Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun frames poetry less as a salon art than as an ethical reflex: you write because not writing would stain you. The opening clause, "I came to poetry", makes the vocation sound accidental, even reluctant, as if aesthetics were the byproduct of a moral emergency. What drives him is not inspiration but "urgent need" - language pressed into service against "injustice, exploitation, humiliation", a triptych that moves from systems (injustice) to economics (exploitation) to the intimate psychic wound (humiliation). He’s mapping oppression from the courthouse to the workplace to the body.

Then comes the disarming hinge: "I know that's not enough to change the world". It’s a preemptive rebuttal to the standard sneer at politically charged art: poems don’t topple regimes. Ben Jelloun concedes the limit to claim a different kind of power - not efficacy in the blunt, legislative sense, but testimony. The subtext is an argument about what art is for when history is ugly: not to pretend it can fix everything, but to refuse the comfort of neutrality.

The final sentence makes silence the real scandal. "Intolerable complicity" suggests that in the face of humiliation, quiet becomes a form of collaboration with the humiliator. For a Moroccan writer shaped by postcolonial power, censorship, migration, and the racialized hierarchies of France and the Maghreb, this is also a defense of speaking from the in-between: the poet as witness, not savior; conscience, not decoration.