by Annie Hawes
It’s a picture of a man on horseback – no frame, a bit raggedy round the edges, and vaguely Persian in style, rich deep colours, with the horseman’s turban and robes flying out behind him, his curved sword raised, his great white horse rearing up, about to crush underfoot a tangle of supine men in uniform.
Abd el-Krim, crushing the Nazarenes! says Khadija. Mokhtar, sitting beneath the image, raises a clenched fist, giving us a gap-toothed grin. The traditions of the Bled es-Siba have not been forgotten. And far from being ashamed of this graven image, or whatever the technical term may be in Islam, Farid the patriarch is so proud of it that he insists on our coming over for a closer look. Gérard is right in there, checking out his hero, while the real Abdelkrim adopts the heroic pose of his namesake, and Mokhtar gives him a round of applause.
The children, whose drumming-and-clapping game has been building up into ever more complex rhythms in the background, have been joined by Aytan, now, on a pair of teaspoons. Can all Moroccans do this? It’s very impressive. One of them will change a rhythm or add a different one, and the others will vary theirs to counterpoint it. At first it seemed just a complex game, but now it’s become real music. The family percussionists build to a mocking crescendo as Farid draws Gérard’s attention to a banknote pinned to the bottom of the picture. Evidently this is an oft-played scenario. Farid unpins it for our inspection. One Riffan, it says. Legal tender once issued by the short-lived Republic of the Rif. Strangely, it seems to be printed mostly in English. ‘State Bank of the Riff ’ it says at the top; and down below, ‘equal to ten English pence’, above the French version, ‘bon pour un franc d’or’.
Of course it’s in English, says Farid. It was designed by Captain Gardiner! Captain Charlos Gardiner! A good man, an arms smuggler, who brought many fine guns, English Enfield rifles and Italian Stati too, to help our republic against the colonizers’ armies. And see what fine-quality banknotes he made, too – seventy years on, and it looks as new as the day it was printed!
The granddaughters have been singing little phrases, copying the Andalus singer from the radio, along with their teaspoon rhythm section. But Farid tells them to be quiet. Khadija must sing a song from the Rif War, now, for the guests to hear. The song is chosen, and Khadija launches into it, accompanied by the infant percussionists. A sad, passionate song, and Khadija’s performance is only slightly spoilt by Mokhtar’s simultaneous translation into Spanish. ‘Lalla, oh, Lalla, listen to the sound of the guns across the river . . . Lalla, oh, Lalla, I still keep my pride, even if the colonizer is here . . . The men wear the jellaba, but it is we, the women, who have prepared them and sent them to war . . .’ Stirring stuff. Gérard is over the moon.
Dinner being over, Nadia brings in a lit brazier for the tea. Farid and Abdelkrim take charge of making and pouring it. Serving tea to guests is men’s work here in the Maghreb. Masses of sugar and a handful of fresh spearmint go into the pot along with the tea, and a sprig of mint into each glass too, for good measure. Abdelkrim makes a fine art of the pouring, raising the teapot almost to head height with each glass, creating a stream of bubbles. It looks beautiful, the bright green leaves against the gold of the tea, the bubbles winking at the brim, though the French contingent are, of course, wistfully dreaming of the fortifying dash of cognac they would be getting back home to aid their digestion.
I settle onto a nice big pile of cushions to drink my tea. I badly needed to stretch my legs out. How do people handle all this sitting cross-legged on the floor, this crouching over their cooking apparatus? My legs don’t seem to be designed for it at all. Mariam comes over to sit next to me. And now, the volume being pretty loud in here still, she decides to talk privately about the reason why she argues with Aytan: her experiences with the Islamists in her own home quartier of Casablanca. Those boys, she says, had nothing to do with the spirit of community and enlightened generosity her husband and his fellow intellectuals imagine when they talk of a rebirth of Islam. More like hatred and despotism. Their claim to respect on the streets was that they’d gone off to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan – and won. They came back wearing big beards and Afghan tunics, swaggering with their new macho-Islam credentials, in and out of the mosque, saying their five-times-a-day prayers as ostentatiously as possible and harassing others to join in, scaring young girls like Mariam and her friends over their Western-style clothes, or tormenting small shopkeepers to close up for Friday prayers. Nobody had any respect for them before they left – they were just the usual layabouts – but now they were holier-than-thou heroes who’d been prepared to die for their faith. Who could stand up to them? The moral high ground, Mariam says, is the perfect place to bully people from.
