Sidi Lahcen blues

Abstract

This story is one of seven biofictional pieces written over a three-year period in the mid-1990s. The choice of seven pieces is consistent with the proverbial mystique of the number 7, as in the oft-implored sab‘atu rijal (Seven Saints), a leitmotif popularised in Morocco through a cult that originated with the 17th-century Sufi scholar al-Hassan al-Youssi, the subject of work by both Jacques Berque and Clifford Geertz. The stories depict scenes from the author's childhood in Sefrou, chef-lieu of a historical region of Morocco whose history was neglected by native scholars until a certain nasrani researcher by the name of Clifford Geertz put it back on the map. The first story in this series, ‘Theft in Broad Daylight,’ originally commissioned by Elizabeth Fernea for an edited collection, Remembering childhood in the Middle East (Fernea 2002), subsequently opened a cathartic cascade of long pent-up emotions that led to more descriptions and story-weaving around Sefrou's corn fields, cherry orchards, mountains, rivers, marketplace, narrow streets, city walls, cemeteries, and saints and spirits, among them Aisha Qandisha and Sidi Lahcen. The former haunted the author's tender childhood; the latter became his story number 3, ‘Sidi Lahcen Blues.’ It tells of a walk by child and father from Sefrou to Sidi Lahcen, the township of the shrine of al-Hassan al-Youssi. The trip becomes a mindwalk and a detour to life in Sefrou before and shortly after Independence, and the social interactions among the town's traditional elements: Arabs, Amazigh, and Jews, and their relationships with the French.