John R. Maier

State University of New York, College at Brockport
jmaier@brock1p

 

If, as Michel Foucault claims, “Western man” has become a “confessing animal” with a narrative literature appropriate to that role, does the Western author/confessor elicit from the cultural other a story that makes sense either to the priest or the patient? The Western listener in this case is American expatriate Paul Bowles. The other culture is Moroccan, on the margins of the complex Arab- Muslim culture of the Middle East and North Africa. As the country in that Arab-Muslim complex with the easiest access for Europeans, a country that has argued within itself whether it ought to belong more to the Arab League or to the European community, Morocco is also on the margins of the West. Indeed, its very name means, in Arabic, the “farthest West.”

 

We ask the others (“primitives,” nomads, Third World peoples, traditional societies) to speak to us–and listen well. We take photographs of them, and analyze the photographs. The professionals in this enterprise are anthropologists and the sociologists like Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, who studied in her own country and then went to Paris and to Brandeis to complete Western-style Ph.D. work and who now interviews non-literate Moroccan women. The women tell her their life stories, and she lets them talk without much imposing of the Western autobiographical styles we have been developing since St. Augustine.

 

American anthropologists have had ready access to Morocco. Many of them–Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow, and Vincent Crapanzano especially–have come, like their counterparts in literary studies, to question the fundamental assumptions of their profession. In different ways they have found ways to have Moroccans speak: for Geertz, through symbols like stories told of 17th Century Sufi saints; for Rabinow, through the hermeneutics of fieldwork (following Paul Ricoeur to the “comprehension of the self through the detour of the comprehension of the other”); and for Crapanzano, through the stories and esoteric lore of a Meknes tile-maker who is convinced he is married to the seductive she-demon ‘A’isha Qandisha. All entered Morocco and found ways to have Moroccans speak to them.

 

These anthropologists are witnesses, among many others, to what Richard E. Palmer has called the “end of the modern era,” and to what Palmer claims is a “major change in worldview” to “postmodernity” (363-364). The postmodern turn is evident immediately in the short stories and novels of Paul Bowles (1910- ). (A possible exception is The Spider’s House.) While there has been some experimenting with point of view, e.g., “The Eye” in Midnight Mass and “New York 1965” in Unwelcome Words, a key element is probably Bowles’ refusal to accept the assumptions of modern Western realistic fiction about character. How much theorizing about literature this has involved is moot. My guess is that Bowles’ refusal of the modern notion of character, derived from an image of the self that had developed during the period of modern philosophy (i.e., since Descartes), comes from his reading of eccentric fiction–from a lifelong interest in Edgar Allan Poe and an adult interest in Surrealism.

 

Bowles’ fiction seems at first to be straightforward realistic fiction, one of the defining characteristics of modernism. But the modernist readings nearly always fail. Characters have little “depth.” They rarely “develop.” Instead of closure, there is most often irony: “relationships” collapse, dialogue falls apart. There is no “self” such as has been assumed in the modern West. In the non-Western storytelling of non-literate Moroccans Bowles found a very different sense of self.

 

One way to detect this postmodern turn in Bowles’ work is to look at Bowles’ translations of Moroccan storytellers. By the mid-1960s he had almost abandoned his own fiction writing for the strange bicultural hybrids that were produced by Bowles–especially Five Eyes (1979). To see what is happening in these texts–literature in English (for an English-reading audience, of course) whose origin is oral performance in Moroccan Arabic–consider a distinction that has arisen in the “modern” world and fundamentally constitutes the West’s image of itself as “modern,” namely a distinction frequently encountered in the social sciences: “traditional” vs. “modern.” Although it is especially evident in anthropology, the distinction is the latest in the West’s powerful “gaze” upon the cultural other: “traditional” replacing to a great extent the earlier “primitive,” “modern” replacing the earlier image (still sometimes found in advertizing) of “civilized” society.

 

In The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing The Middle East (1958), Daniel Lerner collapsed the elements of a “modern” society–a certain type of economic development, urbanism, literacy, media exposure, and political participation–into a simple, telling comment. In the modern or “participant” society, “most people go through school, read newspapers, receive cash payments in jobs they are legally free to change, buy goods for cash in an open market, vote in elections which actually decide among competing candidates, and express opinions on many matters which are not their personal business” (50-1). The psychological mechanism he isolated in the change from a traditional to a modern society Lerner called “psychic mobility” or “empathy”:

 

The mobile person is distinguished by a high capacity for identification with new aspects of his environment; he comes equipped with the mechanisms needed to incorporate new demands upon himself that arise outside of his habitual experience. These mechanisms for enlarging a man's identity operate in two ways. Projection facilitates identification by assigning to the object certain preferred attributes of the self--others are "incorporated" because they are like me. (Distantiation or negative identification, in the Freudian sense, results when one projects onto others certain disliked attributes of the self.) Introjection enlarges identity by attributing to the self certain desirable attributes of the object--others are "incorporated" because I am like them or want to be like them. We shall use the word empathy as shorthand for both these mechanisms. (49)

 

Lerner, a sociologist, mentions along the way that “the typical literary form of the modern epoch, the novel, is a conveyance of disciplined empathy. Where the poet once specialized in self-expression, the modern novel reports his sustained imagination of the lives of others” (52).

