The Hospital
Ahmed Bouanani
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Hospital
Ahmed Bouanani
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Some of The Hospital’s strangest and most moving passages are those in which the narrator, in what seems to be a fever dream, slips back into the skin of the child he was.
The patient—suffering from an unnamed illness—becomes trapped in a bewildering twilight between life and death. The hospital is a haunted shadow world where memory struggles for a breath of air, where the grotesque facts of the outside country are gone over at leisure. Indignities and past sufferings (long-ago familial deaths, a childhood friend left asleep under a streetlamp, the violent and petty offenses of self-proclaimed criminals) are felt again, perhaps made worse by the removal: the ability to sit and think over events with no further possibility of investigation, action, or intervention.
Bouanani’s work has a timeless urgency to it, the kind of timeless frustration that can only come from a specific time and place. And like The Trial or the great Eastern Bloc science-fiction of the 1960s and 70s or other great dystopian novels of the past, the human rage, frustration, and isolation it expresses is equally poignant in past, present, and future..
...as Bouanani parses out his disturbing material, the brief chapters feel as much bumptious as grim, and even sometimes laughable.
It would be hard to avoid the word 'Kafkaesque' in describing this dreamlike and symbolic excursion into an institution that represents suffering humanity.
Moroccan filmmaker and writer Bouanani’s...mind-bending 1990 work about secluded, chronically ill patients blurs lines between history, Islamic folklore, and nightmares. The unnamed narrator is admitted to a labyrinthine hospital for treatment of an unspecified disease. To survive the tedium of endless days and unexplained but gentle treatments, the narrator chronicles his slightly detached interactions with fellow patients.