Mohammed V Hospital
1. Chikhate is a Moroccan term for musicians, singers, and dancers, often in a traveling troupe of entertainers. Formerly, female entertainers were often also prostitutes, a tradition that modern Morocco has tried to suppress. Contemporary videos online show images of raucous celebrations with impressive displays of plump but fully clothed belly dancing.
A cheikha is also a female Moroccan singer, an artist in the honored Bedouin tradition of Al-aïta, poetry sung to music: aïta means “cry” or “lament,” and is one of the many traditional musical forms that Sultan Hassan I revived at the end of the nineteenth century. His patronage was bestowed on many revered Chikhates, but in the unrest that followed his death in 1894, the singer most remembered is the legendary Hadda Al Ghaîtia, known as Kharboucha, a member of the Oulad Zayd tribe. In that time of bilād al-Makhzen and bilād as-Siba, she survived the massacre of her village by a treacherous rival tribe and attacked its powerful caïd through shocking songs of denunciation and defiance unheard of in the Bedouin culture.
2. When Aden Arabie (1931), a collection of essays by the French writer and philosopher Paul Nizan, was republished in 1960 with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, this opening became an important catchphrase for the student protestors of May 1968 in Paris. Their demonstrations against military and bureaucratic elites spread quickly throughout France, becoming part of a worldwide escalation of conflict between revolutionary movements and political repression.
3. Méchoui, a North African dish, is traditionally prepared by roasting a whole lamb or sheep on a spit or in a pit in the ground, so the meat is tender enough to pull off the bones and serve and eat with the bare right hand. The entire animal is consumed, and the host will select choice pieces to offer to guests, with the organs—including the eyes—saved for guests of honor.
An Evening chez Ababou
1. The history of early Islamic Morocco (c. 700–c. 1060) already has ancient Carthage at its back, starts off with the Muslim conquest, encompasses various revolts, kingdoms, dynasties, and polities, spends about five hundred years with the Almoravid, Almohad, Marinid, and Wattasid dynasties, then another hundred years with the Saadi dynasty, and hits the ground running for the Alaouite dynasty in 1666, which, remarkably, is still enthroned today. The Alaouite family claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad and probably arrived in Morocco at the end of the thirteenth century, a pedigree that carries great weight on its home ground. So the two portraits on Commandant Ababou’s wall come with some baggage.
Morocco’s contacts with Europe and the United States were not always happy ones, as the country was still struggling to unite itself into a centralized, modern state with secure borders, and in the later 1800s, Muhammad IV and Hassan I saw the French gain ever more influence in their affairs, until Morocco was forced to recognize a French protectorate (1912–1956). This was a bitter time, with unrest and Berber revolts against both foreign occupiers and central authorities. The resentment of the populace under the humiliating jurisdiction of French courts helped spark an independence movement and the foundation in 1944 of the Istiqlal, or Independence Party, a conservative and monarchist party supported by Mohammed V. Deposed and exiled, he returned in 1955 just before independence to rule as king until his death in 1961. Mohammed V is remembered with some affection by his subjects and with gratitude by the Moroccan Jews who sheltered beneath his protection from the Nazis and Vichy French.
Hassan II (r. 1961–1999) is another story. The eldest son of Mohammed V, he accompanied him into exile and back, served him as a political advisor, was at his side in the negotiations for independence in 1956, and was his army chief of staff for Morocco’s first Royal Armed Forces, leading troops fighting rebels in the Rif mountains. Superbly prepared for the job, he became king in 1971 at the death of his father. His life was a long and busy one, on the national and international levels. He was intelligent, capable, wily, charming, ferocious, loyal and treacherous by turn, and Morocco is the only Arab monarchy remaining in Africa, a constitutional monarchy that Hassan II ruled with the classic iron hand. And from roughly the 1960s through the 1980s, that iron hand put Morocco through what are known as the “years of lead”: appalling and often deadly state violence against peaceful protesters, strikers, dissidents, and activists calling for democracy, thousands of whom were jailed, tortured, exiled, killed, or disappeared. When Tahar Ben Jelloun opens his chapter “Last Moments of Freedom” with “A leaden sun. It’s part of the drama I’m caught up in,” he is waving from the edge of the pit of political oppression into which he will now vanish, and from which many did not return.
