Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

Mama Aicha’s heart began to beat faster, as Si Mohammed’s voice rang in her ear once more: I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth. She answered, “Yes.”

  “Is he with a group of others like him?”

  “There’s no doubt about that.” In every alley of the city there was a bereaved mother—this she had heard from Yusuf, who had not stopped visiting her since those evil hands stretched out to snatch away her own flesh and blood from his very bed.

  Then the fortune-teller said something that could scarcely be believed, after the accuracy of everything she had said before: “Give me a piece of his underwear. I will write a charm on it and you must burn a part of it each day for three days. After a time that is neither long nor short, you will find him returning to you, once he has tired of the nightlife and grown to hate the fornicator who seduced him.”

  Mama Aicha stood up, all of her hope having drained away. “Is this what the jinn who possesses you told you? Tell him to go back to his cards,” she snapped. “My son is not seduced by the nightlife or taking shelter in the arms of women. My son, my love . . . I’ll look for him myself. Let’s go, Zahra, these women are nothing but frauds.”

  “I knew that. I just wanted to bring you here because I thought it would do you good to get out of the house.”

  “Don’t worry, Zahra. I’ll set him free myself.” She said this with a strange earnestness and determination, as if another voice, stronger than her own, were emerging from inside of her. The voice of a different woman, not the Aicha we knew.

  * * *

  Her husband didn’t forbid her to leave the house, but instead pointed the way himself to the secret cave in which all of the city’s most distinguished students, and the best of its high school teachers, were packed away.

  When she arrived at the detention center, she saw that it wasn’t invisible, as she had previously believed. It was an imposing building with colonial architecture squatting at the northern corner of Jemaa el-Fnaa, not far from the circles of singers and the dancers and acrobats and magicians and food carts. Neither the singers’ melodies nor the voices of the storytellers—nor even the clamor of the monkey tamers—could capture Mama Aicha’s attention that day. She had always dreamed about the vast possibilities of this freewheeling square, but now that she found herself in the middle of it, she was scarcely aware of the entertainment and diversions that filled it. Her eyes were fixed on the dreaded building. She paused to look at the police station that had swallowed up her son, and she examined the faces of the officers and state security guards who surrounded it.

  She approached the terrifying building with hesitant steps. Whom should she ask? And how? What had her son been accused of doing? Why had they taken him? Did they know Aziz? Do you know Aziz? Aziz, the handsome young man with the enchanting smile. He was a good boy, did well at school, drew suns with his colored pens. Was it simply because he had drawn a rising sun that he deserved to be punished?

  The questions crowded together inside her head. She imagined herself making her way around the building and asking the policemen who surrounded it one by one. But when a stout, cruel-looking officer came over and ordered her to move along, she realized that she was all but rooted in place in front of the building. Her eyes began to overflow with tears, soaking her veil.

  The policeman repeated his order. “Can’t you hear? I told you to get going. You’re not allowed to stand here. There’s nothing to see—the show’s over there, behind you, you crazy woman. So move along, scram.”

  “I’m not looking for a show, sir. I want my boy, my son . . .” she said, stumbling over her words in fear.

  “Your son? Is he a policeman? Does he work here?”

  “My son is only a student, sir, a young man in the baccalaureate division. Ever since he started school he’s always been the first in his class. He’s seventeen and his name is Aziz.”

  “I thought you were asking about an employee here. This building is not a school or a youth center. Go look for your son somewhere else.”

  “But my son is here, sir. Locked up here three months ago.”

  The policeman was confused. He was only a lowly patrol officer. He had nothing to do with what happened inside. He didn’t know what to do. He tried to hide his confusion behind curses and shouts: “I told you to get out of my sight, you bitch! Get on your way or I’ll break your teeth! This isn’t a high school. If your son is a criminal, go look for him in Boulmharez Prison. This isn’t a school or a jail. So get lost!”

