Personal Legend

Mr. K is an attorney in his late 40s, a notably small man, a DeVito of the Middle Atlas who wears fine suits and silk smiles, and drives a Mercedes the color of his ink black ties. If you saw him walking into the courthouse on MacAllister Street, and you for one are sick and tired of these liberal courts, you would say, 'there's one of those federal prosecutors. He's one of us. I hope he gets those snively bastards who want to take away our guns and SUVs.' Or, if you prefer your liberty a little less light, you would think, 'there's one us, I'll bet you he's with the ACLU, going to defend liberty and justice for all presa canarios.'

Mr. K is always on defense and how did he get there? He spent five years in prison, in a small dirty cell in Ifrane, because he took positions against Hassan II, that most intelligent and charming, if also vindictive and ruthless of dictators. Mr. K was released in 1984 and eventually found his way to the legal profession. These days he has a large stable of defendants and so has decided to give up his house on the main road leading into Azrou and move to Ifrane. It's up in altitude and attitude. After all, Ifrane is a university town. It is also a sweatshop of priviledge and patronage. It's where the governor sits, doling out deals, through his son, to cronies who want to cash in on Ifrane's growing tourist business. You see the town and you wonder why anyone might want to come and stay there for more than a latte. People stay because it's on the edge of the forest, it's eye relief from the marble glare down below, in the valley.

But even as they come to see the forest, it's being cut down. You don't notice, because the cutters go the middle of the forest. From the outside everything appears green and lush. But on any afternoon in the fall, if you walk through the forests around Michlieffen, you'll see hooded men driving their little white panel trucks into the forest, coming with their chainsaws, and you'll notice the old growth stacked up. Now winter is coming and nobody can afford to give a damn about the trees.

But how does it happen, when you hear all the penalties you'll bear if you cut down so much as a rose bush. Well, it's the governor. He doesn't care. And the people who buy public land with the intention of selling dead wood, sell the whole lot. Everyone wants his share.

Incidentally, Mr. K lives on the road east out of Azrou, the road that goes up to the plateau and then down to Midelt and Merzouga — and beyond Merzouga in the distance, you can see Algeria and the Sahara. Azrou is an old mountain crossroads, and like all crossroad towns, it's a place where human dust collects. So here you'll find quality wood crafts and prostitutes. And lately the benefits of drug money from the Rif. This a dry cleaner town for rumpled money. The boulangerie has been remodeled and what a wide screen TV it's got. Rif money. And the local bank has gotten very generous lately with home loans. All rif money. Ask the optometrist; she can tell you everything.

Meanwhile, Mr. K is on his way to the local court house to defend a man accused of being converted to Christianity. It is not illegal to beleive in a religion other than Islam, but it is illegal to prosletyze and to be converted as a result of that appeal. He was telling me about his client one day and the conversation turned, as you always hope it will with attorneys, and he told me about his uncle. Now dead. He died of a liver problem nearly 15 years ago. Liver death is common here. So his uncle grew up in Azrou and as a child went to a local school, in which some of the teachers were Catholic. There was a Catholic monastery in those days, off that road east to Midelt, a huge place now abandonned. Gradually, the uncle became intoctrinated. "He fell in love," is the way Mr. K puts it. Fell in love with the holy spirit and then one day in the 1950s, left Morocco, went to France and became a Catholic priest. And a good priest for the next 24 years.

And occasionally, he woudl return home in his white collar and greatly impressed Mr. K. "Now there's someone I'd like to become," Mr. K thought because his uncle was tall and handsome and seemed fearless. Then 24 years after he became a Christian, the uncle returned home. He'd suffered some sort of crise psychologique. So severe, that he converted back to Islam and, to prove, his steadfastness he walked across Africa to Mecca. Up to the Algerian border, to Tunisia, across Lybia and down through Egypt, and hopped a boat to Jeddah. It took him two years.

