I have a city in the eyes: slavery and memory in moroccan poetry Tahar Ben Jelloun

Abstract

The poetry of Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944-) reveals an intense geography of a multicultural country surrounded by legends and myths, characters and pain. Imbued with certain wound-poems, the poet outlines some landscapes nourished by a participative thinking, coercively, in an all-embracing debate of historical-cultural conflicts. Nevertheless, the Moroccan poet, novelist and chronicler develop his participative literature and, therefore, in the tone of the Mediterranean, he ponders upon and defends an ideology of tolerance and respect for cultural diversity and, thus, a more careful reading of his nation. Catharsis is not the revelation of the world; actually, it is the revelation of poetry, thought and the affective pulsion between the poet and his world. The finality of this paper is to present, at first, a brief history of Arabic poetry, and even then submit Ben Jelloun text capabilities, understood as one of the new possibilities of thinking the other written, spoken, seen, perceived and represented.