  No one in her whole life had ever cursed at Mama Aicha. Bitch. That was the first time another person had flung this hurtful word in her face. She who knew nothing of the world. She who had left her small Amazigh village to come to her husband’s house in Marrakech without ever having had her ears polluted by a dirty word. In Jemaa el-Fnaa, as she moved among the fortune-tellers holding court in the square, she had heard obscenities that embarrassed her. But this foul word now exploded like a bomb in her own face. It was directed at her.

  “A bitch? I’m a bitch?”

  She hurried to get away from the policeman who had broken her resolve and wounded her deeply. As she rushed on, the face of her husband appeared before her tear-filled eyes. How could she confront him after today? How could she look him in the eye now that her modesty had been defiled by a stranger with a word that had never even crossed her mind before? She ran as though she were trying to escape herself and escape the word bitch that pursued her. She came to a halt in the middle of a circle of Abidat Rma. They were singing their nomadic songs and dancing. If only she could disappear. To hide from what she was accused of, she slipped in among the audience. Her feet betrayed her and she collapsed into a seated position on the ground in the first row. Her veil hid her face. She stared at the dancers without seeing them, as silent tears soaked her veil and traced rivulets down her cheeks. The roar of the blood in her veins drowned out the voices of the singers and the music they were making. The dance kept going energetically in front of her, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel.

  As she made her way home, crushed with disappointment, she noticed a gathering of people not far from the commissariat, near the taxi stand. Her heart alone steered her toward them. She heard somebody wail in anguish: “Let me talk to the person in charge of the jail so I can ask him about my son! The baccalaureate exam is around the corner and he’s being prevented from going to school!”

  Aziz was just one of many. She found on every pair of lips her very own questions. They were fathers and mothers, wives and sons, worn out with watching and waiting. Chance had brought them all together in the same place. They came as individuals and convened without having known each other before. Each mother told her story. Each father condemned the brutality with which his son had been treated during his arrest. The police chased them away, but they returned. For Mama Aicha, there was something about finding herself united with those who shared her pain that made her forget the ugly word and feel that at least she was not alone.

  The news of the secret jail spread throughout the city, and eventually it was no longer secret. It was the commissariat of Jemaa el-Fnaa. The arrests didn’t stop, so the number of guards in the vicinity of the commissariat doubled. The mothers began to gather in the middle of the square. They rested in the chairs belonging to the food vendors. Jemaa el-Fnaa gradually became an area for protests. Tourists and visitors to the square, Moroccan and foreign, wandered through without paying attention to the intermittent clashes between the families of those imprisoned and the security forces, the families forming into lines and moving en masse toward the building, and the police, always vigilant, driving them back among the circles of storytellers.

  Suddenly, with no warning, the process of releasing the prisoners began, without a trial. Each day a few would leave, bringing with them news of who would come out next.

  The number of families shrank. The remaining ones kept up their vigil
near the jail. Their initial worry transformed into a real hope that the confinement might be lifted for all of the city’s young men who had disappeared.

  * * *

  Early one morning in January, with rain sweeping across the desolate square as it usually did on cold mornings, the families were surprised to see, through the filaments of falling water, lights shining at the door of the jail. They hurried over to find out what was going on. The lights were from a jeep that was transporting the remaining prisoners. Mama Aicha saw her son as he was being pushed roughly to climb into the vehicle. His head was shaved and a band of black cloth covered his eyes. She slapped her cheeks and cried: “Aziz! It’s my son, Aziz! Where are you going, my boy?”

  Aziz heard her cry. He raised his shackled hand and clenched his fist. Cries and cheers filled the air. The names of the prisoners were repeated in every corner of Jemaa el-Fnaa that day. Mama Aicha steeled her heart. She banished the tears from her eyes. They were forbidden from betraying her devastation.

  It was an agonizing moment for Mama Aicha, who was torn between fear of the cold and the dark, and fear of the wolves that were looking for scapegoats.

