Tahar Ben Jalloun; trans. André Naffis-Sahely
The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely is in two parts. Part 1 unfolds from the perspective of a highly successful Moroccan Artist from an upper-class family in Fez. Part 2 unfolds in the first-person point of view of his wife, a young woman from a poor village in Morocco. The narrative chronicles the deterioration of their marriage from two entirely different perspectives.
The novel opens in the year 2000 in Casablanca with the artist having suffered a severe stroke leaving him semi-paralyzed and speechless. He is helpless, frustrated, and embarrassed by his condition. His narrative alternates between Morocco and France at different time periods. He recalls his life and the early days of his marriage in France when both he and his wife were initially very happy and very much in love. He flashes back to describing his affairs with a parade of women before and during his marriage, expressing no remorse for his philandering. He depicts his wife as totally irrational, borderline insane, and prone to bouts of physical and verbal abuse. As he regains movement and speech, he dictates his version of events to a writer friend.
Part 2 is in the first-person voice of his wife. She discovers the manuscript of her husband’s version of events and presents her side of the story which, not surprisingly, does not correspond with his version. She is a poor Berber village girl who endures both classism and racism from her husband’s family. After their first couple of years of marital bliss, her husband turns into an ogre. She describes him as controlling her with money, demeaning her in public, embarrassing her, flaunting his infidelities, and abandoning her with their children while he gallivants all over the world exhibiting his paintings.
Ben Jelloun captures a marriage in crisis through the contrasting views of his characters who reveal as much about themselves as they do about each other. Although he projects himself as the hapless victim of a tyrannical wife, the artist emerges as selfish, egotistical, and self-absorbed. He is oblivious to his wife’s needs, justifies his infidelities and secrets, and harbors patriarchal views of marriage. The wife, on the other hand, has a modern approach to marriage. Her expectations for loyalty, fidelity, honesty, equality, and mutual respect are thwarted by her husband’s behavior until, by her own admission, she turns into a nasty, vengeful, embittered, and vindictive human being. The children barely receive a mention in either version as if their welfare is incidental to the marital feud.
His exposure of the marriage through contradictory lenses enables Ben Jelloun to illustrate the conflicting tensions within race, class, and age disparity. But the fundamental conflict that undergirds all others is the clash between a traditional, patriarchal view of marriage with a modern view of marriage. The couple inhabit two different worlds. Ben Jelloun skillfully interrogates both perspectives leaving the reader to reflect on whether either perspective is reliable—if at all.
A thought-provoking novel.