Fires Unleashed
Fires Unleashed
To help set the scene, let me first opine on travel writing. I really don't like it, at least the few forays I've had into those books. The little of it I've read seems to be the poorly sketched musings of self-hating authors who inflate their own bitter deficiency of self-importance and insist on their own permanent alienation in cultures they want nothing more from than acceptance, and in that quest fret of losing their own individuality. I'm sure there is some very good travel writing out there. Someone please direct me to it. Fiction is more palatable, largely in that it can avoid that insidious pretense to authenticity. In fiction, I don't have to endure the scrutiny of those questioning my verisimilitude or personal conscience: it's fiction, after all.
In Marrakesh, my "mini-ISP" was storytelling, which I at first assumed would be simple; Marrakesh is, after all, famed for its storytellers. I never met one. In the end, I had to resort to my own experiences and research. This is a modified transcription of the halqa I held in a tent in the desert near Merzouga.
"Before arriving in Marrakesh, I heard those who visited in decades passed wax poetic on the enthralling grandeur of the halqa, the traditional storyteller's circle. Men gathered around a master storyteller who would day after day tell fantastic tales of the companions of the prophet, or snippets from 1,001 Arabian Nights, or even poems and songs they wrote themselves. Five days into my time in the city, spending hours an end from dawn to long after dusk searching for my own chance to experience the wonder of one of these tales, I had yet to find one of these artisans. Several times I came upon circles of men, but they always surrounded simply pugilists, or perhaps gnawas or the ubiquitous tour guides. Near the end of my stay in the city, I gave up, and sat down on the edge of the square to enjoy a shiba tea at a cafe. As I sat looking out on the throngs of tourists, I realized I was overhearing a group of men, both American and Moroccan, sharing stories of the first times in Marrakesh. The first tale, of which I heard only fragments, was not at all memorable, but had to have been at least interesting enough to draw me to their circle. I ordered another tea and sat around the other men. One of them, at first seeming quieter than the rest, waited until his companions had exhausted their tales to begin, and I was immediately made aware he commanded a certain sense of respect from his colleagues, who silenced themselves as soon as he began to speak.
'Here we are in Marrakesh, legendary city of storytellers, yet, how often can you find someone spinning yarns the way they once did? Can you walk Jama'a el Fna hear the words twisting into the air? Rarely, and only by chance. According to varying sources, only seven or eight bards remain. Now, I have been to Marrakesh five times, and other cities in Morocco more than that, but my first visit here my foremost aim was to find one of these traditional halaqat and adapt something I learned into something I could write. I was not so lucky in that search, but nonetheless came away with something loosely resembling a story to tell.'
The other men were often interrupted as they would speak, but here this figure received without ever demanding perfect, attentive silence, and his audience was held in a solemn transfixion as they listened to him recount his time in Marrakesh.
'Of course, my influences are almost entirely western. When I experienced this, I had yet to encounter a real Moroccan storyteller. My presentation is hardly authentic. My stories are not sweeping epics or tragic romances, but are tinged with modernism from our own tradition, and even if the stories themselves take place in Marrakesh, I bring their nuclei from abroad. Even if I adopt this medium, this is only my dishonest attempt at aping this ancient and dying tradition. I recognize the basic fact that my tales are firmly rooted in the western corpus, and at the fore, I am not Moroccan. So in this spirit I begin.
'I am Walstrom, your host. Kan ya ma kan*1, a young man from a faraway land, searching these oft-storied deserts and mountains and medieval cities (oh how Orientalist does that sound?) for something, though he could not articulate what. He was an idealist, and you can attach to that whatever meaning you so choose. Only a few days into his foray into the country, he arrived at Jama'a el Fna, the crown jewel of Marrakesh, if you do look at it that way. From winding medina streets, step into the chaos and fire. Red lights from overhead and flaming sunrises give the impression on an endless but mild inferno in the early evening, and the shouts and aggressions give the distinct conjecture of a primeval workhouse without the labor. For some reason, a poem I heard afar came to mind. Why precisely I recalled it I have no idea. I do not have time to recite it all, but the first stanza should suffice to give an idea:
Beside the pounding cataracts
of midnight streams unknown to us
tis builded in the dismal tracts
and valleys huge of Tartarus
Lurid and lofty and vast it seems
it hath no rounded name that rings
but I have heard it called in dreams
The City of the End of Things.*2
The poem progresses to tell of a city of great furnaces watched over by a withering elite who once built its ramparts, and live only to die in its highest towers. Again, the mind is mysterious, and I cannot tell why I remembered this verse.
