A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco

by Suzanna Clarke

  Meanwhile the Christian rulers in the north gained in strength and picked off the principalities one by one. As each was overrun, waves of refugees fled to Morocco, among them leading artisans, who became the catalyst for a flurry of new building. Their rich artistic legacy can be seen in the exquisite plasterwork, carpentry and zellij of buildings like the Attarine and Sahrij medersas – the most beautiful of the ancient theological colleges in the Medina – as well as many riads and dars built by wealthy merchants, including our own.

  The inspector grilled me about changes we intended to make to the riad, then declared that a second, specialist inspector would have to look the place over. And we’d also be needing a supervising architect. Another layer of bureaucracy and expense.

  Getting a roqsa might have been complex, but arranging a telephone and Internet connection proved no easier. Actually, it seemed remarkable that such a thing was even possible, given that many people in the Medina could not afford water in their homes, but had to go daily to the public fountains.

  At least when I arrived at the Maroc Telecom office the doors were open and there were no other customers. Then it registered that there was no one behind the counters. A security guard waddled up and told me to return on Monday. I was nonplussed. The opening hours were given as Monday to Thursday, eight-thirty to four-thirty, with a two-hour break for lunch. It was nine-thirty on a Thursday. What was going on?

  Puzzling over this, I walked down to the Café Firdous, where I found David having his morning coffee.

  ‘Well, it’s Thursday,’ he said when I told him what happened. ‘Maybe they’re getting ready for Friday.’

  His phone rang. ‘My next door neighbour’s builder is removing all the old medluk from their outside wall,’ he told me after the call ended, looking distressed.

  Particular to Fez, medluk is a mix of sand and lime used as an exterior finish.

  ‘I said I’d pay for it to be restored,’ David continued. ‘I thought we’d agreed, but the builder is taking it all off and replacing it with cement. He says if I want to pay for medluk, that’s my business. The cement can be removed later and new medluk put on.’

  I wondered whether the builder was hoping to be paid twice for the same job.

  Salim, the engineer who’d inspected our house, was sitting at a nearby table. David called him over and Salim agreed to go and see if he could stop the work. According to David, there were issues like this every day. Old surfaces of buildings were removed, and replaced with new and inappropriate materials. It didn’t help that contractors engaged by the government were paid by the metre, so it was in their interest to remove and replace as much as possible. In a strange way, the increasing wealth of the city was becoming a threat to the survival of the very aspects that made it unique, and therefore historically priceless.

  I wished David luck and returned home to meet with a prospective cleaner, someone to mop the floors once or twice a week and perhaps do some laundry. While not averse to doing a bit of the old spit and polish ourselves, Sandy and I needed to concentrate on our building and writing projects.

  I had asked around for a reliable and trustworthy person and was put in touch with a teenager called Damia, who brought along her English-speaking boyfriend to translate. As I gave them the guided tour, I stressed that I needed the floor washed with very little or no water, pointing out the bulge in the kitchen ceiling caused by water being liberally strewn across the floor above.

  We sat at the table and a vigorous discussion ensued between Damia and her boyfriend, who finally said, ‘Damia thinks it’s a lot of work and she needs someone to help her.’

  I was surprised at this. Khadija had never had any problems on her own. ‘If she doesn’t want to do the job, that’s all right,’ I said, and reluctantly Damia agreed to do it alone.

  When she turned up the next morning I explained again the need to minimise water on the upstairs floor, pointing once more at the kitchen wall and ceiling. She disappeared upstairs, and moments later I heard the sound of water being sloshed over the floor. I rushed up and she looked at me in bemusement while I ran around in circles trying unsuccessfully to stop the water getting through the crack in the floor that led to the ceiling. When the flood had been stemmed I took the mop and mimed squeezing it out, saying shrilly, ‘Petit l’eau.’

