by Annie Hawes
The couple had some trouble, they tell us, when they first married, in getting Hadj Mouloud to agree to their setting up a separate establishment, but really, since they have nothing to do with the farming life and the palmeraies, and they both work full time, there was no point in it.
Naturally, as soon as they reveal that theirs was an arranged marriage, the three of us are agog to learn more. First preconception to bite the dust: they are obviously mad about one another. Whichever one is speaking, the other gazes proudly and fondly on. Amina tells us that their engagement was arranged in the traditional way: by agreement between their families, but with both of them free to refuse if they didn’t like the idea. No decent family here would ever force their children to marry someone they were dead set against, a person they knew they would be unhappy with!
But how, I ask, could they tell any of that, if they didn’t even know one another? Did they get to meet up and talk about it?
No, certainly not! But of course they knew all about one another. And when they were children they knew each other well – before puberty children meet often, at family celebrations, weddings and Eids, or with their mothers at the hammam. And then, Amina was always great friends with Abdallah’s sisters at school, she tells us. They all said she would get on brilliantly with him, like a house on fire, they had so much in common, even their sense of humour. And the same went for Abdallah, he knew all her brothers. Everyone said they were made for one another. Then, the two families got on well, and had a lot in common – of course your own family would have the best idea of who you’d be happy with! Here you would never even start being interested in a boy until you knew that you liked his family. Because what else will he turn out like, but his family? Here, when your parents start looking for the right man for you, they will say they are ‘looking for good uncles for their grandchildren’.
Amina did manage to sneak a few secret looks at Abdallah, really, she admits. Girls are let out of school an hour early to make sure they will be back home and out of the way before the opposite sex hits the streets; but there are always ways and means! She and his sisters hid on the way home one day, waited till the boys came down the road so she could check him out. (Amina looks at him under her lashes, giggling with delight at the memory!) And the second time, she says, she even managed to say hello to him!
Amina and Abdallah turn the tables on us now. Europeans are insane, they say, the way we base our futures, and our children’s futures, on some casual encounter in a public place with loud music and drink to befuddle us. What kind of basis is that for a happy life together? Then we go off and set up home with a person of whose family, background and proclivities we know little or nothing, just because we find them physically attractive. Surely there is more to marriage than just physical attraction? It is a social duty, a moral duty, to make it work. The couple should be well matched in background and in temperament. And in social standing. Otherwise there will be too many sources of potential discord. No wonder our European marriages fail so often.
But what, Gérard asks, about love and passion?
It seems a silly question in the present circumstances, when Amina and Abdallah have clearly fallen head-over-heels for one another, but still, it can’t work out like that for everyone, can it? It is also a very personal question, and I am torn between wanting to kick Gérard for asking it and a keen desire to hear the answer. Boldly, Amina takes over answering. If you have remained pure until your wedding night, she says, with a little gleam at Abdallah, it would be hard, with the pleasure you are giving one another, not to fall in love! Would we not agree?
And what about second wives? Abdallah takes over here. He doesn’t fundamentally disagree with the idea, he says. In the old days, when there were no labour-saving devices, it was a way of letting a wife retire – she didn’t want to get pregnant any more, and the work of the household gets harder as you get older, doesn’t it? So a fresh young woman could take over, and give her some relief, take over the heavier jobs. And more children were always needed, too, once upon a time . . .
But what about this business of having separate homes for each wife, like his father? Does that make life easier for any of them? Once a respectable man will have a separate establishment for each wife, that hardly makes sense, does it? I say.
But of course, that is just an ideal people aspire to. Most people are nowhere near Hadj Mouloud’s exalted status and never have been: their wives have to share a home, like it or not. It has never bothered Abdallah, he says, having lots of brothers and sisters from the other mothers. There are fifteen of them altogether, so you just get lots of company when you’re a child – and a fine network of connections, when you’re grown, in every possible area of life!
That may all be true, says Amina. But she has no intention of any such thing happening in this household!
And the hijab? The khimar? The seclusion of wives in the home?
Abdallah says that we Westerners have simply forgotten our own religion. We are Peoples of the Book too – and we have the same traditions, underneath the differences. Why does a Christian bride wear the veil? Why is the epitome of good Christian womanhood the nun, who like any devout Muslim woman wears no make-up, covers her hair and dresses in such a way that her body is modestly concealed?
Amina isn’t too interested in the modesty angle on the veil. It is a brilliant option, she says, and has become a great weapon against being kept shut up the home. In her grandmother’s day, everything needed in the home was produced by women’s labour in their own courtyard, while the husbands’ job was to bring in the raw materials from the outside world. There was no reason why women should be out and about. But these days, young women who want to get out of the house can argue that the family honour, and their own virtue, is being protected by the use of a few scraps of cloth, and get away from the stifling internal courtyard! That is how she herself got permission to go away and study: by promising to wear the full hijab whenever she left the house. Look how many girls – even from poor backgrounds, the daughters of migrants – are getting themselves university educations these days. Soon the face of Algeria will be changed for good. Did we know that almost half of all judges in the courts here are women? That women are taking over medicine and the law as well? Young men don’t bother with education – they put all their energy into trying to get abroad. You don’t need a degree to mix concrete in Europe, do you? But young women don’t have those choices. It’s study, or stay indoors. And they’re voting with their feet. Sixty per cent of university students now are women, Amina says, and the khimar, the hijab, even the face-covering niqab are no sign of oppression, but the woman’s undercover victory flag!
