# 69
Last week we walked as slightly awkward
intruders through a clutch of Berber villages set into the rugged hillsides of
the Ourika valley in Morocco.
The greeting from the children playing amongst the rocks, flowers and thorns was
immediate and friendly. Whereas passing adults exchanged discreet Arabic salaams
with us, the children’s more lively welcome came in French and requested pens
or sweets. Tactically and rhythmically, the call for pens was placed before the
plea for sweeties. Maybe it’s a legacy from my own upbringing that I find it
harder to refuse a child a pen than a sweet. After the first village I was entirely
pen-less and wishing I’d had the foresight to pocket a good few multi-packs of pencils,
crayons and biros while dawdling among the superfluous ‘retail opportunities’ which
clog the arteries at Gatwick.
Berber village
children
I walked on down the red-earth track reminded
of the much-quoted proverb; “Give a man a fish…”[1] There
is no equivalent maxim predicting the consequences of giving a child a pen but it
must have at least an outside chance of being life-changing. In my education,
learning to read went hand in hand with learning to write. Why else would you
learn to read if not also to write? In Islam there is a tradition of learning
to read by fluent and accurate recitation of the Quran. The village children
will already have embarked on this project, repeating verses until they have
them by heart. If a pen helps in this endeavour, all well and good, but if the
habit of writing enables them to expand upon other observations and compare different
ideas it may, in time, unlock a more varied future. Isn’t there a line in
Hamlet – spoken by either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern – that, in consequence of
children yelling out their lines, ‘many
wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills’?[2]
Maybe it’s from there we get the ever-hopeful sentiment that ‘the pen is
mightier’?
Above every Berber
village, the minaret of the mosque
The amplified call to prayer echoes around
these hills five times each day. According to our guide, five is the most
important number. Islamic belief rests on five pillars; the Moroccan flag bears
a five-pointed star. He was keen to distinguish this from the six-pointed Star
of David. Could that be all that fundamentally divides Judaism from Islam - the
geometry approved to draw a star? I remembered the previous day in Marrakesh when, at the Saadian Tombs, a different guide had
shown us historic Muslim graves, all orientated so that the head of the
deceased pointed to Mecca.
Occasional tombs were set at right angles to these and were, he said, the
graves of Christians. On one level, admirable religious toleration was
displayed by burying Muslims and Christians close together if not actually side
by side. I felt (but did not mention to the nice man) that a refined
appreciation of absurdity was shown by persisting with religious differences
even after death. Surely, beyond the grave, either one of them would have been
proven correct or both had entered into some conclusive oblivion where no
amount of abstruse theology and lifelong obedience to ritual would matter a
single damn - for ever and ever. Amen.
In Marrakesh,
the calls to prayer passed unheeded by most of the population. Conspicuously a
tourist, I did not feel so much an intruder in the city as I had in the Berber
villages. My relationship with the villagers was plainly unbalanced. We shared
a mutual curiosity but, realistically, those Berber children would not have the
option of taking a trip to London
and a stroll past my house. In Marrakesh, the
curiosity of the merchants did not extend to London, only to our wallets. Their constant
importuning was driven solely by the wares they had to flog.
Monkey and handler
Place
Jemaa-el-Fna, Marrakesh.
The constantly churning activity, by day
and night, in Place Jemaa-el-Fna is described in the guide-books as
‘unmissable’ and ‘open-air theatre ‘. ‘Unavoidable’ and ‘unbearable’ might be
more accurate. Piping snake-charmers, rubbery snakes, fortune-tellers, acrobats
and sellers of trinkets compete frantically for attention and cash. The air
reeks of horse-shit, burning sheep-fat and charcoal smoke. Decidedly, this is not
one of my favourite places. From within a huddle of onlookers comes the pounding
of drums and the hectoring of story-tellers. Distracted by a group of men
manipulating child-sized monkeys wearing nappies, I nearly walked into an extraordinary
display of ready-made dentures and a heap of extracted teeth, spread across a
fragment of carpet. The crowd are supposed to be first curious, then fascinated
and, finally, sufficiently astonished to part with their money. Honestly? I
found it difficult not to be repelled - but hey, if they gave each monkey a
typewriter and an endless supply of paper…
Approaching perfection
in spontaneous graphic design
[1] Give a man a fish and you
feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his
life.” (Or until the fishery is terminated by over-fishing, pollution,
etc.) There are humorous variations on this; I like the one which concludes …Teach him to fish and you get rid of him
for the weekend.
[2] Okay, according to Google, it’s reported by Rosencrantz in Hamlet,
Act 2, Scene 2.
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