And then he returned and became, as Mr. k says, "a normal person, who married and had a son." The son is now in his early 30s and lives in Europe. "He's my personal legend," Mr. K says, always with his smile, that smile that betrays nothing, that gives you no sign of his own treks.

MAROC-PRISON-TAZMAMART

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Originally uploaded by macnamband.

Photo prise le 06 Octobre 2000 du bagne de Tazmamart, une ancienne caserne perdue dans l'est du Moyen-Atlas, une soixantaine de kilometres de la ville d'Errachidia, qui est devenue aujourd'hui le symbole des annÈes noires du Maroc tant les conditions de ceux qui y ont ÈtÈ emprisonnes ont ete inhumaines et arbitraires. L'association Forum Verite et Justice qui se bat pour faire la lumiere sur les atteintes aux droits de l'homme durant les annees de plomb qu'a connues le Maroc appelle, une manifestation devant le bagne le 07 Octobre. Photo courtesy of Mourad Borja, director of Agence Internationale de Communication et de Presse.

Stanford Social Innovation Review

Recent piece about the civil society in Morocco. Go to SSIReview.com

Never Say Allah is Deaf

Perhaps, a line in a solilquy has become a measure of what's in store here. The line is in a play I've written for the drama club. A new faculty member has joined the club with the conviction, I find out, that he is going to take it over. I am told nothing. I find out from the actors.

The play is about a harraq who comes home after two years working in a factory abroad to visit his family. The family is in disarray and his sister is determined to leave the country. At one point she forecasts the life she sees if she doesn't leave. It's a plea by a distraught woman. Here is an excerpt....

" You will marry some man and you will not care about him, not really — in the end, you will marry for security, not love. That’s your master. After all, what silly dream is that? And if you are not submissive enough, you’ll feel your husband’s distance right away. Or, if he’s like one of these nerds, forever in love with their mother, he’ll want you to put on make up and wear forbidden clothes, like the whores he’s always known. Saving your virginity will have been for nothing. All that worry for nothing. For that one, your virginity is merely a reminder of what you can never be and he can never have. But whoever this man is, maybe he is like every other one, if you are not obedient — if you don’t have his lunch ready just the way he likes it, or if you forgot the bread, he will beat you — with his hand or his mind, and after a while it will get worse, he will ignore you, and eventually you’ll give up, you’ll let your body go, and after a few years he will find someone else and divorce you. There wasn’t anything you could have done, but you’ll brood anyway, and all the new laws won’t change a thing. You’ll be left with nothing except your children, and no one will want you, and then you will be just another divorced woman living the years away in a small apartment in one of those broken down buildings on the other side of town. The closest you’ll get to love will be a song on the radio and the masseuse’s hands in the hammam. You will be bitter and survive on gossip and the hope your children will not leave you. But in the end they will. And you will be alone. You’ll become as warm and loving as a stick. And Allah will be deaf to your prayers, because you did nothing to help yourself. All you did was dream and complain. Dream and complain. And you know what? Your whole joy in life will be to go to dinner with your family, most of them you don’t even like, and it will be too painful even to think about what might have been, the other life you might have tasted.... And when the harrags return in August, with their fancy cars and their European girl friends, and their arrogance, you will know it’s all a masque, you’ll resent them, like everyone else, you’ll think, ‘how pathetic, how you dare you come back like this’, but at the same time, you’ll envy them, you’ll look at them secretly, and it will be torture to see it. "

It's the line, "Allah will be deaf to your prayers," that draws the faculty member's ire. This man is a tall, slender man with exceptionally long fingers. He stops the actors as soon as he hears it. Can't be he said. We need to change this line. We can't say this. Why is that? the actors and I ask. He explains that Allah can never have a human vice, a human failing.

Oh what an argument ensued (to be continued...)

wide right

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Originally uploaded by macnamband.

Two Days Ago

The guardien says he saw Lucy two days ago with a pack of dogs around the marche. Yes, the dog with the blue collar, he says. Running with a pack around the marche. Everyone else says she's been snatched and 500 dinars is the right reward.

