A long way from home

by Claude McKay

The members of the Gueanoua are all pure black. They are the only group of pure Negroes in Morocco. Men and women marry black, and it is the only religious order that has women members. If one is not a pure black he cannot belong to the Gueanoua. They say the strict keeping of this rule makes the Gueanoua magic powerful. The fetish rites are West African and are transmitted from generation to generation. They have a special place in the social life of Morocco. The wealthiest as well as the poorest families have them in to exorcise devils. Often they are protected by powerful sherifian families, and sultans have consulted them.

The harem of the Martiniquan was not such a hot spot, as I saw when I peeped behind the curtain. Just a long spacious room curtained in two, and two women, one old enough to be his mother and one young, brown and buxom. We all had tea together, because, said the Martiniquan, he did not believe in hiding his women from men. However, the male friends that he admitted into his harem were French West Indian soldiers and Senegalese, but not Moors. He was the only person in that quarter who could afford two women. This was because, as a French citizen, he was rated as a European worker and received between forty and fifty francs a day—about six times what the native doing the same work got. Thus the black sailor was really living "white" in Africa.

I enjoyed the Martiniquan Moroccan hospitality for awhile. Then, feeling the overwhelming European atmosphere of Casablanca, I departed for Rabat.

Rabat-Salé was delightfully different. Here the native life was the big tree with solid roots and spreading branches, and the European city was like an imported garden, lovely and carefully tended. At Shellah I visited the tomb of the Black Sultan, who, according to the native legend, was the greatest ruler of Morocco, having united all of North Africa under his rule, conquered Spain, built the great monuments of the Giralda at Seville, the Koutabia at Marrakesh, and the Hassan Tower at Rabat.

I stopped long enough in Rabat to finish Banjo. Some Moroccan students had said to me: "In Fez you will find the heart of Morocco. It is our capital city. You haven't seen Morocco until you see Fez."

Fez was indeed the heart of Morocco and even more to me. In Moscow they had published a cartoon of me sailing upon a magic carpet over the African jungles to see the miracle of the Soviet. In Fez I felt that I was walking all the time on a magic carpet. The maze of souks and bazaars with unfamiliar patterns of wares was like an oriental fantasy. In Fez I got into the inside of Morocco. Hitherto I had been merely a spectator. But the Fassis literally took me in. There I had my first native meal of cous-cous in a native house, and the first invitation was the prelude to many.

I was invited to princely marriage feasts, to eat cous-cous from a common dish with stately old "turbans," to drink thé à la menthe in cool gardens, to the intimate flamenco dancing of fatmas in the garçonnières of fondouks and to the profane paradise of Moulay Abdallah.

Moulay Abdallah is the unique recreation quarter of the young Fassis. It is a separate little walled town with its own shops and police and musicians. Arrayed in richly flowered and loose robes held in place by enormously broad embroidered belts and squatting with the dignity of queens, the young females who take up residence there charmingly dispense mint tea and witty conversation to circles of eager young men. I thought that that antique African city was the unaware keeper of the cup of Eros containing a little of the perfume of the flower of the passion of ancient Greece.

I liked the Moroccan mosaic, which is beautiful and bright everywhere like a symbol of the prismatic native mind. And nowhere is it so lavish and arresting as in Fez. The Spanish mosaics were interesting, but they did not appear as warm and inevitable and illuminating as the Moroccan.