The Hospital Read online

  THE HOSPITAL

  Contents

  Introduction by Anna Della Subin

  THE HOSPITAL

  Translator’s afterword by Lara Vergnaud

  Acknowledgments

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Introduction

  Five hundred angels, each holding a bundle of fragrant basil, surround a single person as he is lowered into the grave, imagined the ninth-century eschatologist Ibn Abi al-Dunya. The basil is a restorative for the tiring exertion of exiting life. The angels attend to the body with perfumes and balms, but scatter when Munkar and Nakir arrive, fearsome fellow seraphs who have come to interrogate the dead. One must remember to sit up, the theologian warned; your finger will be the pen and your saliva the ink. If one replies satisfactorily to their questions, it is said that they will push back the walls of the tomb. The angels will dig a hole beneath you, exposing the fires of hell — just to show you a glimpse of what you escaped. They will create a window above you, opening up a view onto an exquisite garden, a landscape for contemplation and a cool breeze as you wait, with the rest of the cadaverous crowd, for the resurrection day. The Hospital, from its first sentence, takes place beyond death, and for that its author must answer.

  A shaft of light descends through the ceiling and onto the kitchen table, illuminating from its center the mud-brick house where Ahmed Bouanani lived his final years. It catches the cobwebs and spills over a heap of pomegranates, too numerous for the bowl that contains them. A staircase leads to a terrace with a view over the steep hills of Aït Oumghar, a remote Berber village in the High Atlas. Through the winding dirt alleys, donkeys, sheep, and quiet children slink, past crumbling houses stamped with red handprints to keep danger away. In the distance, there are grape vines and olive trees without end and fields of gourds, fed by the abundant waterways of a spring. A gigantic nest crowns a whitewashed minaret: the work of a stork, impervious to the megaphones that call the village to pray.

  It was here that Bouanani went into occultation in 2003, following the death of his youngest daughter Batoul after an accident in their home in Rabat. He left behind the city where he had lived for forty years, and with it, the archive of a life of unceasing creativity, which remained in his flat on the Rue d’Oujda, collecting dust. He left behind hundreds of reels of 35 and 16 mm films on the balcony that had once masqueraded as a dressing room; the costumes his wife Naïma Saoudi designed and dyed in the bathtub; the props and backdrops, impossible for an outsider to decipher their use. He left behind the thousands of books in his library; the boxes of illustrations and comics he sketched, the old photographs, film posters, and playbills. And he left behind the stacks of his manuscripts, written in black or blue ink in a steady, cursive hand and never published: dozens of novels and screenplays, hundreds of poems, short stories, journals, a history of Moroccan cinema, a chronicle of Morocco itself.

  In the stillness of the house at Aït Oumghar there are ghosts of cats. In footage captured of Bouanani not long before his death in 2011, the cats — at least seven — swirl around his feet and jump onto his lap when he sits, wrapped in a blanket, to read. He is frail, hermit-like; there is an elegant nobility to his bearing, “like an emaciated Brahman,” as a friend wrote, or like a certain prophet who would rather cut off his sleeve than disturb the feline sleeping upon it. Some called him “Sidi Ahmed,” imbuing him with the title of a holy man. Those who once knew him and venerated him were discouraged from trying to find him in his mountainous retreat. Rumors circulated that he was dead, he was ill, “drunk from morning till night,” bad-tempered, misanthropic, that it was impossible to pin his geographical coordinates on any map. Even in Aït Oumghar, Naïma’s ancestral village, few knew that anyone lived in the house, for it was said Bouanani never went outside. His books — the very few that were published in his lifetime — were equally hard to locate. It was nearly impossible to find a copy of L’Hôpital, published in Rabat in 1990, Les Persiennes (1980), Photogrammes (1989), or Territoires de l’instant (2000), titles that were printed only because they had been pried from Bouanani’s hands by friends and admirers. No images of the author circulated. In the rare event of a review in the press, it might be accompanied by a picture of the wrong Ahmed Bouanani — a television host with the same name.

