by Mhani Alaoui
One day, she fell upon a book with a blue cover and a title inscribed in gold letters. She was neither a reader nor a teller of stories. She thought of books as a waste of time and stories as a way to escape from the necessity of following a singular course with a well-defined goal. The book was called One Thousand and One Nights. Well-hung djinns, naked princesses, and bawdy artisans stood out from the ancient text. Her heart pounded. It described shameless desire and humorous betrayals with such lyricism that she could not believe that this was a text written by an Arab and a Muslim, and that these stories were told by a woman named Sheherazade. Arabs do not describe sex with such relish. The Arabic language does not write words like cunt, penetration, cunnilingus, throb, or penis with such obvious intent to arouse. In speech, vulgarity abounded. But speech can be translated into drunken song, relegated to the crudest domains of our human activity and then dismissed as lowly. Men and women of her culture thought of sex as dirty and thus thought of ways to make it as dirty as possible.
Shawg did not know that her civilization, now defined by religion and class and gender warfare, had once delighted in the awakening of the senses, in the exquisite beauty of the human form in the throes of desire. She did not know there were many Sheherazades. Her mind expanded, her body felt warm and new. Her senses were so awakened that she could feel a drop of sweat trickle down her lower back. Sheherazade, she read, was the storyteller telling tales to a king holding her captive. Her intended audience may have been male, and her stories may have been a mere survival tactic, but today she was speaking to her, Shawg, through him, King, and the original intent ceased to matter. That day, she did something she had never done for herself before. She put her hand down there, in her forbidden place and gave herself pleasure. The text had lit up all the facets she was made of. She found pleasure through words inscribed on the pages of a book that was over a thousand years old and whose continued re-editing was beautiful in itself. That day she discovered the subtlety of joy, a curtain raised on the infinite possibilities of desire.
But as all things go, the excitement of the discovery waned. Try as she might, she was not able to recapture that initial moment of pure happiness. She understood that pleasure had to be a conversation and that reading books, well, was more of a two-way monologue than a creative dialogue. She searched again. She tried mystic Sufi groups, women, poetry readings, painting, and sculpture, but all to no avail. She decided to settle for a man whose family name spoke of El Andalus, a civilization where pleasure, art, religion, and science gracefully poured into one another. He himself was a shadow of things, a Platonic cave walled in from its physical ideal. But Shawg was tired and thought that with Driss Nassiri she could, at least, begin to rest. She agreed to marry him. She came with him to his family home. As she was about to resign herself to whatever lukewarm existence was in the books for her, she laid eyes on Adam. A witch once told her that the devil himself strung at the cords of her life. When she thought she had found peace, he would touch the strings that held him to her and play her like the meekest of reed flutes. It was not coincidence or luck. Instead it was a precisely orchestrated plan that made two doubting, dissatisfied people find each other. It was the work of a meticulous and cruel architect. That is how, when she first saw Adam, Shawg threw everything to the winds. She allowed herself to dream of pleasure and intimacy once more, only to find that Adam was incapable of feeling or giving pleasure.
She continued her quest. She did so with a lost purity and with bitterness eating at her. It was her revenge, the useless shaking of the chains which held her in. She went with other men and tasted the odd thrills of betrayal. She did not care what Adam knew, or perhaps she wished he would show his anger or hurt, but he never did. He remained quietly in the sidelines, estranged from their own lives.
Now, she had two sons who smelled of wet clay and an anxiety she never felt before in her life. And could it truly be that her story and Maryam’s story may never be woven together? Shawg knew that she would always dream of Maryam, and she hoped that Maryam dreamt of her, too.
Fire and Water
Sheherazade is lying on her side wearing a silk veil and crimson lipstick. Her upturned hand holds an ember-filled pipe. Annoyed, she lets her hand fall to her side and resumes a normal position. I am the tainted odalisque turned inside out. I follow the transformation of my inner self into an object of contemplation. This is a ridiculous exercise. I feel the couch draining my life force out of my body. I am sinking into its depths, and the inertia is contagious and dangerous. A perfectly still, quiet woman in the musty opulence of the brothel...Delacroix must have had a death wish.
She stands up and pushes her veil back slightly to look like a movie star at the wheel of her convertible MG. The background whizzes past her to create an impression of movement, while the car and she remain immobile. She has replaced one still-life tableau with another. She snorts at herself in the mirror, and her image ripples its discontent back at her. The Sheherazade in the mirror strikes up her arms and twirls around herself, presenting her backside to the world. Sheherazade peers into the mirror, and sees a dance of mirrors within. Beyond the shallow surface of the image above is a proliferation of images.
She sees herself in all her forms, in the ways she dreams herself to be and in the ways she knows she is. She even sees the images battling each other for primacy, while the gravitational pull of the mirror pulls them deeper in. They appear to her as a community of flattened dolls. At the very back of the sequence, she sees a little girl with blue boots and serious eyes. Sheherazade is about to tell the tough-looking kid in the mirror of a dead past. She thinks of the sixties. It was a time in the Muslim world when women believed in emancipation, when short skirts, on-screen kisses, cigarettes, and femmes fatales were commonplace. Afghanistan was chic, and Egypt was the movie capital of the Middle East. There was poverty, of course. The glory days were never truly glorious. For it was then that despotism crystallized and the seeds of future revolts were planted deep into the earth. Soon, they would all have to pay the price for their failed experiments in modernity. And that time had finally come.
