by Annie Hawes
So here we sit, on our reed mats on the now djinn-safe ground, next to the great dome of the bread-oven, bashing away with our stone-age implements, the pile of sweet brown almonds growing ever higher. Ahead of us, the rolling hills are turning blue and gold in the distance as evening begins to draw in. Down below, the river at the bottom of its deep valley is slowly disappearing into shadow, while high above us, the tips of the rugged mountain peaks are still brightly lit. Now, just to add the finishing touch, the muezzin down in the village starts to call out the evening prayer across the hills: Allahu Akhbar! God is Great! A moment’s respectful silence follows, but nobody seems as bothered about praying to God as they were to the djinns.
Why, I ask once I’m certain nobody is about to start their evening worship, is it called pastilla, anyway? It sounds a very Spanish name for a traditional Moroccan food.
Nobody knows, says Mariam. Some people say that it’s really bestiya, in Arabic, and pastilla is just a Spanish way of spelling the same word. Others that it’s a Moorish dish, invented over the sea in the days of Muslim Andalusia, and that’s how it got its Spanish name. This last seems pretty likely. I remember reading that pigeon pie was so popular in Granada a few centuries ago that the high towers of the ruined Alhambra were always thronged with pigeon-hunters, who would bait lengths of fishing line to dangle down into the roosts below and catch their dinners for free.
Khadija snorts. That’s all nonsense. Bestila in her own language is a dish of chicken with saffron. It’s a Berber dish. Bestiya is just the same stuff made into a pie with a few eggs, and mispronounced by Spaniards and Arabs. And, not content with that, they have added almonds to the recipe – and sugar too, she says, with a sly grin at Mariam. Ingredients that would make her father turn in his grave! But there, what can she do, seeing she has let the wife of an Arab take charge tonight?
Uphill along the grass-bordered path – this time towards a clean, modern oblong of cement plaster up above the village. The school, and Mariam and Aytan’s home. We enter the schoolrooms first, to deposit our bags. Two large, bare rooms, each with a blackboard on the wall and neat rows of desks – places for fifty pupils, says Mariam, but they’ve only managed to raise thirty-three so far. A bucket of chalks and a pile of little slate blackboards for the children: they don’t use paper, it’s too expensive. A pile of well-thumbed textbooks sits under a window with a huge view across the valley to the misty mountains in the gold-and-blue distance. It all looks fine, if a bit basic, and I wonder what Mariam thinks is so terrible about it.
The teachers’ residence is a shock, though. Certainly not the comfortable apartment I was imagining. More of a camp-site: one room, containing a small table and chairs, a divan bed and an alcove cubby-hole for a kitchen. The place was never intended for living in. The education authorities, building it, fantasized local teachers with homes in the village. There’s a gas-bottle-powered hob for cooking – at least Mariam and Aytan don’t have to borrow mules and wander the hills gathering wood like their neighbours – but that is the end of the mod cons. No fridge, because there is no electricity in the building. No electricity in all the village, in fact. The nearest electricity is at Chefchaouen. There are electric sockets in the walls all right, looking perfectly normal, but they are connected to nothing, and no date has ever been given when they might become operational. Just an optimistic gesture by the builders, says Aytan. Meanwhile, they too have hurricane lamps for the hours of darkness. And a battery-powered cassette radio for information and entertainment, which they’ll be bringing down to Khadija’s later, for music while we eat.
And what do they use for heating, in the cold mountain nights? A couple of charcoal braziers, of course.
Aytan nips back into the schoolroom and returns with one of the textbooks from the windowsill. Take a look at this, he says, flicking through its pages. You three have actually visited a village home in the Rif – more than most people at the Ministry of Education have ever done – so you’ll see how useless it is right away. It’s a reading-primer, we can see that: pictures of ordinary, everyday objects with their names in Arabic script below. But none of us can read Arabic script – how are we supposed to tell what’s wrong with it?
Never mind the words, says Aytan. Look at the pictures! Any old page! Here: a box of washing powder and a washing machine. What are Rif children supposed to make of that? They’ve never seen a washing machine, or a packet of soap-powder, in their lives. People here in the country scrub their clothes down at the spring, with a chunk of soap.
