The Novel “The Labyrinths of Farid Zamanih” by Khalid Al-Mulahiz

Khalid Al-Mulahiz has published a novel in Arabic titled “The Labyrinths of Farid Zamanih” (Slaiki Brothers, Tangier, 2023, 187 pages of medium size). In it the author tells of the “Sisyphean” suffering (suffering that repeats endlessly) of the young Farid, from the time his family left in 1944, when he was fourteen, their douar “Tahounat Arrawabi” (the mill of the hills), not far from Al Hoceima, in the Moroccan Rif region, until he died in France in 2007, without having fulfilled his wish to embrace his mother and meet what remained of his family, or to return to the Rif, which was his beautiful dream.

The events of the novel:

After the father (Farid’s father) killed the landlord “Haj Mouhand”, who worked for him farming land that had once belonged to the former, he was obliged to flee the region with his wife “Arqiya”, his two sons Farid and little Mohamed and his daughter “Zoulikha”, to avoid revenge for the dead man. The father would mislead anyone who asked about his destination, saying he was heading to Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, to throw off those who might track him for revenge. But his real destination was “Kabdana”, toward Algeria, to work on the estates of the French settlers.

After the sheikh “Haydouch n ‘Umar” took them to the eastern bank of the Moulouya river, following days the family spent as guests of “‘Azzi ‘Ayyad” and his wife “Khatchi Thraythmas”, as Farid called them, “Haj ‘Ammar” would lead them to Oran, then to the douar “A‘wiwa”, where they spent their first night with “Hamidouch”, a cousin of “Arqiya”, Farid’s mother. They rented a small dwelling with a toilet shared among many families living in the same neighborhood. Farid and his father got work with the French. Little “Mohamed”, aged eight, would die of typhoid.

After Farid saved the beautiful “Charlotte”, daughter of “Monsieur Joseph”, from falling off the horse she was riding, he was transferred to work in the horse stable and appointed to accompany “Charlotte” and her brother “Tony” on their outings. In 1952, “Al-Ghaliya”, whom he had known since she came to offer condolences on the death of his father, who was found lifeless in an alley in 1947, will ask Farid to accompany her to Oran to visit some relatives. Although she is Algerian, she speaks the Rifian dialect well, being the widow of Maimoun at-Touzani of the Rifian Ait Tsafat tribe. In Oran a young girl was waiting for them, whom “Al-Ghaliya” introduced as “Jamila”, her sister’s daughter. After they entered a house in the “Sidi El Houari” district, they found people there who welcomed Farid and revealed to him that they had chosen him to be one of them in the front resisting the colonizer, because he belongs to the Rif of the greatest resister, Abdelkrim al-Khattabi, and they told him the places he was to blow up to kill the French who frequent them. Before he could even take in what he was hearing, the police stormed the house; all the others present fled through the windows, including “Al-Ghaliya”, despite being in her sixties. During interrogation the police asked him about his relationship with “Jamila Bouhired” and the organization of the “Algerian National Liberation Front”. Here he would learn that the young “Jamila” was a member of this organization, and that she was “Jamila Bouhired”, who had received them at the bus station and led them to the meeting house. Although he told the police the whole truth, except for the theft of “Monsieur Joseph”’s chickens and the places where “Jamila” and her comrades intended to plant explosives, he would be thrown, without any trial, into prison in the “Biskra” province on the edge of the Sahara, which he would not leave until after Algeria’s independence in 1962. After leaving prison, where he spent ten full years, he would learn that his mother, who believed he was dead, had married “Hamidouch”, and that his sister “Zoulikha” had married his friend “Al-Bachir” and they had a son whom they named “Farid” in memory of the Farid whom everyone thought dead.

After working in the port of Oran as a porter carrying travelers’ luggage to the ships bound for Europe, he would find himself, after waking from a doze that overtook him while resting inside one of those ships, far from Oran amid the waves of the sea the ship was ploughing. In “Marseille” Mr. “Jean”, whose luggage he had carried in Oran, would intervene with the border police, to whom he declared that “Farid” was his servant named “Mohamed the Oranais” and that he had lost his identity papers. After a report of loss was drawn up, they gave him a temporary identity card in the name of “Mohamed the Oranais”. He would board the train and get off at the “Lille” station, and from there go to “Lens” to work in its mines. Here he would learn trade-union struggle and become a fierce defender of workers’ rights after organizing a successful strike.

