by Annie Hawes
Youssouf – our own lorry-driving one, not the koranic, talmudic and biblical one – breaks off his tale to attend to the food. The water has come to the boil. He sets the couscoussier over the steam and adds the couscous. A delicious odour is now wafting from the camel stew. Even Guy, who looked a little pale at the concept, is joining in the chorus of mmmms as our chef takes off the lid and gives it a stir, displaying the reality of the dark, wine-laden sauce.
The thousand stars of our hotel have all come out now, set against a black velvety sky. The couscous is ready. Youssouf takes off the pots, hooks his cooker casually off the fire with an olive-branch, and throws on the branch and a couple more bits of vine to keep us warm while we eat. The night is starting to cool down fast. He empties the couscous onto the tray; the sauce goes on top. Youssouf cuts the meat up into bite-sized chunks, and we’re ready to go. There turns out to be nothing at all weird about camel meat. You would easily believe it was a rather robust bit of beef. And out here in the open air, under the stars, the hot spicy sauce is heaven.
So here we are, sitting round a North African camp-fire, eating camel with our fingers and swapping Bible stories with a man who looks as if he’d just stepped out of one. Well, two men actually, Guy now looking very convincing in his burnous in the dusk – and minus the sunglasses. The couscous-eating technique I had thought lost is coming back to me now. The trick is to keep your elbow higher than your wrist, so gravity helps the juice stay at the right end of your arm.
Youssouf is still keen to carry on comparing versions of the good old Holy Tales. What, he asks, about the bit where, much later on, when Youssouf is rich and powerful, he meets Potiphar’s wife again, and she is is destitute now, widowed and all alone. He sees her in the street, recognizes her, goes over to her, and when their eyes meet, his heart melts. And he ends up marrying her.
No, I don’t think we have that part either. The Koran is evidently a lot hotter in the love and romance department than the mealymouthed Bible. As well as much more gripping in its plotting.
As the cooker goes back on for the after-dinner mint tea, Youssouf tells us a story which isn’t actually in the Koran, but which he says is a holy story anyway, told to him by the Sufi brothers at the zawiya school. A story of the time, long, long ago, when all the birds got together, a member of every different species, and set off to find the Tree at the End of the World. They were certain that, when they got there, they would look upon the face of God at last. After many vicissitudes they found the tree, only to come face to face with – a reflection of themselves, a mirror. Because, of course, Allah is everywhere – he is within every living being!
Evidently it is up to us to tell the next story. Blanche Neige, suggests Gérard. Or Capuchon Rouge? No. Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood do not finish on the uplifting moral note we need here. We can’t think of anything offhand. So Youssouf moves on to Abraham – or Ibrahim, as he’s called here – and the time God called upon him to sacrifice his youngest son. What about our version of that, then?
This being one of those camp-fire evenings, and the second bottle of wine well on its way down, I sing him the twangy Bob Dylan version of the Abraham story:
God says to Abraham, Kill me your son,
Abe says, Man, you must be putting me on.
God says, No. Abe says, Well.
God says, You can do what you like Abe,
But the next time you see me coming, you better run . . .
Youssouf enjoys this musical interlude a lot and accompanies me with some of that impressively complicated Moroccan clapping. He has heard of Bob Dylan, he says, although he’s never heard any of his songs till just now, because they have a Berber singer here in Morocco, Walid Mimoun, who is always described as the Bob Dylan of the Rif. Or used to be. He was too popular among the Berbers, so his songs were banned, and he wasn’t allowed to perform any more. He went off to live in exile in Holland and turned into an alcoholic. Doesn’t sing any more now.
But there are ancient Andalusian songs about Ibrahim, too, Youssouf tells us. Abraham is the greatest example of Islam. Because the word islam means ‘submission’ – submission to the will of God – and Abraham submitted to the highest point. He was willing to sacrifice the son of his old age, the apple of his eye, if that was what God wanted.
Will he sing us one, then? Or something by Walid Mimoun? No. Youssouf refuses even to try. He is a terrible singer, he says. We will have to wait until we meet some proper musicians. Which won’t be long, because Oujda is famous for them.