 

Concepts like “literary realism,” thought to support the novel as Lerner conceives of it, derive in part from a literary tradition, from texts that form a tradition. We increase our psychic mobility by reading literary works. But we also draw in our reading upon socially constructed concepts of the self. When such concepts of the self, maintained by a culture other than our own, clash with our own, we find it difficult to accept the other’s self- disclosure.

 

Narratives coming to us from the margins of the Arab- Muslim world can be particularly trying. Arabic literature is old enough and prestigious enough–no matter how small the percentage of readers literate enough to read Standard Arabic might be–to exert influences that are not easily detected by the Western observer. Edward Said, for example, has noticed that “Arabic literature before the twentieth century has a rich assortment of narrative forms–qissa, sira, hadith, khurafa, ustura, khabar, nadira, maqama–of which no one seems to have become, as the European novel did, the major narrative type” (Allen 17). John A. Haywood (126-137) and more recently Roger Allen (9- 19) have struggled with the problem of distinguishing Western influences on Arabic narratives, novels and short stories, from the influences of the Arabic literary tradition.¹

 

Bowles, who has never claimed to have mastered modern Standard Arabic, the dialect used for writing throughout the Arab world, deliberately sought out non-literate storytellers. His preference for the oral performance is an indicator of much that has changed in the Western view of the non-Western world. (Bowles remains, though, one of the great examples of Lerner’s “mobile personality,” a modernist feature that would be impossible for Bowles to suppress.²)

 

In 1958, Lerner could confidently oppose “illiterate” with “enlightenment,” so obvious was it to him that literacy was valuable without question. Since then much research into the distinctive changes introduced by literacy has qualified that easy confidence. When Walter J. Ong distinguishes the psychodynamics of orality from the thought and expression of literacy, he does not devalue the former:

 

          Additive rather than subordinative;
          Aggregative rather than analytic;
          Redundant or "copious" vs. spare and economical;
          Traditionalist vs. experimental;
          Close to the human lifeworld vs. knowledge at a
               distance;
          Agonistically toned vs. abstractions that disengage;
          Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively
               distanced;
          Homeostatic vs. novelty; and
          Situational rather than abstract (37-49)

 

(Note that Ong considers the oral culture “empathetic and participatory” in a much different way from Daniel Lerner, who sees the empathy not in the known and the traditional, but for the other.) In the case of Bowles’ translations, the non-literate Ahmed Yacoubi and Larbi Layachi are certainly “traditional,” according to Lerner’s model, and marked by the orality of Ong’s. The one who elicits their stories, Bowles himself, remains a modern in Lerner’s sense, since he cannot avoid the empathy that is so much a part of modern society.

 

At least one reason for Bowles’ incessant travel outside the United States and his settling into Tangier in the late 1940s was a dislike of most everything Western and “civilized.” He repeated Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation that the West needs to “dump vast quantities of waste matter, which it dumps on less fortunate peoples” (Their Heads are Green vii). Levi-Strauss had written, “What travel discloses to us first of all is our own garbage, flung in the face of humanity.” To this Bowles added: “My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners” (vii). The stories he translated, not from written sources but from his recordings of oral performances, are successful to the extent that Bowles lets the other speak, in writing, in the best American English: he lets them be themselves.

 

Daisy Hilse Dwyer, another of the American anthropologists who have had access to Morocco, based her study of “male and female in Morocco,” Images and Self- Images (1978), on Moroccan folktales she recorded there. She followed Geertz in seeing a different concept of “personhood” operating in Morocco and evident in the folktales–a self socially embedded, relational, interactional: “personality or character varies rather flexibly from relationship to relationship” (182). This is in contrast to the Western stress on the person as “isolate.”

 

If the sense of self, personhood, character contrasts strongly with the West’s self-concept, then stories, whether they are consciously fictions or self-disclosures, are not likely to have the same shape as modern Western fiction. Fatima Mernissi defended her practice in interviewing non- literate Moroccan women, in which she violated “Rule No. 1 that I learned at the Sorbonne and at the American university where I was trained in ‘research technique’: to maintain objectivity toward the person being interviewed” (Doing Daily Battle 18). And she violated Rule No. 2 in the way she developed “as much as possible an attitude of self-criticism” and testing of subjectivity as she edited the interviews. She let the speakers, who had never been given the opportunity/task to tell of themselves in such a (Western) fashion, speak in as comfortable a manner as she could allow. The results were life stories that are “relaxed, often confusing” in the way time sequences and events are narrated. “An illiterate woman who has virtually no control over her life, subject to the whims and will of others, has a much more fluid sense of time than an educated Western reader, who is used to analysing time in an attempt to control it” (20). A non-Western sense of time operates in the stories Bowles translates as well. Whatever one makes of the “reality” in literary “realism,” so important to the modern West, reality is rather differently shaped in the Moroccans’ accounts.³

 

Bowles has provided English-speaking readers with stories that challenge their ability to translate a culture very different from their own. Among the tales collected in Five Eyes (1979) are two that play on the Western reader’s expectations. One seems bizarre indeed, and the other only too easily read. “The Night Before Thinking,” by Ahmed Yacoubi (1931- ), and “The Half-Brothers” by Larbi Layachi (1940- ), Moroccan storytellers, illustrate an unusual hermeneutical bind.

