La nuit sacrée

The Sacred Night

Author	Tahar Ben Jelloun
Original title	La nuit sacrée
Translator	Alan Sheridan
Country	Morocco
Language	English French
Genre	Novel
Published	1987; 2000
Award	Goncourt prize
ISBN	9780801864414
Preceded by	The Sand Child

The Sacred Night (La nuit sacrée) is a novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun published in 1987. It won the 1987 Goncourt Prize. This novel is a sequel The Sand Child published in 1985 .

An English translation was published in 2000.

History

The initial title of the novel was La Nuit du destin, however the publisher Jean-Marc Roberts insisted on changing it. Tahar Ben Jelloun was regularly nominated for the Goncourt Prize and won thanks to the support inside the Académie Goncourt from Edmonde Charles-Roux and outside, from Jean-Marc Roberts.

Summary

After burying her father, the narrator leaves her family and decides to travel through Morocco to discover her identity as a woman. She first meets a prince, who kidnaps her on his horse and takes her to an enchanted land. She begins to discover it, but the tale is interrupted and she has to flee. Dreamlike passages, imbued with the world of the story, are frequent in this novel. After leaving the prince, the return to real life is abrupt for the narrator: she has a bad encounter in a wood, and is raped.

She then arrives in Agadir. While going to the hammam, she meets Assise, the woman who runs the reception. She takes pity on her and invites her to come and live with her. She asks her to keep company with her brother, the Consul, who lost his sight when he was a child. It quickly becomes apparent that they are a strange couple, with an almost incestuous relationship. The Consul and the narrator begin a relationship. As Assisi cannot bear it, she decides to take revenge on the young girl, and finds her uncle, who comes to Agadir to accuse her of lying and theft of the family inheritance. The narrator violently kills him.

She is sent to prison, but does not show the slightest regret for her murder, considering that she only repaired the injustice of Moroccan society. With a blindfold over her eyes, she practices living like a blind person. She escapes from her prison through her daydreams, where she becomes a princess or a saint. However, she is also attacked by her sisters: they found her, and still blame her for having played the easy role of the boy in their family. During a particularly barbaric scene, they sew her vagina shut. The last pages of the book constitute an allegorical end to the plot: the narrator is freed and goes to the sea. There, she enters a white house, which has appeared in the mist.

Analysis

In The Sand Child, published in 1985, Tahar Ben Jelloun gave voice to a storyteller, to tell the story of Ahmed, a young Moroccan girl whom her father had passed off as a man throughout her life, so as not to experience the dishonor of not having male heirs. In this complementary novel, Ahmed speaks again, becomes a storyteller of herself: after the death of her father, during the "sacred night" (the 27th night of Ramadan), she resumes her feminine identity, and decides to leave her bad memories behind. Although these two novels are complementary, they can be read independently.

Combining real facts and magic, Tahar Ben Jelloun develops in his novel an unprecedented portrait of Morocco. The harshest features of Moroccan society are represented there: the difficult situation of women, subject to rape and male domination, the problem of begging, state crimes.