by Annie Hawes
I am disappointed, though. Until today, I’ve always admired the intrepidity of those Moroccans who, leaving their homeland far behind, come to Italy to make their living trekking up and down the steep, narrow alleys of our Ligurian hill villages selling from door to door. They carry huge packs on their backs, from which they sell rugs and household items: dishcloths, oven gloves, sheets, pillowcases . . . Now that I’ve seen Chefchaouen, though, I realize they’re hardly intrepid at all. You could drop a Ligurian hill village in here without anyone even noticing, though you’d need to spruce it up a bit first, or the neighbours would soon be giving you what-for. They must feel completely at home.
Well, not quite, I have to admit. The superior hydraulics of Islam are as evident here as in Granada or Calabria. There are public water-fountains at almost every crossroads, decorated Andalusian style with tiles and brickwork. Andalusian style, because this town too was a place of refuge from Spain. It had not long been founded – by the argumentative Berbers themselves, in 1471 – when seventeen families of refugees, both Muslims and Jews, arrived here from el-Andalus seeking asylum. The Berbers had plenty of Christian trouble on their hands as it was – Chefchaouen had been conceived as a safe base from which to attack the Portuguese, the latest comers to snatch Ceuta. Now, across the water, Granada finally fell to the Christians. Many Andalusian Jews had already arrived seeking safely here. Now came the Muslims. Soon, the Spanish sailed in and seized Melilla. Refugees would go on arriving on Berber shores for the next century, as Spain’s policy towards her remaining non-Christian population hardened. Enough was enough. The Jews and Muslims of Chefchaouen decided to ban any members of the troublesome Christian religion from entering their city gates, ever again – on pain of death. The ban on Christians stood firm from now until 1927, when all of a sudden, faced with those quarter-of-a-million armed men dispatched by the aberrant third People of the Book, the local residents had no choice in the matter.
In all the intervening centuries, history records only three intrepid (or mad) Christians succeeding in entering the town. Two Victorian travellers of the nineteenth century, rising to the challenge as only Victorian travellers would, managed to infiltrate Chefchaouen, one disguised as a Jew, the other as a Muslim trader on his way in, and a beggar on his panic-stricken way out. The third was a Christian missionary, who for obvious reasons did not bother with a disguise. He died shortly after his visit, from the effects of the poison administered to him during his stay. Or so the story goes. And in 1927, when the Spanish troops finally entered Chefchaouen, they were stunned to find the town’s Jewish community addressing them, with great fluency, in a very odd version of their own language. They still spoke Castilian Spanish, as it had been spoken 400 years earlier.
The blue paint on Chefchaouen’s walls, I notice, often doesn’t go much above head height. Maybe it serves some useful function? I was once told that, beneath the superstition, the underlying reason for the blue window-surrounds of olden-day Portugal was to do less with discouraging evil spirits than with repelling insects. Apparently a lot of species find blue particularly unappealing. If so, this must be the most insect-free town ever. The children are still doing a good job of replacing them, though: buzzing round and round me like a bunch of manic bees. One of the boldest keeps trying to put her hand in my pockets. Nazrani, she keeps saying. No idea what this means, but I can tell from her tone that it’s some kind of taunt. Oy, I reply eventually, resorting to international sound-effect language as I slap at her wrist. A woman sweeping the street outside her doorstep comes to my aid – calls the infants to order with a shout and a hand-clap. Within seconds, they have all vanished.
Voilà, she says, with a magician’s twist of the wrist, making me laugh.
Ah, that’s how you do it! I say in English, imitating her hand-clap. Now we’re both laughing. Who needs language? And look at that – even her doorstep is painted blue! A little further on, at the dead-end niche of an alley, the cobblestones themselves are blue. And at the next fountain, two young women are rinsing out a paint-bucket with water. No prizes for guessing what colour paint.
Bonjour, Nazrani, says one of them.
As-salamu aleikum, says the other, giggling.
Bonjour! You’re painting? I say inanely, flapping an imaginary paint-brush against an imaginary wall, in case bonjour is as far as their French goes, and wondering anew about this Nazrani word. It surely can’t be that rude, can it, if these two friendly-seeming women are saying it too?
Yes, yes, painting! Hard work! they say, pointing out a patch of freshly painted blue, head-high, just down a side-alley.
Finished, they add. Cleaning now!
But you stop this high? I ask, gesturing just above my head, hoping to get some interesting information from them about the low-flying behaviour of evil spirits. Or of insects, at a pinch.
The answer does not concern either insects or spirits, however, but humans. Los maridos. We’ve gone into Spanish now, and I gather that their menfolk don’t want them going up ladders. Other men might see things they shouldn’t. (Lots of giggling as one of them raises the hem of her jellaba to show me how.) But the men of Chefchaouen are too lazy (or do they mean too stoned on their own hashish? They are imitating a lounging man puffing at a cigarette) so the upper storeys never get done!
Sounds just like home improvements everywhere, then . . .
Er – Nazrani? I say now, in a questioning sort of voice, hoping for illumination on this matter too.