 

Both Ahmed Yacoubi and Larbi Layachi are non-literate storytellers the expatriate Bowles met in Morocco. In “Notes on the Work of the Translator,” Bowles indicated his admiration for oral storytelling such as he had heard in the cafes of Tangier. Once the tape-recorder had arrived in Morocco, in 1956, he began recording oral tales. Like all the spoken texts in Five Eyes, “The Night Before Thinking” and “The Half-Brothers” were performed without stopping, at a single sitting. Yacoubi’s story derives from traditional Moroccan materials, and is full of imagination; Larbi’s story, on the other hand, strikes the reader as a realistic piece, more like an oral history than a traditional North African tale.

 

As popular as storytellers are in Morocco, the stories have no appreciable value there “as literature.” Virtually every traveler has commented on the storytellers in public places, like the square known as Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech, where they perform daily to enthusiastic audiences made up not of Western tourists but of the people who know the traditions and the languages, Arabic and Berber. Elias Cannetti, who visited the square in the 1960s, was struck by the contrast between the quiet scribes who made themselves available to the many who are not literate in the society (and with whom, as a writer, he felt a kind of kinship), and the flamboyant storytellers:

The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. It is around them that people throng most densely and stay longest. Their performances are lengthy; an inner ring of listeners squat on the ground and it is some time before they get up again. Others, standing, form an outer ring; they, too, hardly move, spellbound by the storyteller's words and gestures. . . . Having seldom felt at ease among the people of our zones whose life is literature--despising them because I despise something about myself, and I think that something is paper--I suddenly found myself here among authors I could look up to since there was not a line of theirs to be read. (77, 79)

 

 

Thanks in large measure to Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Walter J. Ong, and now a journal devoted to Oral Tradition, the debate over orality and literacy has become respectable in the academy, and the value of oral narratives is gradually coming clear to those whose teaching and scholarship have been almost entirely preoccupied with the written word. Before such a revaluation can take place in Morocco, however, an almost insurmountable obstacle has to be overcome. The gap between Modern Standard Arabic, the dialect of Arabic used in writing, and the regional dialects of Arabic is much greater than, say, between Appalachian English and British Received Pronunciation or American Broadcast Standard. Any literate Arab speaker can understand Modern Standard, whether it is written in Iraq, Egypt or the Maghrib; but the local dialects are often mutually unintelligible. Because of that gap, Arabic provided the classical case of what linguists call “diglossia.”⁴ The rich nuances of an oral tale may delight the Arab speaker, but it will not be enough to raise the tale to the prestige of writing.

 

Ahmed Yacoubi⁵ and Larbi Layachi are in a peculiar situation, then. Their oral tales are not available to Moroccan literature, and the English translations are the only texts available to any audience. The original situation of the oral performance, the Sitz im Leben, is not accessible; recordings in the Moghrebi Arabic dialect have not been made available to the public. The written text, in American English, is the product of a collaboration between Bowles and the storytellers; it is all that remains of what was first of all an oral performance in a culture and language strikingly different from the English-speaking readers. The “authors” of the tales find themselves unable to read the texts.

 

AHMED YACOUBI’S “THE NIGHT BEFORE THINKING”

 

Ahmed Yacoubi’s “The Night Before Thinking” is a tale in a vein familiar to Middle East and North African storytellers, a tale of magic and the supernatural.⁶ For that reason it is both familiar to the Western reader–after all, Western literature is filled with magic (Dr. Faustus, the romance tradition)–and inaccessible to us. “Magic moonshine” is appropriate to the romance-writer, as Hawthorne pointed out long ago, so that “the floor of our familiar room [becomes] a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (38). But serious treatment of magic is reserved for special genres–children’s literature, where it is supposedly appropriate to the “magical phase” of human development (to be cast off in normal development), or science fiction and fantasy, where it is part of the game.⁷

 

“The Night Before Thinking” begins in one generation and ends in another. In revenge for the killing of her brother Difdaf, one “Raqassa” (whose real name turns out to be Aaklaa bent Aaklaa) lures an unsuspecting Hakim into her power. Instead of killing him, she ends up marrying Hakim, and a strange boy is born of their union. Raqassa possesses very powerful magic, inherited from her father and drawing support from Satan. Thus it is not entirely unexpected that the strange child finds a way to kill both parents. With their death the daughter, whose growth had been stunted for twenty-five years, begins to grow.

 

Yacoubi’s bizarre tale includes a reversal that might go almost unnoticed by the Western reader but would have fit into the familiar pattern of traditional narratives. The terrible seductress and mother, Raqassa, explains that she gained “the power” because of an accident of birth. When her mother, Lalla Halalla, was carrying twins in her womb, she slipped while running, and the girl was born five minutes before the boy. “The one who came out first had to be given the power,” and so she, not Difdaf, gained the power that is exhibited, for example, in throwing “a darkness” over the face of Hakim, spreading his lips all over his cheeks, and seizing the man with the force of “sixty thousand kilos” (24), capturing him. The story is filled with oddments of magic, burning “bakhour,” an “egg of Rokh el Bali,” humans turning to smoke.