Ahermoumou
1. In 1912–1913, the Moroccan resident-general under the French protectorate, Hubert Lyautey, established a French fort, town, and port at Kenitra. During World War II, Americans captured the air base at Port Lyautey, which the navy operated until control reverted to France in 1947. The United States shared the base with Morocco throughout the Cold War, leaving in 1991.
2. Aïd el-Kébir celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at the command of God, who provided a ram in the boy’s stead. Each household slaughtering an animal traditionally keeps a third of the meat, gives a third to relatives, and the rest to the poor.
3. Born in 1940, Jules Régis Debray is a French philosophy teacher, journalist, and writer best known for his radical theories and his adventures in South America. While teaching in Cuba at the University of Havana, Debray was recruited by Castro in 1967 as an emissary to his former second-in-command, Che Guevara, who was in Bolivia on an ill-fated military campaign to foment a Marxist revolution. Debray was arrested after leaving Guevara’s camp, however, and Bolivian forces soon captured Guevara. Convicted of being a guerrilla, Debray was sentenced in November 1967 to thirty years in prison, but he was released in 1970 after appeals were made by religious, political, and cultural figures such as General de Gaulle, Françoise Sagan, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even (unofficially) the pope. Debray holed up in Chile, interviewed Salvador Allende for his book The Chilean Revolution (1972), and returned to France, where he continues the life of a dedicated intellectual theorist and gadfly.
Liberation Yes, Liberation No
1. Léo Ferré (1916–1993) was a poet, composer, singer, and pianist, who as a child was sent away for eight traumatic years to a strict Catholic boarding school in Italy, from which he emerged as a self-proclaimed anarchist, but one who had discovered the blessed art of music. After further studies and the Occupation, he went to Paris, where he slowly clawed his way up from Bohemian poverty to success, eventually releasing forty albums and many hit singles, some of which are classics. He became the epitome of a chanteur engagé: a politically committed artist.
So was Jean Ferrat (1930–2010), a French singer-songwriter and poet, a chanteur de texte presenting songs of literary quality, in particular the poetry of Louis Aragon. A lifelong Communist, Ferrat never joined the Party and even criticized its failings, but his left-wing sympathies informed his work, endearing him to the public but irritating the authorities. As a teenager, he had taken refuge with Communists when the Vichy police shipped his father to Auschwitz, where he died; years later, Ferrat’s deeply moving song about the Nazi camps, “Nuit et Brouillard” (Night and Fog), was banned by the French state-controlled media.
A member of the Académie Goncourt, Louis Aragon (1897–1982) was a French journalist, poet, and novelist, one of the great names in French literature. Active in the cultural movements of dadaism and surrealism, he broke with them in 1931 to support the French Communist Party and the literary doctrines of socialist realism. After 1940 his poetry and novels took a more traditional turn, and by the end of the 1950s many of his poems had reached a wide popular audience when set to music and sung by stars including Yves Montand, Georges Brassens, Ferré, Ferrat, and Catherine Sauvage.
2. This is the Wikipedia entry of November 15, 2019, and it is perfect: “Les Enfants du Paradis, released as
Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French epic romantic drama film directed by Marcel Carné. It was made during the German occupation of France during World War II. Set against the Parisian theatre scene of the 1820s and 1830s, it tells the story of a beautiful courtesan, Garance, and the four men who love her in their own ways: a mime artist, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat.” The movie is three hours long, and always wonderful.
