Justice & Law Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun’s line reads like a roll call of modern history’s recurring casualties: the people who get managed, moved, and muted by law, border, and custom. As a poet-novelist shaped by Morocco, France, and the long shadow of colonial partition, he isn’t listing “topics” so much as staking a moral jurisdiction. The grammar does the work: “I have written about...” repeats like an oath, insisting that literature is not an escape hatch from politics but a way of staying inside its consequences.

The intent is double. On the surface, it’s a summary of a career devoted to the dispossessed: immigrants, women denied equal rights, Palestinians. Underneath, it’s also a quiet argument about credibility and obligation. Ben Jelloun has spent decades watching how Europe romanticizes “universal” humanism while policing who gets to belong. By pairing “immigrants” with “women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men,” he links the border and the household: two systems where power hides behind bureaucracy, paperwork, and tradition.

The Palestinian clause is the most charged: “deprived of their land” and “condemned to exile” refuses neutral language. It frames dispossession as an active verb, not a tragic accident, and exile as sentence, not journey. In a French literary culture that often treats the Middle East as an abstract debate, Ben Jelloun’s specificity signals solidarity and risk. The subtext is clear: art that avoids naming the victims, and the mechanisms that produce them, becomes another form of complicity.