The Bottom of the Jar

by Abdellatif Laabi

  I thought they were talking about a newspaper that related the story. Prompted by curiosity, I foolishly gave up my place in the queue so as to get a closer look. Other dupes did the same. We then discovered what all the fuss was about, the object clearly spoke for itself.

  SPEND APPROXIMATELY A minute looking closely at the three white dots at the center of the print. Then turn your gaze to a wall or even lift your eyes toward the sky, and if you look hard enough you will see His Majesty the Sultan.

  All of the effigies sold out in the blink of an eye. I managed to secure one and immediately set myself to the task. The results were undeniable. Lifting my eyes to the sky, I was certain that the image I’d had so much trouble discerning the previous night exactly matched the descriptions of the face that the others had convinced me had been there all along. Any lingering doubts I might have entertained were definitely brushed aside. The scientific approach I had acquired at school had been useful after all. As far as I was concerned, Ben Youssef’s appearance on the moon was now a proven fact.

  ABSORBED BY THESE scholarly experiments, I found myself pushed to the back of the queue and was obliged to cool my heels, while I was increasingly tortured by the enticing smell and sight of the crispy fritters that the vendor was stacking one after the other on a bunch of palm fronds that had been tied together.

  Once back at the house, of the two trophies I was brandishing, the most popular by far – against my expectations – were the fritters. The familial atmosphere had cooled down. The adults thought only of stuffing themselves. Only my little sisters deigned to dart a glance at what I deemed the biggest prize, and out of sheer goodwill they consented to take part in the experiment, whose clear results had turned me into a believer.

  The conversation that took place after the meal clarified why the family mood had shifted. I was stunned to learn that the radio, which they had tuned into early in the morning, hadn’t breathed a word about the miracle that the whole of Fez had witnessed the previous night. While one could overlook the fact that Rabat and Tangiers hadn’t said anything, the fact that the event hadn’t been reported by Cairo, Moscow, the BBC, Prague, or Voice of America had shocked us to the very foundations of our being. Had the entire world turned a blind eye to our future and the eloquent manifestations of our faith? Had they turned a deaf ear to the widely attested messages delivered by the sky? The same blackout extended to the official press. The morning papers that Si Mohammed had bought were still spouting the usual bile in regard to our fedayeen and the headlines glorified the deeds of the protectorate: a new road had been built, a dock had been enlarged, a free clinic opened, ten new police stations, a shantytown had been razed, free sacks of flour had been handed out to the needy, caids had been rewarded for their loyal service. Who could top that? We only found an allusion to the events that had so radically turned our lives upside down buried deep in the back pages. There was a humor column with a heading that read “A Race of Lunatics,” where the journalist, who’d only signed the piece with his initials – the coward! – addressed the issue in the following manner:

  The ungrateful opponents of France’s civilizing mission have attempted to deceive their fellow citizens by propagating the preposterous idea that the old sultan, who was legitimately deposed – thanks to widespread support across the country and the efforts of its elite allied to our cause – made an appearance, hold on to your seats, on the moon! It seems this tactic of psychological manipulation, which these agitators learned from their puppet masters in Moscow, had an impact on some uncultivated, simpleminded souls. Instead of helping these people gain insight into the virtues of reason, which we brought into this country, the agents of this pointless and narrow-minded nationalism want to make even bigger fools out of them by pushing them into the arms of a collective hallucination, thereby transforming them into a race of lunatics. What a dirty trick! In light of this, it’s difficult not to be swayed by the argument put forward by one of our illustrious administrators (White Urbanite, no need to give him a name) who had once said in his time: “We’ll get nothing out of these Arabs so long as they write from right to left and piss sitting down.”

  Dirty dog, curses upon his mother’s religion!

  His barking didn’t stop our caravan from filing up the stairs that night. There was Ben Youssef again, making his appearance on the lightly dented moon. The top of his hood was leaning slightly to one side. During the course of the following nights, layers of darkness started to cover his face, first his right eye, then his nose, his mouth, his other eye, and so on. Oblivious to the barking guard dogs and the indifference of the world, we clung to our hope until the final stages of the moon’s “revolution.”

  In the meantime, the “white days” of Shawwal came thick and fast, and one needed to come to terms with that. There was nothing on the horizon. No Ben Youssef in sight. Other torments were on the way, which announced themselves with flashes of lightning and storms prompted by the shockwaves of history.

  Accordingly we dined on the dry bread crusts of expectation and drank the fresh water of stubborn hope. This went on for a succession of seasons, where “our summers became our winters,” before the great upheaval, the real one, came along and the diurnal star of freedom rose in our sky.

  But that’s another story.

