The Punishment (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (World Republic of Letters (Yale))

by Linda Coverdale (Author), Linda Coverdale (Author), Tahar Ben Jelloun (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2020

  $21.61

  An innocent man's gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century despot
  
  In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the author's traumatic experience, written with a memoirist's immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began to secretly write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.