The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (22 page)

Although Abdeslam’s father is the embodiment of authority and tradition, he attempts to prepare his son for life in a rapidly changing world by giving him both an Islamic and a European education. Abdeslam rebels, preferring (partly out of zealotry and partly out of laziness) to stay at the mosque. When he gets into a fight with his teacher at the French school, he is sent home and is promptly disowned by his father. But leaving home and abandoning the French school does not bring him any closer to a purely Moroccan way of life. With nowhere to go, he must depend upon the charity of others, and the first people who take him in are, in feet, a Christian Spanish couple. After leaving the “Nazarenes,” he moves in with Bachir, a drunken, brawling, Europeanized friend. For a time he works in a European bar but later finds employment at a Moslem café. Its owner, Si Mokhtar, tries to persuade Abdeslam to come and live with himself and his wife or to return to his father, but Abdeslam by this time has become too accustomed to the wild life to give it up. He is seduced by one of Bachir’s lovers, a prostitute named Aouicha, and after repeated sexual advances by Bachir himself, Abdeslam slices his roommate’s cheek with a razor partly concealed in a lemon and leaves the apartment for good, abandoning (along with his few toys) the birth name that was his last link to his father’s house. Known simply as The Lemon from this point on, Abdeslam has learned the art of survival in a culturally mixed, increasingly anarchic world, and although he has often resisted Western corruption, he finds himself insidiously reshaped by it.

Many of Mrabet’s tales employ a similar plot configuration to explore the dynamics of cultural interaction. One of them, “Si Mokhtar,” an anticolonialist parable about French acquisition of Moroccan land, is particularly interesting because it raises the question of language as a guarantor of cultural integrity, recalling Abdeslam’s early devotion to “the world of words and letters in the mosque.” Si Mokhtar, in this story from
The Boy Who Set the Fire
, is a man who has inherited one-fourth of his ancestral land from his father and has bought the rest from his three brothers, who care only about quick cash. Si Mokhtar’s desire to keep the land both intact and in the family replicates on a small scale the Moroccan people’s discontent with European partition and occupation of their country between 1912 and 1956.
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Not incidentially, he also wishes for his way of life to remain static, impervious to change. But there is a snake in this garden, a French army officer who has acquired a piece of land and built a house overlooking Si Mokhtar’s property. The Moroccan resents the presence of “the Nazarene” so close to him. The Frenchman, for his part, thinks it “wrong that a Moslem should have all those trees and flowers.” He sends four soldiers down to spy on “that savage” (12), but they are run off by Si Mokhtar’s dogs.

Although “Si Mokhtar” ends with the title character’s death, the integrity of the land (and by extension, traditional Moroccan society) is maintained. When he lies down to die in his beloved orchard, Si Mokhtar writes a message in the dirt with his finger:
“This is our land. If you are my brothers and you love me you will never sell it”
(14), and when one of the brothers finds the message, he vows to obey it. The land itself has become a slate on which a man inscribes and thus perpetuates his personal cultural identity. Earlier Si Mokhtar has spelled out the word “Allah” with the plants in his garden. Both texts are in Arabic, and together they strongly assert the unity of language, religion, and culture as a bulwark against changes initiated from the encompassing outside world of the West. Writing these messages is a way of objectifying the intangible feelings associated, as Ajami puts it, with “the ancestors.” There is a significant irony underlying this use of language in “Si Mokhtar,” however. Classical Arabic is the language of the Koran, and as such, it claims, for Moslems, a special status. But Mrabet, doubly displaced from his own literary culture, tells his stories to Paul Bowles not in the Modern Standard Arabic derived from Classical Arabic, but in Moghrebi, a regional dialect widely spoken in Morocco but held in contempt because it is not the language of the Prophet.

The autobiograpical
Look and Move On
, in which Mrabet figures as both storyteller and quasi-fictional protagonist, dramatizes the encounter with the cultural other in such a personal and direct way that the process of artistic creation and the duplicity of language become important elements in the narrative. Mrabet tells of his youth in and around Tangier, his meetings with various foreigners including an American couple who take him to the United States, and his return to Tangier after a series of unpleasant, if rather amusing, experiences in America.
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Back in Morocco he meets another American couple, Paul and Jane Bowles, and begins telling stories into Paul’s tape recorder. Although the book continues for some thirty more pages, this event is clearly its climax: the moment when Mrabet becomes, with Bowles’s assistance, an interpreter of his world and a surveyor of regions beyond the familiar.

