SOURCE: Marrouchi, Mustapha. “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 4 (winter 1990): 71-83.

In the following essay, Marrouchi traces the development of the character Zahra in La Nuit sacrée and examines how the novel deconstructs traditional notions of gender and colonization.

We're finished with it, with the struggle against exile. Our tasks are now those of insertion. No longer the stupendous generality of the scream, but the thankless inventory of the country's particulars.

(Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais 285)

For many readers, La Nuit sacrée revolves around the blurring of boundaries between orality-writing, prose-poetry, reality-fantasy, realism-allegory, Bâtin-Zahir,¹ and presence-absence. Adapting a narrative to such symbiotic relationships reflects the fact that the author himself is at the crossroads of several cultures, and the novel's heroine is a good expression of this dialectics of belonging and rejection. Both mediator and androgyne...