'You've all felt the rush of the unadulterated excitement of the square, the primal chaos and energy there, snake charmers, musicians, vendors of all sorts, and, in the evening, the food. Beware: dinner at the square is not at all for the faint of heart.
'Entering the stalls, all the, for lack of a weaker word, restaurateurs, if you will, stand and clap; they cheer, shout all manner of profanity and insult, hassle you and grab your arms. Steeled, it is tolerable. Of course, we don't know that going in.' He chuckled, and then screamed,
IT'S F*****G GOOD, MATE!
You eat with us here, no?
Come here - dine it's delicious!
Chawarma? Pastilla? All good food here!
Chez Sidi Moumi! The best in Marrakesh!
Come on - see? Sexy women like our food!
Why no? F**k American! F**k British!
Eat, eat our food!
He continued in this startling manner for about a minute until the waiter gave him an angry glance.
'Ah, it's all the same food anyway. I sat down with my fellow travelers at the behest of someone a bit calmer, and we began to talk of our reasons for traveling. They weren't familiar with "Northwest Passage," so I played it on my phone for them, but I'll sing it to you to bypass the distraction of modern technology:
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
Westward from the Davis Strait, 'tis there 'twas said to lie,
the sea route to the Orient for which so many died,
seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
and a long-forgotten, lonely cairn of stones.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
Three centuries thereafter, I take passage over land
in the footsteps of brave Kelsey, where his sea of flowers began.
Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again,
this tardiest explorer driving hard across the plain.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
And through the night behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west,
I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson, and the rest,
who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me
to race the roaring Fraser to the sea.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
How then am I so different from the first ones through this way?
Like them, I led a settled life; I threw it all away
to seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men,
and to find there but the road back home again.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
And if should be I come again to loved ones left at home,
put the journals on the mantle, shake the frost out of my bones,
making memories of the passage, only memories after all,
of hardships there the hardest to recall.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage,
and make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.*3
'Fairly to the point, and entirely true. What is Jama'a el Fna? Only a facade - what is authentic, not this exterior propped up by the government for tourists? Here they are, preserving their past, but saving only the surface. That is what I came to find. Why is it that here in glorified Marrakesh all I can think of to write about are profane food vendors and thoughts of afar? Decay, my friends, decay. Marrakesh now is the ashes of a fire we stoked, thus I set out to find the coals that had not yet burned, so after a night nestled quietly in the warmth of my hostel, a night sleeping soundly without thinking of my quest, I made up my mind to discover the antithesis of this awful, tainted edifice. I resolved to travel into the truest depths of the medina, and therein find the authenticity I knew must survive somewhere in the quiet, dark alleyways tourists never visited. After breakfast and coffee, I left the hostel and circled around the south end of the square to the road leading into the souqs, and ventured down the narrow, tourist-packed street as far through winding markets as I could, and finally came to a covered vegetable market frequented mainly by Moroccans. I was making progress. I turned away from the square at this crossroads, into a derelict residential neighborhood.
That is where I first heard the whispers. They came quietly at first, young men who looked like any of their peers in physicality, but with a much more sinister bearing.
"Monsieur, hashish?" I brushed them aside, and continued briskly down my path. After around five minutes or so, I realized it had been a while since I had last seen another man an American would call white. I kept walking and walking as the buildings grew more and more tired and the street narrowed. More demands of "Monsieur, hashish." The whispers grew and grew until eventually they could heardly be callsed that at all. A one-armed man gesticulated as subtly as was for him possible at a red door and in his spitting manner beckoned me over.
