A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

We take our seats on the palm-fibre mats under the orange trees. I am a bit nervous about the absinthe aspect of this tea, but I am assured by Kebir, who is now doing a very flash type of tea-pouring that involves filling every single glass, then re-emptying it into the teapot to be repoured from an even greater height, that armoise in its unfermented state does nothing but help the digestion. I sip gingerly at my glass. It tastes good and astringent, anyhow, and I don’t seem to be going blind, or starting to hallucinate – even after two whole glasses.

  Just wait till I see what he has brought to surprise me, says Kebir. Do I remember how he tried to make a bekbouka in Paris? The thing with the sheep’s stomach, that he was missing so badly after a year in that Portakabin, but it came out all wrong?

  Yes, I do indeed – he went to a great deal of trouble to find a butcher who would find him a sheep’s stomach, then stuffed it with meat and spices into something like a very delicious haggis, minus the oatmeal. The rest of us enjoyed it a lot, but it was a great disappointment to the chef.

  Well, this time he has the real thing, he says, made for him by the nomad boys who work up in the hills with Rashid, real specialists of the dish. And that’s what’s boiling in the pot over there. At last I will get to taste it as it was meant to be!

  There’s a chance we may see Sayid, we now hear, as we work our way through the last of the regulation three glasses of tea. He is supposed to be coming soon, bringing his wife and children back home to the safety of Timimoun. He has decided they must be got away from the madness that has broken out since last year, when the Americans came in to reorganize the Algerian oil industry, and then the Islamists went out of control. Sayid himself has been threatened twice over working for the Americans, Mohammed tells us, even though he is doing no such thing: his contract is with the Algerian Sonatrach. And his wife is scared to leave the house at all. Any woman outdoors is either menaced by angry religious barbus, who take her for a prostitute, or propositioned by sex-starved oil men, for the same reason. The town, these days, is a nightmare.

  Gérard and Guy are startled to hear the name of one of the American multinationals in question, famous for its close links to the CIA. (This corporation will, by a strange coincidence, soon be bidding for the contract to build a new secure barrier across the thousands of miles of frontier between Mexico and the USA. Who can say whether Tobias, if he has struck lucky with his Marla, may not be working upon it at this very moment?)

  The boys are right to be horrified, says Kebir. Hassi Messaoud has become a place riddled with violence and poverty, and surrounded by shanty towns of penniless ex-villagers and ex-nomads, who do deals with corrupt binmen to get priority access to the rubbish of the rich. Prostitution has grown into a major industry there, with all the oil men. The filles de joie are brought in as cleaners and caterers by contractors who double as pimps. There are plenty of young women available for the role: mass unemployment has seen to that. Now there is the new religious violence into the bargain.

  It sounds like hell on earth, I say.

  Exactly, says Mohammed. Forget the good salary; all the family thinks Sayid should come right back home to stay.

  Kebir and Mohammed will be taking off in the lorry in a few days’ time, as soon as they’ve finished work on the palm-pollination, to take some extra fodder up to Rashid’s sheep – and of course, they say, we must pile into the lorry with them, come up and stay a few days in the tents. This is the best time of year up on the high plains, and if we treat Rashid right, we might even get a ride on his camel. Mohammed can’t wait to see his face when I turn up in the wilderness with them! He won’t believe his eyes!

  And it’s a good thing for us, says Kebir, that they do have to go up into the hills, because we’ve made a fine mess, when we finally get ourselves all the way to Timimoun, in going to stay with Hadj Mouloud. We can’t possibly leave his place now, and come to stay at Kebir’s as we ought to do. It would be unimaginably rude and disrespectful – it would look as if we were publicly criticizing Hadj Mouloud’s hospitality. Kebir and his family would make an enemy of Hadj Mouloud for life, and he is much too powerful a man to have as an enemy! The Hadj is a man who is very protective of his good name. To leave at all – unless it was to leave town – would be a terrible insult. But to leave to stay at the house of much poorer people – it doesn’t bear thinking about!

  Aisha, who is pounding up the barley in a big wooden mortar for the buttermilk drink, thinks I could maybe leave Gérard and Guy at Hadj Mouloud’s and come on over by myself.

