Time & Perspective Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Exile in this line isn’t a metaphor for feeling misunderstood; it’s a bureaucratic condition that can snap shut at the border. Ben Jelloun compresses an entire political climate into a single, repeating moment: the anxious return trip where your identity is no longer yours, where a passport becomes a leash held by the state. The bluntness of “take my passport away” does the heavy lifting. It names the quiet violence of paperwork, the way authoritarian control often arrives not with sirens but with stamps and silent refusals.

The specific intent is to make exile feel physical and cyclical. “Every time I went back” signals that displacement isn’t a one-time rupture but a recurring audition for permission to exist. The pronoun “they” is strategically vague, widening the net from a particular regime to a whole apparatus: police, ministries, informants, the faceless counter. That anonymity is part of the terror. You don’t argue with “they.” You anticipate them.

Context matters: the 1970s in Morocco are widely remembered as the “Years of Lead,” marked by surveillance, imprisonment, and the disciplining of dissent. For a poet, the stakes are doubled. Writing already makes you legible; returning home makes you vulnerable. The subtext is a grim bargain: you can love a country that may not love you back, and you can cross into your own language and streets knowing the price might be confiscation, not just of documents, but of mobility, career, future. The line turns the passport into a symbol of conditional belonging, and it stings because the condition is never explained, only enforced.