The following is the essay I wrote for my class with Dr. Fatima Sadiqi on gender issues in Morocco:
From the first day of this class, we have greatly discussed the Moroccan-patriarchy as a space-based patriarchy. In this model, patriarchy exerts its control through dictating appropriate places for men and women to be and act. The private home is the place of women, while public places such as markets, schools, government, and even the street are viewed as the places of men. Women can have power in private places, but their husbands or fathers are the only ones have the authority to speak in public places. So far, this has only been a regurgitation of ideas presented by Dr. Sadiqi in lectures, but for the uninitiated, there are examples of cultural customs in which this space-based patriarchy manifests, such as the birth ritual. In this ritual, the mother and her baby are confined in a private place for seven days, during which female friends and families arrive to view the newborn. During this time, also, both grandmothers give the mother initial teachings on how to raise the child, including how to swaddle and feed it. Finally, at the end of seven days, the father presents the child to the community in a public setting, which includes slaughtering a sheep. What is emphasized in an academic view of this ritual is that in the seven days of seclusion, only women are allowed into the private space of the mother. The father only makes an appearance when the baby is brought into public. This is a reinforcement of the space-based patriarchy.
With this lesson in mind, I would like to look at two works by the Maghrebi author Jilali El Koudia, Moroccan Folktales and Stories Under the Sun. The later is a collection of El Koudia’s short-stories, while the former is a collection of folktales. My hope is to examine how space-based patriarchy appears in these stories, especially in relation to the home. Before I do this, however, there are two caveats I need to point out.
First, I would like to discuss the difference between a short story and a folktale. The short stories in Stories Under the Sun are originals of El Koudia, appearing from somewhere within his soul and appearing on the page as he presents them. In Stories Under the Sun, he makes no explanation for the stories, and the book dives into them without much ceremony. In Moroccan Folktales, however, El Koudia includes his own preface, in which he explains the origins of the tales:
Born in a rural family, I used to listen to Mother telling us children some of these tales, the only means of entertainment and relief from daily hardships. Mother is then my first source of most of these stories. In recent years I have asked her to retell them, and I took note and then rebuilt them and translated them into English. The same procedure was followed with other women, particularly older ones. Such stories are collected from various regions of Morocco such as Tetuan, Al-Huceima, Taza, Fes, Marrakesh, and Tahanout. (Moroccan Folktales, page viii)
According to this explanation, El Koudia got these stories from other sources, especially his own mother. This fits with two aspects of Moroccan storytelling. The first we covered in class, that storytelling often comes from female sources, mothers telling stories they heard as children from their mothers to their children. In the birth ritual example, this is similar to how the two grandmothers teach the mother how to take care of the baby. This gives these stories a sense that they were formed in a private space, and that El Koudia is bringing them out into public by publishing them. The second aspect is that these folktales have an oral origin, which El Koudia admits is extremely important earlier in the preface. El Koudia also points out that these folktales are dying out because their role as entertainment is “now being taken over by other mass media” (Moroccan Folktales, page vii). By writing them down, El Koudia is attempting to preserve these stories. However, preserving them by writing them down seems slightly problematic, since these folktales are inherently oral; by writing them down, he is changing them. In this way, then, these folktales are still his creation, just as the short stories in Stories Under the Sun are.
The difference between the stories that appear in these two books is therefore slight but extremely important. The folktales are things he is creating based on a kind of collective memory, passed on to him by his mother and other women. The short stories are his own creations which may have their root in the folktales, though this is difficult to prove. Both, however, should be viewed as contributions to El Koudia’s culture– the folktales are drawn from the nebulous of that culture, while the short stories are new additions to the culture.
The second caveat I need to make is that I am not using these two books as representatives of all of Moroccan literature, nor even as a representative of El Koudia’s full body of work. Any attempt to do so on my part would result in unfair characterization and gross misunderstandings. I am hoping, instead, to look at these two books with the knowledge that they were written inside a space-based patriarchy and see how that patriarchy shows itself or is subverted.
I would like to start with the stories that appear in Moroccan Folktales because they likely have an older origin, even though Stories Under the Sun was published first. I will be looking at six stories from this collection. The first is “Seven Brothers and a Sister,” the first story in the book. In it, a man and woman have seven sons and one daughter before they die. After their death, the sons build a house for their sister to live in while they are gone or traveling, and they protect it with seven locked doors. One day, while the brothers are on a long journey, her cat urinates on the matches, so that when night falls, the daughter cannot light a fire. The story continues:
Aisha had no choice. So she opened the seven doors and for the first time went outside. In the dark night she spotted a fire glowing somewhere that seemed not too far away. She kept walking for a long time until she reached a hut. As she approached the door, it opened as if of its own accord. Suddenly, her eyes fell on an old ghoul. (Moroccan Folktales, page 2)
In this story, the source of Aisha’s problems are when she leaves her home. The ghoul will scratch her arm, then follow her blood to her home, and each day will knock down one door. On the day of the last door, the brothers return and trick the ghoul into a pit, where they burn him. This story seems like it has a happy ending, but the ghoul get’s his revenge in the end when a crow digs up one of his bones and drops it into Aisha’s skull, killing her. All of these events are rooted to Aisha having to leave her home. Of course, the story is told in a way that it is not Aisha’s fault that she left, but the underlying theme of the story is that she was safer inside her home than outside of it. Indeed, considering the end of the story, Aisha is even punished for leaving her home. On it’s own, this story certainly falls into the frame of space-based patriarchy, but it’s also important that this is the first story in the book. The story’s position sets up the rest of the book to also fill into this frame.
