Tuhami

Portrait of a Moroccan

Vincent Crapanzano

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226191461
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Tuhami is an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker who believes himself married to a camel-footed she-demon. A master of magic and a superb story-teller, Tuhami lives in a dank, windowless hovel near the kiln where he works. Nightly he suffers visitations from the demons and saints who haunt his life, and he seeks, with crippling ambivalence, liberation from 'A'isha Qandisha, the she-demon.In a sensitive and bold experiment in interpretive ethnography, Crapanzano presents Tuhami's bizarre account of himself and his world. In so doing, Crapanzano draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and symbolism to reflect upon the nature of reality and truth and to probe the limits of anthropology itself. Tuhami has become one of the most important and widely cited representatives of a new understanding of the whole discipline of anthropology.

Part One

Tuhami was, as I have said, an illiterate Moroccan Arab. He was a tilemaker by trade, and he lived alone in a windowless hovel in the factory where he worked for day wages, along with eight other men. The factory was a complex of gray-ochre and whitewashed buildings, located, as if symbolically, below the bridge that crosses the river Bu Fekran, the Father of the Tortoises, now a trickling stream, which divides the old quarter, the medina, of Meknes from the European quarter, the Ville Nouvelle, as it is often called by even those who know no French.*¹ In the vicinity of the bridge, Tuhami told me, live forty-four saints, the rjal el-bled, who protect him and other pious people who know about them from the evils that befall man. In the river, whose waters are not very clean, women come to wash wool and sheepskin rugs. Tuhami bathes in the river when he is quite alone. The bridge and the dusty, tarred road that crosses it, joining the old and new towns of Meknes, separate the factory from a much larger whitewashed factory, now more or less defunct, that was once owned by a family I will call the Jolans, colons of French and Spanish origin who came to Meknes, I believe, by way of Algeria.

Both factories have a shabby, deteriorated look about them. Like the rest of the city, they attest to former glory. Tuhami claims, on pseudo-etymological grounds, that Meknes was founded by a people, nas, from Mecca. Once, in fact, a series of Berber villages along the bank of the Bu Fekran (called at the time of Oued Felfel the River of Red Pepper), Meknes became a provincial city under the great dynasties of Morocco. In the seventeenth century it was developed into a grandiose capital by the Alawite Sultan Moulay Isma’il, who was famous in Europe for his extravagant palaces and his dungeons full of Christian slaves. In Morocco he is remembered for his ironhanded rule, his promiscuous beheadings, and his extraordinary virility. His palaces, built, torn down, and continually rebuilt during the fifty-three years of his reign, are mostly in ruins today. Their nooks and crannies are occupied by poor squatters, fellahin, from the countryside, who poured into the city with the arrival of the French. They settled where they could, first in the crowded medina and then in the vast shantytowns that began to spring up in the mid-1930s outside the city walls and beyond the cemeteries (Franchi 1959).

The European quarter has also deteriorated. The houses there—some, in the suburb of Plaisance, as pretentious as any Scarsdale minicastle, others as ordinary as the pastel villas of the postwar banlieux of any Mediterranean city—have been neglected by their new Moroccan owners, who took them over at Independence in 1956 and who, for the most part, have neither the money nor the inclination to maintain them properly. The broad avenues and open intersections, which contrast so sharply with the narrow, winding streets and alleys and the claustrophobic squares of the medina, are lined with dilapidated shops, parfumeries, librairies, quincailleries, and the rare boutiques that survived the exodus of the colons. These shops are understocked, and, when they are stocked, it is with seconds, factory rejects, and those inferior products that the big European, American, and Japanese manufacturers unload on Third World markets. On their back shelves are still to be found occasional remnants of pre-Independence prosperity: an unusual book, a fine champagne, long since dead, a bolt of subtly patterned silk, a superb knife or rifle, an evening gown now completely out of fashion, or even a toothbrush made of expensive boar bristles. The confiserie-pâtisserie, which in 1968 was still owned by a local French family, was deserted at teatime, and it now used vegetable oil instead of butter in its cakes. What restaurants there were still preferred the inevitable provincial menu of entrecôte, pommes-frites, haricots-verts, and crème-caramel to couscous, tajin (a stew), and other Moroccan foods. And the movie theaters—there were several large ones in the Ville Nouvelle—were all in need of paint and new seats and smelled of dry sweat and urine. They showed Italian and Spanish Westerns and violent whodunits. In 1968 the judo and karate films had not yet arrived from the Orient.

