This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun

For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret. There it would be, lodging in my breast and nourishing my endless nights, there, in the depths of the humid earth, in that tomb smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice, his reason.

There are secret prisons and then there are prisons so secret they bury them literally underground. For decades, King Hassan I of Morocco kept a group of political prisoners, including several arrested after an assassination attempt in the 1970's, in Tazmamart Prison, where they were kept in unlighted underground cells for twenty-four hours a day. They were given just enough food to keep them on the edge of starvation, and medical care was denied them. Many of them lived this way, deprived even of light, for over twenty years before the Moroccan government admitted the prison's existence and released them. Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel This Blinding Absence of Light is a fictionalized version of one prisoner's experience at Tazmamart.

The prisoners of the novel form a kind of society, working together as much as they can in these brutal conditions. One prisoner, Karim, uses his uncanny sense of time to become a human clock, announcing the date and time to keep the prisoners from slipping into an endless night. Salim, the narrator, is a kind of storyteller, recounting stories from the Quran and Camus, and when those run out, movies like A Streetcar Named Desire (a detail that reminds me of that other infamous prison novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman). In one tragic moment, he denies a fellow prisoner begging for a story, who dies shortly thereafter, a betrayal that haunts Salim. The deaths in the prison are as diverse as they are cruel: prisoners die of diarrhea, constipation, suicide, being eaten alive by cockroaches both inside and out, scorpion stings, wounds brought on by the tremendous weakness of their bodies.

Salim, understanding that the purpose of Tamzamart is to kill by neglect--to kill without ever firing a bullet--cultivates a kind of asceticism that is the novel's most interesting element. Salim must embrace some parts of the prison experience and ignore others, and he must do the same with his former life: carefully, he compartmentalizes his life in the outside world until he can imagine himself as a separate person. In this way, he is able to reflect with dispassion on his father, a neglectful dandy who is a member of the King's inner circle. He recites his prayers with a maniacal devotion, knowing that a small ritual like these might be the difference between staying sane and going mad. In fact, the varieties of madness in Tazmamart are as numerous as the varieties of death. One by one, his friends and fellow prisoners succumb to these madnesses, and then those deaths.

Obviously, This Blinding Absence of Light is a tough read. It is, by all accounts, a faithful account of some of the most brutal prison conditions that have ever existed. But at times it can be quite beautiful, especially in its depiction of Salim's cultivation of mental vitality. You hate to use a cliche like "a testament to the power of the human spirit," but if This Blinding Absence of Light doesn't fit the phrase, nothing does.

With the addition of Morocco, my "countries read" list is up to 70. Nice!!!