Today, and for the first time since she left her great palace and immense power, she feels vulnerable. So instead of holding on to the mnemonic threads of the past, Sheherazade strips herself of her veil, tunic, pipe, and rouge. She appears with shaved head and transparent body. Her hands become translucent, and her eyes pale beyond measure. She quivers at the verge of shadow and inexistence to trick the mirror into returning her soul. She is interrupted by the blue-booted young girl.
“Old Mother, tell me, why does Shawg dream of Maryam?”
“It’s a question of desire, my dear. She is haunted by her.”
“But why?”
“It’s in Shawg’s nature to burn. She lives with fire in her heart and, with her last breath, a final regret. There is something about Maryam that she cannot quantify and thus cannot possess. She will bring about her downfall, and then her heart will break. Now hush my baby and watch as the story that is your story unfolds before you, while the words drop into your eyes like pearl drops in the early morning.”
The little girl opens her thoughtful, serious heart to the tale at hand.
Grand Tribunal
Clockmakers’ Town
Casablanca, February 2011
The sentencing. Time is elusive. It writes itself in and out of our memory. Maryam is standing in a court of law. Her glorious blue boots are old and torn. She listens to the verdict.
“Death:
for destroying government property,
for protecting criminals,
for supporting homosexuals,
for disrespecting the law,
for loving a gay uncle,
for saying no,
for being raised by a witch,
for being a witch,
for performing acts of magic,
for being magical,
for seeing under the veil,
for saying no,
<
br /> for cherishing a ghost,
for owning a diabolic engine,
for helping the insane,
for reading minds,
for being strange,
for saying no.”
But Maryam is already elsewhere, her attention shifting to the whirring of wheels.
School
Maryam rode the same bicycle for many years. By the time she was fifteen years old, the bicycle was rusty, and its chains clicked and clacked breathlessly. She had learned quite early on to be independent. Living in a house with grandparents and a two-hundred-eighty-year-old mother-nanny had been a blessing in disguise. There was no other option but to allow Maryam to wheel herself around. It took her a while to get the hang of the bicycle. Her body would sway to one side, and the bicycle would fall over. She enjoyed her freedom.
Every morning, she would ride her bicycle to her school, the Carmel Saint Augustine, in the adjacent neighborhood of the Place of Fading Oases. The Carmel Saint Augustine, once a Catholic school run and taught by European nuns, was now a state school administered by Lebanese nuns and taught by local teachers. Maryam loved the tall cathedral-like tower and impressive columns. Her boots beat against butterfly-colored mosaics as she hurried down the cold corridor. When she was very young, Zohra or Zeinab would walk her to school, but since her seventh birthday and to her delight, she was entrusted to her bicycle. Maryam was so attached to her bicycle that she gave it a name, “Aoud Errih,” which means “Wind-Rider,” and the name breathed a soul and personality into the rusty, moody bike.
It purred, whirred, barked, and growled, depending on its mood. Maryam had found a sturdy leather belt with which she strapped her books and backpack onto it. One day, when she was no older than ten, as she was walking across the path lined by centennial trees leading to the school’s main building, she thought she heard the trees whispering among themselves. She was used to the old orange tree in the garden back home and its frequent whisperings when no one but she was near, but she did not know that other trees could talk to human beings, too. Of course, she was not any human being. She was a child and a special, dreamy, lonely child. The trees were swaying, dangerously off course. The language of trees is a language from heart to heart. It is perceived rather than heard and reaches to the attentive child’s primal core. Maryam perceived sadness, urgency in their breathy calls. She walked slowly through, respectful and slightly in awe. They were trying to convey a message to her, a grievous message, but she was not able to decipher it. The trees were warning her of a danger, but she could not put her finger on it yet. She continued walking, holding Aoud Errih close to her body, her two hands clenched on its handlebars.
Inside the school walls, the tension became palpable. Groups stopped talking, and eyes followed her as she walked by. Sister Josephine, known for her Levantine kindliness among both students and staff, held out a hand to Maryam and led her to a quiet place. She spoke gently to her.
“Have you ever heard of Birsoukout?”
“Yes, I have.”
“It seems that one of your family members was taken there. We do not know when exactly, but we just found out. That is all we know, child. It seems there is something very very wrong with your family member. It is something terrible that we must never speak of. He is an extremely ill man. I will pray for his soul tonight, and I suggest you do the same because, if what is said about him is true, he is lost to the world.”
Sister Josephine kissed Maryam on the forehead and walked away. Maryam was left alone in the school’s front lobby. In those days, the name Birsoukout roused fear in people’s minds. Terror and confusion trailed in its wake. The mental asylum of Birsouokout was a dreadful place in which were parked all kinds of deviants, schizophrenics, and otherwise mad, ill-adapted individuals. It was a space that remained in the margins of normality, somewhere beyond the everyday consciousness of surrounding physical landscapes. People’s awareness of Birsoukout was stunted by the anxiety it caused and by that forbidden question we all ask ourselves at one point or another: “What if I too were mad?”