Mrabet’s compositional method, as he explains it in
Look and Move On
, is essential to an understanding of how language itself works for him. He deliberately blurs the line between truth and fiction with regard to the stories’ origins: “Some were tales I had heard in the cafés, some were inventions I made as I was recording, and some were about things that had actually happened to me”(91). Bowles’s note at the head of
Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins
, which is a cycle of tales about a traditional Moroccan folk figure, makes the point again: some of those tales are variations on well-known legends, while others are fabrications. When I asked Mrabet which of them were “real” legends and which he made up, he refused comment, suggesting that all stories (told or written) are to some extent “lies.” Elsewhere in
Look and Move On
he interprets a Moroccan song to an American woman: “That whole song is about somebody who left his own country to live in a foreign place with foreign people, I told her. This was not true, but I wanted her to have that meaning” (42). As a Moslem, Mrabet would believe that truth exists only in the mind of Allah. Meaning can be assigned by human beings, but humanly-fashioned meanings are not the same as truth, and language is not the same as reality. The cognitive grasp of experience, the imagining of it, the telling, the translating, the writing—all are reflections of truth, mirrored replications of replications, transformations that are our only way of knowing the unknowable thing transformed.

Transformation is a key element in those of Mrabet’s stories that do not focus on contemporary European influence or cultural relations but instead evoke a premodem Morocco of magic and legend, spells and potions. In these tales the theme of magical metamorphosis often becomes a vehicle for the exploration of the mysteries of otherness and even a metaphor for the passage from “here” to “there.” In a story like “
Baraka
,” also from
The Boy Who Set the Fire
, the journey is straightforward: the title character moves from the phenomenal world to “a strange place, like nowhere he had even been before” (15) through the looking-glass of a kif-induced dream. Kif, a form of cannabis, frequently turns up in Mrabet’s fiction (as well as in Bowles’s) as a way of crossing over into another order of being—one outside the safe borders of the rational self. Baraka undertakes the journey (or the transformation) five times, each time going deeper into the strange countryside, and each time encountering dream animals: birds, mongooses, fish, a spider. When he awakens from the first three dream crossings, he writes down the entire episode in his notebook. Returning from the last journey, he finds near his bed the spider that had appeared in the dream: “Now that he had made it real, he was no longer afraid of it. He thought: Other men dream and return with nothing. But I’ve learned how to bring things back.
Hamdoul’lah!
” (19).

Baraka’s earlier means of “bringing things back” from that strange, other place is through writing, and clearly, the final writing of the text of the dream is the manifestation of the spider. The transformation of the dream spider into a “real” one existing in this world is a metaphor for the act of writing, and writing itself is a way of making concrete the unknowable other. It is useful in this context to refer to Clifford Geertz’s explanation of
baraka
which, as he points out, literally means “blessing, in the sense of divine favor” but more broadly can be seen as “a conception of the mode in which the divine reaches into the world” and “a mode of construing . . . human experience” (44). Baraka is commonly understood as a special ability or talent with which certain individuals are endowed. All descendants of the Prophet (such as the present king of Morocco) are believed to have it; ordinary people may have it, too. Mrabet’s character certainly has baraka in this sense, and very appropriately he thanks God for it (“
Hamdoul’lah!
”), but he also has it in the sense of construing, or translating, human experience. Baraka is, after all, a writer, and it is the writer’s job to go into the inchoate world of the other and bring some of it back—however much transformed—into the realm of human comprehension.

