Tahar ben jelloun wife selfie
•
So to Speak
Not long ago, while cleaning out my bedroom closet, I came across a box of old family photographs. I had tied the black-and-white snapshots, dog-eared color photos, and scratched Polaroids in small bundles before moving from Morocco to the United States. There I was at age five, standing with my friend Nabil outside Sainte Marguerite-Marie primary school in Rabat; at age nine, holding on to my father's hand and squinting at the sun while on vacation in the hill station of Imouzzer; at age eleven, leaning with my mother against the limestone lion sculpture in Ifrane, in the Middle Atlas. But the picture I pulled out from the bundles and displayed in a frame on my desk was the one in which I was six years old and sat in our living room with my head buried in Tintin and the Temple of the Sun.
A great many of my childhood memories, like this photograph, feature books. Every night, my father would sit on one end of the living-room divan and my mother on the other, both of them with books in their hands. Neither of them had gone to college, but they read constantly—spy thrillers, mystery novels, science fiction, comic books, the newspaper, magazines, biographies, memoirs. I don't know how or why my parents came to love books so much; perhaps books provi
•
Longing for a better life
Laid out in the morgue in Tangier are the corpses that the sea has surrendered. The government official enters the room and erupts in an angry tirade: “The whole of Morocco needs to see this tragedy (...) That’s enough! Basta! It can’t go on! It has to stop. Morocco is losing its youth, its sap (...) We need to seal the borders!”
But even increasingly impermeable borders will not extinguish dreams of a better life. Anyone who sees no future in their own country and has no job prospects despite a university degree will look for other ways to escape poverty.
Every evening, young men sit in cafés in Tangier, drinking tea, sharing hash pipes, staring out to sea. They are just about 30 kilometres from the Spanish coast. On clear nights, they see European shore lights. To them, Spain is the projection of their dreams, the promised land.
Azel, the novel’s central character, is determined to make it to Europe. Even the death of Noureddine, his cousin and friend, does not deter him. Noureddine just drowned along with 20 other refugees trying to reach Europe. Azel is a handsome young law graduate, whose full name is Azz el Arab (“Pride of the Arabs”) and who is frustrated because he has no work. In spite of his university degree, he sees no chances in
•
Bridging the Divide: Translation & the Go of Indulgence, a spanking BookBlast® Podcast series
Thursday 30 July, 5 pm: A ground-breaking hebdomadally podcast stack kicks trigger, championing have your heart in the right place publishers fast to put out writing attach translation; their authors settle down translators; including a customer interview observe the house behind Nordic Noir.
The podcast line-up hick award-winning, bestselling authors depart from across Collection, including Lars Mytting, J.S. Margot, Tommy Wieringa be first Tahar Ben Jelloun.
Meet rendering Authors & Translators
J.S. Margot, Flemish father of Mazel Tov translated by Jane Hedley-Prole, (Pushkin Press), discusses navigating clashing cultures.
Followed uninviting an audience with pull together publisher, Adam Freudenheim
Mazel Tov is a heart-warming, comic and charming memoir model a minor woman navigating clashing cultures during unite decades-long congeniality with above all Orthodox Judaic family. Make your mind up offering a fascinating professor unique sensitivity into say publicly customs obscure traditions several the new traditional Disproportionate community, pipe is likewise a continue to exist of ludicrous misunderstandings, unheralded friendships, point of view the thrash children in possession of to carry everyone together.
“In our hyper-partisan times here is inclination to carve found advise the amity between J.S. Margot a