It occurs to me later, pondering the evening as I drift off to sleep, that this business of our all having what amounts to exactly the same Book must explain the terrible trouble the Spanish Inquisition had in establishing whether one of their suspects was, or was not, a heretic. I’ve often wondered why their trials required the presence of such hordes of religious experts. Hard to tell, I see now, whether your suspect was celebrating a Christian, a Jewish or a Muslim holy event. The devil, as usual, was in the detail.
Youssouf drops us off, early next morning, on the outskirts of Oujda. He is last seen beetling off south towards the encroaching edges of the Sahara, a roaring blur of hay and dust. The load looks so lopsided that we can’t believe he’ll get more than ten miles without losing half of it. But maybe that’s what Youssouf secretly wants. Speaking last night of love, romance and the Koran, after a couple more bracing swigs at our wine-bottle, Youssouf returned to the topic of his forthcoming marriage, bride still To Be Arranged.
The truth was, he confided, that he would secretly prefer to marry a black wife. The white girls are too stuck-up, they don’t know how to laugh. Back home, though, if you’re known to be able to afford the paler variety of bride, it is extremely disrespectful to your people not to get yourself one. But the truth is, he’s been pretty keen on a certain dark-skinned girl for a while, and he thinks she likes him too. Of course, they’ve never actually spoken – how could they, in a small town like his? But a woman can speak volumes with her eyes . . .
10
The university town of Oujda, The Little Cunning One informs us, is a sprawling frontier city, much of it modern, with little to detain the traveller. We’re finding plenty to detain us in the old part, though. Last stop in Morocco, and we’re finally getting to thoroughly investigate a city medina. This is the first market day after Eid al-Fitr, and the chaos outside the medina walls is impressive. We’ve fought our way through endless stalls of vegetables and fruits, of spices and olives, of Western-style children’s clothes, kaftans and jellabas, multi-coloured scarves and shawls; we’ve skirted round various cross-legged Berber countrywomen, squeezed through a small herd of goats and got caught up in a mule-and-cart traffic-jam outside the medina gates.
Through the gates at last, and inside the medina it’s still hard to move. There are fast-food stalls – one selling enormous pancakes two feet across, another sheep’s heads neatly halved, so each customer will get a little bit of tongue, of brain, of cheek-meat . . . Gérard and Guy are appalled, but I have already been initiated by southern Italian friends into the sheep’s-head snack – you treat it like a salad, add vinegar and oil – and refuse to be disgusted. It is harder not to be disturbed, though, by the Petit futé’s revelation that the massive terracotta-coloured medina gate we just came in through is called the Bab el-Wahab, meaning the Gate of the Head, because the medieval rulers of the city had a habit of hanging the heads of people they disliked from it. The combination of visible sheep’s heads dissected, and imaginary human ones a-dangling, is too much for Guy, who now sequesters the guidebook, zipping it firmly into his rucksack.
This medina is more airy and spacious than the Tetuan one – or than what I managed to glimpse of it, at any rate. Its alleyways often open out into galleried squares, each one dedicated to its own trade, colonnades arching round all four sides, shading the walkways below from the hot sun. The columns support balustraded balconies above, their inner walls intricately tiled. We weave our way t
hrough porters of water, of skins, of wood, of gas-bottles, of sacks of flour and suddenly find ourselves in the square of the makers of those country-style jellabas. A dozen treadle sewing machines sit outside the workshops in the shade of the arches, and four or five members of a family all sit stitching at the rough woollen cloth, some out in the square, some in the tiny shop behind, its wooden doors thrown open to catch the breeze. There are looms in the back of the shops: they actually weave the cloth to size, then, rather than cutting and wasting any. Yes, now I come to consider the matter, the country jellaba certainly is entirely made from plain squares and oblongs, no fitting or curves. Even the pointed hood is just a cleverly folded oblong, one side stitched together. You can still smell the lanolin in the unprocessed wool, too, I discover, when I pick one up to feel the texture, a perfume that takes me off to Scotland and fishermen’s jerseys. You leave the natural oils in the wool for extra warmth and waterproofing on a Scots fishing boat. Berber herdsmen, out in the mountains in all weathers, evidently have similar requirements. A young boy passes us, carrying four loaves – or rather, four balls of shaped, risen dough – on his head, resting on a wooden board. On his way to the baker’s shop, or the hammam, to get it baked, Guy says. Each family makes sure to put its own special mark on the dough, so they can tell their loaf apart from everyone else’s when it comes back out, cooked. Essential, or all hell will break loose, as people argue over which is their own, superior, property.
