The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  A certain winged steed had also survived the flames. In the wreckage was the kitschy poster of an ornate, pink Buraq, decked out in jewels, with long black hair and heavy makeup — the model for the canvas Naïma painted for the set of The Mirage. There was the drawing made by Ahmed of Buraq knocking over the jug. Spilling from it, in Bouanani’s depiction, are sentences: words that flow into the blank and waiting pages of a nearby book. The picture itself had been soaked with water, and was laid out to dry in the warm July sun. There was a creepy image of a pink and green Satan stabbing Buraq in the heart. And there was Ahmed’s drawing of Muhammad — he had drawn half the Prophet’s face — astride the Buraq and amorously embracing her.

  In Rabat, rumors circulated that Bouanani had died in the fire. Yet in the years that followed he was spotted at least once in the city he had forsaken — in a hotel elevator. Ali Essafi remembers bumping into him. “His body was like that of a ghost, but his spirit was lively, and his hand gestures elegant. His gaze remained youthful and piercing . . .” Essafi was accompanied by a film festival director, and proceeded to make introductions. “My companion looked at Bouanani anxiously, and after fumbling for words, he asked: ‘So you’re alive?’ Bouanani’s answer was a mischievous smile.”

  Set in a place where no one is ever cured, The Hospital is a parable of resurrection. It unfolds within a labyrinth, a tomb that exists outside of time, whose inhabitants dress in “blue, two-piece shrouds.” It is set within the enormous and failed infrastructure of an authoritarian state. Trapped in an unlivable present, the narrator will try an ascent, an abortive, feverish miraj, though he will not even scrape the bottom of heaven’s outermost ring. “I glow bright as a star, I rise above the room to where I can barely hear my companions’ breathing or snoring, I gently flatten myself against the cold ceiling, turn around so that I can look down upon the beds . . .” he relates, before he flops back onto the medical cot. What The Hospital attempts is a resuscitation of memory: of a childhood pronounced dead and the collective memory of a kingdom forced to erase its past. “I admit to being a great amnesiac,” the voice in bed 17 relates. “My memories resemble ruins eroded day after day.” The inmates, like scrappy Scheherazades hooked up to IVs, tell each other well-worn tales to fight against the forgetting. In a place where memories become “bleach-flavored,” their dialogue is full of vivid lists of nouns, as if taking inventory of a vanishing world.

  The patients take pleasure in it: if nothing else remains for them, they can at least wrest back the words for things from oblivion. What emerges from their lists is a hospital that hardly — rather dysfunctionally — seems sterile at all. It has a fantastic garden. “All this vegetation around us! A caprice of a mad gardener . . .” the narrator shouts. He begins to taxonomize. “Look around, we’re not just talking oaks, pines, palms, or harmless poplars. There’s also calabash, rubber, sumac, jackfruit, manchineel, sequoia, and baobab trees, and God knows what else! Not to mention the thousands of exotic flowers that have no business in a hospital.” It is as if someone, an angel perhaps, has removed a wall of the tomb, offering a view onto paradise.

  The Hospital attempts an excavation of memory, but it also poses the question: what’s the point? What’s the purpose of remembering, if at the resurrection, as Bouanani reminds us time and again, everyone will have the same face? Resurrection is the reawakening of the dead; the springing back into gear of joints and sinews unused for centuries as everybody gets up. But resurrection is also the resurgence of camaraderie, of communalism among the living, out of a crater of despair. The marginalized, impoverished, illiterate inmates of the hospital, abandoned by doctors and nurses, band together in unlikely friendships as they weather the freezing winds of a storm. They turn their meager meals into imaginary banquets; they mark occasions with grandiose speeches, like kings. They remind us, at every turn, of their humanity. Despite Bouanani’s preoccupation with ancestors, The Hospital is not about what we owe the dead but about the barest minimum of what we owe the living. It reminds us that the afterlife is not only some shade of existence, postmortem, but also the collective living on — the continuing generations to follow our own. For their sake, it asks how to mend a country, when the rubble of whitewashed memory is the only material at hand.

  It was, by all accounts, a rather exciting moment to leave the planet behind. On February 6, 2011, the world was transfixed as it watched the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Only three weeks earlier, Tunisia’s longtime dictator Ben Ali had been ousted by the protests ignited by a street vendor, who lit himself on fire. In Egypt, the Battle of the Camels had been fought in Tahrir Square, but Hosni Mubarak had not yet been toppled. In Morocco, protesters were just beginning to organize into what would form the February 20 Movement, later to be deftly contained by King Mohammed VI. Yet at this moment of political awakening and hope, Bouanani left the world, in the same, nonconformist way he’d lived in it. He died surrounded by his books in Aït Oumghar. When his death was announced, people mourned the wrong Bouanani — the TV host with the same name.