 

Later, when Raqassa and Hakim produce a most unusual child–a boy with eyes all over his body–they try to explain how they had been able to produce a child with such strange powers. The child himself only laughs at them:

 

What a lot of lies you both tell! he said to them. One of you says the eye in the top of my head comes from one thing. The other says the eye the middle of my forehead comes from something else. You are saying that your eyes are in my eyes. I already existed before you ever met each other. I was hidden and neither one of you knew me. Only God knew I was going to be like this. You didn't know. Now you think you understand all about it. You don't know anything. How can anyone know what's hidden inside the belly of a woman? It's God who decided I should be like this. He cut out my pattern. And neither of you knew how I was going to look. It was written in the books that I was going to be born like this. It was already known. (33)

 

The second child they produce is a girl, strangely deformed and very weak. Twenty-five years later she remained as tiny as she was at the time of her birth. When the son manages to kill the parents, the girl begins immediately to grow. Instead of the live parents, the children keep only two three-colored cloths, one representing the father, the other representing the mother. The son asks his sister which of the cloths she wants. “The girl laughed. She said: I take my mother. Because I’m a virgin. And the boy always goes with his father” (35). The power is returned to the proper relationship between male and female. In spite of the supposed gap of twenty-five years, the offspring of Hakim and Raqassa remain pre- adolescent children, but they are now prepared to grow into their “normal” roles.

 

“Normal” roles are not necessarily the same in different cultures, of course. In an often-cited essay on “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” Nancy Chodorow called attention to the Moroccan Muslim family as one that, even in a patrilineal, patrilocal society, maintained the self-esteem of women–largely because daughters see themselves, in a way strikingly different from daughters in the West, as “allies against oppression,” able to develop strong attachment to and identification with other women (65). Obviously, the family in “The Night Before Thinking” is a perversion of Moroccan norms, due to the peculiar situation of Raqassa. Chodorow’s view of Moroccan Muslim mother/daughter relationships derives from the work of Moroccan sociologist, Fatima Mernissi. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society explores the family in Arab-Muslim tradition and in emerging new models (165-77).

 

Larbi Layachi’s “The Half-brothers”

 

In reading Larbi Layachi’s “The Half-Brothers,”⁸ as in tracking down political chicanery, it is useful to follow the money. The ten-year-old Larbi works with the fishermen, pulling nets, for wages that rarely seem to have connection with the work expended: five rials and a basketful of fish one day, three rials another, one rial on yet another occasion. The boy seems not to expect more (or less), and he does not complain. One day when he is feeling quite ill and barely able to pull the nets, the other fishermen notice it, and suggest he take the day off, but Larbi insists on working (62). He gets his three rials anyway. He is paid twelve pesetas for a basket filled with metal he dug out of a garbage dump (71). He pays a rial for half a loaf of bread, a can of tuna fish, and two oranges (72). Two bilyoun for the cinema (68). He finds in the garbage a five-rial note, which he had first thought only a peseta (74). Usually he gets three gordas for a kilo of bones he sells to “a Jew who lived near the bull-ring” (70-1).

 

Bowles offers no dollar equivalence for these exotic monies.⁹ In one sense it does not matter: the amounts are so small relative to the wealth of an American reader that the meaningless currency is a powerful sign of poverty. From the point of view of a ten-year-old, money is simply “there,” a fact in a world that does not require explanation or expectations. But the arbitrary payment of wages, the caprice in finding money on the streets, the crude exploitation of the boys’ step-father, who regularly takes everything the boy makes at his job (while the other son attends school and is forbidden to work)–are part of a world that seems to lack cause and effect. The boy is industrious enough and clever to survive. He does not try to put the experience in a “larger context,” and neither does the storyteller Larbi, who offers almost nothing in the way of comment incidents in his past. The money is a gift, baraka, the will of Allah. Paul Rabinow, who did his fieldwork in Morocco, noted that

 

poverty does not carry the stigma in Morocco which it does in America. It indicates only a lack of material goods at the present time, nothing more. Although regrettable, it does not reflect unfavorably on one's character. It simply means that Allah has not smiled on one, for reasons beyond normal understanding, but that things are bound to change soon. (116)

 

What is most surprising to the American reader is the apparent lack of causal connectedness between events narrated in “The Half-Brothers.” True, the story leads to the moment when the ten year old decides that he will no longer return to the home in which he is exploited and beaten by his step-father. Henceforth Larbi will live on the beach. The man, Si Abdullah, pockets the five rial note Larbi found in the garbage and forces the boy out of the house to work, though Larbi is not feeling well.

 

I went out. I was thinking: I'll work. But the money I earn I'll spend for food, and I won't go back home at all. I can eat here on the beach. And I was thinking that it would be better for me to sleep in one of the boats than live there in the house. (74)

 

Larbi works that day, dizzy and with a headache, and takes the two and a half rials the chief gives him to a cafe. After dark he finds a boat and sleeps warmly under the fish netting in the boat. When, in the morning, he is asked, “Why didn’t you go home to bed?” the boy answers simply, “I didn’t go . . . . That’s all. After that I lived on the beach” (75).

 

The story thus presents a string of episodes, a linear development, a clear structure with episodes leading to the decision of the boy to live on the beach, but with little of the sense common to Western realistic fiction that all details fit into a larger, causally related whole. The problem emerges early, in the very different treatment given the boy and his half-brother by the mother’s second husband, Si Abdullah. The episodes are strung together without moving toward a climax of intensity. Sometimes the father is awful, occasionally generous; he is always seen from the outside, and there is no interest in (and no comment on) the father or the mother. They act; that is all. The boys, on the other hand, are somewhat rounded but move about unconsciously, accepting social norms that are often puzzling to the outsider, the Western reader.

