THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO

by Wafa Faith Hallam

  We had been staying, “camping” really, at Uncle Latif’s small house in Kenitra for two weeks already amid constant and palpable tension, and they were getting used to our ferocious displays. This had become a common occurrence since I started middle school. We would be bucking heads, usually about Dad, screaming at each other like two shrews in the market square, but it had never gone this far.

  My father had found out where we were staying and had showed up to once again persuade his wife to return to her senses. She had refused to let him in, asked me to see him off. Certainly she hadn’t hit me in quite a while, and never with such cruelty. Previous episodes of physical mistreatment were mostly part of the way she felt she had to discipline her children—mostly me—for being insolent or disobedient, which I was frequently guilty of. I had just turned fourteen and quite ahead of my years. I was no longer a child and felt more like her equal, if not in age in maturity, I thought.

  I stopped in front of the medicine cabinet and glimpsed my distorted, swollen face in the mirror. I looked hideous… I turned the faucet on and let it run for a while; the noise of the water rushing down the spout was soothing. I leaned over and splashed my face with the cool water, blowing my nose loudly. My temples were throbbing, my head aching, murky thoughts jamming my mind. I felt queasy; the ache in my head wouldn’t let up.

  I pulled open the door of the cabinet and reached for the aspirin bottle, twisted the top off, took a handful of the little white tablets, and put them in my mouth. I reached for the plastic cup packed with toothbrushes on the sink, emptied it all at once, filled it with water and drank it. Then I took another handful of the little white tablets and flushed them down my throat again, and I did it again and again until it was empty. Little hiccups came out of my throat.

  I felt bloated and in a daze. I could still see my dad calling me out, the pitiful expression on his face as he implored me to talk to my mother, to convince her to return home. I kept shaking my head as if to say it would be futile… really useless… Mom was too stubborn… never listened to me anyway… all hopeless.

  I reached for another bottle full of pills, another pain killer, Optalidon, an anti-migraine prescription drug, and went through the same deliberate, methodical gestures until I had swallowed all of its content. It was hard to finish off the pills, and I started choking a bit as if I were going to throw them all up. But I persisted, pushing past my body’s reflexes.

  I had no real intent or understanding of what I was actually doing at that moment, but I cannot be sure. Somewhere, somehow, like a small bird crossing a cloudy twilight sky, the thought crossed my disturbed, gloomy mind, a fleeting morbid inspiration. I was terrified but hopeful still I would be found in time and rescued just before dying, and then, then, my mother would be plagued with guilt and sorrow. This was really my revenge, her punishment; I was going to have the last word after all.

  At last, I backed off the sink littered with toothbrushes, caps, and empty aspirin bottle, still clasping the Optalidon container in my hand. I had hesitantly returned back to the room and lay down on my back when, suddenly, the house was rocked by the crashing sound of lightning falling nearby. I barely budged. A beam of dazzling light brought the room out of its deep shadow for a brief second. I shivered a little, held my breath.

  This is the end, I thought…

  And the sky opened up and the rain came down like a torrent, washing away all the sins of the world, wakening the scents of the dried summer earth.

  That night, Uncle Latif returned home earlier than usual. He was told I was in the bedroom, brooding after another bad fight with Mom. He found me lying in the dark almost unconscious, still holding the Optalidon bottle. Immediately, he called out for Mom, picked me up in his arms and rushed me to the hospital, where the emergency crew pumped my stomach. As I began emerging from my profound torpor, I dreamt I was in a state of crazed sexual arousal, pulling out my tubes and throwing myself at the intern, the nurse, and even my uncle before I ran under the shower to cool off. Only that was not a dream.

  My mother told me I had indeed acted outrageously but that my doctor had reassured her that it happened sometimes and not to read anything into it. Coincidentally, my attending intern, Dr. Benhallam, was a cousin of my dad, and he took a particular interest in me, following me closely. This familial connection made it difficult for me to overcome the embarrassment I felt toward him for years afterwards.

