A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Read online




  Award-winning Moroccan novelist and screenwriter Youssef Fadel was born in 1949 in Casablanca, where he lives today. During Morocco’s Years of Lead he was imprisoned in the notorious Derb Moulay Chérif prison, from 1974 to 1975. A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me is his ninth novel and part of his modern Morocco trilogy, along with A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me.

  Translator Jonathan Smolin is the author of the critically acclaimed Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (2013). He lives in Hanover, NH.

  A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me

  Youssef Fadel

  Translated by

  Jonathan Smolin

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by

  Hoopoe

  113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

  420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

  www.hoopoefiction.com

  Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

  www.aucpress.com

  Copyright © 2013 by Youssef Fadel

  First published in Arabic in 2013 as Ta’ir azraq nadir yuhalliq ma’i by Dar al-Adab

  Protected under the Berne Convention

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Smolin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 977 416 754 6

  eISBN 978 1 61797 720 6

  Version 1

  To the martyrs of the extermination prison camps in Tazmamart, Agdz, Kalaat M’Gouna, Skoura, Moulay Chérif, Kourbis, the Complex, and Dar Moqri; those among them who are living and those who are dead.

  Foreword

  ON THE MORNING OF 10 July 1971, General Mohamed Medbouh and Lieutenant-Colonel M’hamed Ababou led a convey of army cadets into the Skhirat Palace, located on the Atlantic coast some twenty-five kilometers south of the Moroccan capital Rabat. It was King Hassan II’s forty-second birthday and he was hosting hundreds of dignitaries, both Moroccan and foreign, to celebrate. According to memoirs published years later, the cadets began that day thinking that they were participating in military exercises with live ammunition. As they approached the palace, Medbouh and Ababou told the cadets that the king’s life was in danger and that they had to shoot to kill in order to save the monarch. Following the orders of their superiors, the soldiers entered the palace and fired immediately, killing dozens in the ensuing chaos. According to the memoirs published later, the soldiers had no idea that they were participating in a coup. Despite the high death toll, Hassan II survived the attack and outmaneuvered Medbouh and Ababou, both of whom were killed during the coup attempt. A number of captured soldiers were executed on live television and hundreds of cadets were arrested and tortured. After a farcical mass trial, seventy-four were given sentences ranging from less than two years to life in prison.

  Barely a year later, on 16 August 1972, pilots from the Moroccan air force attacked Hassan II’s Boeing as he was returning to Rabat from a vacation in Europe. Even though the royal plane was shot multiple times, its captain miraculously navigated through the attack and managed to land safely at the Rabat airport. Once on the ground, Hassan II gained the upper hand. The suspected mastermind of the second coup, General Mohamed Oufkir, reportedly committed suicide after meeting with the king later that day. Pilots and others suspected of participating in the coup were arrested, tortured, and put on trial. While most were acquitted or given light sentences, eleven were executed and five were sentenced to between ten and twenty years in jail.

  The convicted soldiers from both coups were initially jailed in the Kénitra civil prison. But at 2 a.m. on 7 August 1973, fifty-eight of these men were blindfolded and put on an airplane. They believed that they were going to be thrown from the plane to their deaths, but instead, they were taken to Tazmamart, a prison built especially to house them. Today, Tazmamart is seen as the most infamous prison in the Arab world, a word synonymous with unimaginable suffering.

  Located in southeast Morocco near the desert town Errachidia, not far from the Algerian border, Tazmamart consisted of two buildings, each with a central corridor around which twenty-nine cells were located. Each prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in a three by two and a half meter cell with a hole for a toilet and a cement slab as a bed. Because the prisoners only had the clothes they arrived in and two old blankets, they were almost defenseless against the freezing nights and blazing hot days of the desert, not to mention the scorpions, rats, and other vermin. Since the only light that entered the cells came from small cracks in the ceiling and doors, prisoners lived alone in near total darkness, almost never leaving their cells.