Once a thriving agricultural center, bordered by the fertile plains of the Gharb and Zerhoun area, Meknes was in a state of economic stagnation when I lived there. It was considered, however, by most Moroccans to be the most Moroccan of the imperial cities of the kingdom. It was known not only for the ruins of Moulay Isma’il’s palaces, for his great portals, the Bab Jdid, the Bab Berdain, and the Bab Khemis, and for its many splendid mosques but also for its healthy air (there is a sanitorium in Meknes), its fresh produce, and the tempered violence of its inhabitants. At the turn of the century, according to Budgett Meakin (1901), a long-time resident of Morocco whose father founded the Moroccan Times, it had “the worst possible reputation for morals, rivaling Sodom and Gomorrah in the tales of wickedness.” It had been a garrison for Moulay Isma’il and then for the French, as today it is a garrison for the Moroccan army. It lay on the great East-West caravan route, the tariq s-sultan, and was—and still is—an important market town for the Arabs of the plains and the Berbers of the mountains. Despite the monumentality of its ruined palaces, gates, and walls, Meknes retains a distinctly rural character, which perhaps accounts for the fact that it is so highly regarded by so many Moroccans. To the European or American it looks like a dilapidated agricultural town.

Meknes has been known by travelers from time immemorial for its muddy streets and the exceptional jealousy of its men. In the sixteenth century Leo Africanus (1956) wrote that “The wives of gentlemen do not leave their homes except at night. Their faces are covered, and they do not want to be seen either veiled or unveiled, because the men are very jealous and even dangerous when it comes to their women” (p. 177). Meakin (1901) also observed that the men of Meknes are known for their bravery and that their women “are famed throughout Morocco for their beauty,” which, he adds, “is not, however, of the type to captivate Europeans.” Today the respectable women of Meknes rarely leave their homes unaccompanied. The veil is still worn—a bit sloppily, to be sure, and below the nose—by many young women, and it is not unusual to see a schoolgirl dressed one day in a short skirt and the next in the camouflage of the traditional jallaba. Prostitutes also wear the traditional jallaba and veil, usually in bright colors. Their hoods, at least in 1968, were pointed. Some of them wore white gloves, almost as a professional symbol.

The women of Meknes, like the women of Morocco more generally, are considered, at least by men, to be inferior to men, essentially lacking in control over their sexual impulses, adventure-seeking, and always fair game when alone. They are associated, the Moroccan feminist author Fatima Mernissi (1975) observes, with fitna, with chaos and disorder. Fitna refers not only to chaos, disorder, political agitation, rioting, distraction, perturbation, torment, and panic but also to women (Mercier 1951). In its verbal form it means to “pester,” “incite,” “agitate,” “bewitch,” and “bedazzle,” Women are conceived, then, according to Mernissi, as a threat to the Moroccan male’s sense of self and self-control:

The Muslim Woman is endowed with a fatal attraction which erodes the male’s will to resist her and reduces him to a passive acquiescent role. He has no choice; he can only give in to her attraction, whence her identification with fitna, chaos, and with the anti-divine and anti-social forces of the universe. [Mernissi 1975, p. 11]

Moroccan folk wisdom is permeated with a negative attitude toward women. The attraction for women is associated with Shitan, Satan, or one of his refractions. Mernissi quotes the sixteenth-century poet Sidi ‘Abderrahman El Mejdoub as offering “the best example” of the distrust of women.

Women’s intrigues are mighty.

To protect myself I never stop running.

Women are belted with serpents

And bejeweled with scorpions.

This “phallic-aggressive” imagery is, of course, also characteristic of ‘A’isha Qandisha and other jinniyya.

Given this stereotype, women are presumed to require the strictest vigilance. The Moroccan world, like other North African and Middle Eastern worlds, is split dramatically into the women’s world of hearth and home and the man’s world of mosque and marketplace. Although a Moroccan man may enter or leave his home as he pleases, a Moroccan woman has no such freedom. Before marriage she is under the surveillance of her parents and brothers. Her sexual fidelity, a mark of family honor, must be safeguarded not only by her husband but by her ubiquitous mother-in-law. (Marriages in Morocco are usually virilocal.) She must ask permission to go to the hammam, the steam baths—reputed, at least among men, to be a place where illicit meetings are arranged—and to visit saints’ sanctuaries. Women are not permitted in mosques and do not usually go to the market. In the shantytowns of Meknes that Tuhami frequented, they do occasionally do the marketing, bring bread to the public ovens, and fetch water. They are veiled and are accompanied, whenever possible, by a woman past menopause, who is considered to be without sexual allure and is thus allowed greater freedom. Women past menopause are often suspected of witchcraft.