He flicks on through pictures of traffic lights and zebra crossings; of fridges and electric cookers; of lace-up shoes and rubber gloves; of supermarkets and pre-packed foodstuffs. Hardly anything, we see now, that a Rif village child would ever have come across. What a strange country Morocco is: how can such extremes coexist, and so close to one another?
So, Aytan says, our village pupils have first to learn the uses of these alien things, then to learn their names, in a foreign language, then, finally, they can get on with learning to read and write.
In a foreign language? What does he mean?
It’s not just Arabic script, says Aytan. It’s in the Arabic language, too. And the villagers here don’t speak Arabic, do they? But since the Berbers’ Tamazight is not recognized as a national language, there are no textbooks written in it. The kids have no choice but to learn Arabic in order to learn to read and write.
This seems insane. How can a government just ignore a language that’s spoken by so many of its people? Easily done, it seems, when all those people are poor and living in backward, isolated places like this, deep in the countryside. And when anyone who mentions the matter is seen as trying to ethnically divide the nation – and given an unexpected trip to the barber’s.
Then, says Mariam, a lot of people involved in education – especially the more devoutly religious ones, from Arabic-speaking backgrounds – sincerely believe that Arabic is somehow morally superior as a language, because it’s the language of the Holy Koran. To them, Tamazight is the backward speech of an ignorant country people, unworthy of their attention, hardly even a real language at all, in their eyes.
Things might not be so bad, according to Aytan, if their pupils were being forced to learn the ordinary Moroccan dialect of Arabic. That would be some use to them, at least. You only need to go as far as Chefchaouen to hear Moroccan Arabic being spoken. And if they ever wanted to move to a city, they’d have to learn it. But the Arabic of the schoolbooks is very different. It’s literary Arabic, closer to the language of the Koran – the classical Arabic used as a lingua franca across the whole of the Arabic-speaking world, the way Latin was once used in Europe, to ease international communication across its many dialects. But how many of these kids will ever need to communicate with an Egyptian or a Saudi? Or even meet one?
Moroccan Arabic, we now gather, is about as different from classical Arabic as modern-day Italian is from classical Latin. Kids from Arabic-speaking families, city kids with TVs, can pick it up pretty quickly – lots of the words are similar, and plenty of TV imports from Egypt or the Lebanon, soap operas and stuff, as well as the news, are broadcast in it. But not only do people here in the villages of the Rif not speak Arabic to start with, they don’t have TVs either, do they, since they don’t even have electricity. A TV here is something you might glimpse when you go to market in Chefchaouen. So they have no connection with the language at all. It’s utterly useless to them.
I can personally vouch for the difference between Moroccan Arabic and its classical version. Some time after this trip, I found myself showing off my language skills to a Palestinian. I had learned how to say ‘bread’ in Arabic, I said, and ‘water’, and ‘Look!’ – and I could count up to ten . . .
Go on, she said, let’s hear you count! So I began: wahad, zuzh, talata – and before I’d even got to number four my Palestinian was convulsed with laughter. Zuzh, in classical, proper Arabic, means a pair. I had just said ‘one, a pair, three
,’ and I sounded like some old Maghrebi peasant woman! Ha ha ha ha!
Poor children. A veritable Tower of Babel to cope with. And an education system apparently designed by Kafka, or some other aficionado of the bureaucratic nightmare. As if this wasn’t enough, once you reach higher education – not that Mariam and Aytan hold out much hope of any of their local pupils making it that far – the teaching is all done in French. (Kind of lucky for us travellers, though, or we wouldn’t be sitting here chatting now.)
The last teachers here, Mariam is saying, were a stridently pious Arabic couple, who managed to drive away half the pupils. Harangued them from day one in an incomprehensible tongue and then got angry when they were slow to pick it up. Dished out more and more punishments in their frustration. Some way to teach children a new language! And as for learning one themselves, in the whole time they were here those two didn’t trouble to learn a word of the Tamazight tongue. Not even to say hello to the parents, or barter for a kilo of their home-grown vegetables. That’s how far beneath them it was!