On the Outside
1. Born in Fez in 1942, Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet who in 1966, with other poets, founded the influential French and Arabic literary magazine Souffles, which quickly became a forum for creative people of all kinds and cultures throughout the Maghreb and the developing world. Souffles was published in Rabat until 1972, when the repressive regime of Hassan II subjected Laâbi to torture and sentenced him to prison for “crimes of opinion” (1972–1981). In 1985 he went into exile in Paris, where he still lives and writes as a prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and translator.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Mysteries remain about the failed Skhirat coup d’état in 1971 and the next attack on Hassan II, on August 16, 1972: fighter jets from Kenitra Air Base strafed his plane but did not kill the king. His revenge was swift. Mohamad Oufkir—the monarch’s closest confidant, whom he had made defense minister after the general put down the first coup—died that very night. Like the plotters of Skhirat, Oufkir had supposedly become disgusted with the corruption of the king’s regime, although some feel he secretly helped the previous conspirators, if only to clear his own way to more power. The Palace claimed he had killed himself out of remorse for his treason that day.
This was disputed by the Oufkir family; the eldest daughter, Malika, eighteen at the time, had seen her father’s bullet-riddled body. Oufkir’s widow, Fatéma Oufkir, and her six children—the youngest a toddler—were put under house arrest and soon shunted into increasingly harsh confinements in the southern desert of Morocco, ending with a secret prison in Bir-Jdid, a deathtrap intended to kill them slowly. In her book Stolen Lives, Malika Oufkir describes the malnourished family’s misery without books or other simple comforts, medical care, or even basic necessities. Plagued by brutal guards, illness, grueling heat and cold in damp cells infested with scorpions and filthy vermin, kept often in darkness, isolated from the outside world, and for long years at the end even separated from one another, “We were entering the realm of insanity.”
Between 1978 and 1986, Malika and her three sisters shared a cell, with her mother and two brothers in adjacent cells, the oldest boy all by himself. For eight years, schooling and consoling them as best she could, Malika tried to teach her sisters about the life they were missing. In 1986 the family was moved to a single cell, where one night they all tried to kill themselves by opening veins with scraps of metal. In 1987, crazed with despair, Malika, one sister, and the two boys tunneled their way out with their fingers, a spoon, a knife handle and a sardine-can lid, only to wander in terror of recapture in a world they could hardly recognize. Malika finally obtained the phone number of Radio France Internationale, and the world learned of their appalling plight. Forced to release them after their fifteen years of anguish, the vengeful king held them under house arrest until 1991, then kept them in Morocco for another five years until Malika’s sister Maria escaped to Spain in 1996 to sound a second alarm, and the world was again outraged. The whole family was eventually allowed to leave the country.
That happy ending was not granted to those punished for the 1971 assault on the king at Skhirat. General Medbouh and Lieutenant Colonel Ababou, the chief instigators, had trucked in well-armed officer cadets from the Royal Academy at Ahermoumou and launched them at the birthday reception. The cadets were supposedly told either that they were simply on a military maneuver or that the crowd of people there intended to assassinate the king, and some witnesses said the cadets went berserk at the sight of so much luxury. (An official Palace communiqué later claimed the cadets had been drugged beforehand.) Troops loyal to the king arrived, turning the attack into a gun battle lasting several hours. The king hid in the bathroom and was unharmed; about two hundred cadets were killed by friendly fire, and around a hundred were shot by loyal soldiers, who rounded up some nine hundred others. Although the principals of the attack were immediately shot, the king was persuaded to pardon the remaining cadets, although some were sentenced to serve various terms in the Kenitra military prison, and at least fifty-eight wound up in Tazmamart.
This secret subterranean prison, off in the Atlas Mountains of southeastern Morocco, was built after the Skhirat attack to punish dissidents, in particular would-be assassins of the king. It was more a pitch-black tomb than a prison: of the fifty-eight cadets, twenty-eight survived, and only because the world finally found out about them. Some told their stories: in his Tazmamart: Cellule 10, Ahmed Marzouki describes how, believing himself on a military exercise, he found a massacre at Skhirat, where he never fired a shot and tried to stop the carnage. His reward: a five-year sentence. Two years later, the king’s vengeance sent him to rot forever at Tazmamart in a cramped individual cell, where men’s vermin-infested bodies became “one immense wound” and their ever-growing hair, beards, and nails changed them into “phantoms drifting in prehistoric caves.”