  Fifty-eight soldiers entered Tazmamart and when they were released eighteen years later, only twenty-eight had survived the inhuman conditions. Tazmamart was a secret prison and the Moroccan public would not learn the full details of the suffering that took place there until the late 1990s. Nonetheless, for those who had heard of it in the 1970s and 1980s, the mention of the word Tazmamart provoked terror and the prison today symbolizes the cruelest excesses of authoritarian rule.

  The soldiers at Tazmamart were not the only political prisoners in Morocco during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades, known in Morocco as the Years of Lead, were a period of widespread and flagrant human rights violations. Freedom of expression was stifled and fear spread through the country. Farcical mass trials and disappearances became the norm. During this time, thousands of student activists were arrested, tortured, and detained in notorious centers such as Derb Moulay Chérif. Youssef Fadel, author of A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me, was among the young men and women who were held there during the 1970s.

  Some political prisoners, however, were detained in locations that remained secret for years. Students Mohamed Nadrani, Abderrahman Kounsi, and Mohamed Errahoui, along with several of their peers, were abducted in Rabat on 12 to 13 April 1976 and accused of undermining state security. After nearly a year and a half of preliminary detention and intermittent torture, they were transferred to Agdz, a town in southeastern Morocco, without a trial. Instead of a prison, however, Nadrani and his fellow detainees were held for nine years in the old casbah of Pasha Thami El Glaoui and other sites in the region. Years later, when news spread that the Glaoui casbah had been used to hold political prisoners, the residents of Agdz were shocked and appalled.

  Despite the horrors of the Years of Lead, political conditions began to improve in Morocco during the 1990s. With the arrival of the Alternance government, led by former political prisoner Abderrahmane Youssoufi, in February 1998, memoirs from political prisoners who had been tortured and detained during the Years of Lead began to emerge. While several daring novels and accounts had appeared earlier, they were confiscated and banned. Starting in 1998, however, dozens of memoirs, written in both Arabic and French, emerged, breaking the silence about the abuses of the Years of Lead.

  Among these works were a number of high profile memoirs by prisoners who had survived Tazmamart, such as Ahmed Marzouki and Mohammed Raïss. Former detainees at torture centers like Derb Moulay Chérif published dozens of accounts and novels, testifying to their years of abuse. Mohamed Nadrani, Abderrahman Kounsi, and Mohammed Errahoui also published memoirs about their experiences of torture and imprisonment in the Glaoui casbah in Agdz.

  Testimonies from the Years of Lead did not only appear in book form; a number of television documentaries and celebrated films were made about the period, some of them adaptations from, by then, well-known memoirs. And in late 2004, the sessions of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission,
which focused on the abuse of citizens by state authorities between 1956 and 1999, were broadcast live on radio and television. While there is much to criticize about the lack of prosecutorial jurisdiction of the Commission and the interdiction on those testifying from naming torturers, it was an important step forward in the history of human rights in Morocco. For the first time, citizens spoke on live television about their abuses during the Years of Lead. Moreover, these sessions were conducted mostly in colloquial Arabic and not Modern Standard Arabic or French, the languages of the elite, ensuring that they reached a wide audience.

  Youssef Fadel’s A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me should be read as part of this collective experience of human rights abuses, testimony, and reconciliation in Morocco. The novel, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (also known as the Arabic Booker) in 2013, is the second part of Fadel’s trilogy that explores Moroccan history and culture during the 1970s and 1980s. Like the dozens of memoirs about Tazmamart, Derb Moulay Chérif, Agdz, and other sites of torture and disappearance, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me recounts the incredible suffering endured. Unlike other works about the period, however, Fadel does not focus on a single real-world site of torture or the experience of one individual. Instead, he breaks new ground by weaving together details from dozens of accounts into a single novel. While traces of the real-life suffering at Tazmamart and Pasha Glaoui’s casbah can be read on nearly every page, Youssef Fadel has transformed the Moroccan prison memoir into something entirely new. He has created a narrative that reflects the collective consciousness of the country during the Years of Lead. Even though Tazmamart has since been razed by state authorities and Pasha Glaoui’s casbah in Agdz is closed to the public, works like A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me ensure that Morocco’s experience of torture, abuse, and political imprisonment during the Years of Lead cannot be forgotten.