We all wish we could go and stay at Kebir’s and Rashida’s. The atmosphere there is so much more relaxed and cheerful than at Hadj Mouloud’s, and nobody cares if Gérard and Guy come and sit in the courtyard with the women, never mind not even being allowed to look at them. We are spending a lot of time round there. We have even rolled and eaten our own couscous, with the help of Rashida and her mother, an extremely ancient lady with an infectious cackle of a laugh and startlingly bright orange hair under her many loops of scarf: the effect of henna on white, I deduce. Aisha and the children – and Karim, when he’s home – all live here too, each family with its own rooms off the courtyard, traditional style.
Still, only a day or two left until we all go off into the hills together. We have decided to say goodbye to the Hadj then, as if we were leaving for good. By the time we get back, it really will be time for Gérard and Guy to set off southwards, if they want to get across the Sahara before the heat comes. In the meantime, we can stay at Timimoun’s red-mud-brick extravaganza of a hotel and let Hadj Mouloud know that something went wrong with our travel plans – we’ll say we didn’t want to inconvenience him with a surprise visit.
I still haven’t worked out what I’m doing next, or how I’m getting home. I am beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier just to go on across the
desert with Gérard and Guy to Mali, where at least nobody wants to kill me. As yet.
The plane is not flying to Algiers until further notice. The state of emergency continues, and all air transport down here has been requisitioned. Even if it did reappear, the flights cost a fortune, Aisha tells me. More than the boys are planning to spend on whole of the the rest of their trip. The bus-and-niqab option does not appeal, either. I did a test run with Rashida, Aisha and her granny, and dressed up in one of those tent-shaped haiks – certainly a lot easier to keep on than the twenty-yards-of-material Tlemcen version – and added the veil too, by which time I felt seriously claustrophobic, and the granny had my bosom checked out most thoroughly. Verdict? My public laughed their heads off. When the only part of me you can see is my eyes, they are very noticeably the wrong colour. Mohammed went off indoors and came back with a pair of sunglasses to complete the disguise. I’m sorry to say that, like most homes here, they don’t have a full-length mirror at Kebir’s. Otherwise I might have got as much entertainment as everyone else out of my new pious-Muslim-lady look. Apparently I looked like a Saudi Arabian tourist. All very well, but I’d have to wear the sunglasses at night, too, wouldn’t I? And not speak to anyone for the whole two days – not even to get food or if the bus broke down. And if the person sitting next to me turned out to be very chatty, what then? The last straw was Kebir’s pointing out that a woman who looked as devout as I now did would obviously be saying her prayers five times a day, whenever the bus stopped for that purpose. I’d better get into training now, he said, if I wanted to be word perfect for next week. I think he was only joking.
He and Mohammed have offered to drive me in the Gak to Algiers, or maybe over the border into Morocco, if things don’t improve soon. The place where Rashid and the sheep are camped is not too far from the Moroccan border – we could go along the old nomad trail into the Tafilalet, or the northern road that leads to Figuig, which must, I think, be the one Mohammed the father was recommending back at the Rif funduq. That seems ridiculous, though. Eight hundred miles in a big, slow sheep lorry to Algiers, or seven hundred to Oujda. And they won’t hear of just dropping me off at the Moroccan frontier.
Forgetting these worries, we go off to enjoy the next event in the week-long wedding festivities: a music-and-drumming night with a dancer. Aisha and Rashida are not coming. I will probably be the only woman there, they say. Still, I am an honorary man, after all. Hadj Mouloud said so. Though Mohammed did suggest, I admit, that it might be best if he got Kebir to find me a nice green towel and a pair of hobnailed boots for the occasion.
The dance is the only part of the public festivity not held outdoors: that’s how louche it is. It must be the Algerian oasis equivalent of a stag night, and is held in a sort of school hall with rows of seats, a place that doubles as Timimoun’s cinema when the film-lorry comes to town. I should have known from the tale of the women of the Ouled Naïl that dancers are certainly women of dubious reputation, if not actually prostitutes. That is why the respectable population needs to be protected from them by walls. Still, a famous dancer coming to town, big excitement, party night – how could I resist? Eating kebabs and making merry, I hardly notice there isn’t a single woman here, I am getting so used to it – and to my own strange hermaphrodite position, not exactly a man, but certainly not a woman either, to whom all those strange and irksome rules apply.