  Seventy-two hours later, I was sent home.

  My botched suicide attempt changed nothing at all. Even worse, that terribly selfish act had failed to earn me the love and attention I was so in need of. When I tried to protest to Mom and put in plain words my pain, she felt she was under attack and compared my situation to her predicament. She believed she was the victim, not I, whom she always struggled to provide with a decent life, a good education, and bright prospects. It was the same recurring theme I had heard before, a long-lost argument. It never failed to shut me up and make me swallow my anguish hard, forever deepening my resentment of my mother.

  And yet the summer of 1970 had begun as a time full of excitement. My mother had rented a very small, drab-looking “cabanon,” (basic wood cottage), in Moulay Bousselham (“Moulay” for short), a little beach town with a sandy ocean beach and a lovely lagoon. Many Europeans from all over the region, from Meknes to Rabat, had built their summer cottages in Moulay and loved to spend their vacation fishing, boating, and playing cards. They held lively tournaments of pétanque and volleyball, and gathered for an anisette drink or dinner at the famous Miramar and Potinière. Year after year, they were joined by an increasing number of privileged French-speaking Moroccans who enjoyed the same things.

  The atmosphere was convivial and pretty much everyone knew everyone else. I’d spent the school year away from home in boarding school, in 7th Grade, and so I’d become fairly independent and self-assured. I’d learned to smoke in hiding in the dormitory’s bathrooms with a bunch of older girls and I was ready to put my books aside, date boys, and have some fun. My mother had picked up smoking as well, she barely scolded me, but I did not dare smoke in front of my dad.

  In the Lycée that year, I’d had a crush on an older French boy, a senior, who never paid me any mind. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and he was the prettiest boy I had ever seen. He turned up at Moulay that summer; although I still was incapable of approaching him—he didn’t even see me. Perhaps because of his lack of acknowledgement, I redoubled my effort to be noticed. I spent my days on the beach and participated enthusiastically in the evening activities.

  Often at night, my sister and I met other teenagers and young people at the movies and then later in the small town’s disco, where we smoked, kissed, and pretended to be cool. My brothers had their own friends and met them for their own play and games. My mother had met a group of friends too, and she partied as hard as any of us, happy to be rid of my dad, who showed up only infrequently.

  Until he did, one time, when he arrived unannounced and found no one home.

  It is unsettling to me that I had almost no remembrance of that particular day until my sister recently reminded me of exactly what happened—that Dad had had a vicious argument, and not just with Mom, when he showed up in Moulay that evening. He and I confronted each other in our first violent quarrel. I was very angry at him, and was impertinent to the point of contempt.

  “Go ahead, hit me. Do it, if you’re a man. Only you’re not a man… you’re a wimp.” I was daring him with my face, within inches of his. My sister had been shocked by how much disrespect I showed and the episode had stuck in her memory with great clarity. I blamed him for being old-fashioned and sanctimonious, for not understanding any of our needs and aspirations, and for always playing spoiler.

  Today, it is clear to me that I also resented him for not standing up for himself, for letting my mother emasculate him and deprive him of his dignity time and time again. I hated his weakness and obvious impotence! All he could ever do was retreat further into his is
olation and display bitterness on his face for everyone to see. The clash between him and my mother was even worse that evening. She had been dropped off at our cottage by a young and attractive friend of her younger brothers. When Dad saw them, he literally exploded in anger and jealousy, and my mother answered him back with hatred and derision.

  “Don’t you dare insinuate anything improper, you spineless hypocrite drunk… we’re on vacation to enjoy ourselves, no thanks to you. Why do you even bother to show up here anyway?” And so it went, with her words cutting deeper than knives, and my father throwing accusations around, unable to shut her up or control the situation.

