The Hospital Read online

  In the midsixties, with no other source of funding in sight, Bouanani learned how to use his government commissions to secretly, subversively, make the kind of films he desired. Assigned to document public infrastructure projects in the port of Tarfaya, on its ten-year anniversary of freedom from Spain, Bouanani created Tarfaya, or The Poet’s March (1966). In the twenty-minute film, the history of the port city is narrated through a young man’s journey across the desert to find a legendary poet-saint, a character inspired by the eighteenth century Shilha bard Sidi Hammou. On his mythopoetic quest, the protagonist encounters the craftsmen and construction sites that Bouanani had been sent to film. Bouanani would say that if the sequences fulfilling the instructions of his commission were edited out, the true film of Tarfaya would be unearthed: “It was not satisfying, but at least it was there, at a time when there were no other means of production,” he told his filmmaker-friend Ali Essafi. Beneath the neutralizing surface of “heritage,” the film masks a deeper anger. In a midnight scene, it appears a tribe’s desert encampment is viciously attacked by a force we cannot see or grasp. But soon the viewer realizes it is only the camels — spooked by a howling, uncontroversial wind.

  Deeply disturbed by the extinction of cultural memory he witnessed on his early assignments, Bouanani began a lifelong project to collect Moroccan oral poetry before it was forgotten. Few could remember the verses of Sidi Hammou, or the Tassaout poetess Mririda N’Aït Attik, or the many itinerant bands of singers, lute players, and tambourinists who once traversed the country, and who survived only as a tourist attraction in Marrakech’s plaza Jamaa al-Fnaa. “Classical historians and biographers dismiss anything not composed in literary Arabic, casting into oblivion these ‘vulgar and illiterate poets,’ who nevertheless have expressed the deepest sentiments of our people,” Bouanani wrote in a 1967 essay for Souffles. In the fight against colonial invasion, and during the Protectorate era, as tribes were driven from their land or forced to pay steep taxes, the troubadours were at the forefront of the resistance. Ever on the move between villages, disguised in fanciful costumes, they spread news of revolt in coded lyric. Bouanani quotes a poet from the Bni Mtir:

  I speak for those seated around me.

  If I said what I have to say to the spring, she would dry up with rage.

  If I said it to the tree, he would lose all his leaves.

  If I said it to the rock, he would shake from side to side. . . .

  All of you, you who have lived what my words report,

  Listen to me!

  You have eaten the meat of bitter fruit and your children’s lips are

  blistered!

  The poets hoped that lines such as these would come to them in their dreams. They would visit the caves and tomb shrines of patron saints, to offer sacrifices and then fall asleep. If the sacrifice was well received, it was said the spirits would give the poet milk to drink and a plate of couscous. “The number of grains he eats will be the number of poems he composes,” Bouanani noted.

  In preserving folklore, Bouanani fought against the notion that it should be dismissed as superstition while another body of knowledge, European in origin, is elevated as history, science, philosophy, or art. Why should one be considered “mythic” and the other as “real”? And who should get to decide? Before history belonged to Europe, it was the property of Arabia, written with swords in the eighth-century invasion of the Maghreb, as Bouanani muses in the poem “My Country” — a parallel to that of modern-day imperialism. With the French conquest, and the rise of mass tourism, a new danger emerged, of tradition made counterfeit. As the poet Omar Berrada points out, Bouanani observed such simulacra in the Berber dances seeded by the French ethnographer Mazel. So too with the imposed fantasies of the Arabian Nights, which tend to appear in Bouanani’s writings as infected, perfumed, and cheap; “stories in slippers with their falsely serene eyes.” Moroccan artists must stop playing the “misunderstood little genie,” Bouanani declared, yet the thighs of Scheherazade make their appearance myriad times in his fictions. Across his work, the folkloric is simultaneously degraded as an Orientalist invention and exalted for what it truly represents. “Legend is truer than history thanks to the amount of human information it provides,” Bouanani writes. “The fictions it contains are neither grotesque nor childish: they express the true secret aspirations of a people, their spiritual quest for a world of wonder where human values triumph and where the laws they hate are abolished.” It imagines a heaven where angels are susceptible to contagion.

  Sometime in the autumn of 1967, Bouanani caught tuberculosis and ended up in the Moulay Youssef Hospital in Rabat. He wrote letters to his wife Naïma, who had just given birth to Touda the previous year. For six months, Ahmed stared up at the ceiling from the hospital bed.