The Big Mirror
is Mrabet’s most complicated meditation on otherness. Like many of his tales, this novella initially turns on the question of sexual otherness—conflict between a man and a woman—but it quickly develops into much more. Ali, a young Moroccan, is captivated by the beauty of a girl named Rachida and soon marries her. They move into a big old house featuring a ballroom with an enormous mirror on a one wall. At first Rachida fears the mirror, but soon she is spending most of her time gazing into it. When Ali complains to her parents, her father admits that she “is not entirely well” (17). After having a baby, Rachida kills the child and blames the deed on “the other girl”—her reflection in the mirror. Both Ali and her parents conclude that she has gone mad, but when they look in the mirror, they, too, see the “other girl”—this time not Rachida in her red qaftan, but Rachida “wearing the shining white gown of a bride” (22), and weeping. Later Ali sees Rachida in the mirror even though the “real” Rachida is not even in the room.

Disturbed and disoriented by these events, Ali retreats to his farm outside of town, where he falls asleep and, like Baraka, crosses over into a dream land. Again he sees the girl from the mirror, this time promising to marry her. Somewhat later, the real Rachida tries to kill Ali, and failing in the attempt, later murders two neighborhood men, transforming herself into a bird to escape detection. She is abetted in the crime by several old crones, whose magic is responsible for perpetuating the division of her personality. Not long afterward, she kills herself. When Ali accidentally shatters the mirror, he finds himself unable to meet the other girl except through the portal of his nightly dreams.

Even such a bare-bones summary of the tale’s plot suggests that Mrabet is touching on the idea of the other in several different ways. Rachida is from the beginning terrified of otherness; her inability to deal with it is the source of her “madness.” The men she kills are husband surrogates, emblems of an alien threat. So, too, is her baby son, who disfigures her body while he is a fetus and becomes an entity apart from her after his birth, as if a portion of herself has broken away and joined the other side. When she kills herself, she is trying “to destroy what she saw in the glass” (62). Ali also has a double, but he manages to retain control over his “other self” by keeping it on its own side of the border; his dream self is the counterpart of Rachida’s mirror self, and in his dreams the two can meet as husband and bride. The novella ends with the implication, however, that Ali will never again take a “real” wife but remain content each evening to smoke a few pipes of kif and join the white-clad girl in sleep, while spending all his waking hours “working on the land with his men” (77). A deeper implication—perhaps one not consciously intended—is that the integrity of the ego can be maintained only by keeping the threatening Other securely in the realm of dream, doubly distanced by placing her under the rule of Ali’s own dream double—a dream husband to control the dream wife. This need to place the female image—even an ideal, submissive, non-threatening one—under double male domination is not unlike Port Moresby’s fantasy vision of a blind prostitute in
The Sheltering Sky
. Port imagines the girl “in bed, without eyes to see beyond the bed . . . completely
there
, a prisoner” (145). Mrabet’s dream girl is a prisoner, too. “If . . . you had not broken the mirror,” she says, “I could have gone out that way” (76). But Ali, who feels happy for the first time in months, does not appear concerned, and the girl stays where she is, on the other side. Like a tourist, Ali visits her in her foreign country each night, and she “comes out” only through the dual transformation of Mrabet’s story and Bowles’s text.

Whether the other is conceived as an alien culture, as the opposite sex, or as anything outside the self (however “self” itself may be construed), it is a force field of considerable power in Mrabet’s fiction. Wherever it appears, and in whatever context or form, it must be engaged. Some of Mrabet’s characters, like Abdeslam in
The Lemon
, strike a bargain with the other side, interacting with it, letting parts of it become parts of themselves as their lives continue to evolve. This stance is frequently adopted in stories in which women are cast as the threatening, unknowable Other. It is striking how many women in Mrabet are weavers of evil spells, like the old crones in
The Big Mirror
, or mixers of poisons. These women (and one has the nagging suspicion that he views them as epitomes rather than as exceptions) are beyond the pale. But most female characters in Mrabet are merely troublesome wives or lovers over whom mastery can finally be achieved or with whom (in a few of the tales) a real compromise can be reached. The alternative to compromise is elimination or complete segregation of the other. Baraka ensures, through his inscription in the dirt, that his land will not be acquired by the French officer; Mohammed in
Love with a Few Hairs
rids himself permanently of a devious and unfaithful wife; and Ali in
The Big Mirror
manages to keep the entire sexual side of his life, along with his idealized bride, on the other side of the mirror, in the land of dreams.