 

In “Africa Minor,” Bowles describes a “culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior”: “In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between God and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh” (Their Heads are Green 22). The unself-consciousness of “The Half-Brothers” is a narrative correlate of that ancient pattern. The story retains some features common to oral tales. A formula, “Let us say . . . ,” is repeated throughout the piece. The boy makes his money pulling the nets of the fishermen, and the activity is repeated a number of times in virtually the same language. In almost no way does it resemble the storytelling traits of “The Night Before Thinking,” traits that go back at least as far as The Thousand and One Nights.

 

Cultures mix and appear to clash as “naturally”– unreflectively–as a rainstorm causes the shed where the boy and the family donkey are housed together to flood. The West is present, not remarked upon, not remarkable: the Spanish (simply identified with “the Nazarenes,” 60-61); canned food, the telephone, an ambulance, needles in the hospital. The cinema is remarked upon, since it was the first time the boy had seen a movie (69). “I bought a ticket at the window and went in. That was the first time I had been inside a cinema. Now I see why people like to live in the city. This theatre is very fine, I thought. There were pictures of war, and there were airplanes flying” (69). As is usual in Bowles’ own fiction, even the remarkable is presented with no indication of changes in intensity, in intonation, rarely an indication of enthusiasm. This, too, is part of the cultural code: all facts are equal, and equally valued.¹⁰

 

The voice of “The Half-Brothers” may be Larbi’s, but the questions that prompt it–the questions raised by the hidden author/audience–are Western, American. Larbi is prompted to talk in a way that is not a traditionally Moroccan way of speaking. Rather it is a confessional manner that, as Michel Foucault has insisted, increasingly characterizes Western discourse. The result is a story that is closer to oral history, the purest example of this new authorship in the West, than to fictional modes–the portraits of the artist, for example–that help to organize the narratives.

 

Foucault, in volume one of The History of Sexuality (1976), pointed out that in the West, since the Middle Ages “at least,” confession has been a major ritual in the production of “truth.” “We have since become a singularly confessing society” (59). There is a certain irony in Paul Bowles prompting the words of Larbi, since he is notoriously reticent about revealing himself directly, even in his autobiography. Without Stopping (1972) records that Bowles learned early that he “would always be kept from doing what I enjoyed and forced to do that which I did not” by his family, particularly by his father. “Thus I became an expert in the practice of deceit, at least insofar as general mien and facial expressions were concerned.” He could not, however, bring himself to lie, “inasmuch as for me the word and its literal meaning had supreme importance” (17). Except for the hostility toward his family, Bowles’ autobiography is striking in the way it avoids self- disclosure and analysis of the many people, famous and not, who crowd the pages of Without Stopping.¹¹

 

Foucault noted the change in the West that was first religious and legal but came to have great significance for literature. He rightly emphasized the power of the one eliciting the confession:

 

For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the reference of others and the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power. (58-9)

 

As “Western man” became a “confessing animal,” according to Foucault, there was correspondingly a massive change in literature:

 

We have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of "trials" of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering image. (59)

 

In “The Half-Brothers” Larbi is brought to a point where he can and must abandon his family, to live on the beach. Importantly Larbi does not become a writer, as Bowles had, or others, like Joyce, who inscribed their lives in “portraits.” Larbi is the one who was not educated and remained non-literate while Bowles recorded, translated, and wrote down the storyteller’s words. There is nothing in the story (or in Bowles’ comments on his non-literate storytellers) to indicate that there is anything wrong in that. (The one storyteller in Five Eyes who presented difficulties for Bowles was Mohammed Choukri, the only one to become literate and the one who insisted that Bowles follow the Arabic text word for word, comma by comma when the two worked together to translate the stories [8].)

 

Bowles is the partner to Larbi’s confession, but it is not clear where the power is. Success as an “author” had given Larbi enough money so that he could look for a bride (Without Stopping 350); but the anxiety over official objection to his book, A Life Full of Holes forced Larbi to leave Morocco, never to return (355). The story of a ten-year-old who leaves his family, mainly owing to oppression at the hands of his step-father is not in the traditional repertory of the Moroccan storyteller. (Larbi’s mother is sometimes sympathetic to her son’s needs; she tries to moderate her husband’s attacks on the boy; she gives him food; but she, like the rest of the family, merely ignores the boy during a lengthy stay in the hospital.) It is also a scandalous tale in that it does not fit into the curve of development expected of men in the Arab-Muslim world.

 

Larbi is “about ten” when he leaves home for the beach. Significantly, he is not yet an adolescent, not yet bothered by sexual urges. If a certain degree of wild behavior is allowed the drari–even encouraged by cultural norms of child rearing–there is a larger pattern captured by the proverb,

 

The boy of ten is like a peeled cucumber.
The man of twenty makes friendships with fools.
The man of thirty (is like the) flower of the garden.
The man of forty is in his prime. (Dwyer 87)

 

From the child’s earliest days, according to Daisy Hilse Dwyer, the Moroccan boy’s “egotistical spontaneity” is encouraged (91). Even in the womb “the male is believed to be a bundle of energy that is predisposed to movement. The male fetus is believed to flit from side to side in the abdomen, nervously covering his ground.” Still, this exaggerated freedom of the boys running wild in the streets is but one phase in a “developmental pathway” (166) in which a male eventually achieves the potential of his ‘aqel (intelligence, responsibility, rationality; 152), wisdom, and spiritual insight, usually in middle age.