In 1982 the “Lens” mines would close and he would receive a partial pension. He then had enough time to educate himself by reading books and following the news in the papers. In 1992 he would move to a nursing home, where he spent the rest of his life until he died on October 17, 2007, leaving on the table his father’s kif pipe (“sebsi”), an envelope in which he requests that his body be donated to the faculty of medicine, and a second envelope containing his memoirs, which are this novel, with a will that its income, if published, be devoted to cancer patients in the Rif. The author fulfilled this by announcing, as a final note on the second page of the book’s cover, that “all the revenues of this literary work are dedicated to the association ‘Friends of Cancer Patients in Al Hoceima’”.

When the ugliness of events makes the beauty of the novel:

Since novel writing is an art and an aesthetic creation, presenting its events, in summary or even at length, will not make us feel the beauty and splendor it contains. It is true that events occur and follow one another to make up the “labyrinths of Farid…”, but it is the style of their novelistic telling that makes these “labyrinths” something splendid and beautiful, despite the ugliness of the tragedies, pains, sufferings and sorrows that form the soul of these “labyrinths”. What distinguishes this novel (and this may hold for all novel writing) is that it turned the ugliness of events into admirable and enjoyable artistic beauty. That is why the author did not follow the expectation of the reader, who looks for Farid to be reunited with his family and for everyone to return to the Rif that he has never stopped loving ardently since leaving it in 1944, as a happy ending to his “labyrinths”, in the form of a “resolution” to the story’s “knot” as in the classical novel. Instead of this happy ending, the author made Farid’s suffering worsen and intensify with the days, as if he were the hero of a Greek tragedy where gods and humans combine to ambush him by putting obstacles in his way harsher than those he thought he had overcome and got past. This is embodied in the book’s cover painting, by the artist Karim Amsiro, which shows Farid trying to climb up as though to leave a well of suffering, gripping stones set in the wall, but they come loose from their places and fall down, and he goes back to the bottom of the well of torment and suffering, like “Sisyphus” who endlessly resumes carrying the rock to the top of the mountain only for it to roll down again. Contrary to what the reader expected as a “happy closing note”, the author unsettles him with questions left unanswered, although this reader expected the answer to come before he finished reading the novel: who killed Farid’s father, who was found murdered in the street? Was it revenge taken on him for killing “Haj Mouhand”, carried out on him even after he left the Rif to escape this retribution? Or did “Hamidouch”, the cousin of “Arqiya”, Farid’s mother, kill him so as to marry her, as he had wanted before she married and before he emigrated to Algeria?

— How did his friend “Yettou” know he was “Farid the Rifian” (he who, since arriving in France under the identity of “Mohamed the Oranais”, had never told anyone he was a Rifian from Morocco), as she revealed when she wrote in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “You were wonderful, Rifian” (page 162), as she left Farid’s apartment where she had spent the night with him, then vanished, and Farid never met her again although he spared no effort in looking for her?

— Who is that elegant French lady who approached “Gismonde”, the manager of the nursing home where Farid died, who had spoken about the latter’s situation on a television program devoted to “nursing homes and the abandoned”, to give her a financial contribution for publishing Farid’s memoirs, and who, when she asked her name to record it in the register of contributions, asked her to record her contribution in the name of “Farid the Rifian”? Could she be “Yettou”? Or could she be “Charlotte”, daughter of “Monsieur Joseph”, for whom Farid worked in Algeria before he was arrested, who had planted a kiss on his cheek alone, among the other servants, as a farewell when she went to Oran to continue her secondary studies?

