Translated by Phoebe Bay Carter.
The mother did not sleep that night. Nor the next one, or the next, or any night following. A prolonged insomnia settled over her and did not leave until her son died. Then she let out a great sigh and fell fast asleep.
She spent the first night lying on her back next to her sleeping husband, reciting verses of supplication she had memorized, and short surahs from the Qur’an that Jawad had patiently helped her learn for her prayers. But her husband’s snores kept breaking her concentration, and she would abandon the verses to pray instead that a curse be brought upon her neighbor, whom she was certain had bewitched her son. But before getting too carried away, she would stop, ask Allah’s forgiveness, and resume her supplications for Allah’s protection until her husband’s snores would break her focus once again.
Her heart broke for Jawad. She imagined what she would have done if he were her real son. She shook her head side to side hysterically, trying to shake the thought from her mind. She gritted her teeth, muttering to herself. “It makes no difference. Jawad is my son.” And she remembered how the baby’s wide eyes had enchanted her, how she had floated off into the sea of those bright, innocent eyes.
She was born in the neighborhood of Marshan, but her family’s roots were in the town of Beni Boufrah, near al-Hoceima. Her family had come to Tangier to escape the famine.[1] First they had gone to Tetouan, where her mother worked as a maid for a Spanish family. But after a year, they packed their bags again and set off for Tangier. There, things were no better. Fatima endured a childhood of suffering, poverty, and deprivation that continued into her adolescence. So, when Mohammed al-Idrisi turned up from the same town, she agreed to the engagement without hesitation, despite the son, barely a year old, he bore in his arms. Or, to be more precise, she convinced herself that she agreed, for the truth was, her father was going to marry her off with or without her approval.
Her fiancé explained that he was a widow. His wife had passed away, leaving him with the baby Jawad. In those days, it wasn’t easy to verify such claims, and Fatima would later learn that it was a lie. He wasn’t a widow. He had abandoned his wife in Tetouan and taken their son, leaving the poor woman roaming the streets, sleeping on the sidewalk and asking passersby if they had seen her son Jawad. She was homeless for months, until one of the Spanish nuns found her and took her in.
Eventually, Jawad’s mother would find her way to Fatima’s house, and Fatima, who had suffered from years of infertility before finally conceiving her daughter Hind, would refuse to return her son to his mother. There were two reasons for this. First, she had cared for the child for three years. He was now her son, no matter what anyone said. And second, she was not going to hand over a Muslim child to a woman who had abandoned her faith and converted to Christianity. The first thing the father did upon his return was to grab his first wife by the hair and throw her barefoot into the street. Fatima could not accept that kind of violence from her husband towards his first wife, who was still under his protection. Nevertheless, she remained silent, fearing he would take Jawad from her after what he’d done to his first wife. A few days later, they packed up what little furniture they had and moved to the working-class neighborhood of Bir Chairi to hide.
Tears escaped Fatima’s eyes and slid down her prematurely wrinkled face. She was only forty-six, but anyone who saw her would guess she was nearly sixty. She wondered if Jawad’s affliction wasn’t Allah’s punishment for what she and her husband had done to that poor mother, the rightful mother of Jawad.
The dawn prayer was called, and her husband rolled over, preparing to wake up. She closed her eyes, feigning sleep, and rolled onto her side, turning her back to her husband. She stayed like that until she heard the front door close behind him as he left for the mosque. Then she got up and went to Jawad’s room. She opened the door a crack and peeked in. He was asleep beneath the covers with the window open, letting in a cool dawn breeze with hints of the sea. Even so, the stench nearly suffocated her. She plugged her nose, trying not to gag, then stepped back and closed the door.
She washed and prayed the dawn prayer, then prepared some incense and returned to her son’s room to pray over his afflicted body. Holding the incense close to her nose to overpower the room’s smell, she pushed open the door. Jawad had rolled over and the sheet had slipped off him. Her heart shrank and her eyes froze on the coarse hair on his chest, his deformed legs, and drooping lips. She begged Allah for forgiveness, strength, and refuge from the accursed Satan. She drew near the bed to begin her healing rituals, but dropped the incense and screamed when she saw the blood covering Jawad’s hands all the way to his elbows.