  On a cold day in 2014, I visited the house with Touda Bouanani, Ahmed’s older daughter, a brilliantly imaginative filmmaker occasionally known to dress in drag as Fernando Pessoa. At the time, we were both artists-in-residence at Dar al-Ma’mûn in Marrakech, a few hours drive from Aït Oumghar. Touda strikingly resembles her father, in her features and her sage-like presence. As the last surviving member of her family, she is the self-appointed guardian of its memory. Through her, stories rise to the surface, a bit like Melville’s Ishmael, afloat on the coffin and quoting Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” I remember a portrait of her parents, drawn by Ahmed, watched over us in the kitchen. Naïma, who died in 2012, was depicted as twice Ahmed’s size. She stared out at us and smiled; Ahmed was turned inwards, as if to bury himself in the folds of her scarf. He was writing on a pile of papers that rested against Naïma; his hair was a tangle of caterpillars. His eyes were looking down or were shut, against what he calls in The Hospital, in Lara Vergnaud’s translation, “the world’s angry and defeated face” — a face that he could never get used to. Ahmed Bouanani was an enigma, and he must have preferred it that way. But the inquisitive angels hate a mystery.

  1. WHO ARE YOU?

  In 1938 on the night I was born

  this country had no more ancestors or History

  It was a garbage dump where soldiers on the run

  waded in grime and worshipped a deity

  who, deaf-mute, twirled in the clouds

  among locusts and naked angels

  Ahmed Bouanani was born on November 16, 1938 in Casablanca, a colonized city on the verge of war. Through the shutters of his childhood home on the Rue de Monastir, he could observe his surroundings without being seen. What he saw was a world in the midst of modernization, haunted by the unavenged ghosts of a swiftly disappearing past. His was “the generation born of the marriage of the locust and the louse,” as Bouanani would say, an unholy union between a species that nestles and one that invades from above. In 1912, Morocco’s hamstrung Sultan ‘Abd al-Hafid was forced to sign the Treaty of Fez, transforming the kingdom into a French “Protectorate,” with limbs ceded to Spain. While the French decided to preserve the pageantry of the Moroccan palace, it was only a mirage of sovereignty, for true power now lay elsewhere. In modernist office buildings in the new capital of Rabat, a parallel government was erected to control the colony and subdue its insurrections. Within the vast bureaucracy, Bouanani’s father worked as a police officer. In the hallucinations rising up from the narrator in bed 17, Wing C of The Hospital, the technocrats extend even into the afterlife. Certain angels direct traffic, others with desk jobs flip through folders, to “get acquainted with our infamies, rebellions, or submissions, and perhaps as well, some evidence, uncertain and unbelievable, of our humanity.”

  World War II brought swarms of American soldiers to Casablanca, along with air raids, famine, and chocolate bars. While Moroccans across the country rose up in scattered revolts against the colonial overlords, thousands of others fought and died alongside the Allies for a meager pay. A bomb fell on the house next door; Ahmed and his older brother M’hamed played at the war like a game. “Little Soldier Ahmed wears the shoes of a former combatant, he feasts with his eyes on Superman in front of the Cinéma Bahia where a police officer whips the crowd squabbling around the cash register,” Bouanani recalls in Les Persiennes, or The Shutters, as translated by Emma Ramadan, a
collection of poems in which childhood memories appear like butterflies pinned in a box. His grandmother Yamna, “the strangest being in the house,” could still remember the French conquest, and taught her grandson that the souls of dead ancestors hide in the iridescent shells of beetles. Ahmed was sent to study with a Quranic teacher with a particular zest for doomsday. Gog and Magog lurched freely in the classroom as American zeppelins menaced overhead.

  With the end of the war, the Moroccan nationalist movement stepped up its calls for independence, which were met with violent crackdowns and arrests. Although they demanded a democratic future for Morocco, the nationalists, to conjure support, drew upon the figurehead of the Sultan, Muhammad V, who occupied a nearly mystical stature in the popular imagination. In 1953, following massive demonstrations in Casablanca that were brutally suppressed, French authorities attempted to quell the national unrest by staging a coup and banishing the royal family to Madagascar — to the outrage of Moroccans across the country. It was said that the exiled sultan appeared in the moon; at night people climbed up to the rooftops for a closer look. Demanding Moroccan liberation and the sultan’s return, roving militias attacked police officers and government bureaus. In the violence that ensued, thousands were killed.

