Tahar Ben Jelloun - By Fire - Writings on the Arab Spring

I have strived to preserve Ben Jelloun’s tone and diction, his compassion for the protagonist, and his representation of Mohamed’s toxic environment. Priorities in my translation were faithfulness to the text’s lexical choices, Ben Jelloun’s aesthetic, and his voice, which is unique among Arab writers. I have sought to preserve the essence of idiomatic expressions. Above all, by respecting its cultural sensibilities, I have resisted domesticating the text, as an American Englishing will not tolerate Ben Jelloun’s voice. In Par le feu , there appears several times the word flic , whose translation is “cop”; I chose “police” or “police officer,” and used the word cop only in dialogue. I left all cultural elements and sensibilities intact as readers depend on them for access to Ben Jelloun’s streets full of vendors fleeing security agents, parrot men, sellers of pirated DVDs and loose American cigarettes, acrobats performing tricks, monkey trainers, storytellers, drivers who stop to buy fruit through the car window, and town halls where front-desk clerks repel people like Mohamed.

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Translators have an especially important task when they undertake texts from acutely inflamed areas of the world. Literary texts and their translations can open for readers the work of writers who bring news from a space unseen and unseeable by television cameras and officials’ sound bites. The Arab Spring is perhaps history, yet conditions throughout the Middle East continuously plunge into overwhelming humanitarian crises. Human rights abuses run rampant as beheadings and legions of starving, exploited refugees dominate news from the region. The chaos of war and the continuously shifting allegiances of sects, clans, and rebels birth rumors and confusion. There are stories of illegal emigrants making treacherous journeys to find employment, and there are stories of many young Tunisians and European Muslims joining the so-called Islamic State.

Then there are the Mohamed Bouazizis embedded in this mélange of violence and irrationality. They do not want to fight. They want to feed their families and live in peace and dignity. Ben Jelloun tells the story of one such man whom his government failed. Then the sky fell in. Hopes soared for a new era with the Arab Spring, and they collapsed. Now, more than ever, continuous war appears to be the new normal. Beneath the smoke and the rubble, the collapsed homes and desperate refugees, there are real people — individuals, not groups. Redeeming the individual sufferer amid the masses that the West sees on its iPhones and iPads is Ben Jelloun’s moral imperative. Neither the historical Mohamed Bouazizi nor his double are Everyman. Rather than generalize, though, Ben Jelloun, through the double he creates as an act of literature , reveals Mohamed Bouazizi in all his specificity.

Translation is an art. It requires creativity. Above all, it offers understanding of the global perspective. Translating By Fire and The Spark was not a process of replacing one word with another. It meant capturing the essence of the texts. The translation process and recreation of the texts fostered in me a sense of empathy like I never experienced before. It offered me a deeper understanding of how people like Mohamed might feel. I translate Tahar Ben Jelloun’s stories because they help me understand the human condition. I translate his work because he confronts and denounces dictatorship, corruption, exploitation, violence, and female repression. Like the author himself who speaks for all those who cannot speak, I want to translate the silence of all those who hope and wait for someone to tell the world of their suffering. Ben Jelloun’s achievement is to peel back the West’s layers of culture, fear, suspicion, distance, and apathy, and allow us to see — to really see, in a way that only art enables — one specific son, brother, and lover in his humiliation, desperation, and death.

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The Tunisian national anthem by poet Aboul Qacem Echebbi ends with these four lines:

When the people will to live,

Destiny must surely respond.

Oppression shall then vanish.

Fetters are certain to break.

The demonstrators sang this verse, as had their grandparents, during the fight for independence in 1956.

Ben Ali’s regime could be compared to a colonial occupation; that is to say, illegitimate and cruel. He spent more than twenty years assembling networks and structures that rendered the country at his mercy. Using the pretext of protecting the country from the Islamist peril, he allowed himself anything that pleased him, all under the watchful and encouraging eyes of European nations.

Revolutions and resistance often inspire a surge of creativity in poets. After Tunisia embraced new ways of living and working, Egypt followed with a revolt that subverted the idea that the Arab region is cursed and doomed to dictatorship and regression. Some writers devoted their lives to denouncing this curse. Always visionaries, poets foresee what absolutely must change. Dictators would do well to read the poets, whom, in general, they hate. A day always arrives when people’s resistance itself becomes a kind of poem. We saw it in the streets of Tunisia and then in Egypt.