You get just the same kind of thing in Christianity, I say, thinking we’re on the same wavelength. You see evangelists calling for tolerance and brotherly love, family values and what-have-you, but then, as often as not, when they go off to live the dream, there is no tolerance for anyone outside their own sects, the brotherly love turns into race-hate or immigrant-bashing, and the support for family values turns out to mean attacking gays and unmarried mothers.
Well said. I have just confirmed everything a respectable Muslim might think about Western degeneracy. Mariam looks deeply alarmed: she certainly does not identify with gays or unmarried mothers. This place really is like Europe forty years back. Plus or minus a few supernatural beings, that is: I suppose you’d need to go back more like eighty to find Europeans in serious fear of evil spirits. Still, henceforth I shall remember never to say anything that wouldn’t have gone down well with my granny. Then I’m bound to get it right.
The farming folk are ready to take to their beds nice and early. They’ll be up at dawn tomorrow, as usual. And now, we degenerate Westerners discover that alcohol is not so far off the radar as we’ve imagined. Abdelkrim will join us for a bit, he says, looking slightly furtive, as we collect the radio and get ready to take our leave. As we make our way back up the hill, he produces a bottle of Moroccan red wine, magician style, from the deep pocket of his jellaba. Surprising enough, but we are utterly amazed when, back at the house, Aytan brings out a half-bottle of scotch whisky and a bottle of Coca-Cola. I hardly know whether it’s the whisky or the Coke that is the more shocking.
Fortunately, if there’s one thing whisky is good for, it’s getting over a shock; and once Abdelkrim has found a radio station he likes we party the night away – no longer to the ancient music of Islamic Andalus, but to the East–West fusion of Rai music. It’s being broadcast from Oran, says Abdelkrim, where it was first born. Over the border in Algeria. The best music in the Maghreb.
Morning. It’s hardly even daybreak. I’ve been lying awake for ages. Everything’s too interesting for sleeping. The radio is lying right by my carpet-nest. Maybe there’ll be some news from Algeria? I turn it on.
Stupid idea: they’re talking in Arabic, of course. Two announcers are interrupting one another, sounding very agitated. Has something momentous happened?
The door to the teachers’ apartment opens. Aytan sticks his head round it to see what’s going on. I’ve woken him up. I apologize profusely.
Not at all, he says. Carry right on! It’s fine by him if I want to listen to the Algerian football results.
And he goes back to bed.
The water in the bucket is looking very low. I decide to wander on down to Khadija’s. Maybe I can have a splash at their water-butt? I’m not going to be staying here long enough to get embroiled in any water controversies, after all, am I?
I stop off to have a look at the djinn-pond on my way. A beautiful little grotto under the pine trees. You’d have to be blind not to notice the suggestiveness of the forms nature has taken in this welcoming green damp nook. In the dawn light the tall straight rock looks remarkably phallic. And the spring, a tiny mossy crevice in the rockface, ferns sprouting all around it, looks remarkably like the female equivalent. A low boulder by the side of the little pool has been worn smooth by the bottoms of
generations of would-be mothers. I have to agree with Aytan. Definitely un-Islamic. I should think this place must have been a focus for fertility-magic since time immemorial.
The dawn muezzin starts to call as I leave the grotto, reminding me, in the nick of time, that there is only One God. I pass a herdsman smoking a pipe and watching his flock, gazing peacefully out across the mountains. Kif at dawn . . . This must be what the stuff is really meant for. Another muezzin starts up in the distance. And another. Like all the shooting last night, you can’t tell whether there are really dozens of voices calling, or if they’re just echoes and re-echoes thrown back by the hillsides.
