Becoming One of Us

Here is a new tale about an old place, the Jemaa el-Fna of Marrakech, part food court, circus and centre of sorcery and story telling. I had the privilege of spending long periods there when I made Marrakech my home in 1977, walking, sitting, watching, listening to musicians, and yes, smelling and eating the food at numerous outdoor stalls!

There are storytellers in the Jmalfna who pass on the tales from the Arabian Nights and then some. This story is about various kinds of storytellers. Much of it is true, and some of it is not. I will let you be the judge of that.

Open Market, Morocco (Edwin Lord Weeks, 1880)

There is no place like the Jmalfna. It is a great open square in Marrakech that attacks and entertains every sense known to man and then some that I have discovered.

When I am in Marrakech, I stay at an old house turned into a boutique hotel, now called Riads. Of course I stay at a Riad whose name I will not disclose for security reasons as the owners are members of the Moroccan secret police, they have good relations with the local police, are known to be friendly with the few remaining Jews who still call Marrakech their home and are quiet and hospitable.

And then early in the morning, after mint tea and fresh Berber bread and olives, I take up my camera, my tape recorder and slowly wind my way through the kasbah of Marrakech on my way to the Jamalfna.

I share the crowded lanes with loaded donkeys, school children, old men and women and young women who are doing their best to look attractive in the covered fashions that have moved in to North Africa from Syria and Egypt and which have almost taken over those marvelous outfits that once made every married woman (who is not an unveiled Berber from the nearby mountains) look like French nuns with attitude.

I prefer the old dress code—many men still follow it with their woolen jellabas that make them look like Christian monks and their head coverings that are like those of Sephardic Jews. I have a green one embellished with Stars of David. I know that in the local Muslim mind this symbol is also alchemical and mystical, but it always gets oohs and ahs from my coreligionists in Tangier when I wear it at religious services.

And then there are the young Moroccan men whose adoption of French or Italian fashion is never quite right and makes them look more like tourist hustlers on the streets of a Central American beach resort. It is not that I do not get the style, but I do not like the style.

My few Moroccan friends like Hamid agree and they say this is the semiotic of tourist hustlers, commenting that in the mind of these young men, sleeping with a European young woman is the ultimate high as they are foreign, free, and forbidden.

I doubt these young mostly Scandinavian tourists have any idea what goes on when they hook up with these nervous young men, for they think that they are being romanced in the Kasbah.

You can hear the Jmalfna before you even smell it. My favorite sound is that of the double reed “ghaita,” a woodwind like the oboe, which the Aissawa snake charmers use to lull their cobras into semi-somnambulance. Then you can hear the drums of the Gnawa, the descendants of imported mercenaries from West Africa who still intermarry among themselves and carry out structured exorcisms for Moroccan Muslim coreligionists.

Then there is the smell. Scores of open-air stalls and restaurants, grilling kababs, serving up salads (which I never touch because of inconsistent health inspections), wonderful soups which I sometimes enjoy, and freshly baked bread. Of course there is pervasive scent of sugar for those thousands of glasses of mint tea taken by both tourists and locals.

I usually eat at a chain of kebab restaurants run by a local man from Marrakech who has turned his family heritage into a national franchise. I am always treated there like an honored guest and the owner sometimes gives me a glass of brown liquid (beer) to wash it down on the hottest of days.

Then I go out into the square. There are acrobats putting on a show, Berber musicians from the High Atlas Mountains, the Gnawi, the snake charmers, and of course in the corner the story tellers. As my Arabic was improving by the day, I brought a large mega bottle of coke and glasses for all the storytellers, and they gave me a special cardboard seat while I recorded one of them. Here is how one storyteller’s shared his tale. I translated it later in my house in Tangier with the help of my staff:

In the times of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid there lived in Bagdad a poor porter named Hindbad, who on an extremely hot day was sent to carry a heavy load from one end of the city to the other. Before he had accomplished half the distance, he was so tired, that finding himself in a quiet street where the pavement was sprinkled with rose water, and a cool breeze was blowing, he set his burden upon the ground, and sat down to rest in the shade of a grand house. Very soon he decided that he could not have chosen a pleasanter place; a delicious perfume of aloeswood and pastilles came from the open windows and mingled with the scent of the rose water which steamed up from the hot pavement. Within the palace he heard some music, as of many instruments cunningly played, and the melodious warble of nightingales and other birds, and by this, and the appetizing smell of many dainty dishes of which he presently became aware, he judged that feasting and merry making were going on. He wondered who lived in this magnificent house which he had never seen before, the street in which it stood being one which he seldom had occasion to pass. To satisfy his curiosity, he went up to some splendidly dressed servants who stood at the door and asked one of them the name of the master of the mansion.

Of course, I recognized this as part of the Sindbad cycle and was amazed how these ancient stories still lived among these men of the 21^st century, largely because the oldest ones could still barely read anything more than the Quran in Arabic, and this allowed them to have memories like Homer.

As a teenager in Jerusalem, not having much luck with the girls in my class, I decided to take up juggling. I found a teacher in Jerusalem, a Russian who was a member of the International Jugglers Association that was founded in 1947. Israel had an active branch.

Every summer the Association holds an annual convention and for those Israelis who cannot afford to go overseas, there is a National one. There I learnt how to juggle fruit while hopping on one leg and then for the pièce de résistance, I learnt how to blow fire from my mouth and then suddenly make the fruit that I was juggling disappear into thin air.