  Things went out of hand, with Mom breaking dishes and screaming hysterically. Finally, she ran out to the neighbors’ house and called her brother Latif to come and take us out of there. We finished the last month of our vacation in Uncle Latif’s summer rental in Kenitra, a few miles north of Rabat, awaiting Mother’s next step.

  Things could not have been easy for her as she tried to find a way to separate from her husband and keep her children. She came and went to and from Rabat, attempting to convince her older brothers to help her find a way out of her miserable marriage. Uncle Latif was fully supportive of her and helped us financially. But her oldest brother, Mohamed, with whom she had the least affinity, was steadfast in his opposition. He thought her conduct was reprehensible, and that her total independence could only lead to more embarrassment for the family. In the course of a heated argument and in front of us all, he slapped her viciously, ordered her to return to her husband and told her to thank God for what she had.

  We returned from that visit seething against our uncle. None of us forgave him for a very long time. My sister said to me once that she had felt that slap as much as Mom, physically, as if she had been hit herself, and hated our uncle with all her might. She added that she remembered vividly the feeling of oppression and “imprisonment” we felt when we lived with Dad and completely identified with Mom.

  But it was not her brother who compelled Mom to reconsider and go back to Dad one more time. The ordeal of my hospitalization, and my failed suicide attempt, had affected her more than she’d ever admit, not that she ever verbally expressed any guilt or responsibility. On the contrary, she rejected the blame that my father was squarely laying on her. If anything, she blamed him. My reckless act had complicated and undermined her effort, and she was frustrated.

  Thus she was forced to return to the Bou-Maiz farm with my brothers for their last year in elementary school in Sidi Kacem. In the fall of 1970, they were entering 5th grade together. My sister was starting 6th grade and hence joined me at the Lycee Descartes’ boarding school.

  Strangely, in the absence of a mother’s soothing empathy, I did not seek comfort or companionship in my sister. Just recently, I asked her on the phone if she recalled how she’d felt that summer.

  “I was thirteen, for God’s sake! I remember every detail,” she answered with indignation.

  When she finally revealed her thoughts to me, saying how devastated she’d been, she choked up. “I watched them take you away… I was so scared. I stayed awake all night until they came back at the crack of dawn and told me you were going to be fine.” She stopped and I heard her cry at the end of the line.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said at last.

  I wished I could have been there to hold her in my arms and ask for her forgiveness. We were only one year apart in age, but it could have been decades for all I knew. After all those years, it is disconcerting to me to finally concede I had shunned my little sister, discounted her as if she wasn’t even there. She had grown from a silent baby to an angelic and timid toddler, then to a talkative and often funny thirteen-year-old. Her relationship to our parents was more harmonious, less traumatic, because she was spared the closeness and involvement they had reserved for their eldest. Not having a sister she could play with, she had also turned to books for her leisure.

  Nezha explained that I had always considered myself a grown-up and seen her as a child. Our parents had contributed to this estrangement by allowing me privileges that they denied her and our brothers, like staying up late at night, being allowed to watch TV shows they were not permitted to see, and generally promoting me as the mature child worthy of most of their consideration. I suppose I felt flattered then by my parents’ endorsement and my little sister could only pose a threat to my established status in the family. So I did everything I could to put her down every time she made any attempt at getting closer to me.

  Once again, as she often had in the past, Nezha seized this opportunity to tell me how incensed I had been when mother dressed us alike, something she liked to do when we were little, how mean I had been when she’d put on an old dress of mine that was passed down to her. She reminded me that I would sometimes give her a piece of clothing only to reclaim it in fits of jealousy when she looked good wearing it. I often belittled and put her down, widening the gap between us and alienating her further.

  One other incident that had bruised her soul still stood out clearly in her mind while it remained buried deep under the rubble of my recollection. It took place during a party at home with our boyfriends, relatives, and acquaintances. We were, respectively, eighteen and seventeen. She was dancing to an oriental beat with her arms graciously undulating and her chest thrust forward in a slow and sensual motion, attracting admiration and praise, when I viciously lashed out at her.

