by Paul Bowles
BOWLES (LAUGHING): Are you serious? (Pause.) I mean, the government functions like all democratic governments, more or less in accordance with the desires of the majority, yes. But I’m afraid most Americans have no interest in Algeria one way or the other. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is. That’s America.
BENOUAR: Cest triste, en effet. Sad for us, and sad for the Americans.
YOUCEF: Yes. You were saying, monsieur, that you feared an alignment on our part with what you call “the East.” You know, I suppose, that we have consistently rejected all overtures made to us by the Communist Party of Algeria?
BOWLES: And yet members of the French Communist Party have been repeatedly identified among the bodies of dead fellagha.
YOUCEF: That means nothing. After all, we have soldiers from many nations fighting in our ranks. The French are careful not to mention that. But they never miss an opportunity to make propaganda if they find a Communist somewhere around. You realize that all the news you read here or in America is from official French sources. You are not so naive as to believe it implicitly.
BOWLES: Naturally, I only wish it were possible to get news occasionally from other sources.
Paul Bowles flew back from Adrar to Algiers on this ‘Trans-Saharienne’ plane (PB)
GOURIT: I’ll see that our organ, El Moudjahid, is put into your mailbox every week. You’ll find different news in it.
BOWLES: That’s very kind. Are you sure it won’t be a bother?
GOURIT: You can pay me each week at the registry window.
(Gourit and Benouar briefly discuss, in Arabic, the question of whether it would not be better for me to buy El Moudjahid at one of the several newsstands which carry it, but decide in favor of Gourit’s suggestion.)
YOUCEF: You say you spent four winters in Algeria. You must have formed some friendships while you were there. With Algerians, I mean.
BOWLES: Yes, I had casual acquaintances in various places. But most of them disappeared suddenly. For instance, I was in Adrar in January, 1948. I don’t know whether you consider that Algeria or not -
YOUCEF: Of course it’s Algeria.
BENOUAR: Not Algeria proper. It’s the Sahara.
YOUCEF: Algeria is bounded on the South by French West Africa, my friend. That’s what the French have always said, so it must be true, no?
BOWLES: Well, I had friends there. (Turning to GOURIT) In fact, one of them worked in the post office. He sent me a box of dates later, to New York. But he also wrote me a letter begging me not to write to thank him. The next year when I went back he was gone. The French had arrested him and ten or twelve others and sent them to prison in France. No one seemed to know precisely why. (Seeing that YOUCEF was about to speak) I know, they were Nationalists, but then, so was everyone else. The same thing happened to other friends in Béni Abbès. In this case, I was told their offense. They had whistled a Nationalist song one night under the commandant’s window.
BENOUAR: You mean Sidi-bel-Abbès?
BOWLES: No, Béni Abbès. South of Colomb-Béchar. It was the first time I had realized the trouble really existed. Of course, I’d read of the bombardments by the French in 1945, but that was disconnected from -
YOUCEF: Really? Where did you read about them?
BOWLES: In Les Temps Modernes. Incidentally, in that article the number of Moslems killed during those three days was put at forty-six thousand. Do you think that was an exaggeration?
YOUCEF: No. I should think the true figure was probably higher. It’s very difficult to arrive at an exact number in such circumstances.
BOWLES: Anyway, since the night of October thirty-first, 1954, I’ve followed events with the greatest interest. For a long time I’ve been waiting for the pleasure of seeing France commit suicide, and it’s possible that this is one occasion when America won’t be able to stop her from doing it.
YOUCEF: Yes. To get back to what I was saying a while ago. I should be interested to know whether in your opinion there is in your country a general conviction or, let us say, a tendency to believe, that we are sympathetic to what you call “the East.”
BOWLES: But I never meant to imply that you were! I only said I was afraid that by the time the United States came to the realization that she had enough of France’s misbehavior in Algeria, it would be too late to build a new country upon any semblance of friendship with the West.
YOUCEF: Because we should be committed to the other side, no?
BOWLES: I’m not saying I’d attach any blame to you for that. After all, what reasons would you have for maintaining loyalty to those who had refused to help you?
YOUCEF: You will pardon me, monsieur, if I say that you do not seem to have understood the situation very clearly. For us it is not a question of loyalty or disloyalty. It is a question rather of being practical. First, we want independence. Most of the arms we have been using to fight for it, we captured with our own hands from the French in Algeria. We also have arms and ammunition from Egypt and Syria, yes, and if that is due indirectly to the Soviet Union’s assistance to these two countries, that is all the same to us. The Soviet Union already upholds our cause in the United Nations. As long as these conditions continued, we have no need to mortgage our future independence by asking for help from that direction. What would we have to gain by exposing ourselves to Communist domination? Surely that should be clear to you. The F.L.N. has no intention of allying itself with Communists, now or later.
