Jemaa el-Fnaa Public Square: A Cultural and Literary Source in Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child and The Sacred Night

The purpose of this article is to analyze the significance of a special space, which has a particular meaning in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s work: the public square of Jemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakesh’s Medina Quarter. For Tahar Ben Jelloun, the well-known French Maghrebian writer, the process of writing begins with the emergence of creative evidence in speech. It is the matrix of his writing. Thus, an oral perspective is sketched out, a whole game of fleeting narratives told in the public square. This space is an ideal one that draws its elements from orality and contributes to the preservation of traditional knowledge and the implementation of common values participating in a collective memory. How does Ben Jelloun seize the voices that already exist in the real Public Square in order to engage them in his narrative? A closer examination of the text enables us to unpick the process of Ben Jelloun’s narrative strategies. In the public square, the picture that emerges is that two essential elements reveal the organization of the narrative: the cultural source and the literary source.