The relations between spouses are fragile. Marriages are arranged by mothers, and the bride-price and marriage contract are negotiated by fathers. The bride and groom do not ordinarily meet before the wedding night. The wedding itself may be an elaborate ceremony lasting as long as a week or, today, especially among the urban poor, a simple affair lasting little more than a day. It is, in either case, a very tense occasion, for not only is the honor of both families at stake but a considerable financial sacrifice is required of both as well. The ceremony culminates in the groom’s defloration of his bride, and the guests wait expectantly for proof of the bride’s virginity. The bride’s mother or mother-in-law rushes in as soon as possible to inspect the wedding cloth for blood and then dances out to the guests, bearing it on a tea tray on her head. (What is not spoken of but must surely be acknowledged is that the blood-stained cloth is also a sign of the groom’s potency.) The bride’s position in her new family is that of a suspect outsider who must be “domesticated.” Her position improves somewhat after she has borne a son, but she lives, nevertheless, under the threat of divorce (she herself cannot normally initiate a divorce) and under the domination of her mother-in-law. Her husband, humble before his father, gives his primary loyalty to his mother. Mernissi (1975) stresses the claustrophobic absence of privacy within the Moroccan household.

The image of women that Tuhami presents in the pages that follow is, then, by no means exceptional. It is a stereotype, frozen in time and context, perhaps stimulated by my presence and Lhacen’s, and as such it is inadequate to the actual ongoing intricate relations between Moroccan men and women. It does not do justice, save implicitly, perhaps through a conspiratorial silence, to the changing images women present over the course of a lifetime (Dwyer 1978). (One of the characteristics of stereotypic thinking is the reduction of movement through time to a symbolic instant that is perhaps psychologically satisfying to the thinker but is rarely sufficient to the subject of his thought.) Within the prevailing image of women in Morocco—an image the women themselves often accept as a reality—is a changing evaluation from positive to negative, which is reflected in the common belief that women are born with a hundred angels and men with a hundred devils and that over a lifetime the angels move to the men and the devils to the women (Dwyer 1978 and several of my informants). The essentially negative image of women refers principally to sexually mature women. As Daisy Dwyer (1978) notes, Adam and Eve were equals in the Garden of Eden. (They are not equals, however, in the vision of the afterlife that I learned from Tuhami and other Moroccans.) The negative image is of course rhetorically manipulated among men, as between Tuhami and me, and presumably among women, for a host of reasons, not the least of which is one of sensationalism. It should, however, be evaluated, as Dwyer (1978) points out, in terms of a frequently negative image of men and an almost existential cynicism, generally, about the nature of human beings and their relationships. Its appeal to the Westerner, particularly to the Western man, should be questioned, as both Dwyer (1978) and Said (1978) argue.

Tuhami was reputed for his knowledge of the ways of women. He was known among the women themselves, those of the shantytowns and poorer quarters of Meknes, for his herbal remedies, magical brews, and tales of saints and demons. Women respected him for his advice, which he often gave in oracular fashion. Men tended to ignore him. They called him makhardil, “scatterbrained” (the Arabic word suggests dissociation, flight of ideas, absentmindedness), and I have heard at least one man jokingly call him an ‘aguza, an “old woman,” a “hag,” a “witch.” Men—and this is most unusual—did not particularly object when he entertained their women late into the night with his tales and lore. They did not find him threatening.

Tuhami was probably in his middle forties. His exact age was impossible to determine, since Moroccans of his background do not keep track of their birth dates. He claimed to be fifty-five, but this seems unlikely. He had distinctly negroid features. He was a very dark-skinned, thin man, perhaps five feet, five inches tall, with a puffed-out barrel chest and a slight steatopygia. His head was very round, shiny, and almost bald—something unusual for a Moroccan of his age—and his baldness troubled him greatly. He considered it to be a sign of age and ugliness, especially unappealing to women. Except when he was working in the factory in his ragged gray chemise, he always dressed in faded blue pants, which no longer buttoned at the fly, a bright blue sweater, a discarded jacket from someone else’s suit, and a pair of old sneakers. That was his uniform. He never wore a jallaba, he said, because he never had the money to buy one. He was immaculately clean, and his nails were always well trimmed. He was patient and inspired calm.

Tuhami was a very gentle man, immediately likable, soft-spoken, and not much given to the kind of gesturing with which most Moroccans punctuate their speech. There was nothing effeminate about him. He had bright brown eyes, and, when he was happy, his large yellow upper front teeth (his lower front teeth were missing) were always showing in a huge, friendly smile; but when he was morose, he would sit alone in a corner of his windowless hovel, lost in himself and in the demons around him, the jnun, whom he alone could see and hear and about whom he could not speak. Or he would walk, often for miles, to a saint’s tomb, a sanctuary, which he had dreamed of or fantasied, in the hope that the saint’s blessing, his baraka, would free him from his depression. (He was a good Muslim, a pious man who recited his prayers daily, attended the Friday mosque services, and fasted not just during the month of Ramadan, as required by both Muslim and Moroccan law, but during the preceding month of Sha’ban as well.) Occasionally Tuhami would go to the movies—to lurid Indian romances or, less frequently, to violent Westerns—to rid himself of his sadness. The movies were of little help unless he could recast them as personal tales and use them to captivate an audience. His depressions were not in his control but in that of ‘A’isha Qandisha and still other demo...