When this piece was first published in First, Kurt Vonnegut responded: “Where do you find all these magical writers? Nat Finkelstein’s harrowing piece would have been relevant at any time.”
I first sailed to Tangiers in 1964, aboard a Kaiser-built concrete poured WW2 Liberty ship operated by the Yugolinia line. From New York at 99 dollars for the passage: The Beatnik Express.
My lady friend and I rented a terraced apartment overlooking the northern end of Avenue de Mohamed V, a bit away from the expat/Zocco Chico beatnik set. Every day I would stroll a mile down tree-shaded trees through the European Sector, to the Café Paris to quaff a Citron, while observing the street action passing and learning the body language and pattern of sounds. Livin’ the life, like Papa Hemingway doin’ the Ol’ Boul’ Mich. I would then head for the Zocco Chico and the Café Central, to suck some Kif and mint tea with Little Mohammed, a young poet who was into Haiku. He had a cough, so we called him Consumptive Mohammed.
At the end of the day, I would stroll back home, enjoying the sights and sounds.
One day, while walking past a deserted stretch of road, I heard several loud, sustained screams: a child in severe pain. I rushed toward the sound and came upon four Moroccan young men, who having captured a hedgehog, were slowly, very slowly, skinning it while still alive. I wasn’t a hero – I saw four guys with knives.
The next day I asked Paul Bowles what I should have done: yell, scream, what, WHY? Paul told me that the Moroccans most likely had captured the hedgehog for food and were dismembering it alive for fun. He then told me the legend of the Treasure of Banu Nadir, as described in the Sirat Rasul Allah, the oldest known biography of Mohammed, written by Ibn Isbaq in the Eighth Century. It seems that the Jewish guardian of the treasure, Kinana, was brought before Mohammed, but refused to divulge the treasure’s location. Mohammed ordered Zubayn Al Awwam: “Torture him until you extract what he has.” Burning coals were placed on Kinana’s chest until he gave it up. After that, Mohammed chopped off Kinana’s head.
The next time I arrived in Tangiers was for a few days in 1965. I heard that One-Eyed Moe the Englishman had been busted with a gun. The Moroccans, at that time preparing for war with the newly liberated Algerians, were more interested in placing the blame on one of their own citizens than on the American who had actually sold the gun. They hung Moe by his heels, beat him across the ankles and forced water down his gullet until he named a young Moroccan poet – “Consumptive Mohammed” – as the supplier. Before he died in police custody, Mohammed the poet confessed to being an Algerian agent. I was never certain about Moe’s version until…
The last time I went to Morocco was 1975. I went with my then wife, Jill, and our two-year old son, Gustave-Che, who had Down’s Syndrome and was sickly. We shared a bungalow in a small beach resort south of el-Jadida with a couple of Canadians. Jill and I spent our time traveling to Marrakech and surrounding towns, where we purchased fossil imbedded marble tables and built the specialized crates needed to ship marble. We noticed that we seemed to be followed, and kept on seeing the same loiterer in every town we visited. We ascribed it to either racism or paranoia.
One day we picked up a friend at Casablanca Airport, had dinner and arrived home after dark.
They came in five cars, about ten of them. They parked about twenty meters or so from our house and pulled submachine guns from out of their back seats, charged up the hill to our house, pounded open the door and chambered their weapons.
I WILL STOP MY NARRATIVE AND STATE THAT FROM HERE ON, GUILT OR INNOCENCE IS NOT THE ISSUE. TREATMENT IS.
They leveled their guns at each of us and identified themselves as Surete. Jill pleaded with them to stop pointing their guns at our son Gustave. I said to the captain: “There are no weapons here. We will not resist you.” He signaled, and they lowered their weapons and frisked us. They found a small piece of hash in Jill’s pocket and announced that we were all under arrest. They commenced to search the house, our quarters first. They were quite methodical and careful not to damage our collection of 17th century Tibetan Statuary (which later disappeared). They found nothing. There was nothing there. They searched our housemates’ quarters and found four pounds of hash. They told me that I was responsible and transported us off to the gendarmerie.
AT THIS POINT I WILL STATE THAT DUE TO THIRTY YEARS OF DISTANCE AND POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS, SOME OF MY DETAILS MAY NOT BE IN ORDER: MY FACTS ARE. SO, I MAY SKIP SOME DETAILS, BUT HERE ARE FACTS.
They threaten you with pain such as you never have felt before. They separate you from your companions, and throw you into an underground dungeon, and tie you face to face with a Leper. That’s to soften you.
Obligatory whacks across the back of your head (s.o.p). They let you know that this will be rough: that you will be hurt. You decide to adopt a strategy because what they tell you, human beings don’t do to other human beings. You call their bluff, and then a pig in a uniform asks a question and you don’t answer…AND THE CURTAIN GOES DOWN BLACK. AND YOU GET A TASTE OF COPPER IN YOU MOUTH AND THE TASTE OF BLOOD AND PURPLE AND BLUE FLASHES CUT ACROSS YOUR SCREEN AND YOU HEAR SOMEONE SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM…SOMEWHERE IN THE DISTANCE GETTING CLOSER AND CLOSER AND IT’S YOU.
Because they have stripped you buck naked, hung you upside down on a pole, wet you, hooked you up to a hand cranked generator by your ears and jolted your reality into one of pure pain. So, you change the strategy ‘cause the last one didn’t work so good.
The French used imported Moroccans to serve as torturers in Algeria. The two main procedures were L’Avion (what I just described), and Fallakah, in which the subject is hung upside down from a pole and beaten across the ankles with a truck fan-belt wrapped around with copper wires (this is standard procedure for natives).
During the ten or fourteen days I spent in the gendarmerie, I underwent electric shock four times, and I lost the use of two toes when a pig climbed to the top of a desk and jumped on my bared foot. I was told that my son had died. I was taken into a clearing at night with a gun pointed at me and told to dig my grave. They kept on cursing at me in Hebrew hoping that I would respond and prove their thesis that all Jews are Israeli spies.
I could recount more of what I saw while in jail there (of course I confessed – everybody does). The Political whose eyeballs had turned backwards or the Political who went deaf. But I’ll stop here. I’m sorry to have shared my pain with you, but it’s about fuckin time.
Hedgehogs, humans and Jews – it’s all the same to them. In a culture where being right is the same as having the right, all who oppose them are meat.
This was originally published in First of the Month in 2004.