Birsoukout lingered in that repressed domain of our beings and our societies, existing to stifle rebelliousness. Maryam did not know any of this. In fact, she would not even understand this, for she wasn’t wired that way.
She started to run. Who could it be? Who had been taken there? She ran and all around her tumbled an avalanche of whispers and hisses. Her mind was perfectly aloof now, taking in all sounds, echoes, and barely voiced thoughts. A filer for the asylum, a student’s mother, had warned the school about the new inmate. She had recognized, in the new patient, the name he carried, Nassiri. She was not surprised, she had to add, that family had always been unstable, ever since Sultan Boabdil cried like a woman on top of a hill overlooking a deserted battlefield. There was a gene in that family, a deep perversity. But she was trained in impartiality, wasn’t she. She could not say. A family like this one, graceful beyond compare, who liked art and music, I mean they must have that unspeakable thing in their blood. The girl’s mother was a strange one. She died of a broken heart. She killed herself, really, she preferred death to submitting to her husband’s and father’s will. She said no. She finally said no. And the kid’s father, he is with a prostitute, and isn’t she herself a bastard child? Yes, she is.
Maryam’s mind was made up. She ran out of her school, grabbed her bike, which was trembling with impatience, and biked out of there. She could hear the trees’ deep vibrations as she biked through: He sways, sway he does, as do we, we sway too, dangerously to the left or dangerously to the right, he sways, and sway he should not. Trees sway, but that is good. Alone, alone we are, and alone we shall remain. He sways toward someone and that he should not. Go, go get him before it is too late. He will go mad there.
Aoud Errih vibrated under her as they whizzed out into the real world.
An acute pain shot through Maryam’s legs. She was stronger than she used to be, but her legs still burst with pain when her mind opened up to realities beyond imagination. She did not walk, act, or think like anyone around her. She often seemed lost in her own thoughts, dreamy, or in communion with voices and words only she could hear. Yet this invisible thread woven into her existence carried its own burden. When it manifested itself, it pricked her like the thorns of a cruel rose. It drilled possessively into her being, causing her great suffering and a profound, unshakable sadness. But she did not stop. She continued until she reached the high, crumbling gates of the Nassiri house. She pushed and the gates creaked open. The garden was glorious at this time of year. In Morocco, there was no spring season, but the garden did not seem to care, and it bloomed with a pervasive joy. But inside the house, idle moths and the smell of naphthalene drifted by, filling the atmosphere with their soft decay. Today, Maryam sensed that there was something direr than the gentle wasting of days.
Ibrahim was absent. Aisha was listening to Zeinab read to her from a newspaper, and Zohra was simply sitting, gazing toward the door, as though expecting someone. She was expecting her ward, so it was no surprise to her when Maryam burst in, sweating and in obvious pain. Zohra laid her on a sofa and began rubbing her legs.
“It is getting better, you are getting better, controlling the pain, controlling your body. Have you seen, have you heard, we have just been told.”
“Yes Umi Zohra, I have heard about the mental asylum and its newest patient. But who and why?”
“It is Mehdi Nassiri, your great-uncle. They found him and found out things about him, unspeakable things that will bring shame upon your family.”
“What unspeakable things? Is anything unspeakable?”
“To them everything that is threatening is unspeakable. He is in a dark place now, and there is no getting him out. He confessed. He has been stripped of everything.”
“What has he confessed to?”
“It is not clear. But it is too late, he is already forgotten.”
“When did this happen?”
“We just found
out. It could have been days since they took him. But you must return to school. You must save yourself for what lies ahead. You must learn. You must rise. Go back. You must stay focused. Forget about him. Your struggle lies elsewhere. Look at the poor girl over there. There are thousands like her. You must rise above.”
Maryam listened to Zohra’s fiery words and turned to look at Zeinab, that representative of a multitude of poor, unwanted women.
~
Aisha was listening to Zeinab’s raspy voice read the newspaper. Ever since her last resolution to become literate, Zeinab had struggled with the written word and the concepts it conjured. Her mind dreamed of things, of images and emotions. It structured things in a pragmatic, utilitarian way until she began to grasp written text. A new world appeared to her. A confusing world where form determined meaning and logic battled with metaphors. She was often lost and frustrated. She experienced reading like a daily reminder of her failures and shortcomings. Being unable to wrap her mind around the complexities of text and the connection between reading and imagining, Zeinab was close to despair. Simply put, she thought of herself as stupid. More importantly, she began to believe that everything that had happened to her had happened because she did not have the intelligence needed to shade herself from harm. As a result, her voice became raspy and her body broke down a little more. It stooped, dried and hurt. She was ashamed. It was as though a hand was pressing down on her neck and forcing her down. She felt trapped. True, she could now read street signs and billboards, she could travel the city by following directions rather than navigate thanks only to colors, known landmarks, or the kindness of strangers.