There are many other stories that continue the trend set by “Seven Brothers and a Sister.” In “The Sultan’s Daughter,” the plot revolves around the Sultan’s most beautiful daughter leaving the house he built for her to go with her sisters to the hammam (Moroccan Folktales, pages 15-8). Because she does, she is almost killed, and it is only her own cleverness that saves her. In the story “Father and Daughters,” a father leaves on pilgrimage with his son, leaving his daughters behind in a house with an iron door, and only the youngest, smartest daughter is allowed to leave to water the basil outside. The plot of the story then launches off of this point, since the youngest daughter is seen by a prince and she is put in danger. This story is even more interesting because the prince then disguises himself as a woman to enter the private space, and later the intelligent daughter disguises herself as a man to survive (Moroccan Folktales, pages 42-52). In the long tale “The Jealous Mother,” one of the events that moves the plot forward is the main character leaving the house of the seven ghoul brothers who took her in, which leads to a plot line similar to “Seven Brothers and a Sister” (Moroccan Folktales, pages 56-7). Finally, the story “Lunja” begins when the titular character leaves her house when her parents are away, and all of her hardship results from that simple act (Moroccan Folktales, page 72). In all of these folktales, there is an explicit link between bad things happening to unmarried female characters when they leave their homes. Because of this link, these stories all, in their own way, reinforce a space-based patriarchy.
This is not to say that all of the stories in the book are grounded in patriarchy. Of the stories mentioned above, “Father and Daughters” is the most interesting because of the ways that it somewhat subverts space-based patriarchy. These ways have already been mentioned– several important characters cross-dress during the story, and the daughter is able to survive and even lead in the public world of men. However, it is not fully subversive because it still maintains a link between the home and safety– if the daughter hadn’t been watering the plants outside, she would not have been seen by the prince and everything would have been fine. However, the story “The Fisherman” is of greatest interest to me because of the ways it subverts space-based patriarchy. Though the title implies that the story will be about a man, the story is really about the titular character’s daughter, who must endure several attempts by her step-mother to end her life. In these instances, the danger to the main character comes from inside the home: first, when the step-mother marries the fisherman and moves into the home (Moroccan Folktales, pages 20-1); and second, when the daughter has married into the sultan’s family and lets her step-mother come to visit her (Moroccan Folktales, pages 24-5). In the first instance, the step-mother almost immediately begins to abuse the daughter. The daughter’s only respite is when she enlists the help of a mermaid while she is outside the home. In the second instance, the step-mother uses magic to turn the daughter into a dove, and then attempts to have her own daughter take the place of the main character. Again, the main character is only saved when she is captured in dove form by her husband outside, while she is playing with her son. Only once she is back in her human form does she return with her family to the privacy of her home (Moroccan Folktales, page 26). This inverse of roles that makes the private home dangerous and public spaces safe is how this story subverts the traditional themes of the other stories.
Keeping these folktales in mind, I now want to look at three short stories in Stories Under the Sun; “Red Arrows,” “Lionel’s Tree,” and “Rolling Rubber.” It should be noted that each of these stories and most of the stories in this book are very male centric. This means, however, that the themes of safety in the home and danger in public which appear in these stories– or are subverted in them– are all the more interesting because they no longer apply only to women.
Starting with “Red Arrows,” which is interesting mostly because it is, like “Seven Brothers and a Sister,” the first story in the collection. The title comes from a metaphor repeated throughout the story:
The red sharp arrows of the sun are furtively and guiltily peering from their black sheath, as if embarrassed to pierce the frail virgin veil of the still slumbering universe. (Stories Under the Sun, page 9)
This hauntingly beautiful metaphor is repeated on pages 11, 12, and 13 independently, and serves several purposes. Most importantly, it shows that the two seemingly separate story-lines are occurring on the same day and at around the same time. As the old man walks from his rural home, he is seeing the same sunrise as the young man getting into his car to leave his city apartment. Therefore, the reader senses that the two stories are linked, even though El Koudia carefully refrains from linking them until the end. The metaphor also has a vaguely threatening sense to it; the suns rays are arrows, and giving them a red color could imply that the arrows are covered in blood. The reader can only sense all of this, because there is no sense of danger during the first two sections of the story, when both the old man and young man go about their routine with their wives. After the second appearance of the red arrows, the story-lines are slowly intertwined and the image of the red arrows appears more rapidly, until the climax when the young man runs over the old man in his car.
