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

by Suzanna Clarke

  As the writer and photojournalist behind ‘The View from Fez’ weblog, Sandy and I were given media passes in order to do reviews; I was also working on a travel story for my paper in Australia. Fortunately for us, the concerts began in the late afternoon, after our workers had left for the day. They were held beneath the spreading branches of a giant oak tree in the courtyard of the old Batha Palace, which was now a museum of Moroccan arts. The evening concerts were held at Bab Makina, an enormous space with crenellated walls at one of the entrances to the palace, about ten minutes’ walk from Bab Bou Jeloud.

  Built in 1308, Bab Makina had spent part of its life as an armaments factory, so it seemed appropriate that it should be the main venue for an event promoting cross-cultural understanding. The audiences were a mix of upper-class Moroccans and Europeans, mainly French. The high prices for the tickets subsidised free concerts for poorer people in a square near Bab Bou Jeloud.

  On the first afternoon, I watched in fascination as a whirling dervish from Syria began to rotate slowly in the palace courtyard. There wasn’t a lot of room and I wondered if he would spin off like a top into the audience. His eyes closed, a peaceful expression on his face, he spun faster and faster, arms akimbo, until the hem of his long white tunic lifted to form a complete circle. As it wasn’t possible to see his feet, it seemed as if he were levitating, about to take off to another realm entirely.

  Late every evening, a Sufi group performed. Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, is focused on letting go of all notions of the individual self in order to realise unity with the divine, and many Sufi groups use music and dance to achieve an ecstatic state. This face of Islam is very different from the hardline Wahhabism that has parts of the Middle East and Africa in its grip. Whereas Wahhabists must deal with God through intermediaries, Sufis feel they have a personal connection with God – a God who is loving, not a judgemental deity to be feared. Sufi brotherhoods are particularly prevalent in Fez.

  The Sufi performances were extremely popular and getting in wasn’t easy. The night we went, there was such a crush of people that Sandy opted to stay in the gardens, but I needed to get as close as possible to take photos. Despite having a media pass, I had to argue the point with a security man, who eventually took pity on me and led me to the front of the queue. I worked my way slowly through the crowd, trying not to step on toes or babies.

  The group performing was a local Fassi brotherhood who regularly played at weddings and circumcisions, and the audience was mostly locals, families with kids, teenage boys with tight T-shirts, veiled women. I found a spot wedged beneath a huge fountain and a French camera crew, and ended up almost sitting in the sound guy’s lap. The proximity of so many people was overwhelming. It was easy to see how people get crushed to death by the sheer force of numbers on pilgrimages to Mecca.

  When it came time for the musicians to enter they were led by an angelic young boy carrying a candle, and people cleared a path to let them through. The musicians stood in a line facing the audience, and the chanting, drumming and shaking began. The oldest Sufi, a wrinkled prune of a man, had his eyes closed, lost in the rhythm. The singers were dressed in pale robes and sat on one side of the stage, facing a row of musicians in elaborate woven tunics with red and white stripes. A man in the middle led the refrain, keeping time with a small drum.

  The songs were sung very loud, and to an untrained ear sounded a little tuneless, but the rhythm and repetition and sheer energy they exuded was exhilarating. The audience swayed as they sang along to what were obviously familiar numbers. Little girls tossed their hair around wildly, and even demurely dressed matrons looked as if they were about to faint. Every song pushed the outpouring of energy up a notch, until the noise and dancing of the crowd were at fever point.

  Then two young musicians rose and blew with such ferocity on their long silver trumpets that those close by were in danger of suffering permanent hearing damage. In the brief lull that followed the trumpet blasts, I made my escape, to avoid becoming a human pretzel. People were still trying to squeeze into the already overcrowded area and meeting resistance from the security staff. One male journalist being denied access was on the verge of fisticuffs. I slipped past into the night just as the shouting reached crescendo level.

  Afterwards, wondering what it all meant, I sought out the maker of a documentary called Sufi Soul, which was being shown at the festival. Simon Broughton, who also edits a world music magazine, told me there are some fifteen main Sufi brotherhoods in Morocco, each with its own tariqa, or ‘way’. One of the most popular, and also the most flamboyant and theatrical, is the Aissawa brotherhood, the group we had seen perform.

  Simon knew a member of the Aissawa brotherhood who worked at the Chouwara tanneries, and for him the hard work there was made bearable by the thought of performing after it was done. ‘The music is intended to bring the djinns in, not drive them out,’ Simon told me. ‘They’re brought in to deal with specific needs and problems – to relieve anxieties and tension, for example. Different people need different djinns. Sometimes a djinn is summoned by name. The musicians might call on the lady Aisha, and a woman in the audience will jump up, seized by Aisha. It’s believed that the djinn has manifested in her.’

  I had heard that Aisha is supposed to be beautiful and seductive, but with the hooves of a goat. She appears to men in dreams, and sometimes when they’re awake. Children are often afraid of her.

  According to Simon, the majority of Moroccan Sufi bands are male, although there are plenty of female devotees. ‘And there are all-female groups,’ he said, ‘some of which have been around a long while.’