Of course, part of the trick was the setup of the stage with mirrors and hidden trap doors and a whole range of high-tech gadgets that makes you look like a real magician/juggler, and so I became fascinated by the  more adept Moroccan practitioners here.

These experts would juggle everything; fruit, knives, porcelain bowls, walking sticks, and hats. They would throw things up in the air in twos and things would come down in ones. I could not figure out half of their tricks, but I did get to know one of them well. He was a man in his thirties named Belkassem. I would buy him tea and gazelle’s horns each time I watched him perform.

He told me that in Morocco, although you can become a juggler if you are the son of a juggler, it does not always happen that way. He explained that it is like music, and told me that before a child is born God has already decided what gifts he will bring into the land of the living, if the evil spirits, the Jnun (which he simply referred to as “those ones”) will allow. And so it is with jugglers.

I was not surprised, for in America and Israel, both advanced technological states have educators that are having a hard time ignoring that some children are better at some things than others, regardless of the quality and quantity of instruction. Indeed, the Harvard psychologist Howard Garnder has built his career upon arguing that we are all born with a limited number of “mental” modules and one of them is dance-like coordination. Some kids are born with an advanced module, so to speak.

Apropos to this, Belkassem told me the following,

About one hundred years ago during the reign of Sidi Muhammad, the father of Sultan Mulai Hassan, there was a famous family of jugglers who made large sums of money entertaining the crowds of the Jmalfna. They were about to live happily ever after when the father discovered that one of his two sons was sleeping with his fourth wife, who was the age of his son. When this was discovered, the old man divorced his young wife and banished his son from ever coming back to the Jmalfna to perform. The son left in anger and cursed his father publicly, saying, ‘May the spirit who guides you enter hell and may he lead you there after death.” Well, the son went off and he was joined by his brother.

I went back to my Riad that night and wrote up my journal. I had a week left before I had to return to my job in Tangier and I wanted to record just some of the sights and sounds of the Jmalfna in the coming days. However, each time I went back I felt I was being followed. Occasionally, I would see out of the corner of my eye two young men dressed in the pajama-like outfits that are used by so many jugglers in Marrakech.

I alerted my Moroccan security detail Driss, who joined me for a few of my excursions. Each time I thought I had spotted the two young men, I pointed them out to Driss, who saw nothing. He concluded that there was nothing to worry about, this was not a security incident, and went back to his station where he likes to drink tea and read real paper newspapers.

He told me, “I cannot trust the internet, but I know that the news in a real paper will not change until something in the real world happens the next day. Call me old fashioned if you, like but the Internet is like a magician from the dark side of ‘those ones.’

Day after day after day I wandered the Jamalfna looking for these two jugglers and every time I thought I saw them ahead of me, I would run like the dickens, jump in front of two startled Moroccan men and then had to explain to them that I thought they were somebody else. I was beginning to doubt my sanity and then one day it happened.

I was watching the jugglers do their routine. I noticed that they avoided a nearby open space about five yards square. I also noticed that no one stood or sat there. It was as if it had been sealed off and everyone knew not to enter. I tried to do so but was restricted by some psychic force that prevented me from setting foot there. It was an astonishing and unpleasant feeling.

I told Belkassem about it and he asked me to come over to a table and share a cup of tea. He explained,

A long time ago there were two kinds of jugglery which we call hantaera es sghir, or the small jugglery of all the things that modern and traditional jugglers do. But in olden times there was the grand jugglery which we called the great jugglery hanqatera kbira or the great jugglery. These were death-defying acts that did not always work out, due to some family feud or incompetence on the part of the performers. It is said that when the two twins who had been banished came back, they tried to do a piece of grand jugglery with a magician and died in the process. You may have been seeing their ghosts. You are not the only one who has done so and last year, when I was getting over a bad bout of flu, I glimpsed them too. It is not a good sign so please be careful. Go to your Synagogue or one of the graves of the Jewish saints of Morocco and do a cleansing. Sacrifice a goat. That is my advice.

I found all of this hard to believe until I got back to Tangier. After Friday evening prayers at the Synagogue I told the whole tale to Ozziel. He pulled down a book from his shelf and read the following to me.

To become a successful juggler a person makes the riyada, as it is called, that is he fasts for three or seven days and every evening he recites an incantation in solitude and eats during the night, nothing but bread made of barley without salt and oil and containing red raisins. The genies who are going to help him then come and tell him what to do and what not to do, to abstain from salted food, to neglect his prayers altogether to perform abominable acts such as making water in a mosque …or in a hot bath or to eat human excrement. He will then be able to turn people’s sight by sprinkling in the air a pinch of a powder made of 99 ingredients including charred swallows and bats. The genie speaks to him in an inaudible voice, and he can then do wonderful things. He takes, for instance, in his hand an empty glass, and all of a sudden it seems to be filled with water. Or he closes his empty hand and when he opens it there is money in it. He puts a date into somebody’s mouth, and it becomes cow dung, or he puts cow dung there and it becomes a date. He places a tambourine bandier with the skin upwards on an empty spot, taps a little on it, and when he lifts it up there is a snake underneath. All of this is the small juggling as distinguished from the great juggling which was prohibited by the Sultan Sidi Muhammad father of Sultan Moulay al Hassan after a horrible spectacle at the marketplace of Marrakesh where a man was seen slaughtering his two brothers in the presence of all the people.

After putting the book away, Ozziel continued:

There is still grand jugglery going on here and there in Morocco and the spirits of those who get killed in the process are often seen by those who visit the place they once conducted their black art. Foreigners never see the ghosts.

It looks like you are becoming one of us.