To relate this story to the theme of this paper is easy. Once more, this is a moment where the characters leave the safety of their private home, only to undergo some kind of misfortune while in the public world. If they had stayed in the homes, they would have been safe. This story differs from the folktales discussed, however, in that the characters who left the home are both male, while their wives stayed in privacy. Under the space-based patriarchal system, these characters are all fulfilling their normal roles and are doing so in their normal spaces. This story, then, fits neatly into the Moroccan patriarchy. It is interesting for the way it carries the same message, but does so in a different formula from many of the folktales.
“Rolling Rubber” fits into the patriarchy as well, and has similar motifs to “Red Arrows.” It is a story about a man and a woman who walk together everyday down a long and empty road until sunset. Doing so, they gradually fall in love, until the woman brings up to him the idea of marriage, which he is excited about. However, he pauses when she then suggests they meet with her mother in the city. For the man, the city represents everything that he hates, as seen in this quote:
… that’s where they go to meet and mate with each other like beasts in a jungle. The City Centre! They contrived it thus to meet with their dark desires… The excitement that the distinct individual arouses is extinct. Nothing but a fast moving mass of humanity. Uniformity has killed individuality. Dear me! In the crowd, what am I? (Stories Under the Sun, page 86)
The main problem for the narrator, it appears, is that the city is filled with people. In the city, he cannot be an individual because there are so many people around him. In comparison, on the road that he and the woman normally walk, they are entirely alone. El Koudia is careful to never include any other presence when he describes these scenes. By doing this, El Koudia is setting up the city as a public place while the road is a private place, in keeping with the themes of a space-based patriarchy.
The plot’s conflict then arises when the pair move their relationship from the private road to the public city. The first time they do so is to meet her mother, which he accepts. However, after her mother has approved of him, she asks him to go there again, and the following exchange happens:
In an abstract manner, he asked her, “What makes you change all of a sudden?” The question surprised her before she answered by another question, “Are we not engaged?” Although he did not see the connection, he replied, “Of course we are. But what does it have to do with walking straight into the middle of the city at this cursed hour? I thought you did not like crowded spots?” Staring at him, she said without appearing to have reflected, “Are you ashamed of being seen with me?” (Stories Under the Sun, page 91)
Here, the woman is asking to be seen in public with the man, almost in a way that seems like she wants to be shown off. Put another way, she is directly asking him to leave the private in exchange for the public. It is this second foray into the city that ultimately kills the man as he gets hit by a car trying to cross the street. The story falls in with space-based patriarchy because it has this ending; the message, as in the other folktales and stories, is that the public is dangerous while the private is safe. Had the characters gone down their private road instead of seeking the public city, the man would be alive at the end of the story.
The last story I am going to discuss, “Lionel’s Tree,” is similar to “The Fisherman” in the way that it subverts the themes of space-based patriarchy. The narrator is visiting his brother, Mokou, who is living in France. From the beginning of the story, El Koudia fills it with a sense of unease and danger. Mokou is bringing the narrator to his home for the first time, Mokou warns him, “Don’t look left or right” (Stories Under the Sun, page 46). Every night, as they are getting ready to sleep, Mokou loads a gun (Stories Under the Sun, pages 47, 48, 50). When the narrator asks Mokou why he does this, Mokou explains:
‘They hunt us for taking their dirty jobs,’ he whispered. ‘We leave our homeland to clean their dirt. Yet they call us a dirty race. Funny! Bud don’t worry about me and have a good sleep.’ (Stories Under the Sun, page 47)
From this, the narrator and the reader both learn that Mokou has been subjected to racism while in France, and fears for his life because of it. What is important about this is that Mokou loads his gun inside his home, so that he can protect it if he needs to. This aligns itself with a space-based patriarchy in that the home is something he is trying to defend, but he does not seem to feel safe there. It is this feeling of relative lack of safety that gives this story it’s subversive element.
It is important to see that there is no true consensus from both of these books. In many of the stories across both genres, space-based patriarchy is eerily present. Some of the stories that I have highlighted seem to invert the public-private system, but only in marginal ways. However, even in subverting these themes, El Koudia is still paying a kind of homage to them, admitting that they are there. It is also important to note that the works I have highlighted in this essay are only a section of El Koudia’s work, even within the books I selected to analyze. Many of these have no signs of space-based patriarchy, or if they do, they are only marginal. El Koudia’s patriarchal influences only appear occasionally, that is undeniable. But it also undeniable, based on the evidence used in this essay, that the influences exist, both in the stories he created and the stories he got from an oral tradition. In all likelihood, the later also influenced the former.
Works Cited
- El Koudia, Jilali. Stories Under the Sun. Fes, Morocco; I’MEDIA (1999).
- El Koudia, Jilali. Moroccan Folktales. Syracuse, New York; Syracuse University Press (2003).