  The cars began to move and the families trembled with worry. Rumors spread through the city, confirming that the prisoners who had been charged with conspiracy and plotting to overthrow the regime had been transferred directly to the execution wing at Kenitra Central Prison outside of Rabat. They would execute them after a quick trial. The most important work of proving them guilty had already been carried out by the police in the Jemaa el-Fnaa commissariat. Other sources, however, maintained that they were still in Marrakech. That they were being held inside a secret vault in el-Badi Palace, an old prison where the Saadi kings used to entomb their Portuguese prisoners alive. Aziz’s mother tried to discover the way to this vault but she could find no one to guide her. She continued meeting regularly with the other mothers and fathers and wives. They met up near the Jemaa el-Fnaa commissariat and then congregated in the shade of the giant trees in Arset el-Bilk just beside the square. The security officers watched them and counted their very breaths, but the families didn’t care. They supported each other and fortified themselves against despair by nurturing their dreams and pursuing hope, however false it might be.

  Three years they waited, weaving together strands of hope.

  Their initial hesitant search efforts transformed into a full-scale protest and then into an understanding that more action was needed to find out the fate of their imprisoned relatives. The first mission that the families undertook, with Mama Aicha among them, was to see the governor of the city.

  At first, the governor was the epitome of politeness. He explained to them that they lived, thanks be to God, in a nation of laws. Even the most violent criminals were punished according to the law. If they thought that their relatives, whom they claimed had been locked up by the state, were not guilty, then they should look for them away from the centers of power, because the state did not detain people without trial, and apart from the civil prison at Boulmharez, it had no other place dedicated to this function. “Therefore I advise you,” the governor concluded sternly, “to look for your sons far away from us here. Each one of you must do so on his or her own. It’s strictly forbidden to gather like this without authorization. This country has laws, and we can’t permit you to keep spreading misinformation and disorder like this.”

  The governor’s answer stripped away all remnants of fear from inside Mama Aicha, and she felt a strange power coursing through her body and in her soul. She immediately snapped back at him in a tone that was at once strident and aggressive: “That’s why we came to you, sir, because you’re the governor for His Majesty in Marrakech. You’re the representative of the king here. You’re the chief of this city and its protector. If our sons have died, in God’s name give us their bodies so we can bury them, and if they’re still alive, issue the orders to release them from prison so we can see them. It’s been more than three years now since they disappeared.”

  “That’s enough! Go home or I’ll have you and everyone with you thrown in jail. I was clear with you. I won’t tolerate this kind of disrespect against the state.”

  They left the governor’s building. When they paused outside the door to collect themselves, Mama Aicha addressed the group: “Worse than the jail they threaten us with is what we put up with every moment. Isn’t our running frantically through the streets like lost dogs worse than jail? Isn’t their kicking us out in this way a punishment no different than torture? Isn’t the agony of waiting a kind of death that is slowly creeping up on us? As for me, neither jail nor death frightens me. I will go look for my son, either to get him out of prison or to enter it myself.”

  “Wherever you go, Aicha, we go with you,” said one of the other mothers, “to give credibility to these calls for change.”

  “In that case, let’s go back to Jemaa el-Fnaa. We’ll stage a sit-in in front of the commissariat. We’ll demand that they tell us where they took our sons.”

  They occupied the area and were dispersed right away. They returned the following day, the following week, the following month. They always returned. Sometimes the police weren’t enough to break up the protest. They arrested them. They arrested Mama Aicha and the other mothers more than once, and then they let them go after a day or two. Mama Aicha always came out even fiercer, more determined. She no longer cared about dying, and she was no longer afraid of being arrested.

  When she returned home one evening, she noticed under the door a piece of green paper folded into the shape of an envelope. On the back was a circular seal. She opened it and saw that there was writing on it. A shudder went through her in spite of the August heat. Her feelings swung between happiness and sadness—she didn’t know how to read, yet she knew that the letter was from her son. She couldn’t wait for her husband to return. She tucked the letter into her bosom and hurried off toward his store in Souk Semmarine. She didn’t answer him when he asked, surprised, why she had come, as she had never visited him in his shop before. Out of breath, she handed the letter to him.

  “It’s from Aziz.”

  “How do you know? Who told you it’s from him?” he asked.

  “I felt it with my heart.”

  “Oh, Aicha, it is from him. They’ve transferred him and all his comrades from the secret underground cell to the Ghbila Prison in Casablanca. It’s now possible to visit him. He says that we can go on Saturday morning.”

