War & Peace Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun’s line lands like a memoir compressed into a police report: youth doesn’t arrive with romance, it arrives with a wound. “At 21” is doing more than timestamping. It’s the age when many people “discover” politics in a seminar or a love affair; here, the revelation is state violence. The phrasing is starkly instructional, almost pedagogical: I learned repression the way you learn a language, by being thrown into it.

The pivot from abstract nouns to physical fact is the sentence’s trapdoor. “Repression and injustice” could be the vocabulary of any dissident, the kind of moral weather you can argue about. Then comes the clarifying brutality: “The army would shoot students with real bullets.” That “real” is acid. It suggests an official theater that pretends to be restraint - rubber bullets, warnings, procedure - while the regime reserves the right to end arguments by ending bodies. The target matters as much as the weapon: students. The people a nation publicly flatters as its future are treated as a disposable crowd when they become a present-tense inconvenience.

As a poet, Ben Jelloun chooses a plainness that refuses the aesthetic comforts of metaphor. The sentence reads like the moment an artist decides description is already an accusation. The context hovering behind it is North Africa’s post-independence disillusionment: a modernizing state promising dignity, then using the army to enforce silence. The subtext is a coming-of-age story where “adulthood” is recognizing that power doesn’t just lie - it shoots.