They both fall about laughing: I’ve gone and made it sound as if I’m calling them Nazrani, whatever Nazrani may be.
La, la, they say, wagging their index fingers: No, no! And now they point at me, nodding emphatically. Nazrani, they repeat.
Yesus, one of them adds helpfully, as I go on looking puzzled. I get it at last. Jesus of Nazareth – Jesus the Nazarene! And that’s what they’re calling me – a Nazarene, a Christian.
I suppose, in a town with a history like this one, that is a kind of an insult.
When I meet up with the boys again, it is to find that they’ve spent the last half hour in the square fending off an endless stream of horribly tenacious young men who categorically refused to believe that they did not want to buy several kilos of hashish. Or, at the very least, visit a carpet shop. In retaliation, Guy has bought himself a burnous: an enormous ankle-length cloak of white, or rather natural-coloured, wool, a traditional garment in which he thinks he looks less noticeably tourist-like. Au contraire, he just looks absurdly melodramatic. He is about a foot taller than any Moroccan we have seen so far, and quite a lot skinnier. Moreover, we’ve only seen one single ancient countryman wearing a burnous: traditional they may be, but something tells me they are severely out of fashion amongst the locals. Also, Guy’s uncovered European head, complete with Ray-Bans, does not suit the ensemble. Nothing to be done, though. Guy is in love with his burnous and will refuse to take it off until the heat forces him out of it, several hundred miles further south.
Meanwhile he has got chatting to a Dutch woman, who was apparently undaunted by the odd figure he now cuts. She’s been living here for twenty years, married to a local man, and she tells us that the blue paint of Chefchaouen is actually a fashion that was launched by the town’s Jewish community, some time in the 1920s. Sadly, the Jews are all gone now, but their chosen colour remains. The last Jewish artisan, a saddler, she says, went in the 1970s, to Israel. And a few years before him, the last family of jewellers left for France. Apparently particular trades went with particular ethnicities here, once upon a time: Jews always made packsaddles and other rough leather goods, or worked with fine metals. Only Jews could do this last job, because the mixing of two different metals by a Muslim would unleash the supernatural wrath of some particularly awe-inspiring and vengeful djinn.
Chefchaouen’s Jews, our new acquaintance tells us, had already been leaving for a couple of decades; ever since the creation of the state of Israel. Not because they wanted to go there – they didn’t,
and in fact, most of those who left went to France. But every time Israel was seen to commit some act of outrage – first, right at the beginning, driving the Palestinians off their land and out of their homes, then the occupations of more Muslim peoples’ lands after the Six Day War, and so on and on – the Jewish community here was doomed to bear the brunt of public outrage at the actions of a land that was not theirs, and to which they had, and desired, no connection. Their lives had become unbearable. Those of the Jewish faith were now seen in the same light as the troublesome Christians before them. Depressingly, it was the existence of Israel, a supposed place of refuge, that turned the Jews of Chefchaouen, after all those centuries, back into refugees.
Meeting up with Mokhtar, Mariam and Aytan again, we learn some more about the town’s intriguing relationship with Christians. As we stand waiting for taxis under the red-sandstone citadel, Mokhtar grabs Gérard and Guy by the elbows, and swivels them round to face it.
What do they think of it? Would they be up to building a thing like that, he asks. No? Are they sure? He thinks they could, if they really tried, he says. If they were given no choice! And he gives a sinister cackle of laughter.
He now reveals that it is not entirely true that all Christians have been banned here since the arrival of the Granada refugees. It stands to reason, Mokhtar says with a grin, that you Nazarenes are fine people, as long as you’re not at liberty to start causing trouble!
The very last Christians in town were prisoners of war, we now hear, taken some time in the late 1500s, when the bold warriors of Chefchaouen managed to capture a whole invading Portuguese army. They marched them right back here and forced them to build this citadel, in which they were now incarcerated for the rest of their lives. Mokhtar doesn’t sound remotely sorry about it, either. The Christians started it all, anyway, he says; and they were not coming here to settle their families peacefully on the land, like true People of the Book, but to pursue profit and warlike aims: whereas the Jews and Muslims they had driven out of el-Andalus had been living quietly in their homes, minding their own business, in a beautiful, fertile land that they themselves had created, over all those eight long centuries. European settlers have been in the Americas only half that time, and how would they feel if they were suddenly told to pack up and leave? El-Andalus was a beloved country, celebrated in song and in verse as an earthly paradise. Here in the Rif, those Andalusian songs are still sung, and over the festival of Eid, Mokhtar promises, he will make sure we hear an Andalus band play the songs of the old homeland.
Memories are certainly long in this part of the world. TV in the Rif being something you go to the bar to watch – king permitting – people are, I suppose, obliged to entertain themselves in the old way, of an evening, by telling and retelling the old stories passed on by their grandparents, and the grandparents’ grandparents. Not so long since it was like this in Europe, too, though; before the professional creators of endless streams of new tales moved into our homes. I remember the Scots granny, in her later and more confused years, telling us children a tale of terror – in which she was certain she’d participated herself – wherein our family home was burnt down by rampaging soldiers, but the menfolk had managed to save the roof-timbers, carrying them forty miles across country on their own shoulders, all the way to the sea. The burns were running with blood: she had dipped a hand in the cold, cold water and it had come out as red as if she were bleeding herself . . . We eventually realized that these events belonged to the Highland clearances, when the clans-people of the north of Scotland were driven out of their crofts to make way for the more profitable sheep-runs – well over a hundred years before she was born. There must still have been some fine, vivid story-tellers around in Europe when the Granny was young.