"Good women here, good price. Anything you want." I passed him as quickly as possible. The whispers of the drug dealers grew louder and louder.
"Monsieur, hashish? Monsieur, hashish?" Despite my growing unease, I continued, for in this quarter I was assured to find what I was looking for, although by then I could no longer articulate what it was. I turned a corner and was then on a street that would have had me more than on edge in Chicago or St. Louis, but in the warm atmosphere of Morocco, did not set off those same warning bells. Two men tousled in the street, which was now populated only with these low-life figures I had grown to dread. The old flesh-peddler had apparently followed me, and now issued a new cry. "A male, perhaps?" There were screams and the two brawling men drew knives and the whispers of "Monsieur, hashish?" grew to a deafening roar and then the buildings around me seemed to erupt into flame, red coals falling from the sky, and blazing tongues belched from the windows, and you can envision my entirely horrified reaction when I felt a burly arm curl over my shoulder, and I turned to face a tall, strongly built man in a professional brown suit who pivoted and said to me in an accent both unmistakably and incomprehensibly British: 'This is not a place for tourists. The square is that way. Stick to your own kind.' I rapidly left that infernal place.
'Nonetheless, I did not heed his advice, no, I am too incorrigible for that wisdom, and while I departed the burning street, I did not have any intention of returning to that artificial square, at least so immediately. As I walked west, or so I believe, the whispers of "Monsieur, hashish" faded into the background of raucous Moroccan voices, and the more standard souk fare returned to the fore. Alas, though, I did not want to step back into the fire of Jama'a el Fna, so I turned again when I came to the food market, and went down a street running perpendicular to the one I was currently walking. I passed several herbalists lining the road. Old men weighed mystical powders in decaying bronze scales to sell to superstitious old crones, and I was returned to a dream I had my first night in Marrakesh. I found my self replaced to a room utterly gray, reposing on an unmemorable bed. In this small room there was no adornment, only a table across from me upon which sat a large bronze scale. On the right side of the scale I could see a small pile of white beads, black on the left. Besides these beads, there was no discernible color, only an impenetrable gray which gave the room the feeling of a dreary mid-winter sky. From the shadows a phantom hand would add more beads to the existing piles, one at a time, and to whichever pile the hand would ignore, an equal spherule would materialize to keep the scale in a perfect and interminable balance until the mounds threatened to overflow. Thus the scale was ever-even. Daybreak arrived to color my room and the walls expanded and the furnishings reappeared to garnish the cell at my pension. It is truly remarkable how the slightest thought can provoke such a tangent.
This street of apothecaries thinned, and I found myself once again in a narrow dark alley. At the end of this foreboding street, a narrow tunnel bore into the shadows, and, against my better judgment, I stooped beneath the tired archway and entered the small grotto of an ancient herbalist. I was again shocked by language when a decrepit old man hunched in a dark corner invite me into his shop in the King's English.
"How did you come to learn English?" I asked this sack of bones.
"I have traveled many lands and learned many tongues, and for it am none the livelier." An arresting cough echoed in his den. "You would never believe my stories, boy, never believe them. My skills were once very much in demand. I have cured of syphilis a madman with more wives and concubines than a caliph, treated the worm of a conqueror who traded height for ambition. A bearded heathen took my poisons and give his soul for a taste of endless life. I returned here, and heard of his many deaths decades later. You, young man, have many years to see the world. How I hate this prison my body has become. My skills will be forever available to all, if only they knew I rotted in this hole. Yet one thing I learned from my labors can only be expressed in verse:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
"Now go return to your life.
Returning to dinner, I thought back on my day. In the late afternoon, I attended a carpet market, where men from the surrounding villages would bring their wares to sell. Were these new inventions crafted by some cloistered Berber wife, perhaps some ancient family artifact of which economic necessity now dictated its sale? I had no way of asking them, and they would never respond.