After a square of weavers – rainbow-striped blankets, bright primary colours – we pass through a square filled with piles of shiny-bright silver trays and teapots: the metal-engravers’ square, where the twirly designs are added to the tea-ware for that finishing touch of elegance. Through the narrow connecting alley into the next square, we step from the shade to find the most flamboyant trade yet. Out in the centre, blinding in the sunlight, shocking pink and grass-green and sky-blue prevail. Multicoloured sheep’s fleeces dangle, dripping, from bamboo frames around a dozen juggernaut vats of dye. Robed figures are poised above the vats, high on rickety wooden scaffolds amid white swirling vapours and great cloudy bales of pale raw wool, straining as they stir their cauldrons with poles as long as ladders, a two-man job to heave the wool back out, heavy and steaming now, luminously bright and colourful, to drain on the racks above, staining the ground below every possible shade of rainbow-and-mud.
In the square at the end of the next alley, the passers-by seem to be stepping, crabwise, over a series of invisible obstacles. We draw closer, to see that there are indeed long skeins of thread stretching right across the centre of the square. A craftsman sits cross-legged on one side, under the shade of the arches, performing tiny complex manoeuvres with handfuls of twisted threads, while right across the square, under the opposite arches, a child – or sometimes various children – holds on to the far ends, mirroring his work to prevent tangles. We stop for a moment to watch. They are braidmakers, making the twisted-and-plaited cord that’s used to decorate the borders of jellabas and kaftans; and to get across the square you have to step carefully over the braids-in-progress, one after another, like a slow-motion version of some school skipping game. It is not just the skill that’s amazing, though. Equally marvellous is the fact that the craftsmen can count on so much tolerance, not to say loving care, on the part of every last passer-by.
How alienated we are, us Europeans, from our own objects of everyday use, I say to my companions. When do you ever get to see anybody making any of the stuff you buy in the shops back home? Or to marvel at their skill?
And do I know, replies Gérard, why it should be that all these centuries-old medinas of Morocco are so perfectly preserved, with the old crafts going on in them in a way that’s hardly changed for centuries?
No, I don’t. But I can see I’m about to be told.
It’s all down to the French, it seems. And it’s not something my companions are proud of. When France invaded Morocco in 1912 and took over running much of the country for the next fifty years, she put an amazing amount of effort into preserving the country’s antiquities. Teams of French experts were brought here to catalogue the local artistic and architectural heritage and advise on its conservation. Their conclusions were embodied in law: all new French building was to be done outside the walls of the ancient medinas, and absolutely nothing changed within them. Moreover, a building-free area of 200 metres was always to be left empty, a cordon sanitaire separating the crowded Moroccan medina from the wide avenues and boulevards of the new French towns, the villes nouvelles. We’ve just come through one of those spaces on our way from the modern part of town, of course. That’s where the street market was being held, on what was once the empty colonial cordon sanitaire, now re-occupied by bustling Moroccan life.