  Jonathan Smolin

  1

  Zina

  Monday, 21 May 1990, 8 p.m.

  1

  A MAN I DON’T KNOW is standing in front of the bar. He acts as if he wants to tell me something, but I ignore him. I prefer to ignore what goes on in men’s minds. As I approach he seems about to open his mouth, but he stops when I move away again. I avoid getting too close so I don’t have to hear what he wants to say. I pass him from behind the counter, and whenever I open a bottle for a customer, I try not to get too near to him. Or to stay far enough away so I can’t hear him. I look at the watch on my wrist. It’s eight o’clock. I open a bottle and put it in front of another customer, though he hasn’t asked for it.

  But this won’t change the words in the man’s mouth into water. Or make his ravenous stares less insistent or decrease my caution. Finally, as I pass, the man I don’t know leans on the counter, toying with his glass, and over the commotion of the bar, the loud music, and the noise of the pinball machine, he asks me whether I like flowers. I don’t respond. I try to steer clear of problems. I’ve got enough problems of my own. I’ve learned how to hide my thoughts from people, to keep things to myself. For a day when the weather’s clear. And besides, I don’t know if I like flowers or not.

  I move away again, uninterested in him and his question. I’m not someone who likes starting conversations for no reason. Customers are busy with their drinks and talking about the drought. His question doesn’t interest anyone. No one cares about flowers in a season without rain. Though it’s May, the man is wearing a thick djellaba striped black and tan. It’s as if he’s sprouted up here in the middle of the bar at the wrong time and place. He’s wearing black sunglasses that don’t hide the traces of smallpox dug into his face. He follows my movements with his gaze and waits for me to come close so he can start talking again, but I don’t pass in front of him. He plays with his glass, waiting for me to go by. I count the words he might say. It might be only four words, like the last time: “Do you like flowers?” It seems he isn’t waiting for me to respond. He came to speak, not to listen. That’s what I read in the movement of his fingers playing with his glass of water. And in the faint smile emerging on his lips.

  Then I pass him. I hear: “There’s a flower festival in the south this time every year. Single women go there to get married.”

  It takes me longer to pass this time, because I listen to all these words. As if the game’s started to entice me. Will I go by a third or fourth or fifth time to listen to more of the man’s prattle? I’m not single and I don’t care if there’s a time every year for single women to get married. I’m interested in the man’s words like I’m interested in the drunken chatter every night in every bar. There’s a gravedigger who only likes talking about the number of dead people he buried that day. And there’s a carpenter who dreams every night of a wardrobe he escapes with, disappearing into the forests where the wood he uses comes from. When you stand behind the counter at Stork Bar, you’re ready for every kind of chatter that pounds on the door of your head. My sister Khatima, on the other side of the counter in front of the register, talks and raises her hands, chuckling, not caring what this or that customer might say. She doesn’t put a red rose in her hair like Madame Janeau, the former owner of the bar, but she gives customers a free drink or two from time to time. Maybe Madame Janeau used to get her flowers from the festival the man was talking about. I’m not like my sister. I’m wary of everyone who’s interested in me in any way.

  I approach him when I see him take a piece of paper out of his pocket and put it on the counter. I look at the paper and see it doesn’t indicate anything. This time the man starts looking around like he’s going to say something illicit. He looks like he wouldn’t know how to laugh. I put a bottle in front of him. He looks around again and says, “Am I drinking it on your tab or are you drinking it on mine?”

  Neither. Men like women who drink with them but I don’t drink. My sister Khatima doesn’t drink either.

  I see now he’s laughing. As if he’s reading my mind. He has glimmering gold teeth, which make his presence here stranger. I see the piece of paper’s still there. I open the bottle, but before I move away I hear him say: “At the top of the mountain overlooking the village that welcomes loud wedding parties, there’s a casbah where widows and married women who lost their husbands in the coups go.”