  Back downstairs, I resumed writing, then was amazed to hear the slosh of water once more. I raced up the stairs two at a time, to see a large puddle disappearing through the crack. Perhaps my previous reaction had been so amusing she wanted a replay. I obliged, struggling to get rid of the water while she stood and watched me. Then I took her back to the kitchen and pointed yet again to where the ceiling was about to collapse. ‘Pas avec l’eau!’ I yelled.

  Finally she seemed to get it, and the rest of the cleaning passed without incident – in fact she did an exceptionally through job. The only cause for concern was the sound of breaking glass. When I went up to look later I couldn’t find what had caused it. No doubt the offending object had been whipped out of sight.

  The following week, I had a call from the guesthouse owner who’d recommended Damia. She wanted to know if I was happy with her and I said I was, with the exception of the water incident. It transpired that this woman had just lost a large sum of money. She’d been packing to go away and had momentarily left her money belt on her bed. Damia and her boyfriend were there at the time, along with her cook. Several hundred dirhams were gone, along with some foreign currency.

  The latter had turned up in an unexpected way the following day. ‘I’m sure you must have made a mistake and the money is here somewhere,’ Damia’s boyfriend said and proceeded straight to a guidebook, inside which, lo and behold, were the foreign notes. He denied there’d been any theft.

  ‘It’s as though the culprit felt guilty and wanted to return some of what they took,’ said my friend, who’d decided not to go to the police but was weighing up whether to sack all three. ‘I doubt Damia’s boyfriend is the thief, but he’s probably trying to cover for whoever is.’

  I decided that until the situation was sorted out I wouldn’t be employing Damia any more. The telephone conversation shifted to how difficult it was to get good help, and I hung up with the ghost of Somerset Maugham whispering in my ear: ‘I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.’ Was I, despite my best intentions, succumbing to a colonial way of life after all?

  It was now the middle of May. Spring had well and truly arrived and the air was redolent with the scent of roses: you could buy kilos of petals at the souk, from which many people distilled their own rosewater for use in cooking and ceremonies. We were asked to dinner by an American couple we’d met. They had spent all day having a cooking lesson from a Berber chef, going around the souks and selecting the best and freshest produce, then being galley slaves while he created the magnificent meal we were invited to share.

  The first course was fresh goat’s cheese with herbs, presented with a radiating sun of roasted red capsicum, followed by an eggplant and chilli salad, then a mouth-wateringly fresh chicken dish with prunes, roasted almonds and potatoes. A melon and mint dessert followed.

  I sat next to a young Fassi woman of unusual beauty called Ayisha. She wore a dark-red Saudi Arabian tunic and trousers, and had such perfect sculptural arches over her eyes that I had a pang of eyebrow envy. Her English was excellent – she was studying it at university – although she had an American accent from watching soap operas.

  Ayisha was twenty-three and from a desperately poor family. She was longing to break free of her confined existence.

  ‘But I don’t want to marry a Moroccan man,’ she told me. ‘They don’t treat women like equals.’

  A couple of years previously she had been affianced, as she put it, to a fellow who’d asked her father for her hand. To her father this meant she could forget about studying, so she rebelled against the proposal and insisted on her right to go to un
iversity. Her father was unimpressed and their relationship was now strained.

  Despite thumbing her nose at her father and pursuing an education, there was one area where Ayisha wasn’t prepared to break with tradition. She was a virgin, she told me, and would remain so until she married. I enjoyed her lively mind as we ranged over everything from the role of women to religion and vegetarianism. Ayisha did not eat meat, as she ‘empathised with animals acutely’, a considerable attitude shift in a culture that valued animals largely for their utilitarian purposes.

  In lots of ways Ayisha typified the young Moroccan women who were causing a seismic upheaval in their extremely traditional culture. This had resulted in thirty-five women being elected to the Moroccan parliament in 2003. And in 2006, fifty women had graduated as religious leaders, the first contemporary female group to be officially trained as such in the Arab world. They could do everything the male imams could, except lead Friday prayers in a mosque. This was an unheard of prospect just a few short years before.