No Sign

I called Muhammed and we went off to the mazbalah, along the road east out of town to Michliffen. It's a smelly crow's feast behind a tall cinderblock wall. Bulldozers move the trash around. Donkeys, dogs, goats, sheep, foraging through the plastic. Three boys in rag tag police uniforms, shredded and faded, rescued from the trash, come out of a bunker on a hill. No, they haven't seen any dead dogs, but can you spare some dinars. Muhammed smiles but doesn't give them anything.

The wind redecorates the pit; trash swirls everywhere. Much of it outside this pit. In infact, toward the west, the crap and smell extends for hundreds of acres. A man with a face as lined as an old gardner's glove wants a ride back to town. He hasn't seen any dog like the one we're looking for but he has several puppies. He tries to sell one or some. It's the last thing I want.

Dog Gone

It's been 48 hours since the bitch left. Last seen with another dog traveling off into the moor, on Wednesday evening about 5 p.m. I would have thought she'd come back by now. Went off to get laid, maybe. It's that time; her mind is full of less chaleurs.

The vet

She may be pregnant so we go to Meknes, to visit the doctor. She looks dreamy on the way. We get lost in Meknes. We're half an hour late. It's behind Belvie, across from the stadium, next to an internet cafe, up a few steps. The office is a narrow sliver. We wait a long time. Has she eaten today, the doctor asks. I didn't realize the operation would be the same day. I lie a little. She hasn't eaten much in truth, but she has eaten. The doctor is concerned. He thinks it would be better to wait. I agree. Come back in a few hours, he says. I do. The dog stays tied up. When I get back the doctor and I sit down. I want to know about the procedure. He explains. How much is this going to be, I ask. The equivalent of $260. I had no idea. I'd heard half that. I fall back on my anger. He explains. I argue. Can he come down a little? The truth is, I'm running dangerously low on money. Finally, he says well what about shots. Get a shot now and another in the spring. It's a short term solution and you woulnd't want to do this every year. Perfect, I say. So, he says, wait a few weeks, you'll see spots. Call me then and I will give her a shot.

His next patient, a pit bull, is late. He tells me that this business of treating animals badly has no corollary in the Koran. In fact, he explains, once the Prophet was sitting with a cat asleep on his clothing. It was time to pray but the Prophet ever sympathetic to cats cut the cloth around the cat rather than disturb it.

But dogs are another matter. If you touch a cat before prayer, no need to wash. Touch a dog and you must wash 7 times. That's with sand, you understand. Seven times and the Prophet said that there was only 3 reasons to have a dog: to guard sheep, to stand guard at your house, to accompany you on a journey with animals. Guard. But he would have no tolerance for other more sentimental reasons. He didn't see them as companions in that sense. He thought of them as necessary but dirty and, unlike cats, without intelligence or felinity, as it were.

Meanwhile, Lucy is tired of waiting. She bites my hand. The next patient arrives. We leave.

The Muqaddim

At the top of the stairs of the old Hotel De Ville, through the main entrance, to the left, is the muqaddim's office. There is no name, no plaque, no official signs whatsoever. The muqaddim knows where everyone lives, sometimes without their knowledge. Everyone knows where the muqaddim works. It's a tall office with tall windows, old fluorescent lights, a wood veneer desk and behind it, the muqaddim himself. A small man for such a large room. He's 40, in gray slacks and a sports shirt. An anonymous figure but no banality of evil and not like the intelligence agent he is supposed to be. It is rumored that every Friday, sometimes more often, he funnels the latest reports to Rabat of who is where and doing what.

The phone is always between his cheek cheek and shoulder. He motions you to sit down. He greets you in a whisper. Meanwhile, others come in. They greet each other, whisper, and walk out. People come and go. Eventually, the muqaddim hangs up the phone. What can he do, he asks. You wish to have une letter d'attestation. It's a shame to bother you over such a small matter, I tell him, but Maroc Telecom needs this letter. Of course, he says. I give my carte. He quickly finds the proper form, pick up the ringing phone, gives me the form, with a pen, and motions me to fill it out. And while I am doing that, he reaches over and stamps first one signature, then another, and another.