But the questions that puzzle the reader most are:

— Why did Farid not go to meet his mother and his sister “Zoulikha” after he left prison, which he kept wishing and dreaming of until he died? Why did he choose that his mother should not know he was alive, preferring that she go on firmly believing he was dead? His love and longing for the Rif were boundless; one can even say that this Rif was for him like the reason for his existence. He says of this love and longing: “Sometimes at the big market (in the French city of Lille), enlivened by a majority of Maghrebi communities, I come across someone speaking Rifian, and I walk behind him like an exposed informer, eavesdropping and catching the news without drawing the speakers’ attention. I was very happy the day an emigrant cursed me in Rifian, believing, like everyone here, that I was Algerian. I did not answer him, as though I had not understood his violent words. On the other hand, I wanted to embrace him and return the greeting of the people of the Rif; I suppressed this feeling and preferred to pray to God to rain even more curses on me! I was thirsty to drink from the springs of my mother tongue, ‘Rifian’” (pages 151–152). But what stopped him, when he was a worker in France, from visiting the Rif, or even from telling the Rifians there frankly that he was a Rifian like them, he who was tormented with passion for this Rif and longing for it?

In truth, Farid was aware of these last questions, and has the answer to them when he writes: “My narcissism oscillates between the nebula of existential wandering and the hallucinations of the giant Ouriaghli persona lurking inside me, the one who, when pride rides him, believes he knows everything. I do not know who I am, or what exactly I am looking for, or what precisely I want. All I feel is that I am swinging without balance between firmness in defiance and continuing the path of resistance, and fragility and doubt when feelings of anxiety assail me. I argue with the mirror of the soul whether I am always that quarrelsome Rifian who trained himself to flee, loved hiding and believed that returning home is a sort of impossibility. It is very hard to reach a satisfying answer when you are both the lost one and the guide” (pages 180–181). So he knew he is “lost”, and knew that he alone can guide himself to the road that will get him out of the wandering.

Might these questions that remained hanging not be part of the ugliness with which the author made the beauty of the novel?

The beauty of language and style:

To succeed in turning the ugliness of events into admirable, artistic, novelistic beauty, the author Khalid Al-Mulahiz used an Arabic that he made supple and tamed until it became his own possession, forcing it to give more than it has, which made it dense in meaning and rich in expression and style, and made it appear in this novel writing more beautiful, more radiant and more effective than it is usually seen, like a bride adorned with the finest jewels and dressed in the loveliest garments on her wedding day. That is creativity: turning what is ordinary (the Arabic language) into something exceptional, and what may be imagined (Farid’s story) into something real that we feel as though we were living it.

The author knew how to use historical data consistent with the context of the events, such as the famine that struck the Rif in the early 1940s and the emigration to Algeria that resulted from it; the culture of vendetta; and the figure of “Jamila Bouhired”, meeting whom caused him, though he had no prior acquaintance with her until the police asked him about his relationship with her after his arrest, the prison that he left only on the eve of Algeria’s independence, after ten years behind bars on a charge of belonging to the Algerian Liberation Front, of which he had heard only during his questioning by the police. He also used expressions from pre-Islamic poetry such as: “As for me, like a boulder the torrent has hurled down from on high, I stayed rooted to my place in the assembly” (page 83), to express the situation he found himself in after everyone managed to flee out of the meeting house except him, whom the police arrested when they stormed the house; and expressions from the Qur’an, such as: “I tried to complete the circle of sleep, but I failed when the ababil birds of insomnia began chasing me and pelting me with stones of questions pricked with the needles of fate” (page 133), describing the sleeplessness that seized him after he slipped aboard the ship “Ramonita 3”.

I said that the author, by his superior creative ability and his splendid style, made of Arabic something like a bride on her wedding night, who adorns and decks herself with the finest and most precious jewels and clothes she has. Let us listen to the author displaying some aspects of this adornment and decking-out: describing the state of hunger that pricked his intestines, Farid says: “The birds of my belly chirp with hunger, and my intestines, on a day of famine, writhe and warble in search of a meager morsel” (page 17). Of the wandering he began early, as a child, he says: “In the ashes of this wandering I stumble in following the trace of devotion, and fall prostrate in the mihrab of my memory, to surrender like a lost child lulled by the chants of the night vigil, which carry me there to throw my small body into the cradle of my being” (page 7); “A roaring cry in my depths, and nightmares of question marks besiege me when the whispers of rhymes caress me, the scepter of words tosses me about, and the answers to the questions of wandering are lost to me and from me. I rebel against the shackles of my madness and climb the minaret in secret and in public, asking the people at the top of my voice about the snare of the question of identity, through the symbolism of seven questions that, in their wisdom, invoke the heavens, the earth and the days” (page 8). Expressing the ability to resist forgetting, he says: “Sweeping the memory clean of the algae of forgetting brings me back into the presence of my grandmother…” (page 9).