I find Khadija and Nadia already out in the yard, busy getting the bread-oven lit. Apart from its enormous size it’s identical to the country bread-ovens you still find in Italy, a kind of igloo inside which you make a fire of wood, slapping a horseshoe-shaped iron door over the entrance to keep the heat in. Once the fire has burnt down, you shove the embers aside and add your dough. The accumulated heat within does the baking, imparting a lovely smoky flavour to your bread.
Khadija is very proud of hers: she and Nadia built it themselves. The only thing they paid for was the metal door. The reason for its huge size is so they can make a few pennies doing other villagers’ baking for them, and extra loaves to sell on market days. She is so pleased with my appreciation of it, and my genuine interest – born out of certain Italian experiences with an outdoor pizza-oven – in the topic of mud-plaster recipes and the desirability of adding cow dung to them that she decides she’ll make me a special treat for breakfast – a brik. But don’t tell the others!
No risk of that. Firstly, they’re still asleep. And secondly, I don’t know what a brik is.
Nadia is spreading a pair of rush mats over the other side of the yard: time for prayers. Didn’t I hear the muezzin? Why don’t I join them?
Er, well, to start with, I don’t know the words.
The first bit is easy, says Nadia. As-salamu aleikum, she begins. Come on, just try!
What, the prayer starts by just saying hello?
Of course it does. You are saying good morning to your two djinns.
News to me. I didn’t even know I had two djinns.
But everyone does. The djinns who sit on either shoulder, one of them calling you to do good, the other to do evil: and keep a record of your actions for Judgement Day.
Really? Not news at all, then. I don’t think they are exactly Christian, not in the biblical sense – more folklore. But that makes it even stranger to come across the same thing here. I remember from my childhood that, if you spilt salt, you had to throw a pinch of it over your left shoulder, into the eyes of your Bad Spirit, whose perch it was! I am amazed.
Khadija and Nadia just laugh. What’s to be surprised about? Of course I know about the djinns: everybody does! Except Aytan, that is. He will give you a big long lecture about how the greeting is not to your guardian djinns at all, but to the umma, the rest of the Muslim world community. But then, city people do have their own ways, don’t they?
I am beginning to have a theory about all this party-pooping behaviour of Aytan’s. I think people here, especially educated people, are so traumatized by a long history of colonial disdain that they’ve internalized the colonizers’ image of their nations as scruffy, superstitious savages. Good luck to Aytan, but I’d say you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you get rid of all the magic and mystery in your religion. The Christians have done that in my own country – invented a supposedly rational religion – and look how many people ever go to church in England!
The brik turns out to be a brilliant Rif version of the fried egg on toast. Khadija folds a left-over pastry leaf from last night into a sort of cone in her hand, like the paper cornets sweets used to be sold in once upon a time, then cracks an egg into it. She adds salt, pepper and fresh coriander leaves, folds over the top, and sticks it down into a triangular envelope with a bit of the egg-white. Now she fries the whole thing crispy in olive oil and butter mixed. I immediately make plans to breakfast on these things forever, until I remember what a performance it is making the pastry. But then, maybe you could use filo pastry, or the stuff you wrap spring rolls in?
Scenting delicious snack aromas, the grandchildren now appear, demanding the same. Indulgently, Khadija makes them one each – only because it’s Eid, now! – and they all run off, dribbling egg-yolk.
Khadija sighs. What is going to become of her grandchildren? She will tell me a secret: the only reason she is glad that they are going to Mariam’s school is so that they will be able to leave this place one day. Education is good, because it makes it easier for people to go. There is nothing here but scraping a living from the land, living on a tightrope, wearing your fingers to the bone – always anxious and worried. Nothing will stop her from getting those children reading and writing as well as the imam himself!