I turn now to look at Mariam as she speaks and do a double-take. She has done a Yazid on us, in reverse. She has quietly removed her jellaba now that we’re in the house. The religious-looking woman in the tightly tied khimar has vanished, transformed into a girl in a T-shirt and trainer-bottoms with a mop of dark, shiny curls. She and Aytan both laugh at my expression, while I quickly readjust my stereotypes. These are her normal Casablanca clothes, she says. She has to look ultra-respectable here, though, in the eyes of village parents, especially if she hopes to convince them to send their daughters to school.
Do people not actually have to send their children to school, then? I ask.
Supposedly, yes. But there’s no way the government is going to enforce the law. This is the Rif, the Bled es-Siba! We’ve seen how Mokhtar and Khadija live, and as long as nothing changes, the older generation can’t see the use of schooling. There’s no work but on the land. Parents need their children’s help in the fields. And without running water or electricity, or labour-saving devices of any kind, work on the homestead takes up most of the hours of the day. People can see more point in training their children up in that – especially the girls, since most of it is women’s work – than in sending them off to school. The skills that will fill your larder and see the family through the winter are essential: unlike reading and writing.
What an uphill struggle it must be to get and keep those thirty-three pupils! I take off my hat to Mariam and husband. On top of the other disincentives, it seems, parents often fear that this new-fangled government-sponsored kind of education must be somehow irreligious. Traditional schooling here has always been run by the zawiyas, the local Sufi brotherhoods. Boys learned to read and write, did some basic maths and studied the Koran. This new national schooling, for both sexes, may be sponsored by the king himself – who is a sharif, a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, the best of Muslim pedigrees – but the king’s name is not greatly respected round here. The Rif Berbers never wanted him anyway. Some say they’re no better off now than they were under the Spanish. And then, there is much talk of his jetsetting lifestyle. People suspect the king of being tainted by Western corruption, or, if they are too loyal to allow of such a thing, believe he is led astray by his Westernized advisors. Which makes his schools only too likely to infect their children with the evil ways of the Nazrani.
Depressing. What exactly can we represent in the eyes of Muslims? What sort of corruption is it?
Mention of her king has had an electrifying effect on Mariam. Not greatly respected? I should think not, she says angrily. Have we heard of Sheikh Yassine? No? She is not surprised. He would be called a dangerous fundamentalist by the West, of course, but he’s a hero to poor Moroccans. He dared to publicly demand that the king should share his riches with his people, or admit that he was not worthy to call himself a true Muslim ruler. The sheikh is locked up now, of course. But his daughter is carrying on his good works still, in his name – helping out in hospitals, distributing tents, blankets and food after fires in the shanty towns, organizing funerals for destitute people, giving meat to poor families on Muslim holy days. Did we know, she asks, that in this country it is officially a crime to discuss the Royal Purse? She will commit a crime now, and tell us that the king personally owns a whole third of all the farmland in Morocco, as well as the phosphate mines that are practically its only source of hard currency. Thanks to all that, he and his family are multimillionaires. And look at his country!
Come on, enough chat, says Aytan, hastily changing the subject. Time to get our beds ready – and get down to the mosque before someone catches sight of that moon.
The rugs Mariam promised us are rolled up against the wall, serving as cushions on the divan. Beautiful rugs, I see, as I spread my selection out between the desks: fine, thick wool, the warm earth colours of natural dyes, woven by hand into intricate geometric patterns.
All local Berber rugs, Mariam says. She’s collecting them to take home to Casablanca. This one must have been woven as a wedding gift. She points out the deliberate mistakes in the symmetry of the design – deliberate, because only Allah is perfect. And look at this diamond shape here – see how it has little extra ‘v’s for legs? And the two little dots here for eyes? It’s a frog, a Berber fertility symbol, but heavily stylised so that nobody could say that it is blasphemous, that it is imitating God’s work, and disrespectful to Him. Still, it’s perfectly recognizable as a frog once you know, isn’t it? People in the village offer her them cheap. They know she loves the old ones most. She shouldn’t really take them, but how could you resist? That’s why she’s got so many. Luckily for her guests!