  He hadn’t seen any mixed-gender bands, but he told me that in the Jilala sect women are heavily involved as singers and dancers alongside male musicians. The Jilala are usually seen at moussems, a local festival held to honour a saint or holy man. ‘They get the women dancing,’ said Simon, ‘and frequently the women go into a trance.’

  Such trances also occur when other brotherhoods perform. From what I saw at subsequent ceremonies, the state appears completely spontaneous, an altered consciousness of which the participant, usually a woman, has no recollection afterward.

  While my first experience of a Sufi performance was intriguing, my concern about being crushed had made it difficult to enjoy. So I felt privileged when, some time later, Sandy and I were invited to a private Sufi healing ceremony for an English friend with cancer.

  The ceremony was held in a riad in the backstreets of the Medina. We arrived just before ten at night to find carpets laid out in the courtyard, with sheepskins and cushions to sit on. This time there were just twenty of us in the audience, mainly Europeans. We took our places for the entrance of the Aissawa Sufis, who were wearing turbans and colourful tunics, some carrying maroon and green flags, others blasting their silver trumpets into the night. Arranging themselves in a circle, they sat down and began to play drums, ghitas (a smaller version of a trumpet), and clackers.

  At first I found the music an incomprehensible wall of sound and wondered how I was going to stand three hours of it. The expressions on the faces of other guests told the same story. But after perhaps an hour, a strange shift in perception occurred. The music seemed to come in waves, approaching with an insistent rush and an increase in tempo that grew and swelled, filling the listeners with exhilaration. One by one, we rose from our places and started swaying and dancing, faces glowing. The trumpets swung over our heads, the drums crashed, the chanting gathered pace. We began clapping, and moving faster, led by the musicians into an increasingly frenetic dance. Everyone wore ecstatic smiles. It’s impossible to think about the petty concerns of life while your brain is being pummelled into submission.

  Then the waves of music ebbed and we found ourselves in silence. A silver cup containing milk was brought out and blessed by the head of the brotherhood, then offered to our sick friend to drink while a prayer was said. We closed our eyes for a few moments and willed her to be strong. When the music star
ted again it was as if a switch had been thrown, and the mood swung back to an ecstatic celebration of life.

  No one was left unaffected. One previously reserved Englishwoman who’d been sitting on the edges was now leaping around as though she were plugged into mains power. The rhythm built to its final crashing crescendo, leaving us high with exhilaration. I agreed with Simon – Sufi ceremonies were like a rave party, but with better music.

  Sandy and I had a wealth of material from the festival to post on the weblog and turn into newspaper articles, but as we were still waiting for Maroc Telecom to connect us to the Internet, we had to do it all from a local café, where the keyboards were in Arabic. My six or seven visits to Maroc Telecom had resulted in assurances that a technician’s arrival was imminent, but none eventuated. It was a bit like Waiting for Godot. I was told on one visit that we couldn’t possibly have a problem because we weren’t on the list of people who had problems. How one made it onto the list was a mystery.

  Then Jenny’s mother, hearing the story, joined the campaign. In Fez for a holiday, she took herself and Jenny’s translator off to lay siege to the head technician in his office. Her petite, birdlike appearance belied her determination: she told the technician she had flown all the way from Australia to sort out this problem, that it was an urgent business matter and she needed it done now.

  She must have been formidable because the technician got on the phone and we were online within an hour. In Morocco, personal contact makes all the difference. At last we were able to sit in the comfort of our downstairs salon and file our stories and pictures.

  But our battles with bureaucracy didn’t end there. Late one night, I opened the door to find a local government official known as the Maqadim, who had visited several times before – once to check the status of our passports, then our ownership of the riad, and again to inspect our roqsa and make dire admonitions about changing anything in the house. The Maqadim was a tall, thin bearded man with gold-rimmed glasses and he relished the more officious aspects of his job.

  I waited for him to state his business. He wanted to come in, he said in French, to check the work on the house. I reluctantly let him in, saying Sandy was already asleep. Taking him into the kitchen, I pointed out what a good job the builder was doing. He gave the work a cursory glance.

  ‘Where is your architect’s attestation to say he is in charge of the job?’ the Maqadim asked.

  I told him that the original was at the government offices and that I didn’t have a copy.

  ‘I must have one,’ he said. ‘You need to give it to me.’

  I couldn’t see why. It was self-evident we had one, as we wouldn’t have received our roqsa without it. If he was so keen on seeing the attestation, couldn’t he call into the office? It was right near his. But I didn’t want to antagonise him, so I agreed to drop it in.

  ‘When?’ he insisted. ‘It must be this week.’

  It seemed that the Maqadim was intent on hassling us until he found something wrong. He had developed the habit of knocking on our door when he knew our workers wouldn’t be around. I suspected he was hoping we’d slip him a handful of dirhams to leave us in peace, but as he never asked and we didn’t offer, he kept turning up.

  The majority of Moroccan officials we encountered were pleasant and helpful; this man was an exception, and unfortunately this wasn’t the last time we were to cross swords with him.