  This Saturday, December 9,

  . . . Boredom has long, long legs and a cold, harsh head . . . Even photographs are terrible to see. When will I return to their world? Maybe . . . and maybe.

  I wasn’t able to write a single word Sunday, and it’s even colder today. Earlier it was like the end of the world. In my cold little planet, I’m thinking of you. Warming my poor body beside yours, penetrating your blood in search of the sun. Thousands and thousands of times I hold you against my sick chest, I lose myself in your hair, in your eyes, and in your hips and in your stomach. My life stops and I have the entire universe in my head. My desire would endlessly fill the pages. One must shut up to hurt less.

  Write me, tell me about your day, tell me about Touda’s world. Take time to write to me.

  The one who wants you,

  you, always beautiful, always happy

  Ahmed

  “It’s cold here too, like in my memory,” the narrator writes in The Hospital. “No chance of nestling into the soft belly of an illusion.” A swarm of insects flutter through his dreams, different species of butterflies “that my naked body attracted like a light.” He is amazed he can still remember the names: “Urania, Vanessa, Bombyx, Argus, Machaon, and Phalene specimens.” Armies of caterpillars creep along the contours of the night. When Bouanani was released from the hospital in May 1968, he received a certificate of good health authorizing him to return to work. The slip of paper, which Touda found years later, was signed by a certain Dr. Papillon, or Butterfly.

  3. WHO IS YOUR LORD?

  “Who was Caesar then?” Touda asks her father in footage captured in Aït Oumghar. “Ghannam,” he replies. “And Hassan II.” Not long before he was exiled to the TB ward, Bouanani suffered a banishment of a different sort. Although deeply political, the filmmaker preferred to float above party politics, and resisted any affiliations. Yet at the CCM, he was ever suspected of being a communist. When Omar Ghannam was appointed as its director, he deemed Bouanani a subversive element and ordered him to cut his long, flowing hair. Banned from directing any more films, Bouanani was relegated to the dusty archive department, and permitted only to work as edi­tor. Yet surrounded by reels of moldering footage — documents of the French invasion and its “civilizing” mission — Bouanani soon realized that editing could be a way to overcome censorship and an art form of its own. He would resurrect the old newsreels, from the CCM collections and others he found on the site of a dismantled production studio, some of it so faded it appeared as ghostly white. Behind closed doors, like the spider of his hallucinations, he began weaving together archival footage into a clandestine, feature film Mémoire 14, which told the story of Morocco’s subjugation and reflected upon its present day.

  In the early 1970s, an increasingly autocratic King Hassan II led a movement to Arabize collective memory: to erase the deviation of colonialism from Morocco’s history and eschew European curricula in schools. The record of national memory would begin only in 1956. To speak of anything earlier became taboo, and in particular any mention of a certain, ill-fated “Rif Republic.” In 1921, the editor-turned-guerilla Abd el-Krim led a revolt to liber
ate the mountainous region of the Rif from Spanish and French rule. After a series of stunning, unlikely military victories, Abd el-Krim established the independent Republic of the Rif, which began to print its own banknotes, appointed a Prime Minister, and sought diplomatic relations abroad. After five years, European forces succeeded in violently suppressing the Rifians, using chemical weapons. Exiled to the Indian Ocean, Abd el-Krim became a hero of anti-colonial resistance everywhere, and the Rif Republic remained as a model of how the people might rise up together to create the kind of nation they wanted to live in. As its memory could not be spoken aloud, Moroccans would give folkloric names to the different years of the Rif War, as Bouanani captured in “Mémoire 14,” a 1969 poem recited in the film that shares its name.

  Years of the gazelle,

  years of the locusts,

  year of the sword and the canon,

  year of the fair season.

  Our blood still tastes like legend.

  The number fourteen conjures a conflicting way of measuring time, as the Islamic fourteenth century A.H. corresponds to the twentieth century C.E. — the designation ever prompting the question, common to whom? The dueling systems of timekeeping destabilize any authority time itself might have, that “invention of adults” which twists into absurd shapes in the eternity of a hospital ward. In the footage of Mémoire 14, reptilian army tanks scale a desert ridge; a man runs with a lamb in his arms as bullets fly; a plague of locusts descends upon the fields; the Sultan, swathed in white, appears beneath his parasol; a camel is shot in the head.

