Tahar Ben Jelloun, 78, winner of the 2007 Goncourt Prize for "The Sacred Night", author recently of "Lovers of Casablanca", lives part of the year in Tangier (Morocco), in the North, his beloved city "which has not always been spared, but this time, it is not concerned by this disaster".
The Franco-Moroccan writer, who was still in his native country a few days ago, knows very well these rural regions that were very affected by the earthquake that hit the country on the night of Friday 8 to Saturday 9 September.
"In many villages, people are still building as best they can"
"It is especially the countryside, where the buildings are not modern, that has been hit hard. In many villages, unfortunately, the inhabitants still build as they can, according to their ancestral habits. In the countryside, people were buried in their homes... Since the earthquake in Agadir in 1960, which is still in all memories in Morocco, because the city had been completely razed, normally in the country, all construction obeys anti-seismic laws. But not always in rural areas away from major cities," he says. Villages where raw earth is often used, where there are still wells, where tractors have not always replaced animals.
VIDEO. Morocco: more than 800 dead after magnitude 7 earthquake
The novelist, who did not manage to reach his in-laws this Saturday morning, catches his breath, in Paris, very marked: "They are not in the affected area, they live further west, but we heard the earthquake everywhere, it resounded as far as Casablanca. What impresses me very much and worries me is that the magnitude of the earthquake is higher than that of Agadir at the time. I checked, it's scary. Moroccans have all spent the night outside and panic exists. From Agadir, we are afraid of aftershocks and we know that a city can be wiped off the map. It's scary. »
The member of the jury Goncourt tries to see a single point, not reassuring, but which calms "the trauma Agadir", still so present: "There had been 12,000 deaths, do you realize? All the memory of a city, all its population. We had to rebuild everything, everything. This time, the earthquake mainly affected sparsely populated areas. It's terrifying, but there will be fewer missing people. »
Has this geographical area of the Maghreb subjected to seismic fragility led to preparation among the inhabitants, a bit like in Japan? "No, we know it but we forget that there can be an earthquake. I traveled to Turkey, which is also sensitive to these disasters. There was an alert in Istanbul, but you get used to it, you can't think about it all the time. »