 

The drari in Morocco have certainly occasioned their share of comments from Western visitors there. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s largely successful attempt to enter the world of Moroccan women was initially blocked by the boys in the neighborhood, who treated Fernea’s children rudely. They made rude gestures, called the Fernea children names, and threw clods of dirt, then stones, at the family. Even the mild-mannered anthropologist, Fernea’s husband Bob, turned on them when they demanded baksheesh and tweaked daughter Laila’s hair at the same time. Fernea’s sense of alienation was complete. “This was no fairy tale, I told myself. We were alone, strange and alien, in a strange and alien world” (59).

 

Anthropologist Paul Rabinow found his way literally blocked by the drari, when he first entered the village of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi, where he was supposed to conduct his research:

 

The car was greeted . . . by what seemed like hundreds of drari--which is inadequately translated as children. These fearless little monsters surrounded the car, much to the annoyance of their elders. Screaming, yelling, and pushing they proceeded to examine all of my possessions. One of the villagers' main fears, it turns out, was that these drari would do some irreparable damages either to me or to my belongings. Their fathers threatened them with beatings, curses, and exclamations, to little or no avail. (84)

 

Fortunately, the Fernea family came to be accepted in the neighborhood. A young boy even alerted them to a key they had left in the door, an invitation to robbery in most cities. And Rabinow, similarly, found little to complain about later in his stay, regarding the boys. Daisy Hilse Dwyer, though, notes the anxieties of Moroccan families over the unruly behavior of sons even much later in the sons’ lives, before the wisdom of age enters them. And the beatings Rabinow found the fathers threatening their sons with are very much a part of the fathers’ prerogatives.¹² The expectation that men normally improve with age (and women do not) is a common pattern in Moroccan folktales (Dwyer 52-7).

 

Precisely because it is not difficult to “follow” such a story, what is revealed is our way (tradition) of reading, the genres and expectations with which we are familiar. Larbi’s theme, Bowles tells us, is always “injustice and the suffering it causes,” and his purpose is “to ‘tell them outside’ what it is like to be shut inside” (Five Eyes 8). Presumably, the outsiders are the readers. But the very familiarity with realistic fiction which makes the story accessible may obscure the concept of character that informs the piece.

 

Both Daisy Hilse Dwyer, who studied Moroccan stories for the light they shed on Moroccan ideas of male and female and their separate pathways of development (166), and Clifford Geertz, upon whose work she drew, distinguish between a Western and a Moroccan view of the person. In “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Geertz described Morocco as a “wild-west sort of place” filled with “rugged individuals” of many types. Yet he cautions that “no society consists of anonymous eccentrics bouncing off one another like billiard balls” (51). He emphasized the connectedness of individuals, the nisba that bound persons to families, occupations, religious sects, and even spiritual status. The outsider might see them as individuals of the Western sort, but insiders always knew the nisba of the person. “They are contextualized persons,” Geertz maintains.

 

Behind this is a very different concept of the person from what has developed in the West since the Renaissance:

 

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotional judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and seen contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. (48)

 

By prompting a decidedly Western style of story from Layachi, Bowles decontextualizes the ten-year-old. In particular, the developmental pathway (which, as Dwyer points out, has a moral curve quite different from “the predominant Euro-American sort” [166]) is obscured in the manner of closing the story–with Larbi as the triumphant individual who has thrown off the constraints of his family and society.

 

In contrast, Yacoubi’s “The Night Before Thinking” returns the reader–after any number of magical turns, imaginary leaps that are by definition unexpected–to the familiar context of the Arab-Islamic family. Yacoubi includes one jest at the expense of the Western reader, who is routinely inscribed as the Nazarene in these stories: when he tells the story of the accident that brought a girl to birth before the boy, Yacoubi’s character says, “And she was born five minutes before I was. Five minutes for the Christians is a long time. For us it’s not such a big thing. But this time it was like a thousand years” (25), since the power fell to the woman’s lot and not the man’s.

 

In a more innocent age these stories might have been enjoyed and dismissed as products of a “primitive” mind. The dangers of an attempt only slightly less suspect are still common: to read in the “Oriental” mind a strange, unfathomable otherness, and to see these others as what Edith Wharton called “unknown and unknowable people” (whom she nevertheless was able to describe; 113). Edward Said has alerted us to the dangers of “Orientalism.” As early as Aeschylus’ The Persians a West has thought itself confronted by a significant cultural other (56-7), visible today mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. Paul Bowles himself, attracted by Surrealist ideas, felt that in the part of the East he settled in he was finding the unconscious that civilization, the West, had repressed.¹³

 

Listening to non-literate Moroccan storytellers, recording their voices, translating their culture into a form of printed text, into a tradition that developed a certain kind of “realistic fiction,” Paul Bowles has formed a curious kind of hybrid text. Authorship of “The Night Before Thinking” and “The Half-Brothers is not the simple process–an individual drawing on individual experience to produce a work–that the West has considered somehow fundamental to the very notion of literature. Now that an anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, is drawing on Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to understand the anthropologist “as author” (Works and Lives 18-20), and Geertz himself is being drawn into a newer, more complex understanding of the authorship of literary works (Hernadi 757), it is becoming increasingly useful to look at texts produced by unusual “authors.”¹⁴