  The crowd on the sidewalk. Around a red circle. At eight in the morning. Eight fifteen in the morning. January of . . . Someone had grabbed his 7.65mm revolver hidden in a pile of mint. . . . He fires the only bullet. . . . And the sun felt dizzy. Morning no longer knows which way to turn. The entire city, the walls, the lights, the new sky where the stars barely had time to turn on. Everything falls in front of my bicycle. Collapses. A police officer stops me. No, let him go, it’s his dad. It’s my dad. And the entire city says that it’s my dad.

  In early 1954, amid the wave of nationalist attacks on policemen, Ahmed’s father was assassinated on the street not far from their home. Ahmed, who was sixteen at the time, did not witness the shooting but arrived soon after, and saw the stains of blood on the sidewalk. The killer was never arrested and his identity would never be known. “I began writing after my father died,” Bouanani would recall in a journal entry. “Today I would say that writing was a refuge from my distress. But at the time, it was the legitimate ambition of an adolescent who wanted to get out of adolescence, who wrote, in his grand naiveté, also legitimate, on the first page of one of my middle school notebooks: ‘I want to be Victor Hugo or nothing.’”

  The following year on November 16 — Ahmed’s seventeenth birthday — the Sultan, in his fez and sunglasses, stepped off a plane and onto Moroccan soil again, called back from exile by the French in a desperate attempt to restore order to a country in chaos. Greeted by enormous, rapturous crowds, Muhammad V announced the end of the Protectorate: a few months later, Morocco’s Declaration of Independence would be signed. Ahmed, by all accounts a diligent student, finished his baccalaureate, and left Casablanca for Paris in the early 1960s to study film at the prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. As soon as he received his degree, he returned to Morocco. It was 1963 and he was eager to contribute to the greater cause of a new, national art.

  2. WHAT KNOWLEDGE DO YOU HAVE?

  The screenplay? Come on! The actors are here. They’re friends from bad neighborhoods. They’re ready to throw themselves on Tarzan and tie him up to a tree trunk. That’s all there is to it. From now on they’ll all be available Saturdays and Sundays to transform into a strange painted tribe with feathers on their heads: a mix of Indians and savages from Africa and Central America. They don’t really need costumes. Only the “bad guy” presents a problem: he’s a colonist. He wears a hat, short-sleeve dress shirt, shorts, socks up to his knees, and polished black shoes. Oh yes, he’s armed.

  In the early 1940s, an illiterate paperboy saved up money to buy a 9.5mm camera, and filmed his own versions of Tarzan movies in the woods of Aïn Diab. The boy, Mohamed Osfour, tried to process the film himself, using household cleaners mixed with teaspoons of chicken blood — an act that Bouanani would hail in his unpublished manuscript La Septième Porte (The seventh gate) as the heroic and unlikely birth of Moroccan cinema. In 1897, the Lumière brothers immortalized a Moroccan goatherd; during the Protectorate, the country became a ready-made set for Orientalist fantasies on the silver screen, among them Luitz-Morat’s At the Entrance to the Harem, for which the Pasha of Marrakech supplied 12,000 extras. Yet Osfour’s homemade endeavors marked the first native film, Bouanani argued in the magisterial history of cinema he would write over the course of a decade.

  In 1944, the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) was established in Rabat, a small office under the Ministry of Interior that served as the Protectorate’s film regulatory institute. It produced short films to be screened in theaters before the feature, to extol the achievements of the colonial regime. In the mid-sixties, with the launch of national television, the Palace turned to the CCM to create films that would promote a sense of Moroccan identity. Upon his return from Paris, with few other prospects for employment, Bouanani took a job as film editor at the CCM, where he would remain for thirty-two years. He also took on work for government-sponsored heritage projects, to document Amazigh, or Berber, culture so rapidly disappearing. Sent on assignment to the remote Aït Bouguemmaz tribe, high in the Atlas mountains, Bouanani filmed them performing a circular, ritual dance. Yet when he inquired as to why they danced in this particular way, the chieftains replied that a French ethnographer called Jean Mazel had told them to, lending evidence to his theories on “solar dances.” On assignment to document villagers in the town of Imilchil as they picturesquely toiled away at handicrafts, Bouanani was appalled to find soldiers supervising them with guns — and so he filmed them too. When he screened it for his bosses at the CCM, they berated their employee for “spoiling” the image of Morocco, and the film became Bouanani’s first, of many, to be banned.