Our taxi grinds its way on along ever narrower mountain roads, winding through green hillsides dotted with wild marigolds, great ochre gashes here and there where the steep land has fallen away in a cascade of rocks. I am squeezed into the back seat with Gérard and Aytan, Mariam travelling in front. Somewhere behind us is a second taxi with Guy, Mokhtar and another two passengers who were going this way. You don’t hire the whole taxi in this part of the world, just a seat in it. And it doesn’t leave until it’s full.
Aytan is intrigued to hear that we’re on our way to Algeria. Plenty of trouble there, he says, shaking his head. He’s been following the news on Algerian radio. Latest is that the stand-in government – though maybe that really means the army – has banned the Front for Islamic Salvation. They’re rounding up thousands of its supporters and putting them under arrest. A stupid move. The FIS were calling for peaceful reforms, but they’re being treated as if they stood for an Islamist revolution and an end to democracy, a country run by imams.
I am impressed. At last we’ve met a Moroccan prepared to believe that the Algerians may not be a nation of Godless Communists who merely masquerade as Muslims.
Worrying, says Gérard, who seems to have taken to Aytan right away. Surely that will only push people into the arms of the extremists, convince them that change will never come through the vote, only through violence?
We’re going over a high mountain pass now, through a spectacularly narrow sunless gorge. But I’m hardly taking any notice of the landscape. I am busy concentrating on how unafraid I would be of holidaying in Ireland. Where on earth did I pack Samir and Mireille’s paper napkin?
We clamber out of the taxi at last, in what seems to be the middle of nowhere, and stand waiting for the others to turn up. The afternoon sunlight on the mountains is beginning to mellow. Birds of prey are soaring and dipping across the wide valleys, shrill angry cries as they compete for air space. Below us, the vibrant green of the spring hillside is interrupted, here and there, by the lighter green of almond trees. Down at the foot of the valley, a silver ribbon of river snakes its way along a rock-strewn bed. In a fold of the hill above the road lies a village of scattered stone houses, terraced fields all around it, and the dome of a small mosque. It all looks idyllic. Maybe we shouldn’t bother with Algeria after all?
7
Guy and Mokhtar arrive, laughing and nudging one another, labass- ing away at the other people in their cab. They’ve been at that old price-of-mules bonding again, evidently. Once Guy has disentangled himself and his burnous from the rest of the passengers, Mariam and Aytan lead the way down a narrow dirt track through a sparse olive grove. There are primroses and violets in the grass at its edges, and tiny star anemones under the trees. We’re going to stop off at Mokhtar’s first, to drop off the stuff Mariam has bought for tonight’s dinner. There’s a golden-orange pumpkin for the couscous, a tiny twist of saffron for the pastilla, and Aytan is carrying a bag filled to the brim with almonds still in their shells. They’re for the pastilla too: it’s a kind of pie filled with chicken – or with pigeon if we’re lucky, Mariam says. Sweetened, toasted almonds are always part of the recipe, everywhere in Morocco – except here in the Rif. But for tonight, Khadija, that’s Mokhtar’s sister, has generously agreed to let Mariam treat the family to her own home-town version. And she’s brought the almonds herself, she says, just to make sure there’s no backtracking!
Mariam and Aytan, we have discovered, are not from the Rif at all, but from the city of Casablanca, a couple of hundred miles away. When you first qualify as a teacher here in Morocco, you have to take whatever job you’re offered for your first four-year stint. Poor villages like this one, Mariam said, would never get any teachers otherwise. It’s a catch-22 situation. Hardly any locals have ever had any schooling, so there never will be any local teachers wanting to settle down here to work. These four-year billets are part of the king’s literacy campaign, which might one day change all that. When Aytan and Mariam have earned their laurels here, they’ll get a chance at jobs nearer to home and family.
It seems a good plan to us foreigners. But Mariam doesn’t sound too hopeful. You will see later, she says. Then you will tell me how serious this country is about educating the child
ren of the Rif.
We turn uphill into a sort of smallholding, a jumble of low stone buildings enclosing a wide dirt yard. On the nearest side stands a relatively modern house, its sharp cement angles an odd contrast to the ancient, organic stone-and-mud of the older buildings. They have everything you could possibly need to survive here, Yazid-style: chickens clucking about the yard, a cow tethered by the far building, munching its way through what looks like a pile of dry palm-leaves, rows of vegetables down below the house – tall stands of peas or beans towering over the rest – and citrus trees beside them. The most noticeable feature of the yard, though, is a bread-oven of enormous size, shaped like a great domed beehive, mud-plastered and well over head-high.
