Book 1:9 Ayesha Reborn

Cosmic Council of Enlightened Beings    Anu 2007 - composite fractal

So, my pathetic confused mind infested by the cosmic dreams and delusions of the high hippy mind-set, compounded by the grief of leaving my baby, we left Tangiers by bus next morning en route to Casablanca. 

Casablanca….. the very word rolled around my tongue and triggered movie-fed mystery & romance, an uncertain electric anticipation.  What would we find?  Big Atlantic surf? Perhaps a charming old port town with undertones of sordid danger. Old ladies embroidering in doorways of bordellos. Back street hole-in-the-wall coffee shops where stoned American expat writers exchanged revolutionary words. Cellar wine bars where decadent scions of wealthy Euros were getting their bit of rough among sailors and beautiful Arab boys?  None of the above leapt out of the picture where the bus dropped us off. 

Casablanca today - feels little changed

What we found was uninviting wind-swept unimaginative blocks of recent builds, office blocks. Along the seafront it was blowing fiercely and sand filled everything, drifting along the promenade, piling up against walls, making walking a battle. The almost mythic romantic spell cast by Bogart, Bergman, Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre et al. was shattered. HA! As for the longed-for surf – there was none, just a pale grey green heaving maelstrom covered with sloppy dirty foam that became lost in a hazy obscured horizon. Not a place to linger. We checked timetables for buses to Marrakesh and finding nothing till next day, decided to try our luck hitching. But first we had to eat so we headed away from the harbor front and found quieter back streets where the wind wasn’t so fiercely oppressive. 

Tagine, khobs & couscous

A cafe eatery was open and I had my first real Moroccan meal - tagine, khobs and couscous. There was nobody else in the shop and when we went to pay we praised the owner, telling him how delicious it had been. He didn't speak good English and my French had not yet come up to speed, but we engaged in a bit of conversation. He introduced himself as Jamal and insisted I come with him to meet his wife and see how cous cous was made. Tom said he'd stay in the shop and watch our gear. 

Jamal took me behind a curtain at the back of the shop, into a side corridor, then down and down into depths of the building, past rooms

Making couscous

of startled women and children who crowded out to watch us go, through ever-narrower corridors that seemed to be carved from rock and earth, then down a last flight of steep steps to a tiny room.


Enter, enter, he beckoned, and I managed to squeeze past and was confronted with an enormous black woman, all done up in a beautiful yellow abaya and orange hijab, silver jewelry on her wrists.

Imagine this beautiful lady is over 300lb

She was huge. She must have weighed over 300 lbs or more.  She was squatting on a low mattress on the floor with her hands in a gigantic bowl working at separating the grains. Around her were sacks of grain and bowls of processed couscous.
I took it all in and understood a sudden dreadful truth - she must be a prisoner in this room! There was no way she would be able to fit through the little door or the corridors.

Making c

Feeling uneasy I tried to make the best of it and said Bon jour and she gave me the traditional greeting, with the biggest happiest smile. Jamal introduced her as Fatima, his wife, or one of them. I didn't quite understand exactly what he was saying because I was suddenly gripped with a claustrophobic panic attack, feeling cold all over, dizzy and sick. I ran from the room, back up the steep tunnels and once in the shop again I sank into a chair and shook, trying to regain composure. I just wanted to get far away. I didn't let on to Tom, who was diverted showing God's eyes to a group of kiddies, maybe Jamal's children. Jamal appeared in the doorway and I thanked him and tried to explain I couldn't cope with enclosed spaces and to apologise to Fatima who was probably wondering what had happened. I don't know if he understood. Probably just confirmed to him that foreigners are mad.

We shouldered our gear again and with Marrakesh calling, headed out of town on foot, thumbs in the air. We were picked up quite quickly  by a big Mercedes being driven fast by Serena, a modern urban French Moroccan lady, just fresh from a beauty salon by looks of her  grooming

Hand with special wedding hen

and the delicate spidery floral pattern on her hennaed hands.  A traditional classic abaya concealed elaborate soft filmy embroidered finery beneath. Two silent big-eyed boys, aged about eight and six, sat in front with her, all done up in their best special occasion Western-style clothes, bow-ties and short pants with long socks. Very prep school.   
Serena spoke in French but when she realised we were sadly inadequate there, switched to heavily accented English and said she was trying get more fluent if we could be patient with her and also explain to her boys a few English words & phrases as we went. She had come from Marseilles where she lived, married to a French Moroccan restaurateur. She had been traveling a week, with stopovers to visit relatives en route, and was now on her way to her final destination, her sister’s wedding some miles out of Marrakesh in the palace of a local sheik. We spent the trip giving English lessons and watching the scenery roll past. Tom gave the boys God’s Eyes which Serena hung from the car mirror, making a bright happy dangly statement as they swiveled and twirled, catching the light of the late sun coming thru the rear window.

