He convinced me to drive him to a book signing for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Le racisme expliqué a ma fille. It must have been before the Second Intifada. I drove him because he never found time to get a driver’s license, I don’t think he has taken a single lesson. Perhaps the steering wheel frightens him or maybe every time he intends to go for a lesson he writes a poem instead. That’s why he writes so many poems. The event was at a theater in Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and the place was full. I’m hazy about what happened but I do recall my friend fidgeting in his seat incessantly, as if there were thorns on his chair. And I do remember the Q&A at the end, when an Israeli writer of a certain age stood up and said that colonialism wasn’t all bad, and then it was Ben Jelloun who started squirming in his seat like my friend, I think he was looking around for emergency exits, and the writer kept describing the positive sides of colonialism, especially the building of highways and infrastructure.