  By the midsixties, the excitement of independence had given way to disillusionment, as the success of the nationalist resistance opened the gate for absolutism to reinstate itself in familiar forms. Following the death of his revered father, the cold-blooded Crown Prince Hassan II had risen to the throne. The regime grew ever more repressive, and traces of the colonizer still remained everywhere, from the language taught in schools to the thousands of French troops still stationed on Moroccan soil. In 1965, students rose up in protest in Casablanca, joined by the masses of unemployed and the impoverished dwellers of the expanding slums. Street battles between the people and security forces paralyzed the city, while the spirit of uprising spread across the kingdom. After several days, the riots were violently crushed by army tanks, as the king’s military general hovered above Casablanca in a helicopter. With thousands killed, imprisoned, or disappeared, the slim Constitution suspended and Parliament dismissed, the brutal suppression marked the beginning of Morocco’s années de plomb, or “years of lead.” On national television, the king attacked the students who had provoked the revolt. “Allow me to tell you,” Hassan II announced, “there is no greater danger to the state than the so-called intellectual; it would have been better for you to be illiterate.”

  For a generation stuck between locust and louse, the uprisings marked a political awakening. The following year, a group of artists and intellectuals established the radical journal Souffles, to which Bouanani contributed several poems and essays. In his manifesto, the editor and poet Abdellatif Laâbi railed against the stagnation of Moroccan thought and called for the total decolonization of culture and art. Yet what foundation was left upon which to build a national culture? What bound Moroccans together as a nation? After all, it was the colonizers, Laâbi wrote, who had come up with the boundaries of nations, artificial divisions that retraced the history of conquest and dismembered tribal zones. What made Morocco a unity beyond a shared history of defeat? Its conquerors had imposed an invented binary between “Berbers” and “Arabs,” for the French had seized upon linguistic differences to p
it two imagined “races” against one another. Often, colonial administrators extended special protections to the Berbers to alienate them from their Arab neighbors, in a classic tactic of divide and rule. “Are we really a people?” a patient called “Fartface” fumes in The Hospital. “Think about it. We were born with our right hands outstretched, begging in our blood, not to mention cowardice, infamy, and fear . . . We don’t even know how to talk anymore, our people’s pitiful vocabulary barely fits in the palm of my hand.”

  Under Hassan II, illiteracy was endemic, and in Bouanani’s microcosmic ward, few of the inmates can read. When a villager in Wing A receives a rare letter from the outside (possibly non-existent) world, no one is able to decipher it except our narrator. Like a virus, illiteracy came in multiple strains: from aphasia to the peculiar wordlessness caused by a fall into the cracks between languages. In Moroccan schools, French contended with classical Arabic in curricula, which faced off with the tongues spoken at home: the colloquial Moroccan Arabic known as Darija; and several regional varieties of the Tamazight (or Berber) language. In the fray, the words for things — flora and fauna, tagine ingredients, musical instruments — were disappearing. In “The Illiterate Man,” a poem published in Souffles, Bouanani wrote:

  All the memories are open,

  but the wind has swept away the words,

  but the streams have swept away the words.

  We are left with

  strange words

  a strange alphabet

  that would be astonished to see a camel.

  In the wake of the humiliating defeat of Arab forces in 1967 by Israel, Souffles became more militantly politicized, and introduced an Arabic-language counterpart Anfas, with the aim of moving away from French. Yet for his own part, Bouanani began to distance himself from Souffles and continued to write predominately in French, the language of his education. He anticipated the criticism of writing in the colonizer’s language, and took a characteristically cryptic, iconoclastic approach. “For me, all languages are foreign,” he would say. “They resemble — pardon the metaphor — wild mustangs that need to be broken. I will let you imagine the rodeo.” In an interview, Bouanani would recall how he once supposed cinema could be a universal tongue, an escape route from the politics of language — until he watched a Charlie Chaplin film with a crowd of Berber farmers, and no one laughed.