Not where we stayed, but imagine this palace 

surrounded with palm lined paths, pools, fountains and guesthouses 

and you'll get the idea.

The sun was setting as we came to her destination, a terracotta bijou palace glowing red in the last sun rays, set in the sheltered rear of a wide valley, backed by rising ridges in a grove of date palms and olives. It was the time of the evening prayer, but Serena invited us to her suite of rooms and gave us mint tea. She said we must obviously stay the night. After the prayer was over, Serena took us to meet the sheik and several of his wives who looked us over with hardly concealed amazement and curiosity.  In a side reception room we all reclined on carpeted divans and embroidered cushions, making awkward conversation in several languages, trying to find common ground while waiting for the evening meal, sipping cool drinks, eating dates, looking out French windows on three sides onto a tiled patio and a lantern-lit path through the palms to a pool with a gently spouting fountain.

The Villa Josephine in Tangiers - I couldn't find an image to suit the palace garden where I stayed but this is very similar, if you change the white marble to red adobe and the paving to terra cotta tiles

Serena put it to the sheik that we needed to sleep over and he welcomed us with all the full embrace of Moroccan hospitality, taking us out past the fountain to a summer guest house beside the pool. Our separate private accommodation for the night. I was speechless as I gazed around this beautiful pavilion enclosed by an ogee arched lattice screen wall, inset with stained glass panels, giving views onto the surrounding garden. Inside zellij tiles covered the walls to waist height . It was not large but did have an elevated comfy curtained bed, a divan, cushions galore and small inlaid tables, tiled floors and all the brass fittings I’d come to enjoy so much, hanging lanterns, small tables, bowls. A rudimentary en suite was contained in a tiny interior room behind the bed as well as a large wardrobe cupboard. I was beginning to see that this was the common theme in Moroccan interior decoration, for the wealthy at least, with variations on the theme and degrees of decrepitude and opulence as the householder’s status & wealth declined or rose. 

Our host the sheik was a relaxed older man with a well-run establishment. Servants were at hand for every task it seemed and we were told that Ali, a boy of about fifteen or so, would look after whatever we needed. As we wandered back to the main palace through the lamp-lit palms, the sheik told us his family line was part of the Alaouite Dynasty of the present royal family which went back to the Prophet Muhammad and had been in Morocco many generations over hundreds of years. His forefathers had built the palace in the 17^th century after the conquest of Marrakesh. I found myself wondering how heavy  the weight of having such a heritage must be,  whether it was a kind of living prison from which there was no escape, only endless rituals and obligations that must be obeyed, or if he ever considered what being born into a family less bound by the past might feel like. 

I thought about my own family, its lack of coherence or regular ritual gatherings, our unknown past. My uncle had traced our lineage back to the Doomsday Book and a Danish Viking and his two sons who, around 900 A.D. had pillaged parts of Somerset from which the academic family of my paternal grandfather, a maths master, had migrated to Oz in the 1860’s.  But I didn’t give this much credibility apart from an affinity with all things Danish and a liking for Scandinavian men of the Viking mold. These types of genealogies seemed to me to be open to wide interpretation and I’d never seen the actual document my uncle claimed existed.  Commonly there always seemed a claim that the line to went back to some royal family or famous person. My uncle believed it and even came up with a coat of arms and a family motto “Withhold the spears”, useful in family tiffs.

Olga, my beautiful operatic soprano mother

All I knew about my mother, Olga, was that she was an orphan who, maybe, had been shipped to Australia in 1921 after the 1^st World War at the age of four and given a generic surname by the Catholic church, a name common amongst these kinds of orphans apparently. I always felt “Olga” could mean she was Russian, but who knows, the records are lost. 

So listening to this old sheik telling of his family, his burden of heritage and looking at his palace, the only home he’d ever known, I wondered who had the better life when compared. I tried to picture myself as a part of this tribe. A wife, a sister, a servant. His mother. I wondered how many mother-in-laws he had to contend with, how many cousins, aunts, uncles and so on.  It must all be a very complicated social network to negotiate. 