The music is strings and massed drums, a slow rhythm building up with the dancer’s first tiny, shimmying movements, louder and faster until it fills the room and nothing is left but the beating of the blood, while now, with shiny red lipstick and lashings of blue eyeshadow, hair out and flying, jewellery jangling, the dancer shakes and stirs for all she’s worth, stamping and twirling, framed by the vibrating hands of her musicians, working up a film of sweat. Soon men from the audience are starting to rise as if hypnotized from their seats, brandishing banknotes on high, then walking entranced, in time to the beat, up the central aisle to the dancer’s side. They pause as close as they dare to the gyrating, hip-twitching dancer, join her in the dance for a moment, then plaster the money onto her as she dances, taking their time about it, sticking it to her forehead on her own sweat, or on her cleavage, or tucking it into the broad belt of jingling coins she wears slung low on her hips.
Moussa, standing next to me at the back of the hall, remarks enviously that not one of them has a chance with her, anyway, whatever they may think.
What does he mean? Are they expecting to get some private time with her if they stick enough money onto her?
Well, he says, he thinks she must take the highest bidder to her bed. Or maybe, he adds, receiving a sceptical look from Kebir, she already has some rich man lined up anyway?
Kebir pooh-poohs the whole idea. The men are poor saps, showing off. Not impressing the dancer, but one another – and all imagining exactly the same thing as Moussa!
Moussa, when challenged, doesn’t seem too sure of how it works – but he is certain that only a rich man would get the chance . . .
Early in the morning, before we leave, Mohammed and Kebir take us off to see a marabout – a living marabout at last, a real Sufi sheikh, not just the tomb of his dead ancestor. Though we’ll be going to the tomb as well, because Kebir has promised to take a few pinches of sand, impregnated with the ancestor’s baraka, back up to one of the nomad shepherds who look after the sheep. And a charm, too, if Sidi Haddou will make us one.
And what, we enquire, are these items needed for?
Two different matters, he says with a grin. One is for, er, men’s problems. And the other for – rain!
We set off along a narrow track around the bottom of a hill crowned by the ruins of another abandoned ksar, crumbling away like the fingers of a mud skeleton. We’re into serious dunes here, soft sand that gives way under you: the muscles of my feet and ankles are soon crying out in agony. A good mile from the nearest dwelling now, we are tormented all of a sudden by swarms of flies. How on earth do they appear from nowhere in the middle of a desert?
Mohammed starts grumbling about being dragged off miles through the dunes to collect cures and spells he doesn’t really believe in – and to pay homage to a man who has never lifted a finger in his life and expects his whole village to keep him – just because his great-great-great-great-grandfather was a holy man! Mohammed is ashamed that we have to witness this superstitious nonsense.
Not so different from priests back in France, says Gérard comfortingly. Every French worker has to pay towards their upkeep, too, taxed straight out of their wage-packet . . .
But Mohammed says it’s worse here. Double the number of parasites to support. Not just the imams and the mosques, but the sheikhs and their zawiyas too, sitting on your back. Though the sheikhs are men of peace, at least, who seek harmony and reconciliation, and may well be worth their salt, while imams and mullahs do nothing but cause trouble!
Perfume of wood smoke, trails and wisps of it up ahead, signal a village at last. And here on its outskirts is a threshing floor, just like the ones you find in the Spanish Alpujarras. I recognize it right away. A round, cobbled area, with a wooden post in the centre where the threshing party attaches the livestock that are driven round and round over the crops, the tramp of their hooves separating the grain from the chaff. By the side of the threshing floor stands a little shelter of woven palm-leaves – the sentry box, Mohammed says. Each village piles its compost on the threshing floor over the winter – manure, straw, palm prunings, vegetable peelings, everything and anything that will rot down into good dark earth. So precious is this stuff, and so vital to the survival of the palmeraies, that the villagers mount guard over it by night, all through the winter months.
Although there is no manure here now, oddly enough there is a guard in the sentry box – or at any rate, an inhabitant. A somewhat wild-eyed and ragged-looking individual is hunkered down inside the shelter. He glares angrily out as we pass, but says nothing. No greeting is passed with him.
; This man, Mohammed tells us, lowering his voice, lost his reason years ago, when his father cursed him from the house for disobeying the patriarchal authority. A father’s curse is called sakht; it is the exact opposite of baraka, and means that everything you do will go wrong, for the whole rest of your life. Nobody wants anything to do with you any more: nobody will join you in any enterprise, or let you join them. Because from now on, your presence will be like a black hole, sucking out all the grace and good fortune that might have been theirs. Your only way out is to leave town, go somewhere you are unknown. But not everyone has the strength of character to do that. Far less if they truly believe that they are doomed, now, to fail at everything they undertake. Probably he is living off the charity of the marabout Sidi Haddou these days . . .
Sakht! It sounds as horrible as its meaning. Poor man!
A vile tradition, Mohammed agrees. He gets angry, he says, with the people who turn up here – from French universities, from America even, all the -ologists fascinated by local culture, studying Timimoun’s ancient traditions, wanting to save them. It may be fascinating to them, but they don’t have to live with it. Personally, Mohammed can’t wait for the whole lot to die out. What is good about sakht? About the seclusion of women? About the exclusion of the Haratine? In France, he discovered what it was to be ostracized, excluded, presumed inferior on sight. I was there with him in Paris, wasn’t I, at his first experience of it! And he wants no truck with such horrors, traditional or not.