 

It would, in one sense, be helpful to have the tapes of Ahmed Yacoubi’s and Larbi Layachi’s stories in Moghrebi Arabic. One could then trace the changes from speech to writing, from a local dialect of Arabic to a regional dialect of English, in a more detailed way than is now possible. On the other hand, when a non-literate Moroccan friend thought one of Bowles’ translations was “shameful” because he had “written about people just as they are” (in the friend’s view making them seem “like animals”), the friend dismissed the “objective truth” of the representation: “That is statistical truth. We are interested in that, yes, but only as a means of getting to the real truth underneath” (“Africa Minor” 32). On one point the American reader can be certain, however. Paul Bowles may have sought the primitive, the unconscious, in Morocco; but the longer he remained there and the better he became to know the people and the local dialects, the more he was able to appreciate the different sense of “reality” he found there.

 

Notes

 

1. For the postmodern turn in Arabic literature, which also complicates the relationship between Western narratology and the East, see Maier, “A Postmodern Syrian Fictionalist.” Anton Shammas’ Arabesques (1986), written by a Palestinian whose first language is Arabic, but written in Hebrew (it caused no little controversy in Israel), is a postmodern novel that somehow manages to incorporate both traditional Arab storytelling and a distinctively Western narrative. Amulets, fortune-telling, and magical birds combine in the same work with the (apparent) autobiography of a Palestinian writer carefully set in a specific historical situation. In many ways the main narrator, Anton, measures himself against the man he could not be, his uncle Yusef, the storyteller rooted in Arab and early Christian traditions. Anton is more sophisticated, more Westernized, more “modern”–in all the ways suggested by Daniel Lerner, especially in his “psychic mobility”–than his uncle; the traditions are known to Anton, and fascinating, but they elude him:

 

That's how Uncle Yusef was. One the one hand, he was a devout Catholic, who like Saint Augustine was utterly certain, as if the Virgin Mary herself had assured him, that the years of his life were but links in a chain leading to salvation. On the other hand, as if to keep an escape route open for himself, in case the only reality was dust returning to dust and the jaws of the beast of nothing gaped wide, he still could believe that the circular, the winding and the elusive had the power to resist nothingness. However, he did not judge between these and even conceived of them as a single entity in which the djinni's Ar-Rasad was one and the same as the cock that crowed at dawn when Saint Peter denied Jesus thrice. And here I am, his nephew, who served as an altar boy until I was twelve and since then have trod among the alien corn, here I am trying to separate myself from Uncle Yusef's circular pagan- like time and follow the linear path of Christian time, which supposedly leads to salvation, to the breaking of the vicious circles. (227-8)

 

2. What cannot be suppressed can be subverted by irony. Bowles’ story, “The Eye,” is a brilliant study of a society that believes in the “evil eye,” and of an intrusive Westerner, a kind of self-styled “private eye,” who manages to get the Moroccans to talk to him about a bizarre event in the past.

 

3. Palmer identifies the “movement beyond Western forms of reality” as an important feature of postmodernity. “For some, the way beyond modernity is the way outside Western forms of thought” (373). To the examples Palmer gives could be added a most intriguing one from the Arab- Muslim world. In 1964 a court case was brought against the Lebanese writer, Layla Ba’labakki (1936- ), who was charged with obscenity and harming public morality for a short story she published, “A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon.” The case brought against Layla Ba’labakki by the Beirut vice squad rested on two sentences in the story. The case against her was dismissed by the Court of Appeals. The judges accepted Ba’labakki’s claim to belong to the literary school of realism, but in doing so, the judges appealed to Islamic tradition (making a move that would certainly seem strange to, say, American jurisprudence):

 

The court wishes to state that realism in human life can be traced to the most ancient period in our history, to be more precise, to the moment when man was created by God, in his naked reality, and, later, hid his nakedness with fig leaves. On the whole, the court believes that so-called realistic phrases used by the author are only a means to express a kind of example (hikma), as in the lessons or examples we receive from the following works of literature: 1. The myth of man receiving the Covenant from God, the rainbow in the heavens, and man's unworthiness to receive it 2. The legend of the isolated cave in the desert (Saw'ar), its walls stained red with blood which stained the entire land of Canaan 3. The tale of Egypt's Pharaoh, in which his loved one, tempting the Pharaoh to lust, writhes on a bed of Lebanese cedar wood, her naked body fragrant with the scents of the land of Ethiopia 4. The story of the virgin of Israel, guardian of a dying kingdom, bringing to old age and coldness the warmth of her body . . . 5. The legend of the rose of Sharun, the lily of the valley. . . . (Fernea and Bazirgan 288)

 

Arab realism is rooted in Arab-Islamic traditions, and the lower court’s decision stood closer to those traditions than the higher court’s. Overturning the lower court reflected the influence of more cosmopolitan and probably Western traditions.

 

4. Modern Standard Arabic is a grammatically simplified version of Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, the most prestigious form of language in the Islamic–not just the Arabic-speaking–world. Originally designed for the media, Modern Standard has already made “diglossia” much too simple a notion to describe the sociolinguistic intricacies of Arabic. M.H. Bakalla prefers the term “spectroglossia” for that reason (87).