  Morocco is now a leader in the Muslim world for female rights and freedoms. The year 2003 also saw the introduction of a new family law code, known as the Mudwana, an historic piece of legislation that allows women to press charges against their husbands for domestic violence. Before that, a wife needed a witness to such acts before she could lay charges – an impossible situation. Under the Mudwana, women also have equal property rights and custody rights, and no longer have a legal requirement to obey their husbands. Forced marriages are illegal, and polygamy is permitted only if a judge can be convinced that both wives will receive equal treatment. Men cannot divorce their wives just by ritually saying ‘I divorce thee’ three times, as they could before 2003, and they also now have a legal responsibility for any children born outside marriage.

  When the Mudwana was introduced thousands marched in support, but tens of thousands of fundamentalists protested, seeing increased freedom for women as a challenge to Koranic teachings, and a slide towards the immorality perceived in Western societies. The King and the government admirably maintained their resolve to ratify the law, although its passage did not change everything overnight: many Moroccan women are illiterate and don’t know their rights, or are afraid to use them.

  The simultaneous introduction of women into parliament will hopefully ensure that these reforms are not eroded, but the increasing power of the fundamentalist Wahhabists across the Middle East and other parts of Africa is an ever present threat. This movement generally believes that women should be submissive and ought not have a role in public life.

  ‘I think we’re going to be great friends,’ Ayisha said at the end of the evening, squeezing my hand. I hoped so too, and indeed, a few days later she came to visit at Riad Zany.

  I showed her around, and when we entered the tiny room off the stairs from the catwalk I wondered aloud whether it had been a place for prayers.

  ‘It’s too small for prayers,’ Ayisha said. ‘You couldn’t stand to do prostrations. Of course, in the old days there would have been slaves in this house. This was probably where they slept.’

  I’d never thought about slaves living in our house, but it made sense. Looking around the room, I saw that it would fit two sleeping people. A third could have slept on the narrow, tiled mezzanine, which I’d assumed was for storage – but it was long enough for someone to lie on, with a niche on one side to hold a candle and a few clothes.

  I looked up at the intricately painted ceiling running along the length of the passageway, illuminated by a couple of arched windows onto the courtyard. Its repeating geometric pattern would have taken ages to create. Had a talented slave done it in their spare time to make their situation more bearable? Or had a kindly owner paid for it to be done, to beautify an otherwise utilitarian space? It would have to remain one of the many mysteries of the house.

  Ayisha told me that until the early 1940s every self-respecting Fassi family owned a slave. They bought and sold them on the market like sheep.

  ‘My great-grandparents had a slave,’ she said. ‘My great-grandmother told me that in the old days children were frequently snatched off the streets and sold. One young girl from the powerful Alouite family was out playing in the street when she was kidnapped.’ Ayisha made a snatching gesture, her eyes wide.

  ‘The girl’s father loved her so much, he spent years searching for her. He even dressed up as a beggar and knocked on the doors of houses all over the city to find her. Finally a young woman answered who had an unusually shaped birthmark on the side of her face. He looked into her eyes and realised he had found his daughter.’

  I wondered if the father had told his daughter who he was immediately, and whether she believed him, but I didn’t want to interrupt Ayisha’s story.

  ‘Then the father went to King Mohammed V,’ she continued. Mohammed V had ruled during the 1930s and 1940s. ‘He told the King that one of his family had been stolen and sold into slavery, and the King said, “That is enough. From this day I am going to make sure this barbaric practice is outlawed.”’

  My interest piqued, I did some research on the subject, then engaged a local guide to take me to the sites of a couple of old slave markets. One of them was hidden away down back alleys near the mediaeval Muslim college of the Attarine Medersa. Following the guide’s lead, I ducked through a doorway and found myself in a large square surrounded by high walls. There was a smaller adjoining square, enclosed by a raised platform and pillars and resembling a Roman forum. It seemed likely this would have been where the slaves were shackled for display.