As I sat with the assembly of his family and guests around the immense feast that was the evening meal eating from the tagines, 

A feast for a sheik and harem

the huge bowls of cuscus and many side dishes of assorted delicacies, I tried to work out how their behaviors would be dictated by their place in the pecking order. There were so many people we were divided into two groups, each around a giant low table laden with food, sitting on the floor on low cushions. I was interested to see there was no actual clear division of the sexes. The seating arrangement seemed to have more to do with convenience and status. A lot of the men sat at the sheik’s table as did women from the wedding party, Serena, Tom and myself and a few of the sheik’s older wives. The other women and a few younger men sat at the other table, near a door to a room where the children were eating attended by young girls and servants. Serena sat beside me, with Tom on her other side, guiding us through the etiquette – the hand-washing, eating with one hand and not spilling the food. With a nod or a simple word she made sure most of the dishes came our way. It was my first experience of a Moroccan feast, mysterious new flavors and foods, all so delicious. I had no idea what rules of social etiquette I was breaching, but if I was offending anyone, nobody reacted in any way except with warm smiles.

I put myself in Serena’s place, watching her interactions with the others, who she deferred to, who deferred to her. It seemed she had high status as her sister was marrying the sheik's eldest son, which elevated her to a sort of royal aunt in the scheme of the tribe. Below the sheik’s wives but above their children. The thought of having to tread these defined lines all my life...no...not for me. But for them it was all they knew, born to it, that was normal behavior for them. Unquestioned. I suddenly felt I was very privileged to have been born free, unfettered by such binding ties. I reflected that if one of these women had a violent abusive husband, she would not be free to escape as I had. If she did she would probably have been easily rounded up and brought back,  accused of bringing her punishment on herself and met some appalling fate in a society where men had the upper hand.  The whole tribal setup suddenly seemed like a huge cage, not just for the women, but the men as well. No jumping fences here.  Serena had obviously found a degree of freedom in her life in Marseilles, but even so she was on a long leash and had been reeled in back to the family core for this occasion of one more ritual of binding.  I wondered what the concept of freedom meant in this country. What form would it take for any individual? I wondered if my understanding of what I was experiencing was real or some figment of what I thought it was. How could I ever really know? As if in answer I heard a baby crying in the adjacent room and immediately understood the nature of my own chains as the absence of my child hit home, painful and hard. No, I was not free. I was on a long leash too.

As the next day was going to be a very busy one with the wedding preparations everyone retired early and we were grateful, both of us were dog-tired. We were invited to stay for the wedding but I felt we’d only be an extra distraction. Also I could not face celebrating what I was fast beginning to see as a form of bondage to a lifetime of slavery.  I just wanted to keep going. Onward to Atlantis! 

But before sleeping I wandered around the garden. So beautiful in the light of the late moon-rise silvering the palm leaves and revealing mysterious hidden pathways. I followed one through a tunnel of over-arching leaves. Rounding a bend I saw ahead a candle-lit room in the side of the palace and moved closer to see what was inside. It was a small reception room with French windows open to the night. An ancient woman in an elaborate wine-colored caftan lay back on cushions on a low couch, the sheik on a cushion beside her massaging her feet.  A gramophone was softly playing J'attendrai , an old French song from the 30’s. Behind them, set at the rear through an archway I could see a bed with filmy canopy curtains. Outside a servant was squatting against the wall and when he saw me hurried inside and spoke into the sheik's ear.

The sheik rose and came to the doors and spotted me. Very surprised he stepped outside and beckoned to me to come closer.  I was a bit embarrassed, feeling like an interloper, spying on an intimate moment of I knew not what, so I stuttered an apology and made to leave.  But he welcomed me and ushered me into the presence of this very grand wizened old dame. Closer now I saw her long lean face had thick maquillage, kholed eyes and ringed hennaed hands, one of which had a beautiful hand bracelet from fingers to wrist. Dark red false nails matched her clothes. Her hair was a deep black mane with wine highlights, but I was sure it was a wig. Around the neckline of her velvet caftan deep ruby and emerald jewels were set in a couching of rich gold bullion embroidery. She seemed quite frail. “I would like you to meet Lilah, my mother” he said. Very surprised I bowed, knelt beside her, took her proffered hand and kissed it, not knowing how else to show the respect obviously demanded here. She smiled and squeezed my fingers, so I was apparently welcome. 

Hand bracelet and rose petals

Still holding my hand she reached into a bowl of rose petals on the low table beside the divan with her other hand , scooping them up and dropping them into mine - a spontaneous soft fragrant gift - I buried my nose in them - ah!....sheer delight.

The sheik spoke to her in French and I understood enough to know he was telling her that I was the Australian visitor he had told her about earlier, and of my quest to travel into the Atlas Mountains with a donkey. She nodded as he spoke, then, waving her spectacular hands around expressively, started to speak, surprisingly, in English. Or rather a garbled Franglais, but I could understand her.

 “I am Lilah - and your name is?”  She demanded. So I told her my name and she laughed. “No, No, That means something you wouldn’t like in our language. I am going to give you a Moroccan name. If you are to travel in this country you must have a proper Moroccan name. Your name will be “Ayesha”."
Hmm..... Ayesha. Rider Haggard. The Immortal Goddess. She.