  Ahmed Bouanani might have slipped entirely into oblivion, and been utterly unknown in English, were it not for the efforts of Touda Bouanani, Omar Berrada, and translators Lara Vergnaud and Emma Ramadan, chief agents of the auteur’s resurrection in the present day. The poet, scholar, and curator Omar Berrada was reading old issues of Souffles, in an attempt to connect to a lost, earlier generation of Moroccan intellectuals, when he first stumbled upon Bouanani’s name. He came across references to a mythical text called L’Hôpital, and visited every bookstore and library he could think of, in Morocco and in France, yet couldn’t find a copy anywhere. Finally locating one on the internet in Uruguay, several years later Berrada was able to arrange for the republication of L’Hôpital in Morocco in the original and in Arabic translation, and an edition in France, in collaboration with editor David Ruffel. Berrada invited Touda Bouanani for an ongoing residency at the center he directs, Dar al-Ma’mûn, and has organized exhibitions, artist commissions, and talks in Bouanani’s memory. Ali Essafi has created a Bouanani documentary, Crossing the Seventh Gate. The old apartment in Rabat has become a hive of activity — scanning, digitizing, collating pages fallen out of order, itemizing on color-coded spreadsheets — the physical labor of reanimating a writer from the grave.

  Inspired by Pessoa’s legendary trunk, Touda has transformed a painted chest from one of her father’s film sets into a trove for his papers. In the esoteric Les Quatre Sources (1977), Bouanani’s only experiment in color, which starred Naïma as a wild sorceress, the trunk concealed a sword passed down from a father to a son. Touda is only just beginning to reckon with the scope of her father’s archive, and what to do with it. If Bouanani seemed to reject the idea of publishing, rather than face the censorship that plagued his films, the text themselves tell another story. Though written by hand, certain manuscripts are formatted as if they were published books, with lists of front matter — “Previously Published” and “Forthcoming” — detailing titles that Bouanani would never see printed in his lifetime. For his nonfiction works such as The Seventh Gate, his history of cinema in Morocco, Bouanani diligently prepared the indexes. Many of the drafts of novels, poems, and stories are illustrated with his drawings, of turbaned theologians, snoring peasants, mythic beasts. Among the papers is a copy of the first edition of Les Persiennes, which appeared in 1980 when Ahmed’s daughter Batoul was eleven. She colored in the pages with bright magic markers, transforming the first page of her father’s tome into a hybrid chicken-goat with claw legs. Later, in 1999, Bouanani would properly inscribe the copy to his daughter, four years before her sudden death: “For my Batoul, some lice and vowels from an earlier time. With an affection and a love that knows no limit —”

  “Happy are those who can make of their suffering something universal,” reads a scrap of paper from 1913, unearthed in Pessoa’s chest. Over forty years of letters and moving pictures, Bouanani’s elements remained remarkabl
y consistent: a 7.65mm bullet, the sound of swallows, a cadaver, and a pickax, the view, half-light, half-shade, through the blinds. He leaves us with a corpus deeply evocative of his own Morocco, its particular species of lice, angels, and flies. Yet out of his strange alphabet, Bouanani has created a body of work that has withstood every torment of time. In the face of a world that remains angry and defeated as ever, Bouanani points us in the direction of the sacred. He passes along the keys to the winged steed to us. “I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret,” Norman O. Brown once wrote. “There comes a time — I believe we are in such a time — when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries . . . by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new.” Ahmed Bouanani is such a mystery. Confounding archangels and autocrats, fire, water, and censorship, Bouanani comes to us, resurrected from the fragments of memory. With his Naïma, they are like the pair captured in an Amazigh love poem, which Ahmed put to paper before it was irrevocably lost:

  A spring gushed up from the tomb of Fadel.

  A spring gushed up from the tomb of Attoush.

  They met each other and circled the world.

  — anna della subin

  new york, 2018

  THE HOSPITAL

  The only memory I have, after centuries spent living inside a stone, is of the gentle touch of tears on a man’s face.

  — Michel Bernanos, The Other Side of the Mountain

  when i walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive. At least that’s what I believed since I could smell the scents of a city on my skin, a city that I would never see again.

  As naturally as could be, I had fallen in behind one of death’s slow employees, I had added my name to a yellow sheet already covered with flyspecks, I had said thank you four or five times to heads nodding at me behind screens in tiny, enclosed spaces where decades of paperwork and x-rays were piling up on dusty shelves; and, as naturally as could be, I hadn’t bothered to turn around in the large hallway to salute life one last time. I had abruptly found myself in another silence — later I’ll call it the silence of a jar — on a planet inhabited by caricatures of aging men, ghosts cloaked in coarse linen, happy as trees or rocks, resigned even to their vomit. The nurse leading me to Wing C proudly wore a Swiss watch on his wrist, undoubtedly purchased on the black market. As we walked, he’d announced the time twice to the groups of invalids slumped on the ground or straddling the low walls. I felt that perhaps this was his reason for being. Not only did he shout out the time, but he also took care to specify the seconds — and thousandths of seconds — to men frozen here for days or weeks and who seemed to harbor all the necessary indifference to the passage of time and changes in the calendar. Was it his way of distancing himself from this ailing humanity? To show them that he belonged to a realm of greater energy, vitality, and life?