  ALTHOUGH SANDY AND I were used to spending a large amount of time together in Australia, working side by side for so long was a new experience for us. Mostly we managed to balance the multitude of demands made on us during the day pretty well, still maintaining our sense of humour, but there was a palpable sense of relief when the workers left and we could sit down for a drink and a chat.

  Sandy had been making an effort to learn Darija, and during the day he would go around the house every half-hour, checking what people were doing. If this wasn’t done, the workers would assume they knew what we wanted, then spend ages doing something that often had to be redone later. Sandy had a sympathetic way of dealing with people that made them feel he was on their side.

  ‘We are not used to having bosses who are so friendly,’ Si Mohamed told us after a few weeks. ‘Usually we get shouted at.’

  Sandy never shouted but nor was he a pushover, and he could be firm when necessary.

  While Sandy did most of the supervising, I concentrated on the design side of things – door frames, balustrades, tile patterns, furniture, fittings and finishes. Having researched what was traditional then adapting a design to suit our house, I would communicate with the artisans via Si Mohamed. Sometimes, naturally, they had their own ideas about the way things should be done, but I tried not to lose sight of the overall design. New elements had to blend with the old, rather than compete with them.

  I did most of the cooking, and in the absence of a cleaner, Sandy took that task on, an arrangement that sometimes had the locals bemused. He was brandishing our new vacuum cleaner one morning when the workers arrived. They gave him odd looks. I knew that a Moroccan man would never be caught dead doing housework, and thought it was good for them to see the ‘grand patron’ of the riad taking such things in his stride.

  The day before, Sandy had been hanging the washing on the line when a woman on the terrace next door burst out laughing at him. Sure, this was a cultural difference, but to me, women who ridicule men when they do housework are their own worst enemies.

  Sandy was given a reprieve when we found a new cleaner, a university economics student who came a couple of times a week. She wore a headscarf and was outwardly traditional, yet she was also a born flirt. Some of the male workers joked about taking her as a second wife.

  We had emerged from the cocoon-like environment of the music festival to have our house invaded by electricians. In our experience of electricians in Australia, they’d mostly worked quietly and been expensive; here they were the reverse. The financial cost was reasonable, the psychic assault anything but. Like army ants on amphetamines, they attacked our beautiful walls with hammers and chisels, shrouding the courtyard in dust through which stone and plaster chips flew like shrapnel.

  We had marked the walls in coloured chalk to indicate where we wanted lights, switches and power points. The current wiring had been installed in 1940s conduit on the outsides of the walls. Many of the power points didn’t work and the capacity of the system, at 110 volts, was such that you could blow a fuse by running two appliances at once. We had to decide what was most essential at any given time, the fridge or our laptops.

  Now these chalk marks became a kind of lunatic join-the-dots game, with muscly young men making deep tracks for the new conduit in our ancient walls, which leaked copious quantities of sand. We tried not to cringe at the channels in walls that were supporting a huge weight above them.

  This trench warfare moved so fast we had to frantically shift our belongings from room to room, shoving everything into plastic bags, to keep ahead of them. We had thought we could confine them to the first floor until the lights and switches were installed, after which we could move up and they could move down. But they insisted on attacking the riad on all fronts. Nobody could explain why – it simply was.

  By four o’clock on the first day, we felt shell-shocked and jittery. Our house had become a war zone. It was times like this I wanted to take a holiday from the life we’d chosen. I had to remind myself why it was we’d travelled to the other side of the world at great trouble and expense to live lives our grandparents had happily rejected. The romance of having no hot water, and boiling the big copper kettle for every set of dishes and bucket bath, had soured. I regularly burned my toes as I poured the leaky kettle.

  Then there were the hours spent crouched on the floor handwashing clothing, sheets and towels. And yet, compared to almost everyone around us, we were well off. The locals who filled every available container with water at the fountain down the alley and carted it home had no choice; they couldn’t afford the
water bills. I had to admit I was a spoiled Westerner who found it hard to go backwards in my living standard. I liked having hot water on tap, and above all I liked hot showers. The prospect of doing without for several more months wasn’t appealing.

  But eventually the trenches were all dug and the electricians moved on to laying the cables, a process which was less dusty but just as chaotic. Like feral spaghetti, cables colonised the entire riad, and walking around became an exercise in avoiding them. Underfoot they threatened to send us tumbling downstairs; they reached out from walls and attempted to ensnare us as we passed.

  Several days into the age of electricians, I was aroused from a siesta by yelling. A woman was screaming at Mustapha from the adjoining parapet. He shouted back, others joined in, and the whole thing became a slanging match.

  I hurried out. ‘What on earth is going on?’ I asked Si Mohamed.

  ‘The neighbour says the plaster is falling off her wall from our banging. Mustapha is telling her it is her fault for not letting us inside to check it in the first place.’

  It was the same woman who’d told us to go away when we asked to look at what was happening on her side of the wall. Immediate action was called for. Grabbing the nearest suitable gift, which happened to be a bright yellow melon, I collared Mustapha, Si Mohamed and the hapless Jon, who’d chosen that moment to appear, and we marched around to her door.

  Presented with the melon, the woman changed completely. As we were taking her seriously, we were honoured guests in her house.