Tahar Ben Jelloun in The Sacred Night depicts Moroccan society and rails against social injustice, sexual and religious hypocrisy, gender inequalities, patriarchy, and women’s oppression. He conveys his social critique in a poetic and concise style blending realism with dreamlike hallucinations, which gives the narrative a surrealist dimension. From the outset the narrator establishes with the implied reader a reading pact and insists on the tale’s unsettling quality and discontinuous structure, begging for the audience’s patience: “Doors will open, perhaps not in succession, but I will ask you to follow me and to be patient.”
A sequel to The Sand Child (L’Enfant de sable, 1985), The Sacred Night is the story of a Muslim father who has seven daughters and is desperate for a male heir to perpetuate his name and inherit his fortune, which is coveted by his “rapacious” brothers. A tyrannical figure emblematic of the Moroccan male-dominated society, hajji Suleyman views his daughters as a cumbersome progeny, whom he treats with contempt and indifference. He repeatedly accuses them of causing him shame and humiliation, persuaded that “a son was the only thing that could bring him joy and life.” When his wife becomes pregnant he decides to raise his eighth child, who turns out to be a girl, as a boy, then as a man. For 20 years, he has brought up his daughter as a boy (named Ahmed) until that Sacred Night—the 27th night of Ramadan during which the Koran was revealed to Muhammad—when he calls his son/daughter to his deathbed and tells him/her the full truth, begging him/ her to forgive him and forget.
A social victim compelled to engender a son, real or imagined, to win his male counterparts’ respect, the hajji proves above all a victimizer who symbolically kills his daughter (renamed Zahra during his confession) by disguising her sexual identity. Zahra’s metaphoric burial is reminiscent of the pre-Islamic period when Arabs drowned or buried alive their female infants to avoid disgrace. It suggests that although Islam has banned the killing of girls, the “barbaric” practice symbolically continues in today’s Morocco where women are still considered inferior to men, socially marginalized, and deprived of basic human rights. While Ben Jelloun, through the heroine’s blurred sexual identity, intimates a struggle for gender equality, he similarly indicates that the birth of women as free individuals requires further real or metaphoric murders. Though reborn as a woman, Zahra does not feel fully liberated; she still has to kill her dead father a second time to exist on her own terms. One night after the funeral, she returns home and puts all her belongings (mostly men’s clothes, and birth and marriage certificates) into a bag that she buries in her father’s grave, determined to lay to rest her former identity. In a lastditch attempt to exorcize her past, she ragingly fastens around her father’s neck the bandages that she had used to bind her breasts, symbolically strangling the corpse that wrecked 20 years of her life.
The symbolic killing of the gendered Other reveals (in both the father and the daughter’s case) how far relationships between men and women in Morocco are mostly motivated by violence and struggle for domination. Ben Jelloun writes on the dust jacket of his collection of stories Le Premier amour est toujours le dernier (1995): “In my country, there is a rupture in the relationship between men and women. Within a couple, there is no harmony. Love is the reflection of a major violence.” The relation between Zahra’s mother and father is emblematic of the Moroccan couple depicted here. Both partners nourish silent hatred and violence against each other. They live in disharmony and perpetual misunderstanding, each wishing the other’s death. The spouse prays to God to let her outlive her husband a month or two to breathe freely for a few days, while the husband yearns for his wife’s death to marry a woman who could give him sons. The daughter, too, wants her parents dead, and has contemplated murdering them to lead a free existence.
The hajji’s household resembles a claustrophobic space where all the members of the family suffer silently and suffocate. In Zahra’s case choking is metaphorical as well as literal. The bandages confining her breasts complicate breathing, and the tense family atmosphere adds to the suffocation.