He hangs up, takes my paper and goes away. Others come in during his absence. They look over his desk looking, like dogs over the dinner table. Everyone has this question on their face, "is it ready?"

The muqaddim's assistant returns along with a woman, carrying the application. There is a problem. She needs to see a letter of attestation from the university, a proof that I work at the university. But the police have that I say, pointing out that that information is on the carte de sejour. Yes, but we don't have it, the woman says. She's modern looking, wearing slacks, makeup, glasses on her head, a big smile. But all I need is to prove to the phone company that I live at this address. Isn't it duplication? I ask. It may be, she replies, but we need it. The police have it and we have it. But you both work for the same government, yes? Yes, but it is important that all the agencies have the same information. But this is just to get phone service. Yes, she says, I know, but this is the way it is. It's always like this. Everyone must be noted, we must fill out these requirements. It's not our doing.

We have no control, she adds. Don't you see?

Along the river at Source Erabbia

Originally uploaded by macnamband.

King's coming

King’s coming. New white lines on the road. No trash in the median strip. Everybody look sharp. The Christmas crown is lit up ruby red in mid August. The highway sign on the Azrou road says, don’t use your mobile phone. Everything ship shape. Everywhere the police are going somewhere in convoys. Troop transports on the move. king’s coming. Get pretty, get clean. Look like you mean it.

Out Dark Spot

The move is made. Infinitely better to be out of Le Residence. The guards; J,, the lucretia Borgia of housing; the blathering of early family cocooning; the eerie sense of collective madness and the laughable security. They have one of those Mission Impossible drop gates, but only on one side of the two line entrance. I told the guards to call Paramount Studios and see if they don’t have another one in the back lot. They smile; I smile. Nobody knows what the other is saying, much less thinking.

What I was thinking was that any terrorist planning a Belson siege in Ifrane is now going to think long and hard about how to get past that bar. Which is wood, to top it all. I’m thinking they might have send in a suicide bomber just to blow up the gate if it doesn’t open automatically; I think the weight is too much. Meanwhile, those who wish to be viewed and noted by Dr. K. as to when they came in and who with and what about, has to wait for the guard to give up his conversation about his neighbor’s cousin’s mother’s dalliances with the mukodoom and push down on the weight and let in the light.

But here’s the point. We moved out because of Lucy. The people were terrified. Poop everywhere. People were drowning in it. Then a boy lost his cap; a little girl watched in horror as her sandwich disappeared into the blackskape of Lucy’s great white Nazi mouth. But let’s be Berkeley. She needed her freedom. And she was not going to be held back by unlocked windows and guards with nothing gunlike in their white holsters... But now she’s here, the door’s open 24/7. No questions about where she goes, who she sees, what watering holes she wishes to frequent. And so now we’re here and you’d think now, finally, happy. HAAAAAAPPPPPPPY.

But it ain’t so. The bitch is on a streak. For the last four days, something destroyed. A scatter rug, the gear shift nob, two poinsettias. Every day she finds something to stab me with. Why? Well, it’s a new house. And incidentally, at least once she’s gone back to Le Residence, to wait for Catherine, of Tarragon, who left her out to dry every day I was gone. Chained up like the hunchback of Neutered Dames. Which she is not and needs to be. But you wonder why she would go back there. Why would Nelson Mandela want to see that prison again? Well in the bitch’s case one reason she went back is I beat her silly when she tore up the plants. For no good reason. That was personal. She knows what she’s doing. It’s all planned. She’s wired. She has a list.

And by the way, It’ll be a couple hundred dollars in repair costs before we’re finished with the sofas she tore up in our apartment and then Catherine’s. But it’s the pathology of it that I mind. Hers and now mine. Folie a deux, what happened to us? Old white men, left to their own devices come apart.