A mustachioed man weaved throughout the food stalls selling his wares as I ate alone that night. He wore a fake nose and glasses and held a squeaker which whistled a horrible plaintive rhythm. I looked at him discreetly, and I don't think he noticed me. His eyes were sunken beyond the geometry of his face, and even as he joyously approached children to try to sell them the little plastic party favors, his visage was heavy, undeniably somber. I think now that grim whistle is one of the truly saddest songs I have ever heard. Squeak squeak! Buy it! What in his past led him to this business? Squeak squeak. Ask not for whom the man squeaks; he squeaks for thee. The squeak man cometh. You have to have heard the sound, but for me it is miserably tragic, and I have no idea the reaction it would stir in me to listen to it again.' With no introduction this time he began to sing again.
'It was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through,
that I looked from the Citadel down to the Narrows and asked what it's coming to.
I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass right down to the waterline
and I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:
can I sing it just one time?
'With half-closed against the sun, for the warm wind giving thanks,
I dreamed of the days of the deep-laden schooners slashing home from the Grand Banks.
The last lies done in the harbor sun with her picture on a dime,
but I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:
can I sing it just one time?
Can I sing it just one time?
'And haul away and heave her home, this song is heard no more:
no boats to sing it for, no sails to sing it for.
There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.
We traded old ways for the new, old ways for the new,
old ways for the new, for the new.
'Now you ask what's this romantic boy who laments what's done and gone.
There was no romance on a cold winter ocean and the gale sang an awful song.
But my fathers knew of wind and tide and my blood is maritime,
and I heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:
can I sing it just one time?
Can I sing it just one time?
'And haul away and sheet her home, this song is heard no more:
no boats to sing it for, no sails to sing it for.
There rises now a single tide of tourists passing through.
We traded old ways for the new, old ways for the new,
old ways for the new, for the new.
'So it was in the spring this year of grace, with new life pushing through
that I looked from the Citadel down to the Narrows and asked what it's coming to.
I saw upper Canadian concrete and glass right down to the waterline.
I have heard an old song down on fisherman's wharf:
can I sing it just one time?
Can I sing it just one time?
Can I sing it just one time?'*5
Belting out his baritone notes something seemed to have changed in Walstrom. The song quieted near the end, but his fervor remained, and he did not pause before suddenly attacking us.
'Can't you see? It's gone. Can you understand what I'm saying? You're all here hunting the same thing, don't deny it. Even if you're a student here, or someone who says you're genuinely interested, well, businessmen get a pass on this, but you're the same in a different way, we're all just Orientalist bastards looking for our fix of the exotic. We traipse around in outfitters' shirts with our cameras and drinking water, and look for something that's real, something that clashes with our processed West. Ha! you won't find that now - we and our ancestors have burned it all. From the rape of colonialism, to our so-called enlightened modernity of cultural tourism, we really haven't come all too far, no, throw it in to the fires, this age of mysticism and separation is dead. I could say that all you get now is cries of 'Monsieur, hashish!' but that would be far too dark, really, and not what you want to hear, so in my permeating dishonesty I will tell you that you will find here something individual, that it is yours to find, and all our experiences will be different, but, no, I don't believe that anymore.'
Then his tale was finished, and he removed himself to another chair to sit aside in silence, and took the pose of a businessless vender. We sat at the table, our tea glasses empty. 'It's getting late,' said the waiter, who brought a scrap of paper with the drinks tabulated, and I looked up to see the heavens veiled by a gray bank of gathering clouds, and a clearing road leading to the edges of the medina sat in a disquieting calm under a heavy sky--seemed to lead into the maw of an immense furnace."
-WWW
*1. An Arabic phrase roughly translating as "there was and there was not," used commonly by storytellers to introduce their stories.
*2. Archibald Lampman, "The City of the End of Things"
*3. Stan Rogers, "Northwest Passage"
*4. Percy Bysse Shelley, "Ozymandias"
*5. Stan Rogers, "Fisherman's Wharf"