  In 1971, Bouanani finished Mémoire 14, with a run-time of 108 minutes. Yet Ghannam found it inflammatory, and ordered him to redact vast sequences, especially the footage from the Rif War. With each new cut Bouanani screened, Ghannam demanded further censorship — and that the outtakes must also be burned. What was left of the film was a mere 24 minutes. “Our memory is long-lasting,” the narrator declares almost mischievously. As Bouanani recalled to his friend Essafi, the tyrant Ghannam remained displeased by the film, threatened to fire him, and to see that Mémoire 14 was destroyed. It was, fittingly, the intervention of history itself that rescued the film. Ghannam was invited to a birthday party for Hassan II in July of 1971, an extravagant feast held in the seaside palace at Skhirat. Just as lunch was served, a thousand mutinous soldiers stormed the banquet, overturning tables and raining bullets onto the guests. The King and his family escaped, yet nearly a hundred revelers were killed — Omar Ghannam among them. The first line of Mémoire 14 repeats as its last: “Happy is he whose memory rests in peace.”

  In the wake of the failed, bloody coup, soon followed by a second attempt, the response from the palace was immediate. Suspected plotters, traitorous generals, and large numbers of left-wing intellectuals alike were rounded up and forcibly vanished. They would be incarcerated in secret desert prisons that would only become known to the public in the 1990s, when the inmates who were still alive were released. Most infamous was Tazmamart, a remote sepulcher where hundreds of Moroccans were left for nearly two decades to die a slow death, confined underground in isolation, without light or basic medicine. Among the incarcerated was Naïma’s brother Nourredine, a student at the time. After disappearing for two years, he was discovered languishing in Kenitra Prison; over the course of his ten-year imprisonment, Naïma and Touda were able to visit him. With him in Kenitra was Abdellatif Laâbi, whose 1972 arrest put an end to Souffles-Anfas. In a poem in their honor, Bouanani wrote:

  As soon as the guards turn their backs

  he flies

  he comes to greet us . . .

  The birds know you

  There are shreds of cloud in your beard

  wipe them off before going back to the walls

  Happy are my friends

  the poet prisoners

  for beneath the earth they see

  much further than us

  “Strange age,” a haunting voice announces in Arabic. “Hadn’t our ancestors predicted this? Even dreams will be forbidden. . . . Forbidden . . . forbidden . . .” the voice growls. In 1979, after a succession of further tyrants at the CCM, a new, sympathetic director was appointed, Bouanani received a raise, and he was finally able to make what would become his only feature film — the cult classic al-Sarab, or The Mirage, based upon a screenplay he had revised for ten years. In the opening scene, two men haul sacks of flour along a hillside path, and argue over whether a donkey may be buried in a cemetery. Will a donkey be admitted into paradise? Their conversation evokes the Prophet’s night journey to heaven aboard the winged steed Buraq, the ascent known as the miraj — a word so close in sound to mirage — from the Arabic root “to rise.” One of the men, Mohamed, discovers bankrolls of dollars hidden in the flour. He sets out for the city with his wife Hachemia to exchange them for dirhams, in a quest reminiscent of Arabian Nights tales of men seeking their fortunes abroad. They encounter a ragged, raving messiah who captivates Hachemia. “At the resurrection, everyone will have the same face,” he preaches to his followers, who sit in a circle around him, chained by the neck. Meanwhile, Mohamed is too afraid to enter any bank, fearing its European keepers will assume he stole the money. When he meets a mysterious magician Ali Ben Ali, who claims he can help him, the naive Mohamed is drawn into a shadowy underworld of dissent, although its nature is never made explicit. Inside Ali’s hideout is a gigantic canvas of Buraq — painted by Naïma.