Beds sorted out, we are introduced to the bathroom facilities. No taps. No running water. Their water supplies are a bucket with a dipper in the kitchen alcove. The school loo is a row of earth closets in a shed outside. Guy would rather go in the bushes, he mutters, horrified, in my ear. How quickly we Europeans do forget our own past! The only loo in my Italian home was, for some years, an earth closet. They may not be ideal, but they are perfectly bearable if you look after them properly – and the best possible solution for not wasting scarce water. Meanwhile, the most repellent earth closet I ever came across in my life was somewhere in the heartlands of Guy’s own country, a mere decade or so ago. It was out at the back of a country café-bar, and so vile was it that, though I am not a squeamish person, I actually went straight back in and cancelled my omelette. At least this facility, though it may have no running water, is scrupulously clean.
Where do we get more water from, we ask, if we want to wash? Is there a well or something?
No. Nothing. Just the bucket. Each pupil carries a bucket of water up to the school, once a month, so they get a bucket every day for cleaning and cooking, and a couple extra. Thirty-three children, thirty-three buckets. Otherwise, the nearest public water supply is the field aqueduct, a whole kilometre away.
Some of the people in the village have wells or springs, water good enough for washing and cooking, though not for drinking, Aytan says, but he and Mariam were warned before they came never to accept any offers of neighbours’ water. Access to water is always the biggest source of trouble and strife in the Moroccan countryside, and other neighbours might easily believe the water was being provided in exchange for preferential treatment of their children. Then, if the teachers got embroiled in some local water-controversy, it would just give people another reason not to send their children to the school. So Mariam and Aytan only get a proper wash at the hammam when they go into Chefchaouen, and they pay Nadia to do their laundry down at the spring.
I can’t believe they’ve stayed here two years, in these conditions! And another two to go! Awful to admit this, but it seems all the more shocking now that Mariam has transformed herself into – well, into someone who looks just like me.
How do people here really see us Westerners, then? I ask Aytan, as we hurry off downhill towards the mosque, racing
against the dusk, skirting round a low rockface with an outcrop of smooth tooth-like rocks before it, three pine trees standing at its heart. What is this terrible Western corruption that is threatening Islam?
I am hardly prepared for the onslaught this question will provoke.
Aytan purses his lips in thought. You are seen, he says eventually, as having no loyalty to your family, or your community, or even your religion. You care for nothing but money. And for display – for ostentation. Your moral world has shrunk to dog-eat-dog. Your grown adults behave like selfish infants, without responsibility or self-control. Husbands and wives leave one another on a whim, and children suffer. You have lost any sense of decency and shame: your families abandon their old people and show them no respect, once they can no longer earn. Women are not respected either, but reduced to sex objects, half-naked images on every street corner. You have no fellow-feeling for your neighbours, or generosity towards those poorer than yourselves – neither individuals, nor nations. Your own prophet, Jesus, turned over the tables of the moneylenders at the temple. But you have turned your backs on him and forgotten the Book.
Sheikh Yassine puts it well, he adds. You have sacrificed yourselves on the altar of desire, as clients addicted to a consumer market. Capitalism is left to run wild, untamed by human values or moral principles.
It’s nothing personal, though, says Mariam hastily, looking daggers at her husband. That’s just what’s said about your culture, not about you as people.
No dispute, anyway, we tell her. We would all love to see capitalism tamed by human values! But how is all that threatening Morocco, anyway?
Aytan laughs. Not just Morocco, he says. Have we not seen that the West has a controlling hand in every Muslim country in the world these days? Every country must base itself on the logic of the market and the rationality of self-interest – or suffer the consequences. Look what’s happening in Algeria! But logic and rationality are not the only values humanity needs. Logic and rationality would tell you that Hitlerism was a fine system! And if we in the West don’t like that, if we want a return to human values, the answer is obvious – turn to Islam! Islam supports the family and the community; the powerful do not turn their backs on the weak, or the rich on the poor.