  I kept moving as if in a fog, at the end of which the men in white were waiting, I kept moving in a day that could not exist, telling myself: I am not afraid of hell, no, not the hell promised by the holy verses, but a hell without flames, without cannibalistic cooking pots, where they inject you, in small doses, with a slow death. Here, everything is foreseen, custom-built for us, it’s normal that we are rewarded with a pitiful death, beneath tons of indifference and oblivion.

  to those watching, a drowned body rejected by the waves takes on the attributes of a monster — you turn away in disgust, or else observe at a distance, silent and respectful. Under the summer sun, the corpse is protected by anonymity. In horror, you imagine the multitude of creatures that fiercely tore into its skin and eyes, the small fish with sharp teeth who slid between still growing strands of hair.

  The child whose name I once shared, now having taken charge of my sickly body, my face, my memory, resembles in every way this heaving form, stripped of all substance, which the ocean offers up to the astonishment of the living. To describe him I have only photographs in which he invariably adopts an awkward and timid pose. With such flimsy testimonies, it’s hard not to smile, not to feel an emptiness in your gut. As for the impostor, he obsequiously drapes the corpse in a silk shroud. He rarely shows his true face. Instead his dates, places, and stories glisten like enamel, like the pure chrome of an engine.

  My corpse doesn’t bother me. I examine his festering wounds without self-pity. I can’t resurrect him, I’ve forgotten too much. I suspect that, at the threshold of a poorly moored adolescence, my younger self destroyed his tiny world with a brutal kick in the teeth.

  A labyrinth is waiting for me, full of dead-ends, blocked by the efforts of that damn wisp of straw whose corpse, out of time, taunts me with the smile of unshakable death. Here in this hospital, will I end up like the pilgrim dreaming of riches who, upon waking, shows me his penniless hands, minus a finger or thumb?

  I admit to being a great amnesiac. My memories resemble ruins eroded day after day. The child that I used to be, within that distant edifice, has nearly erased all the faces, carefully rubbed away the events, the words, but he couldn’t entirely destroy the memory of winters with tantalizingly frozen waters, or those of magnificent summers where the ocean beckons like a pleasure now forbidden to my fragile and sensitive body. Despite him, the homes of my childhood linger in smells that refuse to dissipate, in subtle noises, muffled until they’re nothing but silences, infinite stretches of silence along which I struggle to put myself back together. And even when the miracle works, when a faint glow pierces the bedroom curtains and I see myself prostrate on a sheepskin stained with henna, miming one of the five daily prayers with a frightened fervor, my eyes blink, suddenly damp; the reflection of my image framed in a rectangular mirror with rounded edges then softens in the heat of the mirage. The child halts his prayer, lifts his head. Lines interrupt the serenity of his forehead. For a moment — an interlude of time that prolongs the flight of a fly — he searches himself, the taste of salt under his tongue. Something collapsed in the silence, with a motionless brutality. The child repeats the Quranic phrases in his head, turns them around in his mouth; the formulaic expressions take on the dull taste of things incomprehensible, opening up a void in which genuine hope, rid of the dross of legend, is nonetheless born. I rejoin my body just as the boy is being seized by wild joy. On the sheepskin, scarcely an eternity ago, the ancient wisdom of the stone filled me; now I break out in laughter that only I can hear; I stare at a ceiling that doesn’t collapse to punish me, and in the half-light of my childhood, for the last time, I see God’s grand stature crack, breaking without majesty, scattering in fragments around my peals of laughter.

  Stretched out in my bed, I’m looking at another ceiling: between the two cement surfaces, time passed furiously, draining my life like an anonymous, faded, and empty shell.

  It’s cold here too, like in my memory. No chance of nestling into the soft belly of an illusion. The hospital is a frozen body, walled in from every angle. Nothing survives here except bones and men pale as lice.

  i rub shoulders with death every day, that’s why I no longer fear him. I see him in the eyes of my companions, dressed like them in squalid blue pajamas, smoking crappy tobacco like everyone else, shooting the shit while waiting for dusk. He doesn’t hide in dark corners, behind parapets, under beds, in humid, stinking latrines — he joins us at the dinner table, he laughs along with us, he shares our madness, then he leads us to our beds the same way you’d try to tuck in a mischievous child who refuses to go to sleep. Is he waiting at the entrance to the wing, waiting for our eyes to close and our bodies to drift off in the dark? Only the dying truly recognize him when he materializes. He arrives at the restless sleeper’s bedside, listening to his labored breath, inviting him to follow, without cruelty, without solemnity. One week after my admission to the hospital — I say one week even though I have only an approximate idea of time
— death took a small old man from the neighboring room. He was the first to die during my stay, or more precisely, the first death in Wing C. Later I’ll describe the hospital. For now, it seems immense to me — perhaps it had been imagined and built without any plan at all in the middle of a forest in the city suburbs. The number of wings itself is unclear. To find out, I’d need to go on more walks, to push a little farther each day; but, since my arrival, as I wait for someone to prescribe a specific treatment, I’ve stayed in bed practically every day and every night. I only leave the room long enough to stretch my legs and quickly eat my meals on the veranda.