  “You have no breast to show for it. Leave that to me! In fact, you ought to put your hands in front of your face, since they’re your best feature.”

  I had always made light of it, arguing that was just a bad joke. Finally facing up to the truth, I struggled with the guilt of my atrocious conduct. What kind of a person would do or say things like that? Feebly, I protested that I couldn’t have. She swore it was all true. Deep down I knew, of course, she was right.

  I feel profound sadness as I write these words and mull over the emotional wreckage in my past. We all want to believe in the inherent kindness of our nature, and the realization that evil can indeed find a place next to the goodness in our heart is profoundly disturbing. The hurt I caused my little sister in those days can never be undone. Ironically, neither can the hurt that I caused myself by rejecting her, condemning myself to loneliness at a time when I was so in need of the love and support of a sister. In the end, justice has somehow prevailed.

  7

  A Taste of Freedom

  Within a year, on July 10, 1971, and again on August 16, 1972, King Hassan II survived two spectacular assassination attempts and credited his miraculous near-death escapes to his “divine protection,” or “Baraka,” as he called it. Worst of all, both coups had been plotted by two of his closest and most trusted generals.

  The first, a random shooting conducted by two-hundred and fifty young cadets from a Middle-Atlas military school, occurred in bright daylight, during the King’s lavish forty-second birthday party in his summer palace of Skhirat, a beach resort a few miles south of Rabat. In a bloody two-and-a-half-hour gun battle, the cadets killed ninety-two guests and dignitaries, including the conspiring general, and injured a hundred and thirty-three. The king was unharmed.

  The second coup was led by General Oufkir, the kingdom’s number two man at the time. Hassan II was returning from a three-week sojourn in France when his plane was attacked in flight by four F-5 Fighter jets. They shot at his aircraft and destroyed two of his plane’s three reactors. A few passengers were injured, but the king himself once again escaped unscathed. He succeeded in driving himself away from the airport in a nondescript car after his plane crash-landed.

  After being informed that the king had survived the attack, the fighter pilots shelled the airport, killing a few people, and continued shooting at the official motorcade en route to the palace in Rabat. Around midnight, it was reported in an official statement that General Oufkir had committed “suicide” and “shot himself” for his treason, in the presence of the king.


  That summer of 1971, only a few days after the first botched coup in Skhirat, my mother dreamt of plotting her own marital “coup” against my father. She had been biding her time until my brothers graduated from elementary school. In her mind, it was unconceivable that she’d stay with her husband after her youngest children had gone off to middle school in Rabat. At long last, the stars aligned in her favor when Dad was abruptly fired from the citrus farm.

  “I’m going back to Meknes to look for a government job,” he told mom that night in a gloomier than usual tone.

  She instantly realized this was the occasion she had been hoping for. She took a deep breath before she answered in a conciliatory voice, “Well, since the children are on vacation, I guess it would probably be better that they and I go to Rabat and spend the summer with my brother Hak.”

  My father was probably relieved that his wife didn’t burst into angry blame and reacted so calmly.

  As the summer drew to an end, it became apparent that Dad was prolonging his absence. His search for new employment was taking a lot longer than he had anticipated.

  “Assuming he’s looking for a job at all,” my mother once blurted out in disgust.

  In fact, I suspect, she was rather hopeful that he wouldn’t find a satisfactory position, and that he’d remain in Meknes. Her yearning for freedom was taking shape and a way out had begun to surface in her mind. She wished to get rid of him at any cost; the question was how.

  For the first time, she sought the advice of a lawyer-I am not sure how she came up with the idea, since this was not a customary approach to divorce in Morocco. The attorney informed her of a provision in Sharia law that allowed a married woman to divorce without her husband’s consent. She could file on grounds of spousal abandonment of domicile, stipulating that my dad had disappeared and failed to support her and his children after he was sacked. This meant she had to wait for a few more months, praying that my father would not show up but stay away and out of touch.