Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change

Leila Abouzeid (Morocco)

morocco Leila Abouzeid was born in 1950 in El Ksiba in the Middle Atlas region of Morocco. She was educated first in Rabat and then in England and the United States. Year of the Elephant, the English translation of her first novel, Am al-Fil, was published in 1989 and has been translated into Hebrew and Urdu. Return to Childhood, her memoir , appeared in 1998, and her most recent novel, Last Chapter, was published in English in 2000. Leila Abouzeid leila abouzeid, right Myearliestmemoryisofabustrip.Wewereonourwayfrom Sefrou, my mother’s home town, to El Ksiba, a Berber village in the heart of the Middle Atlas where my father, Ahmed Bouzid, worked as an interpreter for the French. It was on that bus trip that I first began to understand that my father was involved in political activities, activities that were dangerous for us, his family. We had gotten off the intercity bus between Fez and Marrakech and were waiting for the El Ksiba bus, at the corner of a smaller road that ascends the Middle Atlas mountains . The driver’s assistant brought our luggage down from the roof. The bus resumed its journey. My mother sat down on the ground and put my sister Naima on her lap. My older sister Fatiha sat next to her while my youngest uncle, Sidi Mohammed, lifted the pieces of our luggage and placed them in front of her. As with all our trips to Sefrou, my mother was returning loaded with brass cooking pots, wood washing basins, wood trays, braziers, and short brooms. She would say, when she was in a good mood, “I buy useful things to have near me when I need them.” She was convinced that in El Ksiba she was living in the wilderness. But when she was upset, she would criticize herself and say, “Smart women buy gold, but I buy pots.” A truck appeared on the main road from the opposite direction and turned toward El Ksiba. My uncle waved and walked over to it while my mother shouted, “Say, you are Si Hmed Bouzid’s brother-in-law.” return to childhood Leila Abouzeid ^ The driver stopped and looked down. “I only have one place,” he said. “The truck is full.” “Nobodyelsebutmeneedsalift,”saidmyuncle.“IwanttogotoElKsiba to tell my brother-in-law, Si Hmed Bouzid, that we’ve arrived.” “Get in, then,” said the driver. My uncle walked around the truck and climbed into the passenger’s seat. The truck began to move. The sound of its engine changed, grew distant, and finally faded away. Silence prevailed, a mountain silence offset by the cry of a sheep and a distant voice answering a call in Berber. Refreshed by the mountain air, I left my mother and sisters by the El Ksiba sign and wandered along the side of the road beside the wild boubal, with its soft yellow corn wrapped in its leaves. I remember the peace of that place, for of course I did not know then what that day was to bring to my family. We were three girls with our mother by that sign that day, and if Khadija had not been dead we would have been four. Khadija had died of measles in Rabat, where we had lived for eight months. During that time, the Nasara, the French Christians for whom my father worked, allowed him to enroll at the Institut des Hautes Etudes, which was located in the green-domed building that now harbors the Moroccan Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines. We had lived in one of two apartments on the ground floor of a building across the road from Moulay Youssef Hospital. Our next-door neighborswereJmiaandherhusband ,ablackMoroccancouple.Theysharedtheir apartment with a poor French family whose father was a caretaker in the nearby Christian graveyard. Every time my mother sent me on an errand to Jmia, I found the Frenchwoman sitting on a chair in the courtyard in front of her room mending socks with a sewing basket on a table in front of her. I cannot remember her in any other way. By contrast, my image of Jmia is that of a slim, tall, very black woman wearing a Moroccan dress with her head wrapped in a scarf. That was the apartment where Khadija died and Naima was born. Khadija died before she could talk. She was probably no more than two years old. Once when she got lost a...