  Epilogue

  SINCE THEN, THE earth has continued to spin on its axis like a whirligig. Life too.

  More lives than one. Thanks to the stories I have told, I find myself face-to-face with a set of Russian dolls. I pay close attention to the dolls all lined up in a row. From the smallest to the largest, there is a common thread, as the life force passes from one to the other, and each time I acquire a new lease on my soul. And to think that none of the dolls had the idea to run roughshod over the others and claim sole maternity rights over the whole set. I have tried to give a simple answer to the voice that claims to speak for memory, that pesters me and asks: Who is Namouss? The answer that rises in reply is happily unforeseen: Namouss is my ancestor and my child.

  There’s nothing left for me now but to go back to the starting line and loop-the-loop.

  But before that, there’s one question left that needs to be cleared up. What is this mysterious “bottom of the jar,” the emblem from which this story unfolded?

  The origins of this expression can be traced back to an anecdote by the famous Joha,19 a mythical Mediterranean who was a master of practical jokes. Here it is.

  After having been an imam, a judge, a lawyer, a porter, and a number of other professions – all leading nowhere – Joha was living hand to mouth. One day it occurred to him to give business a try. He would sell honey and butter at the souk. But there was a snag: He wouldn’t have much stock. Customers won’t crowd around me, he said to himself, if I don’t put my wares in plain sight. He purchased two jars, which he filled to the halfway point with excrement, before topping one off with honey and the other with butter. Then he took them to the souk. It didn’t take long for customers to crowd around him. Before making up their minds, each of his customers asked to sample the merchandise. First one came, then another, and so forth. It got to the point that they were drawing near the danger zone. Infuriated by how people sampled a lot and yet bought little, Joha yelled out this warning: “Keep licking away and you’ll get licked, if you carry on like this, you will land in shit. Beware of the bottom of the jar!”

  The scatological element of the story diminished over time. The Fezzis, however, did hold on to the notion that by wanting to get to the bottom of things, one usually hit on distasteful truths, vile things that are best left unseen lest one winds up making sworn enemies. The flawless reasoning of the Jesuits! This also exists in the lands of Islam. But when it comes to the Fezzis, who are sophists at heart, this was interpreted differently and has now come to mean the exact opposite. In its newfound form, it designates a vast repertory of horrible words and idioms that are enjoyed in the company of a select few: double-edged words, metaphorical expressions, wi
tty one-liners, and allusions that only the initiated can grasp, prompting them to burst into ecstasies, much to the chagrin of the laymen around them.

  This “bottom of the jar” has spread far beyond the city of Moulay Idriss, and for that matter far beyond the reaches of the imperialism that the Fezzis often profited from – and still do – even though they believe that there’s a bottom as well as a rock bottom. Let’s be fair and leave to one side those who, admittedly, weren’t able grasp the full sense of the story unless they happened to have heard it related in their own accent, with their own expressions and gestures, their naïveté and endearing certitude, a conviction fairly common among tribes and peoples, of being the center of the universe.

  But enough of these tiring platitudes. There’s still a little left in the jar for those with a taste for it.

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN and the family was still gathered in the apartment that my father had rented in the new town after Ghita’s untimely death. An ironic twist: The apartment was part of the L’Urbaine complex, the flagship modern development during the days of the protectorate. It was where the upper crust of French civil servants and other influential people once lived. Despite the ravages of time, the building was in decent shape. At least to the casual observer, since once you got past the gates, the truth in the old adage “other times, other customs” emerged. The majority of the mailboxes were gone and those that had survived dangled loosely right in front of the diligent postman’s eyes. The elevator was nothing but a distant memory, attested to by a majestic, iron-clad cage that was irremediably empty. It was a good thing that Driss’s apartment was on the first floor. But let’s move on.

  The television was always on and the lively conversations ignored the images in the background and drowned out its accompanying decibels. We were taking part in a ritual that always took place when we got together: bringing Ghita’s sayings and doings back to life, her unforgettably epic opinions.

  “Do you remember what she said about fasting one day during Ramadan?”

  “And when we moved to the house in Siaj and she couldn’t stand the fact that we’d be under the eyes of our first-floor neighbors?”

  “And the time when she played a trick on Touissa when we were in Sidi Harazem?”

  “And the pot that she emptied in the toilet the day the khatib was murdered?”

  “What was it she used to say to express how nothing got past her?”

  “If I step on a raisin I can immediately taste its sweetness in my mouth.”

  “And the first time she went to the cinema.”

  “The things she said about poor Farid al-Atrash!”