So I try to fathom it. New house, I understand. You feel a little estranged. But you wanted your freedom, right? From wherever she’d gone. But she’s saying, “So get up off your fat ass and let’s get on a mission you old fart. Here you are, adjusting every last marigold, every rug angle and light shadow, not doing a shred of work, because you can’t sit still for more than 6 minutes and you’re talking to me about having too much energy. Physician, heal thyself. And while you’re at it, take a shower.”

Meknes wall

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Originally uploaded by macnamband.

Deep Stuff

I returned to the villa coming up on 8. I didn’t park out in the street, that white gravel bone of roadway that connects half finished projects with other half finished projects, and all of them tied with the bow of infrastructural despair. Did you ever notice that there are windows only on one side of a building here? Keep the light at bay. Keep it dark where I can see you.

I got out of the car and there was devilina in the moon light. Slinking like shylock toward BethleMAN. What destruction now, I asked. Her tail wagged like a snake in no hurry. That's the sign. She was tight to the ground. Still, I chatted on our way along the narrow walk back to VillaOcilla, as I call it. Pathovillalogical. And sure enough we get to the garden and, on the eve of a full moon, I could see clearly what she’d done, taken the poinsettia out, for the second time in two days. The same plant out of the same pot. And one other as well. The same one as before. The same two as the day before. The red Poinsettia, as in blood and love and sentimental journey.

It was message alright, from outer dog space. But what does it mean? I said to her and meanwhile she’d turned into an ocelot creeping along. You wanted democracy, you got it. You got us thrown out of the other place ‘cause you didn’t like that. Now, what’s wrong with this. I can’t spend every minute of every day minding your mental store.

I went to her, she rolled over, and bit me as I tried to get her Raskolnikov ass back to the spot. Show her the damage for zillionth time. You bitch-critter, I said and tried to kick her as she ran off into the dark. This is the SIXTH day in a row. It’s a little cold war going on here. And after each day I try some new psychology. True love, tough shit, basketcase enabler, just walk and talk, I’d give her a martini if I had one, but it’s never enough. You understand, I'm doing everything by the canine juvi book.

This was especially weird because I’d taken her on a mammoth walk at 7 a.m. We got back at 10 and both of us passed out like two drunks on the bed. I couldn’t feel my legs; she was twitching like an epileptic. Now, at the other end of the day, this. And by the way, should I count up all ‘a’tta boys’ I gave her. And at the other end of the day, at 7 p.m., I’d been willing to take her downtown to the cyber cafe, let her wait in the car, while I did my business. Ten minutes tops. But she wasn’t around so she missed out on a mission.

What the fuck do you want? I shouted at the dark. “Money? You want money?”

I told her I’d take her out to Moroccan Route 66 and let her off and seek her destiny among sheep herders. 'That’s your blood. Go back to your Berber amazon queen and smear the blood of your enemies on your breasts and eat their children. Your neurotic fuckette. And then tell me your excuse. Tell me you’re a victim. Tell me you live in emotional Falluja. I’ll still kill you. Because now it’s archetypal. You’re fiddling with deep stuff.

Trash to the left o'me, trash to the right o'me

On the way back, along the narrow old road that winds through the forest between Ifrane and Azrou, a man on a motorbike passed us. A few minutes later we rounded a bend and there he was picking up trash dumped along the side of the road. There was a lot of it, plastic water bottles, yogurt cartons, child’s drawings, and two empty wooden fruit trays buzzing with yellow jackets.

Je vous aide, I said and started picking up debris. He’d gotten most of it into a big black plastic bag. “Fais attention,” he said when I tried to pick up the fruit trays. He had no fear of the yellow jackets and slipped the trays in his bag.

When the bag was full he walked across the road and up into the forest. About 20 yards in he threw the bag behind a bush, brushed his hands, and came back.

I guess we couldn’t leave it by the side of the road, I said, and maybe a truck would pick it up.... That’s what we need, a truck, he said.

