Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun
Did your view of the role of a mentor change during the course of your relationship?
I have to admit that at the start I imagined myself playing the teacher, taking on the role of Elder or even Wise Man. I’d been convinced of that since a discussion about it with Mario Vargos Llosa, who went through this experience before me. But, after the first couple of words, that was it – Edem and I had shifted up a gear. From then on, what I wanted to do was to discuss literature and writing with him. I like to illustrate what I’m saying with examples, recommending novels for him to read so he can see the internal logic in them. You learn to write by reading texts that are powerful and difficult. Besides Faulkner, who is a giant, I suggested he should have a look at The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato, for its architecture, and Borges’ Collected Fictions for the magic in the writing. He read them and we had long discussions about them.
That’s also the attitude of an educator…
No, I deny that. What right have I to be an educator? It’s not my role. A mentor doesn’t direct, he accompanies. The outcome of this should be not just the text, but a concept of literature. And Edem is bubbling over – he’s a river in flood that needs to be channelled.
What were the flaws in his novel in its original draft?
It was too conceptual. His heroine didn’t just want to raise this poor black guy and give him a better situation in life, she wanted to turn him into an icon, a James Baldwin. The latest version is far more satisfying, more credible. I have to tell you that being criticised for a lack of credibility shocks and offends him – it really hurts his feelings. I found that out… afterwards, but he had to go through that particular pain in order to make progress. In any case, my influence is merely indirect, which is always preferable to anything head-on.
After that, what kind of questions did he ask you?
Technical ones, often. To get past that I took him to the Lycée Régnault in Tangier one day, and we had a debate about being a writer – there, just the two of us, in front of the fourth- and sixth-year students. I was the journalist, asking questions, and he was the writer, answering them and explaining how he wrote. The students were thrilled!