  But everyone decides this would look even stranger. And, says Rashida, even if the Hadj didn’t take offence, the rumour would soon be all round town that Kebir was putting her out to grass and taking a second wife! No, no, we’ll just have to wait a few days and all go up into the hills.

  Time to eat, and after a salad of produce from the palmeraie – grated carrots with fresh coriander, honey, lemon, and some kind of kale-like leaf – we are going to have couscous with klila, a kind of sheep’s cheese. This is the children’s favourite, and they are clinging to Aisha’s skirts as she mixes it, to make sure they don’t miss a second of eating-time. She stirs a sort of compote of dried apricots and dates into the hot couscous with a big knob of butter from a deep earthenware jar, and then crumbles the sheep’s cheese into it. Another stir, and it’s ready. The cheese is deliciously sharp, a lovely contrast with the sweetness of the fruit and the buttery couscous – I’m not surprised the kids love it. The klila itself reminds me of nothing so much as the matured, dry ricotta that southern Italians use in place of Parmesan on their pasta. I check with the chefs, and yes, klila is made from the whey of the sheep-milk, just like ricotta. I’ll be able to watch them making it when we go up into the hills, too, if I’m lucky.

  Does this mean, I ask, that they make a full-fat cheese with the whole milk first, like the Italians? No, it doesn’t – they make sheep butter instead, something I’ve never heard of till today. But I’ve already gathered from our diet at Hadj Mouloud’s that people here are as much butter addicts as we northerners, though they eat so little meat I don’t suppose they could develop a cholesterol problem if they tried.

  Now comes the Saharan haggis. As delicious as the one I remember from Paris – with major improvements in its flavour as far as Kebir is concerned, now that it has the correct down-home spices in it. But – woe is me – one of the spices in question is ferociously hot chilli-pepper. I am reduced to watching Gérard and Guy stuffing greedily – again – and gloating along with Kebir about how delicious the bekbouka is, meanwhile making sure that my own mouthfuls are composed mainly of the pancake-style bread that Aisha has served us as accompaniment. With copious swigs of the lovely green-barley buttermilk to damp down the fire, I can just about tell that it really is delicious.

  Moussa and Aisha are chatting away in the Berber tongue, and I notice the name of Hadj Mouloud cropping up; Mohammed is looking very gripped by their conversation. I wait hopefully for a translation. Aisha, it turns out, working at the town hall, has her fingers on the pulse of the struggle we heard about among the moksirin – the Haratine man’s bid to buy that palmeraie. Hadj Mouloud and friends, she says, are trying to reactivate an ancient Berber law, designed to stop family land getting broken up; a law which allows any relative, however distant, of the owner to step in and buy a piece of land – at half the price offered by any non-family member. Which basically means, if the Hadj can find such a relative, that our Haratine man will be out of the bidding. Normally, Aisha says, nobody would even have thought of trying to reactivate such a law. But since the privatization of everything, and the kowtowing to Islamists, the government has brought back the local djema’a, the council of elders, a body abandoned years ago as not properly democratic, not least because only landowners could sit on it. Hadj Mouloud evidently thinks that, in the present climate, other feudal institutions that suit his purposes may successfully be slipped back into the pot.

  What makes her despair, Aisha says, turn
ing to me, is that thirty years after the French left and Algerians achieved democracy at last, men down here still can’t see one another as equals. Haratine are born inferior and naturally they should have less rights: that’s how they see it. If they can’t even learn to see one another equals, what hope is there for women?

  Well, when she puts it like that, I tell her, I realize there is plenty of hope. Look at my own country – we were a third of the way through the twentieth century before the British state finally admitted that women were as fully rational as men. First the vote was only for male property-owners – just like the djema’a. Then it was only for men. Then women finally got a vote, but only if they were over thirty. There are women still alive in my country who grew up in those times, taught that they were too stupid to have a say in the world, and men’s natural inferiors. But look at the difference nowadays: anyone who seriously tried to assert such a thing would be taken for a madman.

