim. The resulting novel is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and its determination to survive. 'A masterpiece' Judges of the IMPAC award 'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review

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?Ocupaba permanentemente sus pensamientos. Sentado a su mesa de trabajo, no conseguía avanzar en ninguno de sus proyectos. La imaginaba en sus brazos, tarareando las canciones bereberes de su aldea, unas melodías que no le gustaban demasiado, pero de las que ya no podía prescindir, incluso sin entender qué decían. Eso era el amor, desear lo que te recuerda al ser amado.?Un pintor, en el mejor momento de su carrera, se encuentra súbitamente paralizado por un ictus cerebral en su mansión de Casablanca. Su proyección artística y su envidiable vida de exposiciones y viajes se ven bruscamente interrumpidos. Sueña con volver a coger los pinceles, pero le minan todo tipo de ideas sobre su desgracia que achaca en parte a su matrimonio.Para escapar a la depresión que le acecha decide, con la ayuda de un amigo, escribir un diario en el que relata el infierno en que se ha convertido su vida en pareja. Aunque reconoce que él tampoco es un modelo de virtud, y no oculta otras relaciones ocasio

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In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.

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Terrorism Explained to Our Kids, takes the form of a dialogue between the author and his teenage daughter. Using her ill-defined fears as the starting point, Exploring all forms of terrorism in both a historical and contemporary context, the book addresses complex and pressing questions in an everyday, accessible language. Because Ben Jelloun understands that terrorist acts come from the perpetrators' deep sense of inadequacy, his arguments are all the more powerful. The author, himself a Muslim, places a high value on the importance of secular values, with which he believes Islam is compatible.

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The Sacred Night continues the remarkable story Tahar Ben Jelloun began in The Sand Child. Mohammed Ahmed, a Moroccan girl raised as a boy in order to circumvent Islamic inheritance laws regarding female children, remains deeply conflicted about her identity. In a narrative that shifts in and out of reality moving between a mysterious present and a painful past, Ben Jelloun relates the events of Ahmed's adult life. Now calling herself Zahra, she renounces her role as only son and heir after her father's death and journeys through a dreamlike Moroccan landscape. A searing allegorical portrait of North African society, The Sacred Night uses Arabic fairy tales and surrealist elements to craft a stunning and disturbing vision of protest and rebellion against the strictures of hidebound traditions governing gender roles and sexuality.

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An innocent man’s gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century despot In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the narrator’s traumatic experience, written with a memoirist’s immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began secretly to write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.

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Longlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize Since she's been ill, Lalla Fatma has become a frail little thing with a faltering memory. Lalla Fatma thinks she's in Fez in 1944, where she grew up, not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left behind. By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother's life in post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom resignation was the only way out. Tender and compelling, About My Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond between mother and son.

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