  “That’s tomorrow!” she exclaimed.

  They didn’t sleep that night. They went into the kitchen together and prepared Aziz’s favorite dish: tharid with chicken, onion, and raisins. They went to the wardrobe and selected some of his favorite clothes: his light summer shirt, a new pair of jeans which he’d worn only once or twice before his arrest, clean underwear, and his Adidas sneakers. Before dawn they were at the train station.

  They arrived at the prison early in the morning and stood in the line of families which stretched along the whole length of the massive wall, waiting to be called to enter the visiting room. As the hours passed, Mama Aicha counted each second. She kept her eyes fixed on the mouth of the guard, following the movement of his lips with rapt attention, afraid that he would speak their names and they wouldn’t hear him. She was assailed by anxiety that the workday would end before they would be allowed to visit. Finally they reached the visiting room. She stuck her head between the bars on the outer window to search with her own eyes for the face of her son among the nearly identical heads behind the second window. Shaved heads, sallow faces that showed their bones, bulging eyes. Before she was able to speak to her son, the screen was lowered and the visit came to an end. She pounded her fist against the window and shouted with all her might: “I’m not leaving this room! I didn’t see my son and I didn’t speak to him!”

  Her anger was contagious, spreading to the other remaining families so that they, too, refused to leave in protest of the shortness of the visiting time. Ten minutes wa
s barely enough time to raise the screen and lower it again. The whole prison mobilized to deal with this emergency. The administrators bargained with the families, but they would not accept; they threatened the families, to no avail. A SWAT team surrounded the visiting room to force the families out at gunpoint. They arrested some of the fathers and forbade the rest of those waiting in line from visiting again. Immediately after that, the prisoners announced an indefinite hunger strike, demanding that the conditions of the prison be improved and the date for a trial be set.

  The women resolved that the men should stay out of any active confrontations. They could watch from afar and help with communications. Mama Aicha went out into the streets, joining hands with mothers and wives advocating for the improvement of prison conditions and the acceleration of the announcement of a court date. They staged a sit-in at the Ministry of Justice. They forced their way into the meetings of political parties. They pressured their leaders to end their silence. They brought petitions and proclamations to the newspapers. They went to the colleges and universities to inform the students about the plight of their imprisoned sons.

  A few of the prisoners were released to ease some of the tension. Then the trial came. The sentences ranged from five years to life. Aziz’s lot was twenty years in jail. After this, the prisoners launched another hunger strike, protesting the even worse conditions of the prison to which they were moved after the trial.

  Mama Aicha’s house in el-Rahba el-Kadima alley became a regular meeting place for the mothers and wives of those imprisoned, where they strategized and planned counterattacks that would expose jails and jailers alike. In her small house in the heart of ancient Marrakech, a plan was formed to occupy Assounna Mosque, the largest mosque in the capital of Rabat. They staged a sit-in there one Friday immediately after prayers.

  They made another plan to go to the Faculty of Literature in Rabat, and so they went. The students there joined forces with them in a demonstration the likes of which Mohammed V University had not seen since the Moroccan Student Union was banned. In Aicha’s house, they made signs to carry during the May Day marches. They raised their voices high to expose the truth about the prisoners of conscience who were denied the right to education and medical care. They camped out at the Ministry of Justice and the minister met with them. He made them promises that the demands of the prisoners would be met, and a committee traveled from his ministry to the prison to negotiate with the inmates to end the strike. The demands were met, but the sacrifices were great. All of them emerged from the forty-day strike as thin as skeletons. A young man from Marrakech named Selim el-Mnabhi had died during the strike. Mama Aicha was right there alongside her comrade Umm Fkhita, the mother of the martyred Selim, as she prepared to receive the corpse and carry out the burial according to custom. They held a martyr’s funeral—Selim’s funeral—a funeral in which old and young marched together, men and women. Leftist activists from every Moroccan city were in attendance, walking beside the two mothers, Fkhita and Mama Aicha, in a funeral that was unique in all the history of Marrakech.