  Mohammed and the boys are all busy admiring the lorry, and getting it ready for the trip. It is another Gak, just like Youssouf ’s haystack transport back in Morocco. Strange that I’ve never heard of such a brand, when they seem to be all the rage here in the Maghreb. Mohammed tells us that they are – or were – made by Berliet. I have heard of the company, at least. My interest in lorries being just about exhausted by this information, I wander off into Timimoun’s weekly souk, on today in the main market place: a walled square, dirt-floored, surrounded by broad mud-brick arches.

  Starved as I am for female company at Hadj Mouloud’s, I soon fall in with a bunch of Haratine women, lively and cheerful and loud and dressed in bright primary colours, all with their hair done up into those long tresses of beaded braids that fly and tinkle as they move and laugh. They have bright, open faces and smile a lot, lovely white teeth in gleaming ebony faces. A bunch of paler-skinned women go past as I examine the wares on the Haratine stall, covered head-to-toe in pale haiks. You can’t meet their eyes, which are the only part they have showing, and they don’t even smile, never mind look as if they’re having any kind of a nice time. Repression? Social status to be maintained? Born grumpy? No idea, but it is certainly not attractive. But then, what about all the lively women at the wedding the other night? Do the non-black women have split personalities, one private, one public?

  I am certainly beginning to see Youssouf’s point about white brides being stuck up, and black ones more fun. It occurs to me now that the home town Youssouf was heading for isn’t so far from here – the long curve we’ve taken south-westwards from Algiers has brought us right back round towards the southern oases of Morocco and the Tafilalet. Maybe his black beloved is actually a Haratine? The national borders, in these nomad lands, are an artificial, colonial invention, after all. Would they have Haratine over in the Moroccan oases too, in the same lowly social position? That might explain what was so shameful about the liaison in his family’s eyes.

  The Haratine women are soon plaiting my hair into beaded braids just like their own. How could I resist? I have only stopped at their stall to check out the wares – I am now addicted to kohl-containers and have to buy another to add to my collection at every market. Next I inspect some strange necklaces, pyramid-shaped beads of some dark-brown shiny stuff. They mime at me to sniff one. Cloves! They have mixed some sort of resin with ground-up cloves and moulded these tiny, perfumed shapes between their fingertips. They act it out for me, and I realize you can even see their fingerprints on some of them. They give me a lot of necklace information I can’t understand – we don’t have more than a few words of French in common – but in amongst the laughter and linguistic confusion I gather that the necklace either protects you from headaches or cures them. I don’t exactly want one, not being a dangly-necklace type of person, but somehow I end up festooned with three of them and not allowed to pay. The word baraka crops up a lot – do I not have to pay because I am bringing them baraka? Will the necklaces bring me baraka? Whatever. It is all good. Now I compliment them on their amazing hair – one of the older women, with so many glass beads on her braids that you can hardly see the hair, lets me feel the weight of them. One thing leading to another, as it so often does; suddenly there I am, squeezed in round the back of the stall, having my hair plaited up, three of them at it at once, sides and back, building lots of silky threads into the plaits to bulk them up, giving me a stylish cornrowed fringe at the front, and adding a good pound weight of green and blue beads to the ends. A lovely feeling, as you move your head, those long swaying tinkling tresses. I feel like the business. My best hairdressing experience ever. I have never before had anything as interesting to look at, while having my hair done, as hobbled camels and date-flower-laden donkeys, nor been serenaded by beturbaned old men with hand-drums. Or had such entertaining stylists, in such numbers – even though they do, at one point, prod my bosom in such a lively manner that, still not too stable in the hunkered-down position, I fall flat on my bottom in the dust.

  Moussa will tell me later that they certainly do have Haratine in Moroccan oases. Shurfa and m’rabtin too. And that over in Morocco the djema’a is still as it was in the old days, going strong, and for property-owners only: under that king of theirs, who would even dare try to change it? But just like here, he says, thanks to emigration, some of the Haratine actually own property these days. Which has, I gather from the cheering tale of Haratine resistance he now tells me, set the cat among the pigeons in a big way.

  It seems that in some small oasis town, once part of the Sijilmassa complex – an olive-growing town, thanks to its plentiful water supply – the Haratine decided to stand their own property-owning candidate for the djema’a. And this Haratine having won his seat, the owner of the only olive-oil-mill in town, a sharif, was so outraged that he banned all Haratine from using it. That would teach them. Their whole harvest would go to waste.