  I remember an old dream. A memory lights up my mind. I understand. Before he whispers in my ear, I understand. All of a sudden, I’m disturbed. All of a sudden, I take the letter. All of a sudden, I turn to my sister Khatima at the other side of the bar. All of a sudden, the man whispers again in my ear: “You’ve got just enough time to catch the nine o’clock bus from Fez.”

  A man of around fifty who hasn’t come here before. He doesn’t stand at the bar longer than the time it takes for his compressed words to ignite inside me. He keeps standing, looking at me. As if he’s waiting for me to jump over the bar to catch the nine o’clock bus. I disappear into the kitchen and open the letter. I know Aziz’s handwriting. What am I going to do with his letter? Should I toss it in my mouth as if it’s a seed of idle talk and chase it down with some water? I look at my watch.

  I thought I’d forgotten. I was broken. I understood. I calmed down. I forgot. I thought the idea of looking for him again had died out, disappeared, and was extinguished.

  I haven’t left Stork Bar and the house above it for four years. Since Madame Janeau died and left the bar to my sister Khatima. My sister took care of her more than Madame Janeau’s family, which used to come every six months from France to see if the old lady had died yet. But instead of leaving the bar and the apartment on top to them, the old lady gave everything she had to Khatima, who took care of her and buried her in the grave they bought together in her final days. We threw ourselves into the harsh work that running the bar requires. And its daily problems with drunks, cops, secret police, and soldiers. From seven in the morning until the middle of the night.

  How time has passed! All these years. And the idea of finding him hasn’t left my head. The idea is still as
fresh and insistent as it was when I began my long search for Aziz. I always thought he hadn’t died, that the earth hadn’t swallowed him up, that I’d find him one day. I began my search for him at sixteen. I’m now thirty-four and I’ll keep at it until I’m sixty or seventy or older. I’ll find him in the end. I love to imagine myself victorious one day. This feeling fills me with great happiness. I once went all the way to the Maamoura woods after a phone call from a man who said he knew where Aziz was. All I got was a fleecing to add to all the previous ones. I wasn’t weak and I didn’t despair. The false news gives time meaning. It keeps the flame burning. The false news spares the flame of memory, burning like the torch bearing it, and moves forward. I didn’t hesitate for a moment before the Maamoura news, just as I don’t hesitate now. I’ve got just enough time to catch the nine o’clock bus from Fez, as the man said. I go back to the counter without deciding whether I’ll tell my sister Khatima or not. I don’t have a good reason to tell her, or not tell her. I didn’t tell her the previous times. Meanwhile, the man’s left the bar without drinking his bottle.

  2

  At the station, the nine o’clock bus from Fez hasn’t arrived. There are few travelers. They don’t look like they’re heading to a flower festival or a marriage festival. Three men are smoking and four women in ornate clothes sit on top of packs. There are some carts with thick sacks on them and dogs sleeping below. The ticket window is closed. One of the three men says it’s been closed for years and points to a man standing under an electrical pole. The moment I see him, the man throws his djellaba hood over his head and turns his back to me. I think he’s the same man, even if he’s selling tickets. Black sunglasses, a pockmarked face, and the same black-and-tan-striped djellaba.

  I approach him, and all of a sudden he takes out a ticket and hands it to me. Like any ticket seller, as though he wasn’t just at Stork Bar. I look closely at him so he can recognize me. He seems confused when I tell him I just saw him at Stork Bar. My words annoy him. Yes, he was getting drunk, he says, but at another bar, and he begs me not to tell his boss so he doesn’t get fired. There isn’t the slightest hint of joking in his voice, even though the situation is almost a joke. Continuing to talk about it won’t lead anywhere. So I ask him about the bus, when it’ll come. He regains his confidence and energy and says: “It’ll arrive at nine.” I look at my watch. It’s nine fifteen.