After her father’s death Zahra decides to leave her village and break away from her former constraining past, eager to condemn it to oblivion. She sets out for an unknown destination, aspiring to “a second birth in a virgin, clean skin.” Reborn as a woman, her first sexual experience is yet that of violence and rape. One afternoon as she was coming out of a small village, she was followed by a stranger chanting prayers “In the name of God, the Merciful, the compassionate. . . . Praise be to God, who has decreed that man’s greatest pleasure lies in women’s warm insides.” The unnamed and “faceless” stranger then rapes her in the woods and disappears.
The anonymous man, appearing only once in the text, embodies the pervasive violence against Moroccan women, an endemic oppression that turns every male into a potential rapist. On the other hand, the fact that he chants prayers before assaulting his victim shows how religion often serves as an alibi to men’s domination of women. In the same breath Ben Jelloun, through this ghostly character, denounces violence against woman and religious imposters who often invoke God to justify their crimes. He once argued in response to critics that what he condemns in his fiction is not Islam, which is “a wonderful culture and a great civilization,” but those who exploit this religion to “dominate women and children . . . and to arrange society in which men exercise all rights but hardly have any duties.” The blind Consul in The Sacred Night broaches over Islam in terms echoing Ben Jelloun’s argument: “Like you, I like the Koran as a superb poetry, and I hate those who exploit it parasitically to limit freedom of thought. They are hypocrites. . . . They invoke religion to humiliate and dominate. And I presently advocate the right to think freely, to believe or not to believe.” A surrogate author, the Consul blames those fanatical imposters who use Islam to dogmatic ends. He argues for freedom of thought and religion and advocates gender equality, considering Zahra, brought home by his sister, L’Assise (the Seated), to look after him, as an equal partner rather than his servant or “slave.”
The relationship between Zahra and the Consul generates harmony and self-accomplishment. The heroine’s presence invigorates the Consul’s artistic creativity (he has resumed writing only with her arrival); and the taleb’s care and tenderness have rekindled Zahra’s desire and sensuality. Things run smoothly between the two until the Seated, who apparently has an incestuous relationship with her brother, shatters the couple’s harmony. Jealous of her brother’s love for Zahra, the Seated begins to suspect her rival of having murdered her parents and run away with the family’s riches. She decides to pry into her past, determined to get rid of her. After a week’s absence she comes back with Zahra’s uncle. When the latter threatens to unveil her disgraceful past she murders him and is imprisoned.
This dramatic episode reveals two important points: first, harmony between men and women in The Sacred Night (and in the bulk of Ben Jelloun’s works) is as rare as it is precarious; second, eradication of the past is impossible. Zahra believes that with the death of her intrusive uncle she has finally vanquished the past, but she soon realizes that in prison, too, she is haunted by familiar faces that she thought she had done away with. She recalls, for instance, having been visited and tortured by her sisters in prison, but she is unable to tell whether these visions are real or hallucinatory. She cannot even locate where and when the event took place, and this shows how past and present are enmeshed.
With the constant return of the repressed, Zahra comes to the conclusion that her past will always haunt her. It is bound to repeat itself endlessly, casting her story in an eternal now. Revealingly, the heroine’s ultimate reunion with the Consul and the Seated augurs the reenactment of the drama interrupted by the prison interlude, thus reinforcing the tale’s inconclusiveness: “You are not of those who end yarns. You must be instead one who leaves them unfinished in order to make them into an endless tale. Your story is a succession of doors which open onto blank spaces and tortuous mazes.”
In leaving open-ended Zahra’s story, Ben Jelloun urges the reader’s active collaboration, and encourages a proliferation of meanings and multiple readings. Meanwhile, through textual open-endedness, he suggests that the question of women’s condition in Morocco remains an open issue, continually raised and incessantly delayed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aresu, Bernard. Tahar Ben Jelloun. New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1998.
Gaudin, Francoise. La fascination des images: les romans de Tahar Ben Jelloun. Paris: Harmattan, 1998.
Kohn-Pireaux, Laurence. Étude sur Tahar Ben Jelloun: L’enfant de sable, La nuit sacrée. Paris: Ellipses, 2000
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