What about your olive trees, though? I ask. I’ve been wondering about this since I tried the oil yesterday. Why can’t people here make a living from anything but cannabis? There are plenty of olive trees. Surely there’s a good market for olive oil? That’s certainly what saved our village in Italy, just when it seemed about to die on its feet, with every last son and daughter either leaving for the cities or emigrating. And I know for a fact that Italian wholesalers are buying up more and more hectolitres of North African oil every year.
Khadija says nothing in answer to this, just gets to her feet and leads me off outside the yard. Here, round the back of the house, beyond the yard walls, a single fat millstone stands out in the open, resting in a deep circular enclosure – the pit that holds the olives. There is a wooden bar slotted through the millstone’s central hole to rest on a central pivot, also of wood. Khadija leans on the bar, worn smooth and gleaming with the effort of years. The stone creaks round an inch or two in its channel. This, she says, is how they mill their olives here.
I have heard of this very low-tech kind of mill, but I’ve never actually seen one before. You call it a frantoio a sangue in Italian, a blood mill, which may sound barbaric (pace my Berber-Amazigh hosts!), but the name is just to distinguish it from a frantoio ad acqua, a water-mill: the driving force being not the water flowing through a river, but the blood flowing through a living body.
Well, I say, obviously she and her neighbours would have to take their harvests to a proper commercial mill and pay to get it pressed, but it would be worth it, the price they’d get for the oil would easily cover the cost and make them a nice big profit too.
I am already planning to start ringing people up as soon as I get back to Italy – maybe I could single-handedly save this village from poverty? – when Khadija puts a full stop to the fantasy. There is, she says, no such thing as a commercial olive-mill here. Not anywhere in the region. People here have always made their oil on this small family scale.
I take another look at the mill. Usually, the living body that drives one of these things is a mule or some other beast, not a human. Imagine having to use nothing but your own body-weight to shove that great stone round and round over the olives. I thought I’d gone back to the simple life when I moved to Italy. Little did I know how much simpler it can get! There’s a ring of cobbles set in the ground around the millstone to give some purchase as you battle to shift that massive weight. What a terrible job it must be.
You can harness it to a mule, Khadija agrees. That’s what they used to do in her father’s time, but a mule costs seven or eight hundred pounds, an investment well beyond her family’s means.
But wasn’t Mokhtar trying to buy one only yesterday, when we met him?
In his dreams, says Khadija. He likes to be out and about, doing the rounds, talking horseflesh and money-making schemes to other men, who are probably in the same boat as him anyway, penniless. So they all end up smoking so much of their home-grown kif that they can’t even remember what the scheme was, never mind get hold of the mule!
I find myself wondering whether the ri
ver down in the valley might be powerful enough to drive a mill-wheel. No, silly idea: medieval technology can’t be the answer. They would have to go for ultra-modernity, to start such a project from scratch and make it profitable. But no, that’s no good, is it? First, they would need electricity. I give up. I knew I wasn’t cut out for commerce. Not surprising people here end up turning to kif.
Where is the press, then? I ask. How do you extract the oil from the crushed olives?
Khadija points out a large pit a few feet away, in the lee of the house wall. I gaze at it, perplexed. How on earth do you use a hole in the ground to squeeze crushed olives?
No squeezing involved: that is the explanation. You throw the crushed olives into the pit, she explains, and cover them with hot water. The oil rises slowly to the top over the next day or two, and you scoop it off, spoonful by spoonful.
Very ingenious indeed – if you only need to make oil for your own use, and couldn’t afford the massive torque of classical oil production anyway. Something tells me that, though Khadija’s extra-virgin would certainly qualify as organic, it might well contravene a few modern hygiene rules once it had sat in that hole in the ground for a day or two. What we need is a millionaire philanthropist. Or better still, some government investment. It was European Union money that saved us in Italy – I wonder if they’re really planning to let Morocco into the European Union any time soon? Doesn’t seem too likely. They’re spending a fortune building great high fences to keep them out, aren’t they? And if they let Morocco in, I suppose they’d have to build an even longer one right through mountain and desert, round the outside of Morocco instead.