When he and his friend Al-Bachir accompanied the young “Charlotte” on her outing, she begged the latter to sing her the song “Mahnni zine l‘amar”, and she began to dance to the tunes of the song. Farid said of her: “Her body swayed like an anemone when the evening breeze caresses it, and we swayed with her like drunkards, though we were not drunk. The locks of her hair bowed and prostrated in space, and we were worshippers and ascetics, wandering in the sanctuary of her beauty” (page 66). He remembers her while held in police custody, and says: “As for you, Charlotte, your reproach needs a private session beside a spring of water; I have become addicted to your breath and nearly suffocate when the oxygen of your tenderness flees my imagination. No one after you concerns me; let us wash away the misery of deprivation and pray the prayer of the mad in the garden of delight… To the cherries of your eyes I whisper: ‘It is enough for me of this life that you passed through my life, my life’” (page 92).

When the family spent the night in an old place that seems to be an abandoned mosque, Farid says, describing his father’s snoring: “Even my father, who claimed he would stand guard, his nostrils began to play a symphony of snoring that resembled, in its dissonance, the engine of a worn-out tractor” (page 22). After the death of his brother little Mohamed, and then of the father after him, Farid wrote: “In the blink of an eye all our dreams melted, all our papers burned, all our flowers withered, all our hopes collapsed; we lost the compass of the road and signed the birth of another novel. The beads of the necklace dwindle and scatter in silence…” (page 74).

Describing the weather as they (his family members) moved away from the douar “Tahounat Arrawabi” in the Al Hoceima area in 1944: “Mischievous clouds kept flirting with the threads of the sun and kept them from sliding down to us, preventing them from warming us and melting the level of negative energy nesting in our selves” (page 14). And in the cell where he lay with other detainees, he says of their suffering from the cold of December: “Gusts of cold air slip in through the ventilation holes made in the concrete wall of the cell; we gently bury time as we watch them caress the torn cobwebs strung under the ceiling. We stubbornly resist the harsh cold of December. Our thin bodies shelter under a single blanket that looks to onlookers like rolled-up rugs, or mummies from the pharaonic age” (page 98). Remembering what he had known in their house and was now deprived of, he says: “I no longer pricked up my ears to catch the vibrations of the rustling of the fig tree’s branches as they harassed the wall of our room after shedding their leaves and becoming bare. And the creak of the worn-out wooden window no longer caressed my eardrum as it resisted the drunken cold in its artificial swaying to slip into the room and disturb the calm rest of our bodies” (pages 14–15).

On leaving prison he did not easily recognize the spaces of the “A‘wiwa” district after “concrete parasites grew and scattered the plans fixed in the room of my architectural memory”, as he wrote on page 108. And when he learned, after leaving prison, of his mother’s marriage to “Hamidouch”, he wrote: “I had no consolation but to cry like a child who has lost all the toys he loves, like a child who tired himself building a sandcastle that, in a moment of high tide, a reckless wave swept away…” (page 112). When he went to Oran, after leaving prison, to knock on the door of the house where he was arrested, to ask about “Al-Ghaliya” and “Jamila”, who had caused him 10 years in prison, and found a woman there he did not know, he wrote to describe the moment: “I got flustered like an amateur actor who forgot the text he had been reciting for days” (page 123).

In the small bus that took him with others toward the “Lens” mines to work underground, he says, describing their state: “Misery was our identity, poverty our accusation and emigration our choice…” (page 143). In truth, if I tried to cite samples of the novel’s beautiful expressions, I would have to rewrite it in full, because all its expressions are a model of beauty, brilliance and high artistic creation.

Arabic version | French version