Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry, for Tahar Ben Jelloun, isn’t a decorative art object; it’s an operating system. Calling it “a situation” yanks it out of the salon and drops it into lived reality: poetry is what you’re inside of, not what you occasionally visit. The phrase carries a quiet political charge too. A “situation” implies pressure, constraint, forces acting on the self - the kind of conditions that shape a writer formed in postcolonial Morocco and long attuned to the moral drama of migration, racism, and state power. Poetry becomes less a genre than a posture: how you stand when the world tries to make you kneel.

His escalation - “a state of being” - turns technique into identity. Ben Jelloun’s subtext is that the poetic is not optional when language itself is contested. In societies where official narratives launder violence or simplify belonging, the poet’s job is to keep perception complicated, to refuse the deadening comfort of a single story. That’s why he pairs “facing life” with “facing history.” History here isn’t a neutral archive; it’s something that looks back, demands allegiance, imposes categories (native/foreign, modern/traditional, acceptable/suspicious). To “face” it is to resist being faced down by it.

The line also hints at a bilingual, trans-Mediterranean reality: writing between worlds often means living between worlds. Poetry, in that context, is less self-expression than self-defense - a way to remain porous to experience without being erased by it.