After a Year with a Master
Edem Talks About His Year as a Rolex Protégé
You seem completely transformed since your recent, long visit to Tahar Ben Jelloun in Morocco.
I certainly did have some unforgettable times in the alleys of Tangier which have been such an inspiration in his novels. I’m left with a very strong mental image of one moment in particular when, as I was watching the sea, moments from the present came together and joined memories from the past. Actually, in the port of Tangier, where so many young people dream of crossing the sea, I found the same music of taking flight, of leaving, as I found between the walls and on the shores of Lomé, the city of my childhood. Such strange resonances!
Like a mysterious, subterranean echo passing between the mentor and his protégé…
I rediscovered part of my own story in his. The story I’ve lived myself, that I carry within myself and that I’m in the process of writing about. We talked about it – we talked about it a lot – at his home, in his house on the mountainside, which has such an air of work and serenity about it.
How did you work?
On a low table! With blank pages, words to be heard, and mint tea. It was spell-binding, and the spell still held when we went to Fez, his native city. There I had an even stranger experience: it was my first time there, and yet I had the impression I was returning and finding places I’d known long ago. In fact they were the places in his novel Prayer for the Absent, which I had absorbed really thoroughly. You can imagine how bowled over I was when I came upon the real setting for the novel, and how useful it was for the work I’m doing now. There’s no substitute.
Has your way of doing things changed since you started discussing things together?
Definitely! We clashed as much about the form as the content, he got me to reread Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and he proved to me that my African-chestnut-seller-in-Paris character wasn’t believable… and I turned him into a black taxi-driver, which does actually fit better in my story. I’m the one who invented him, but it was [Ben Jelloun] who prompted me to invent him. It was perfect, really. Isn’t that what you’d expect from a collaboration like this? It was a tough fight, because each of us clung to our own point of view, but without making concessions we managed to reach agreement.