We looked down at the few bits of trash we’d missed. He bent down and picked up a child’s drawing. I know who these people are, he said, and pointed down into the valley where torrents of kids come to a nearby camp in the summer.

He shook his head in disgust and we walked up the road, he walking his bike. He wore a red baseball cap and a bemused expression. In his late forties, short and stocky. For about a quarter mile he stopped from time to time, picked up trash and threw it off the steep drop on one side of the road. He explained he was the head forest ranger in this part of the Middle Atlas.

I don’t know why people do this, he said, throwing some plastic bottles as far as he could. It’s a mystery to me. It’s these French people. They come here and throw all their stuff in the forest.

We collected some more. I had a small plastic bag filled with stuff. Finally, he jumped on his scooter and slowly disappeared in a noisy, black cloud of smoke.

The dog and I walked on.

Eventually, we came to where the forest has been cleared and the land flattens out. There was the ranger again. We reached him and this time he was putting a collection of garbage behind a bolder, pushing some other rocks into place so you couldn’t see anything from the sides. He was still shaking his head. But finally he stopped and came up close to me and said, “they just want to eat these people, they don’t want to work.”

I nodded. Goodbye, he said, threw his leg over his scooter and coasted a few yards to another trash side.

Mosque outside the gates to the medina in Meknes

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Originally uploaded by macnamband.

Footprints along the baseline

Behind the restaurant overlooking the town’s artificial lake, there are two clay tennis courts. These belong to the Ifrane Tennis Club. The club is open from May until October. It costs 300 D to join and you need two photographs of yourself and a birth certificate.

All this week there’s been a tournament. The first player to win 9 games wins the match. There were perhaps 20 players. A friend drew me into it. My first round opponent defaulted. In the second round I was matched with a boy in his late teens or early 20s who had only been playing for six months and should have won, and even went ahead 7 games to 4 at one point, I nearly double faulted the match away, but eventually I prevailed. In the third round I didn’t win a game and again double faulted the match away.

They have a strange practice at the club. They brush the courts and carefully sweep the lines and then they water the court. There are several ways to care for clay courts, but the customary way is to soak them in the morning and at night and then you brush the courts before every match. Or, as they do on baseball diamonds, you might lightly sprinkle the base paths after they’ve been swept, although I always thought you wet the ground first, then sweep it. In any case, here they do the brushing and then they heavily water the courts so that every match begins in mud and the court scared with hose marks and mounds. And of course all the lines are hidden.

My last opponent, Driss, has been attending college in America, in Virginia. He described himself as Moroccan American and when we talked about this odd practice of wetting the courts, he said, well this is the Moroccan way. It’s always been done this way. The logic is unimportant. The important thing is to do things the way they’ve always been done. So this is one reason things don’t change much here. But for them, there’s great security in doing it the old way, great security in how it’s always been.

In the garden of the Great Mosque of Cordoba

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Originally uploaded by macnamband.

Don't Ask

At 1:30 a.m. she was still gone. Way past curfew. Way past caring. I said, fine you want to get laid this time of night then that's your business but I'm not worrying if you're half dead on the side of the road. Good night.

The next morning, around 5 a.m. I heard that poof of a bark. A mindless involuntary response. And then again and this was more than a poof. I'd left the door open to the apartment in case, as well as the two doors to the building, and all the windows. Of course, that's the whole problem. Leave them open the width of a pencil and she's gone. I also put out some food.

I get up, go outside and there she is, latched to her leash, under a tree. I approach and she slithers toward me like Shylock looking for a bob. I was glad to see the bitch; I let her go.

"It wasn't my fault," she began. "I met this boy and he...."

"Skip it," I said. "I don't want to know."

She wagged her tail, not having to tell me a long cock 'n bull story about her 'boyfriend.'

"It's weird out there at night," she said, wanting to tell me and not tell me, but hoping I would have at least some questions.

I don't want to know, I told her, and we left it at that.