Breaking Ground
If anyone had told Tahar Ben Jelloun that one day he would become a mentor, he would have burst out laughing. And if anyone had predicted to Edem Awumey that he would have the pleasure of being a protégé some day, he would have scratched his head. Now, their partnership seems so natural they do not even discuss it.
At the beginning, they discovered each other cautiously, that is to say they read each other’s books. Just to get an idea. Then they listened carefully to one another, circling around each other to see where they could push the envelope, one in voicing criticism and the other in accepting it.
Edem began to send Ben Jelloun the first pages of what he was working on, a typed outline that was to become a work in progress before becoming a finished book; then Ben Jelloun sent him his comments. Edem was in Gatineau, a province of Quebec, Ben Jelloun was in Paris, Tangier or wherever his novels in translation took him. They were planting the seeds of an “e-collaboration” that naturally brought them closer together.