There are stories more powerful than their characters, and the family Binebine belongs to that genre unique, exceptional. The patriarch of the saga was the jester of king Hassan II, but we continued having fun and laughing thank you in the years of lead,when the monarch moroccan sent to the dungeons of his eldest son, Aziz Binebine, for participating in 1971 in the coup d’état that sought to overthrow him. And while Binebine father was still cradling the monarch until he caught the dream stories a thousand times versioned, Binebine son was going to languish in the secret prison of Tazmamart, where the darkness, extreme temperatures, hunger, the silence and the absence of time horizon were undermining without doblegarle at all.
Aziz was one of the few survivors of that repression-blind dictator’s moroccan. And his little brother, the well-known artist Mahi Binebine, has a new the story of that father who entertained the king while did not laugh, precisely, to their children, those who reneged in public in order to maintain your position. I, jester of the king (Alfaguara) is the story of that drama without dramatismos, because Binebine has chosen the mood and tone of oriental fairy tale to draw their story.
Mohamed Binebine, jester of the king and father of the author, Mahi Binebine.
“When my brother came out of jail and brought him home, 18 years later, it measured nearly 50 inches less, seemed to split in two, it was as a survivor of a nazi camp, was a living dead”, account Binebine. “The only four that had survived of his pavilion were not harboring hatred.”
In the first few weeks, the brother returned he reproduced the conditions of their lives in prison: tumbaba on the ground in the remotest room, in semidarkness, and he spent hours in silence, but also met the two emergencies were opened to step the go to recovering the ability to live in freedom: the first was the embrace of his mother, the only one Rivalo who had held the blind faith that was alive and that kept food every day even though I didn’t know anything about him. And the second, the reconciliation with the father. His mother, then ill with cancer, lived for his return as a gift before he died (he died three months later). His father, who had formed another family, was a more difficult issue.
But so free of hatred was the newly released which asked his little brother to take him to see him. “I didn’t want to because, for me, my father was the one that had abandoned us, had denied us, had broken the book of family in the television. And yet, my older brother was there telling me: ‘take Me to see him’. And I had to carry. As both were, father gay and son coup embraced a non-stop crying. “I discovered that my father was a be exceptional.”
When hatred dominates you, learned Binebine his brother, “about all you destroys you, it rarely affects the others.” For this reason, the painter and sculptor, whose work is part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim in New York, decided to give posthumously to his father, the voice narrator of his book, so as to achieve the aroma to The thousand and one nights, of multiple stories within a story. “My father was a storyteller and so the book had to be like a story. The narrator is him, I let him tell his version,” laughs Binebine.
and So ends a story of a brother morally exalted while decrease in size; of a father’s jester who does not know how to amuse their children; a little brother that has given to the literature a bitterness, full of tenderness; the damage is just as extraordinary as the forgiveness that was required; and a series of buffoons, where the patriarch worked for the king and this child is said to “jester of my readers”. It is, in the last instance, “a book of reconciliation, of redemption, of peace. I am also at peace.”