  Speaking of the cinema, I still haven’t told you that beautiful story. I’d gone to see a film at the Boujeloud – I was wearing a coat that I’d just bought. When I got there, I took it off and hung it on the back of my seat. It was only after I’d come home that I realized I’d forgotten it. Ghita was beside herself. She promised she would light seven candles to Saint Sidi Abdelkader Jilani if he helped us recover the coat. I went back to the cinema and miraculously found the coat exactly where I’d left it. Ghita was ecstatic, but when I reminded her of the seven candles she’d promised to Sidi Abdelkader Jilani, without batting an eyelid she said, “So what? We have the coat in our hands right here, so the saint can go take a hike!”

  Along those lines, television began to run the evening news. I used what influence I had to call for silence. I expected the fall of the Berlin Wall to be among the top headlines. How naïve I was. For almost half an hour, the wooden anchorman focused on royal audiences, foundation-laying ceremonies presided over by ministers who didn’t even know how to hold a trowel, and soporific debates being held before a mostly empty parliament. He then apologized that due to the “wealth of material” he could only gloss over the international news in brief. We were finally allowed images of the Berlin Wall, pieces of which were being grabbed by its brave dismantlers as if they were holy relics.

  Driss, who still has a lively interest in politics, surprised us with the following remark: “Only Hikler could have ordered the destruction of that wall.”

  “No, Father, Hitler is dead,” I said, thinking it was advisable to correct him.

  “That’s only what they tell us. It seems he’s still alive. But God knows best.”

  “Believe me, Father, he died when I was still crawling around on all fours.”

  “If you say so . . .”

  Entertained as I was by this exchange, it only served to make Ghita’s absence more painfully felt. I thought about what she might have said in these circumstances. The sweet wind of her presence brought a smile back to my lips. Written by both our hands, it’s only fitting that our story comes to a close by giving the last words to her.

  “Pahh, is that the only news they could find to tell us! A falling wall . . . it can’t have been built very solidly. The walls of Fez are still standing after all.”

  Créteil - Fez

  May 2000 - June 2001

  ENDNOTES

  1Expert in Islamic law.

  2Walled Jewish quarters in Moroccan cities, originally set up to protect its inhabitants from pogroms.

  3Laâbi’s note: Neggafate is the plural of neggafa, women who more often than not are of black ancestry, and who provide a number of services. They are responsible for the bride from the ritual grooming right up to when she is led to the altar, where they proffer advice suitable to the occasion, including tips on various erotic techniques.

  4Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) was Tunisia’s first president after independence from the French and led the country from 1957 until 1987, when his newly appointed prime minister, Zine El Abidine ben Ali, used a number of medical reports to declare Bourguiba unfit to rule, at which point he was deposed. Ben Ali was of course later the first leader to be overthrown during the Arab Spring in 2011.

  5Laâbi’s note: The ellipsis isn’t meant to censor the word. The point was to demonstrate how the people of Fez pronounce words, usually dropping the first consonant, where instead of saying qaf they will say af.

  6Minor ablutions are washing the face and hands up to the elbows, the feet up to the ankles, and rubbing water on one’s head. These are usually performed before prayers. Major ablutions are washing the entire body and must be performed after sexual intercourse.

  7The nationalist leader of the Democratic Independence Party, formed in 1946 as a splinter from Allal al-Fassi’s Istiqlal Party.

  8Khattabi (1880–1963) was a Berber political and military leader during the Rif War (1921–1926), who initially defeated and chased the Spanish out of northern Morocco but was later destroyed by the French. He was exiled to the island of Réunion and kept under house arrest from 1926 until 1947. He later sought asylum in Egypt, where he died.

  9The “yellow spirit,” a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.

  10A Moroccan myth: a spirit that can inhabit the bodies of women or take the shape of women. In southern Morocco, Aïcha Kandisha takes the form of a goat, while her shapely, alluring legs remain human. In the north, however, Kandisha has the body of a woman but the legs of a camel. She entices men and then tears them apart.

  11Gnaoua are descendants of former slaves brought back by the Moroccans after they conquered Timbuktu. They have a rich cultural tradition where music occupies a large place.

  12A hadra is a ceremony where participants go into a trance while music plays around them. A specific color is worn to attract specific spirits.

  13A low-ranking civilian officer appointed to represent a certain district as an informant and council assistant to the municipal authorities.

  14Laâbi’s note: The month before Ramadan when children often play with firecrackers.

  15Notaries for religious marriages.

  16Students.

  17“I swear to God!”

  18A body of Islamic scholars that interprets sharia
law.

  19Laâbi’s note: Joha in classical Arabic, Goha in Egyptian, Khodja in Turkish, Guisha in Albanian, Giufa in Sicilian, Odja in Greek, Djahan in Maltese, etc.

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