The memories of another survivor provided Tahar Ben Jelloun with the material for his award-winning This Blinding Absence of Light. In a cell less than ten feet long, about half as wide, and impossible to stand up in, there was “a hole for pissing and crapping. A hole not even four inches wide. The hole was a part of our bodies. We had to forget our existence fast, stop smelling the shit and urine, stop smelling anything at all.” To remember was fatal: “Anyone who summoned up his past would promptly die,” coming alive only to realize that they were all already “in our graves.” The prison had been designed specifically to torture inmates to death infinitely slowly: engineers and doctors had studied “all the possibilities for prolonged suffering.”
Once a day, the inmates were given just enough to keep the body alive while the mind died: a bowl of slop they compared to camel piss, and bread hard and tasteless as a rock. The concrete sleeping platform sucked out the body’s last heat in the bitter cold, when limbs and joints would stiffen so “we could not even rub our hands together or pass them over our faces. We were as rigid as corpses.” There were no doctors; the skittering of scorpions in the dark could be deadly, and tuberculosis was the prevalent disease. One inmate with a wasting sickness was even supposed to have been taken to a military hospital on the way to Skhirat, but the commander forgot about him. At death, “The folded knees had worn a hole in his rib cage, and the ribs had worked their way into the joints. Impossible to unbend the arms or legs. His body was a ball, all bony. It probably weighed less than ninety pounds.” But the most horrific torment of all was the permanent darkness, a scourge that dissolved memory, logic, will, madness itself—even the soul: “Night was no longer night, since there were no more days, no more stars, no more moon, no more sky. We were the night.”
Although human rights organizations had begun investigations during the 1980s, and rumors about Tazmamart served to terrorize the Moroccan opposition, the regime consistently denied its existence until pressure from these groups and some foreign governments finally forced King Hassan II to release all surviving prisoners and close Tazmamart in 1991.
The 1990s in Morocco saw a slow and grudging relaxation of oppressive government controls in the human rights and political arenas. King Hassan II died in 1999, and the accession to the throne of his son, Mohammed VI, has seen further reforms. Morocco is still the only Arab constitutional monarchy in Africa.
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN, born in Fez, Morocco, in 1947, is an author, poet, and now painter who learned French at school in Tangier and studied philosophy at the Mohammed V University in Rabat. In 1966, he helped found the magazine Souffles, which championed a new linguistic aesthetics promoting contacts between the French and Arab literary worlds. His first collec
tion of poems, in French, was published in 1971. Later that year, for political and professional reasons, he moved to Paris to study psychology, in which he earned a doctorate. He soon began writing articles for Le Monde, and, already a prolific writer, he published a dozen literary works before his novel The Sand Child (1985) brought him wide acclaim. The sequel, The Sacred Night (1987), won him the Goncourt Prize, and This Blinding Absence of Light brought him the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Elected to the Académie Goncourt in 2008, Morocco’s most famous literary son and a stalwart of French literature, Tahar Ben Jelloun has published more than sixty books. Showered with honors and distinctions, he is the most translated francophone author in the world.
LINDA COVERDALE has a Ph.D. in French Studies from Johns Hopkins University, a B.F.A. from the Parsons School of Design, is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and has translated over eighty books, by authors including Roland Barthes, Emmanuel Carrère, Patrick Chamoiseau, Annie Ernaux, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, Marguerite Duras, and Georges Simenon. She has translated Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier, A Palace in the Old Village, The Punishment, and This Blinding Absence of Light, which won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for both author and translator. She has also won the 2006 Scott Moncrief Prize, the 1997, 2008, and 2019 French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. She lived in France as a child, grew up on Long Island, and now lives in Brooklyn.
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