  I’d read that the majority of Moroccan slaves came from West Africa, brought over the Sahara by traders. On their hellish trek through the desert, they were made to walk on the outside of the caravan to protect the goods within from attack by nomads. Anyone holding up progress was killed. The mortality rate was staggering – up to eighty per cent of those taken died on the way.

  I was astounded to learn that in addition to the slaves from West Africa more than a million Europeans were taken. These were captured by Corsair pirates between 1530 and 1780, in numerous raids that depopulated coastal towns from Cornwall to Sicily. In the summer of 1625 alone, more than a thousand unfortunates were taken from the west coast of England. Corsair pirates were renegade groups of Moors who’d been expelled by the Spanish. They sold their captives to work as labourers, galley slaves and concubines.

  Imagine going about your business as a Celtic villager and suddenly being whisked off to a completely alien society, unable to communicate with anyone. Given the knowledge of the day, it would have been the modern equivalent of being captured by extraterrestrials.

  ‘Slavery in Morocco was not like elsewhere,’ said my guide. ‘Slaves were treated as part of the family.’ Seeing my sceptical expression, he added, ‘They had a good life. Why would you mistreat someone who could take it out on your children?’

  I raised my eyebrows. If it was such a good life they were going to, why was it necessary to take them by force? On the contrary, I imagined the slave market was an extremely sad affair, with friends and family who had survived the dreadful trek together being forcibly split up. As far as I could see, the only positive thing to come out of slavery in Morocco was the rich legacy of gnawa music, a fusion of African and Arab influences.

  The slave markets were still operating at the time of the French occupation in 1912, when they were officially outlawed but in reality only driven underground. The French turned a blind eye to the practice among powerful families and some of their own countrymen, and in the meantime supply dwindled due to the tightening of national borders.

  Now the small square was filled with a cheerful jostle of women bartering second-hand clothes, everything from baby bootees to elaborately embroidered evening dresses. There was a great deal of chatter and laughter and it was as much a social occasion as a market, a far cry from the atmosphere the place would have had when slaves were sold here. In the afternoons it was the men’s turn, and they came to buy a
nd sell leather hides.

  I was perturbed to learn during later conversations with Moroccans and expats that a form of domestic slavery still exists in Morocco. Some wealthy families ‘obtain’ a young girl from the mountains, who is brought to the house as a domestic help and must do everything from cooking and cleaning to childminding. Human Rights Watch reports that ‘girls as young as five work 100 or more hours per week, without rest breaks or days off, for as little as six and a half Moroccan dirhams (about 70 US cents) a day’. It’s a difficult thing to police because the girls often have no identity card and so officially don’t exist. If the head of the family where she works is questioned he simply claims the girl is a niece. Some cases of physical and psychological abuse have become public, resulting in outcry.

  In early 2007, the government launched a program called Inqad, meaning ‘rescue’ in Darija, as part of its ten-year National Action Plan for Childhood. The program aims to eradicate the market that deprives little girls of any semblance of education or opportunity. Whether they can achieve this remains to be seen, but it’s a move in the right direction.

  The Moroccan government is also attempting to combat the trafficking of men, women and children to Europe and the Middle East for forced labour and sexual exploitation. While many of those trafficked are Moroccan, others from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia transit through Morocco, and some end up staying in cities like Tangier and Casablanca.

  These problems are by no means unique to Morocco. On the other side of the equation, some crimes we take for granted in the West, such as those related to hard drugs, are relatively rare here. The loneliness and alienation that is often the reason for people in wealthy countries turning to drugs does not appear to be as much of a problem in Morocco; people are too busy coping day to day. And the fabric of community is as intricately interlocked as the houses themselves; everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else. There are no instances of people dying and not being discovered for months, or sometimes years, as happens in Western countries. When I was in Fez by myself the neighbours would regularly bang on the door to check that I was all right. It was a bizarre notion to them that I might want to be alone.