Ayesha seduces Leo into the Immortal flame - from the movie She (1965) starring Ursula Andress & John Richardson

Yes, I liked the sound and feel of Ayesha, the way it worked in my mouth.  OK, I would be Ayesha in Morocco. Why not!

That out of the way I asked her about herself. Obviously she was no tribal Moroccan. She said was originally French. She’d been brought up in Paris, attended finishing school in Switzerland and returned to Paris in her late teens where she worked as an actress. Which is where she’d met the love of her life, the previous sheik, her son’s father, a member of the ruling family of Morocco and cousin to the then King. I suppose she would have been in her eighties so I calculated that this would have been back in the early 1900’s. But now in her dotage she was unable to walk, only left the room in a wheel chair and had not left the palace compound in more than ten years.

“But I have wonderful memories as during my marriage, as part of my duties as a member of the Royal Family, I was a cultural ambassador for Morocco in the twenties and thirties and visited many countries throughout Islam and the wider world – the Americas, including the countries in the Caribbean and South America, most European countries, Russia, Africa, Asia and yes, even Australia and New Zealand.  I was at a reception in Cairo and met your great operatic soprano Dame Nelly Melba - I still have her records!“

I was overwhelmed. This woman was so unexpected and impressive. Any preconceived notions of women in this country were suddenly rendered null & void. I was certainly beginning to understand that Moroccan people were very diverse and in this case, amazing. Obviously behind the veils, behind the anonymous street doors, women were not all the picture I’d had in my mind. The men were more visible, but the women.........well first Aisha, now Serena and Lilah, had opened my mind to all sorts of possibilities and I wondered what my next encounter might bring. 

I tried to fit the fragmented pieces of what I knew of Moroccan history and Lilah’s life in it together in my mind. I realised there had been some outstanding women who featured as heroines here in those fraught years of civil unrest, wars, invasions, occupation.  Being married to the sheik and being part of the Alaouite ruling dynasty, she obviously had enjoyed the privileges of high status and wealth, but she must have lived through tumultuous times. But this was no Joan of Arc, Lilah came across more of a houri than a warrior princess as she reclined, sipping water and murmuring fragments of memories of her glory days.

I left her regretfully, wishing I had more days to visit with her. But my ability to stay awake was waning fast and I needed to get some sleep before the rigors of the coming day on the road. As I knelt to kiss her hand in farewell she grasped mine and pulled me closer “ Take care Ayesha, be very careful. This can be a very dangerous place for foreigners. People disappear”, she hissed, her dark eyes looking deeply into mine. I nodded, a bit too taken aback by the unexpected intensity of her warning to reply.

After mutually gracious farewells the servant was tasked with walking me back up the palm-lined path to the pavilion. At the bend I pause and turned to get a last glimpse. The sheik had lifted Lilah from the divan and was carrying her to the bed in the back room. As I watched them her head fell back in his arms, her wig fell to the floor and I saw she was bald.  Reflectively I continued to the pavilion and slid in beside the sleeping Tom who sighed and cuddled into me as I dropped into unconsciousness after a very full day. I dreamed of my operatic soprano mother on a headland singing her favorite aria from Madame Butterfly, her arms reaching out for me across the oceans.

A simple Moroccan breakfast

Next morning we were woken in the dawn by a servant bearing a tray of mint tea, orange juice, crepes, honey and almonds. We sat by the pool eating the little feast. Lovers playing footsy with our toes in the water, feeding eachother, watching the first sun glinting on the bursts of spray from the fountain as we gloried in this sweet slice of paradise. 

I told Tom of my encounter the previous evening and my new name, which he immediately loved and said he would only call me Ayesha from now on. Now we were Abdullah and Ayesha. It felt right. New names for the adventures ahead.

 It was such a pleasant place. I could have stayed and lived here, if things had been different, or I had been born into another life. But the palace began bustling with the portent of the special day ahead, so we quickly gathered our things and left early, giving our heartfelt thanks for the hospitality. I felt I'd had experiences that had taught me so much in so few hours. Unrepeatable. 

Serena seemed to understand why we couldn’t stay, she didn’t seem offended and was probably secretly relieved, one less thing to look after on this busy day of days. She drove us back to the main road bus stop and said a through bus was due soon. Sure enough within minutes we were waving goodbye out the back window of the fast Casablanca to Marrakesh express bus, hugging each other with delight that everything was working out so well. With Marrakesh so close I could almost taste it, I was almost delirious with anticipation.

Next Blog #10: Marrakesh - Destination of my Dreams.