  Though the action is set in 1947, the film seems to juxtapose two eras: a Protectorate past and the unspeakable oppressions of the present years of lead. Mohamed discovers Ali lying in a dark passageway, gravely wounded, alongside other men, evocative of political prisoners. “May our powers of resistance equal our suffering,” the magician declares as he slips unconscious. A Satanic child cackles at Mohamed, sending him into a panic. “I am just a poor man, I don’t meddle with politics,” he cries. When he escapes the tunnel, the world outside is in ruins; the grass has grown tall as if years have passed in minutes. He finds Hachemia deep in an ecstatic, communal trance, and drags her away. They reunite on the beach, in the warmth of an abandoned bonfire. A menacing group of drunken partygoers drives up to them in a convertible, wearing macabre masks, laughing in their faces. Mohamed’s money was only an apparition; the poor will stay poor and must not even dream of becoming rich, concludes the sardonic fable of The Mirage. “My only ambition — and it’s the ambition of all Moroccan filmmakers — is to get audiences used to seeing themselves and their own problems on the screen, and from that, to be able to judge themselves and the society in which they live,” Bouanani would say in an interview. “The screen must cease to be the privileged mirror of foreign countries.”

  Bouanani had originally titled it “Some Dollars for Mohamed.” When the title was rejected, he tried “No Dollars for Mohamed,” but that too was censored, as disrespectful of the Prophet who shares his name. Mohamed appears again as a character in what would be Bouanani’s most ambitious literary work, a monumental, never-published trilogy that he wrote over the course of thirty years. In Le Voleur de Mémoires (The thief of memories), a multi-generational family saga intersects with the national history of Morocco, in an epic it seems Bouanani never wanted to end. “I was happy to live with my characters,” he recalled in a journal. Although certain friends knew he had been at work on the project for decades, it was not known until after his death whether it had survived and what stage of completion it had reached. “I don’t like to end my novels . . . It’s like throwing these beings that had been my flesh, my blood, and my memory, into the arms of certain death,” he wrote. “It’s like closing a door on a paradise now lost and condemning oneself to stay behind, alone.”

  4. IN WHAT DIRECTION DO YOU PRAY?

  No creature appears more frequently, across Bouanani’s oeuvre, than the one with a horse’s body, a woman’s head, angel wings, and a mane as long as a cloud. Buraq is the winged embodiment of love, a sym
bol of the sacred that outstrips all religious authority. She transcends the dour theologians who despise her because her name appears nowhere in the Quran. In Bouanani’s short story “The Resplendent Chronicle,” a dissident scribe named Malek is wounded by an assassin’s dagger, and is found in a pool of blood, still alive. On his deathbed, Malek gives his son the keys to the barn, where he housed a secret vehicle — the Buraq. His son Kacem unlocks the door to the stable, mounts the steed, and zooms off into the night. Centuries ago, when Buraq took flight with the Prophet Muhammad on her back, it is said she knocked over a jug of water with her hoof. When they returned to earth, having visited the seven levels of heaven and conversed with God Himself, the Prophet intercepted it before the water spilled out. Yet when Kacem descends from his own celestial journey, he finds, instead, that his father’s house is aflame. “A gigantic blaze illuminated the sky. Everything around him was burning: the house, the books,” Bouanani wrote, painting a scene that would prove eerily prescient. “The acrid odors of paper and flesh were wafting from the gutted ruins.” For Kacem, everything is lost — his father’s manuscripts, the relics of his childhood — except the Buraq, his inheritance, the creature that is his burden and his escape.

  Late in the night on July 23, 2006, a neighbor in Rabat called Ahmed and Naïma to tell them that their apartment was on fire. It started on the balcony and first consumed the reels of films, the props and costumes, before spreading to the library, the boxes of manuscripts and photos, incinerating the bicycles, the television, and ultimately destroying half the flat. Its cause was never determined. “Sheets of paper fanned the flames,” the police report concluded. What wasn’t turned to ashes was drenched in the water that quelled the fire. Ahmed refused to return to the apartment, to witness the extent of the damage, or to ever estimate what was lost. It was Naïma who returned from Aït Oumghar to the heaps of charred rubble in Rabat and individually dried all the surviving papers in the sun. While the computers had melted, she found that many of Ahmed’s handwritten manuscripts had miraculously survived unscathed, among them several wrinkled drafts of The Hospital. On the cover page of The Thief of Memories, water had begun to wash away the blue ink of the word “Mémoires” — but the text was still intact. Naïma found the slightly charred pages of A Shroud for Naïma, a novel Ahmed had written in 1971. She salvaged the waterlogged draft of A Village Under the Sun; so damaged that the pages, with their lines of perfect handwriting, had become translucent. She unearthed a scorched and molten Gallimard edition of Borges’s L’ Aleph that was still, somehow, legible.