BOWLES: I’m very glad to hear you say all this. I’ve read two or three of your brochures: one on the members of the Foreign Legion in the Army of Liberation, one on the history of Algeria, one on how the F.L.N. works. It seems to me it would be very useful if you were to publish one in which you make clear your position regarding communism. I think it would help a great deal, in the United States, at least. It’s about the only concrete suggestion I can think of at the moment. Can’t I give you some whiskey? (They all declined, and I served them three glasses of water. Before leaving Youcef asked for copies of my novels in French translation, which I gave him. I have not seen either Youcef or Benouar since.)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Somewhat later there appeared in the newspaper Die Welt the account of an interview, by a journalist named Wirsing, with Ferhat Abbas at his Geneva residence, during the course of which the Algerian leader was quoted as saying that a three-man commission representing the F.L.N. had visited Moscow and Prague in quest of heavy arms. According to the article, the members of the commission were told that such aid could be granted only if the F.L.N. broadened its political base to include the interests of “all sectors of the Algerian people.” It was suggested to the commission that its request would receive serious attention if a certain Ali bou Hali, an old-time member of the Algerian Communist Party, now resident in the Albanian capital of Tirana, were to be included on the executive committee of the FL.N.
The FL.N. quickly denied that such an interview had taken place, and denounced the article in Die Welt as a journalistic invention.
Africa Minor
Holiday, April 1959; Their Heads Are Green, 1963
IT HAD TAKEN the truck fourteen hours to get from Kerzaz to Adrar and, except for the lunch stop in the oasis of El Aougherout, the old man had sat the whole time on the floor without moving, his legs tucked up beneath him, the hood of his burnoose pulled up over his turban to protect his face from the fine dust that sifted up through the floor. First-class passage on vehicles of the Compagnie Générale Transsaharienne entitled the voyager to travel in the glassed-in compartment with the driver, and that was where I sat, occasionally turning to look through the smeared panes at the solitary figure sitting sedately in the midst of the tornado of dust behind. At lunch, when I had seen his face with its burning brown eyes and magnificent white beard, it had occurred to me that he looked like a handsome and very serious Santa Claus.
The dust grew worse during the afternoon, so that by sunset, when we finally pulled into Adrar, even the driver and I were covered. I got out and shook myself, and t
he little old man clambered out of the back, cascades of dust spilling from his garments. Then he came around to the front of the truck to speak to the driver, who, being a good Moslem, wanted to get a shower and wash himself. Unfortunately he was a city Moslem as well as being a good one, so that he was impatient with the measured cadence of his countryman’s speech and suddenly slammed the door, unaware that the old man’s hand was in the way.
Calmly the old man opened the door with his other hand. The tip of his middle finger dangled by a bit of skin. He looked at it an instant, then quietly scooped up a handful of that ubiquitous dust, put the two parts of the finger together and poured the dust over it, saying softly, “Thanks be to Allah.” With that, the expression on his face never having changed, he picked up his bundle and staff and walked away. I stood looking after him, full of wonder, and reflecting upon the difference between his behavior and what mine would have been under the same circumstances. To show no outward sign of pain is unusual enough, but to express no resentment against the person who has hurt you seems very strange, and to give thanks to God at such a moment is the strangest touch of all.
Clearly, examples of such stoical behavior are not met every day, or I should not have remembered this one; my experience since then, however, has shown me that it is not untypical, and it has remained with me and become a symbol of that which is admirable in the people of North Africa. “This world we see is unimportant and ephemeral as a dream,” they say. “To take it seriously would be an absurdity. Let us think rather of the heavens that surround us.” And the landscape is conducive to reflections upon the nature of the infinite. In other parts of Africa you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. When you have understood that, not intellectually but emotionally, you have also understood why it is that the great trinity of monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam – which removed the source of power from the earth itself to the spaces outside the earth - were evolved in desert regions. And of the three, Islam, perhaps because it is the most recently evolved, operates the most directly and with the greatest strength upon the daily actions of those who embrace it.
For a person born into a culture where religion has long ago become a thing quite separate from daily life, it is a startling experience to find himself suddenly in the midst of a culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior, and this is one of the great fascinations of being in North Africa. I am not speaking of Egypt, where the old harmony is gone, decayed from within. My own impressions of Egypt before Nasser are those of a great panorama of sun-dried disintegration. In any case, she has had a different history from the rest of Mediterranean Africa; she is ethnically and linguistically distinct and is more a part of the Levant than of the region we ordinarily mean when we speak of North Africa. But in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between God and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh (or however one prefers to conceive and define that pristine state of existence we intuitively feel we once enjoyed and now have lost).
I don’t claim that the Moslems of North Africa are a group of mystics, heedless of bodily comfort, interested only in the welfare of the spirit. If you have ever bought so much as an egg from one of them, you have learned that they are quite able to fend for themselves when it comes to money matters. The spoiled strawberries are at the bottom of the basket, the pebbles inextricably mixed with the lentils and the water with the milk, the same as in many other parts of the world, with the difference that if you ask the price of an object in a rural market, they will reply, all in one breath, “Fifty, how much will you give?” I should say that in the realm of beah o chra (selling and buying; note that in their minds selling comes first), they are surpassed only by the Hindus, who are less emotional about it and therefore more successful, and by the Chinese, acknowledged masters of the Oriental branch of the science of commerce.