The mixed motivation for all this, my French informants tell me, was a paternalistic commitment to saving Morocco’s heritage from a nation deemed too ignorant to appreciate its own treasures, and naked self-interest on the part of colonizers and settlers. By the time they decided to take Morocco, the French had under their belts almost a century’s experience of colonizing next-door Algeria, which they had been running since they first invaded, in 1830. They had learned many lessons in this time and had concluded that the less noticeable the settler presence was, the less likely the indigenous people were to get annoyed and begin resisting the colonial regime. This was the reason the pied-noir farms of Algeria employed Moroccans from the next-door Rif, and even Spanish peasants from Murcia and Andalusia, as seasonal workers, rather than locals. The thing to do was to keep the two communities as separate as possible: an apartheid system, with no settler interference in the old Moroccan cities, which would be left to Moroccans, untouched and unchanged, while the settler-French cities developed independently alongside them.
The French settlers began actively forbidding any modernization whatsoever by the local people. In their old home towns, shopkeepers and artisans were not allowed to install glass shopfronts, or replace their old wooden doors with modern ones, or indeed to paint them any colour but brown. They were not allowed any form of street advertising and, most bizarre of all, they were not allowed to install electricity anywhere in the medina. I find this part hard to believe – with thousands of people living in the medinas, and all the tradesmen who might need it for their work! But it was so, although, as the 1940s hove into view, medina shops were finally permitted one electric light bulb each, as long as it was hidden right at the back, out of sight of passers-by.
Since the Moroccan areas of Moroccan cities were thus forcibly prevented from taking up new technologies or developing along normal twentieth-entury lines, all modern commerce and industry soon became concentrated – as luck would have it – in the hands of the French pied-noir settlers of the salubrious New Towns. The medinas now became virtual ghettos for Moroccans – overcrowded, insanitary and poor. Causing, naturally enough, frequent uprisings against the French presence: not at all the intended effect. Still, right through the 1940s and 50s, the French settlers went on adamantly preserving the Moroccans’ heritage for them. By now, petrol had become a necessity of life, but no petrol stations were allowed anywhere except in the French villes nouvelles. And handily, whenever anti-French trouble broke out, the beautifully preserved gates of the medina could simply be closed, locking the indigenous residents in, while the 200 metres of empty space between the two towns made it a simple job for the French troops to round up protesters before they could get anywhere near their French targets.
So there it is. That’s what I’m enjoying looking at, here in the medina of Oujda. The results of fifty years of utter vileness. Or not entirely, because the locals did get some plumbing and electricity in the end. In the 1950s, once they had got rid of their French tutors, they ran amok, Guy tells me, gaily despoiling tons of lovely old paving stones in their centuries-old medinas so as to put hygienic new sewers and proper power lines into their homes. They also demolished quite a few ancient buildings to make way for roads wide enough t
o take motorized vehicles.
One is appalled.
Over in the corner of this square is a narrow, winding staircase that seems to lead to the upper level, above the arches. We can see people up there – are there more stalls and workshops up above? Or is it private? We hesitate, and a gaggle of bold young girls accosts us. Who are we looking for? Do we speak French? Why are we here in Oujda? Do we like it? How come I am travelling with two Frenchmen if I am English? Which one am I married to? Can French people marry English people? Do we know their father, Hamid? He lives in France too. Or their uncle Rashid? This sister is called Zeinab, and that one is Aisha, and they have two little brothers as well, and one big one, but he’s in France too, and they all live up there on the balcony above, except the ones who are in France. What are our names? Look, up there on the balcony, that’s their mother, Latifa, and the other one’s their aunt, Naima.
Mother and aunt look on from above, smiling, waving, nodding.
Would we like to come up and see their house? asks Zeinab, the bravest girl. Aisha translates the invitation into Arabic for the older generation’s benefit, exhilarated by the naughtiness of it. Aunt and mother exchange glances for a moment, but why not? Nudging one another, giggling, they beckon us up.
Under the arch we go and up the curving staircase, carried on a tidal wave of excited, chattering children – another half-dozen infants have added themselves to the cavalcade now – to find ourselves out on a wide communal balcony above. There, down at the far end, are the mother and the aunt of our captors, next to one of the ubiquitous braziers of this land. They are still giggling, covering their mouths with their hands, as they head this way to welcome us. Two of the smaller children race up to them, clinging to their legs for security in the face of this unheard-of Europeans-in-the-home situation, while the rest carry on dragging us forward.