 

5. Jane Bowles’ biographer, Millicent Dillon, includes much information about Ahmed Yacoubi (1931- ) in A Little Original Sin (464). Paul Bowles discusses him in Without Stopping (esp. 308-33) and in Five Eyes (7, 144).

 

6. For the different kinds of Middle Eastern and North African folktales, see Arab Folktales, esp. “Djinn, Ghouls, and Afreets, Tales of Magic and the Supernatural” (63-74) and “Magical Marriages and Mismatches” (153-157).

 

7. For an explanation based mainly on Piaget’s stages in the child’s conception of the world, see F. Andre Favat, Child and Tale, 25-28 (“Magical Beliefs in Child and Tale”) and 48-57 (“The Present Explanation”). According to this explanation, the child’s interest in the fairy tale peaks between six and eight years and then declines rapidly. There is a resurgence of interest around eighteen and twenty years, and “in the adult there are vestiges of animism, magic, moralities of constraint, egocentrism, and the like” (56) that may account for continued interest in such stories long after the magical stage is abandoned.

 

8. Millicent Dillon and Bowles (Without Stopping) offer insight into the life of Larbi Layachi:

 

Paul and Jane had met Larbi while he was a guard at a cafe at Merkala Beach in Tangier. He had struggled since childhood to survive on his own and had spent a good deal of time in jail for minor infractions. Though he was illiterate, he had a remarkable gift as a storyteller, which Paul had immediately recognized . . . . Though Larbi had made some money from the sale of the book [A Life Full of Holes], he was quite content to work as houseboy for Paul in Arcila. (346)

 

Bowles fills in the background of Larbi’s book, segments of which had been published, and Grove Press had wanted to see a book:

 

At some point Richard Seaver had the idea of presenting the volume as a novel rather than as nonfiction, so that it would be eligible for a prize offered each year by an international group of publishers. . . . Larbi's book was defeated by Jorge Semprun's Le Long Voyage . . . Larbi made enough money from it to look for a bride. (Without Stopping 350)

 

Besides underscoring the prestige of the novel in the West, the story indicates the ease with which fiction and nonfiction slide into one another.

 

9. Bowles does not translate or explain a number of Moroccan terms and references, thus giving the narrative an exotic quality. Terms like Ouakha (rather like American OK; 56), vocatives like auolidi (my son; 60), and exclamations (Allah hiaouddi! and Ehi aloudi!; 64) really require no gloss. Common Moroccan terms like djellaba (the hooded overgarment with sleeves; 66) qahouaji (the tea-maker; 74), baqal (grocer; 59), and tajine (a Moroccan dish; 56) are so common in Moroccan stories (and in Bowles’ fiction) that they give the ordinary reader a sense of being an insider. Local references–Dar Menebbhi, Aqaba dl Kasbah, the Monopolio, Bou Khach Khach, the Charf–work in largely the same way.

 

10. Note the (unremarked) presence in this Muslim world (where “Nazarenes” [Christians] at least upset the half-brother’s father) of “the Jew” who buys things from Larbi: “There was a Jew who lived near the bull-ring, and he always bought everything I took him. Usually I sold him bones. He paid three gordas a kilo for them” (70-71). This time he sells things from the dump and gets twelve pesetas. There is no hint of animus: it is simply accepted that they are culturally other.

 

11. The most horrifying of the youthful stories is Bowles’ account, given him by his grandmother, of his father’s attempt to kill the six-weeks-old infant (Without Stopping, 38-39). According to the grandmother, Bowles’ father was jealous of the attention the son was receiving and exposed the infant to snow and cold. He was rescued by the grandmother. In a less dramatic gesture, the father beat him–only once–when Bowles was young and seized the boy’s notebooks:

 

This was the only time my father beat me. It began a new stage in the development of hostilities between us. I vowed to devote my life to his destruction, even though it meant my own--an infantile conceit, but one which continued to preoccupy me for many years. (45)

 

12. See Patai’s chapter, “The Endogamous Unilineal Descent Group” (407-436), added to the 3rd edition of his work. On paternal authority regarding the son–including beating–with examples from around the Middle East, see 412-17.

 

13. For the attraction of French Surrealism, see Millicent Dillon, 92-93. Wayne Pounds notes that “in Moroccan folk culture Bowles has found a mythology and an objective correlative to those concerns which have remained most important to him as a writer” (119)–e.g., in tales of the Terrible Mother such as one finds in Yacoubi’s story. Pounds elsewhere (50-1) distinguishes between “the primitive” of the anthropologists (i.e., “a shared symbolic ordering of experience”) and of those who see it as a regression to older, pre-civilized thought. Eli Sagan gives a lucid account of Freud’s argument against civilization, 123-25.

 

14. Bowles provides a good example of Barthes’ “hybrid” author-writer–who is, according to Barthes, a characteristic literary figure of our time. Not only is it virtually impossible to separate life from fiction in Bowles’ work, but nonfiction can be turned into fiction. A case in point is his revision of his wife’s nonfiction piece, “East Side: North Africa,” into fiction (“Everything is Nice,” in My Sister’s Hand in Mine 313-20). Stories in his Collected Stories, like “Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat” (401-404) and “Things Gone and Things Still Here” (405-409), were originally conceived as essays. “Unwelcome Words” (61-86), the title piece in a series of stories, consists of letters of “Paul” to another writer cast in fictional form.

 

 

Works Cited

 

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