  But lo and behold, in the nick of time, another Haratine, recently returned from a long sojourn in Germany, stepped into the breach – and spent all his savings on a brand new mill. Ultra-modern, much cleaner and faster than the old shurfa one, extracting more oil per kilo of olives into the bargain! And now, indeed, members of the aristocratic classes, out of pure self-interest, are slowly succeeding in overcoming their prejudices and giving him their custom.

  Things have been going swimmingly with Hadj Mouloud since we were forgiven for that first looking-at-his-women mistake. Now I bounce in all excited about my braids, waiting for his reaction, only to receive no comment at all. Hadj Mouloud just pretends he hasn’t noticed. And so does everyone else in his household. Not that I was expecting much joy from his womenfolk. I asked if I could eat with them the other night and was sent to join them in the kitchen. Six women of varying ages sat on cushions on a sandy floor around the couscous bowl and the fruit and blanked me completely. Hardly a smile, hardly a word addressed to me, not that we had any language in common, but still, that doesn’t stop people communicating if they want to, as I very well know. And they hardly spoke to one another, either.

  It dawns on me now, as the tea-tackle is brought in as usual by the silent women, that since Hadj Mouloud and family can have no idea how this type of hairstyle is viewed in Northern lands, they must imagine that I’ve intentionally disguised myself as a Haratine. Which would be pretty odd behaviour if you happened to think, as people of their class seem to, that nobody in their right mind would wish to identify with a Haratine. Still, it’ll be a good lesson to them all.

  Hadj Mouloud seems to get over it pretty quickly, anyhow, and as we sip, I decide to ask him about second, and indeed third, wives. I know I’m not supposed to ask him about his own ones, of course – though I am very curious to know the status of the various women of this household – so I just ask him if he agrees with the taking of more than one wife?

  Hadj Mouloud, good-mannered as ever, answers – if rather curtly – that he is in perfect agreement with the Koran: that a man should only have as many wives as he can afford to keep at exactly the same s
tandard of living, each one in her own separate establishment.

  And what about the Haratine, I ask, still thinking of Youssouf. Do you really never intermarry with them, then, not even as second or third wives?

  You would only marry a woman of the Haratine, he says, even more curtly, if you already had a full complement of three white wives. Then you might take on a Haratine, who would work as a servant to the others.

  Really? So there actually is intermarriage, then. And yet, in spite of that, the communities have stayed so separate for all these centuries? I can’t make head or tail of it, till Gérard comes up with the solution.

  Does that mean then, he asks, that any children of such a marriage would also count as Haratine – as members of the servant class?

  Of course they would. Like the illegitimate offspring of slave-owners in the USA, once upon a time. We realize, at last, from the extremely stiff responses we’re getting, that this is not a decent topic to be pursuing and politely change the subject.

  Later, we will hear from Abdallah that Hadj Mouloud has a fourth, black wife himself, whom he keeps right over the other side of town. Which means, come to think of it, that if only poor Youssouf was rich enough to marry three pale-skinned women first, nobody would disapprove at all of his marrying the dark-skinned girl of his dreams.

  22

  Abdallah’s and his wife Amina’s home is in one of the newer, French-colonial houses: nothing at all like Abdallah’s father’s. It has tiled floors instead of sand, and we sit on divan-sofas arranged round a coffee-height table, in a living room – yes, it has a definite function! – open to the walled interior courtyard and the palm trees that protect it from the burning sun.

  Amina too has been to university – and even spent a year in Algiers, chaperoned by an aunt who kept house for her. She receives us in a tightly tied khimar and reminds me of Mariam – in her strict-teacher persona, that is, not her relaxed Casablanca mode. Amina seems to have been seriously influenced by the puritan version of Islam up in the North: she wears no kohl on her eyes nor jewellery of any kind and chaffs her husband for having taken us to the Ahellil, a primitive country entertainment, she says, and of very dubious religious significance. She is a teacher too but holds no brief for the Berber tongue, even though it is the language of her own parents. It keeps the children back, she thinks. It is better for them to be taught in Arabic. Arabic helps detach them from superstition and backwardness.