In Morocco you go into a bazaar to buy a wallet and somehow find yourself being propelled toward the back room to look at antique brass and rugs. In an instant you are seated with a glass of mint tea in your hand and a platter of pastries in your lap, while smiling gentlemen modeling ancient caftans and marriage robes parade in front of you, the salesman who greeted you at the door having completely vanished. Later on you may once again ask timidly to see the wallets, which you noticed on display near the entrance. Likely as not, you will be told that the man in charge of wallets is at the moment saying his prayers, but that he will soon be back, and in the meantime would you not be pleased to see some magnificent jewelry from the court of Moulay Ismail? Business is business and prayers are prayers, and both are a part of the day’s work.
When I meet fellow Americans traveling about here in North Africa, I ask them, “What did you expect to find here?” Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer, reduced to its simplest terms, is: a sense of mystery. They expect mystery, and they find it, since fortunately it is a quality difficult to extinguish all in a moment. They find it in the patterns of sunlight filtering through the latticework that covers the souks, in the unexpected turnings and tunnels of the narrow streets, in the women whose features still go hidden beneath the litham, in the secretiveness of the architecture, which is such that even if the front door of a house is open it is impossible to see inside. If they listen as well as look, they find it too in the song the lone camel driver sings by his fire before dawn, in the calling of the muezzins at night, when their voices are like bright beams of sound piercing the silence, and, most often, in the dry beat of the darbouka, the hand drum played by the women everywhere, in the great city houses and in the humblest country hut.
It is a strange sensation, when you are walking alone in a still, dark street late at night, to come upon a pile of cardboard boxes soaked with rain, and, as you pass by it, to find yourself staring into the eyes of a man sitting upright behind it. A thief? A beggar? The night watchman of the quarter? A spy for the secret police?
You just keep walking, looking at the ground, hearing your footsteps echo between the walls of the deserted street. Into your head comes the idea that you may suddenly hear the sound of a conspiratorial whistle and that something unpleasant may be about to happen. A little farther along you see, deep in the recess of an arcade of shops, another man reclining in a deck chair, asleep. Then you realize that all along the street there are men both sleeping and sitting quietly awake, and that even in the hours of its most intense silence the place is never empty of people.
It is only since the end of 1955 that Morocco has had its independence, but already there is a nucleus of younger Moslems who fraternize freely with the writers and painters (most of whom are American girls and youths) who have wandered into this part of the world and found it to their liking. Together they give very staid, quiet parties which show a curious blend of Eastern and Western etiquette. Usually no Moslem girls are present. Everyone is either stretched out on mattresses or seated on the floor, and kif and hashish are on hand, but half the foreigners content themselves with highballs. A good many paintings are looked at, and there is a lot of uninformed conversation about art and expression and religion. When food is passed around, the Moslems, for all their passionate devotion to European manners, not only adhere to their own custom of using chunks of bread to sop up the oily mruq at the bottom of their plates, but manage to impose the system on the others as well, so that everybody is busy rubbing pieces of bread over his plate. Why not? The food is cooked to be eaten in that fashion, and is less tasty if eaten in any other way.
Many of the Moslems paint, too; after so many centuries of religious taboo with regard to the making of representational image
s, abstraction is their natural mode of expression. You can see in their canvases the elaboration of design worked out by the Berbers in their crafts: patterns that show constant avoidance of representation but manage all the same to suggest recognizable things. Naturally, their paintings are a great success with the visiting artists, who carry their admiration to the point of imitation. The beat-generation North Africans are music-mad, but they get their music via radio, phonograph and tape-recorder. They are enthusiastic about the music of their own country, but unlike their fathers, they don’t sing or play it. They are also fond of such exotic items as Congo drumming, the music of India, and particularly the more recent American jazz (Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley).
At the moment, writing about any part of Africa is a little like trying to draw a picture of a roller coaster in motion. You can say: It was thus and so, or, it is becoming this or that, but you risk making a misstatement if you say categorically that anything is, because likely as not you will open tomorrow’s newspaper to discover that it has changed. On the whole the new governments of Tunisia and Morocco wish to further tourism in their respective countries; they are learning that the average tourist is more interested in native dancing than in the new bus terminal, that he is more willing to spend money in the Casbah than to inspect new housing projects. For a while, after the demise of the violently unpopular Pasha of Marrakesh, Thami el Glaoui, the great public square of Marrakesh, the Djemâa el Fna, was used solely as a parking lot. Anyone will tell you that the biggest single attraction for tourists in all North Africa was the Djemâa el Fna in Marrakesh. It was hard to find a moment of the day or night when tourists could not be found prowling around among its acrobats, singers, storytellers, snake charmers, dancers and medicine men. Without it Marrakesh became just another Moroccan city. And so the Djemâa el Fna was reinstated, and now goes on more or less as before.
