Art & Creativity Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Ben Jelloun puts “wounds” at the center of his project, then refuses the usual escape hatch: wit. The line is a quiet rebuke to the contemporary expectation that pain should arrive packaged as entertainment, irony, or brandable uplift. “The eternal treasons of life” is the key phrase: not a single betrayal, not a villain you can cancel, but a steady drip of losses that feel personal even when they’re structural - exile, racism, poverty, the humiliations of bureaucracy, the private betrayals of body and memory. Calling them “eternal” turns grievance into condition; calling them “treasons” keeps the moral voltage high, as if life itself were an unreliable accomplice.

The sentence “It’s not very funny” lands like an anti-performance. He’s declining the protective armor of humor, and also declining the reader’s desire to be charmed. That refusal is political in its own way. Ben Jelloun, writing out of postcolonial Francophone space and frequently about migration and identity, knows how easily suffering gets aestheticized, consumed, converted into exotic tragedy or “resilience” content. Sincerity becomes a safeguard against that market logic: not confession for its own sake, but an ethical stance that insists the wound is not a prop.

There’s also a subtle warning embedded in “commitment.” Sincerity isn’t a mood; it’s discipline. He’s telling you the work will be uncomfortable, maybe even inconvenient, because it won’t let either writer or reader hide behind cleverness.