Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Translator's Prefac -- Off to El Hajeb -- Last Moments of Freedom -- Akka -- Medical Exam -- Punished by His Majesty -- Heavy Stones out in the Sun -- Maneuvers in the Rain -- Mohammed V Hospital -- An Evening chez Ababou -- The Convoy -- Ahermoumou -- On Sophisticated Brutality -- Daily Life -- Liberation Yes, Liberation No -- On the Outside -- June 5, 1971 -- The Surprise -- Translator's Notes -- Translator's Afterword
Summary:
"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."--Jacket.
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