Jawad’s eyes snapped open, and the mother grew even more frightened when she saw the ruby red that had completely overtaken the whites of his eyes. The son opened his mouth as if to speak, gesturing something with his hands that the mother couldn’t interpret. But the only sound that came out was an incomprehensible groan that could have been the snarl of an injured wild animal. The mother covered her face and buried her head in her chest. At that moment, Hind came in and saw what her mother had seen. She patted her mother on the shoulder, then put her arm around her waist and guided her out.
The mother collapsed into the armchair and hugged her knees to her chest, sobbing faintly with a staccato, almost silent cry. She remained like that until the father returned from his prayers. Then she stopped crying at once. She had made up her mind what to do.
After breakfast, the father went back to sleep and the sister went to check on her brother. She stared silently at him, and he stared silently back. Then she deposited his breakfast by the door and retreated, closing the door behind her. As for the mother, she had donned her jilbab and draped her white veil over her face, then left to see a faqih,[2] of whose virtues she had heard a great deal.
She knew she was supposed to take her bewitched son with her but, realizing this was impossible, she settled for a shirt from his dirty laundry. And so, off she went on her errand, where the faqih will assure her, with the confidence of someone who had already heard her story, that her son had been bewitched and the one who’d done it was a woman with ill-intentions towards her son. The charm had been placed under the doormat, where the son had stepped on it when he left the apartment and again when he returned, and then the ill-willed woman had taken it and flushed it down the toilet, and by now it had reached the sea where it could never be recovered.
“So what is to be done?” The question came out hesitant and confused, spoken by a woman who wasn’t used to leaving the house without her husband or son. The faqih took the bewitched young man’s shirt, spat on it, then lit it on fire and let it burn on a metal plate to his left. He waited until it had burned up entirely, then got up and gathered the ashes. He mixed them with a bit of ink and then spat again. He dipped a quill into the ashy mixture and scrawled several lines on a piece of rough paper. When he had finished, he folded it carefully and placed it in an amulet, which he gave to the aggrieved mother and instructed her to place it around her son’s neck or, failing that, under his pillow.
The mother got up and put a purple twenty dirham note in the faqih’s hand. He shrieked and dropped the money as though it were a hot coal. He asked loudly for God’s protection against Satan, and told her that her son’s curse was a difficult one. It had required immense effort, and the Blue Jinn he serves accepts only blue. The mother turned her back to fish her wallet out of her bosom and pulled out a blue note, mourning the days when faqihs were content with five dirhams. And now they wanted two hundred! The faqih plucked the two-hundred-dirham note from her hand and smiled at her, revealing his rotten teeth. “Inflation, lady. Even jinn suffer from inflation.”
Poor Fatima would soon regret handing over all that cash after she found that the “healing” amulet in fact did just the opposite. For, when she snuck into her son’s room that afternoon, thanking Allah that he was asleep again, and placed the amulet under his pillow, she saw with her own two eyes – which will one day be eaten by worms, as she would later say to a woman waiting with her to see another faqih – how his eyebrows suddenly grew in an alarming fashion. She froze for a moment in shock. Once she’d composed herself, she tried removing the amulet from under the pillow and saw, to her amazement, that his eyebrows shrunk back to their normal size. She put the amulet back, and this time saw his beard grow and grow until it was hanging off the edge of the bed. She nearly fainted, but managed to remain upright and removed the amulet once more. The beard returned to normal. She decided to burn the amulet and find a new faqih. But the same sequence of events will repeat themselves with faqih after faqih, until she will finally decide to surrender to whatever fate Allah had ordained.
[1] The Moroccan population suffered a year of famine and epidemic in 1944-1945 because of drought and measures imposed by the French protectorate on the distribution of basic foodstuffs.
[2] The official meaning of faqīh is an Islamic jurist, an expert in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). In Morocco, however, it is also used to refer to people who perform healing spells with Qur’anic verses, summoning the help of jinn.
Notes from the translator:
Dear Readers,
One of the fun and challenging aspects of translating this chapter was all of the different kinds of prayer that Fatima engages in throughout her day, running the gamut from more orthodox practices, like sallāt al-fajr, the dawn prayer (the first of the five-daily obligatory prayers in Islam), to more popular, vernacular practices, like her visit to the faqih to call upon the powers of the jinn.
In the opening scene, Fatima is reciting short surahs (chapters) from the Qur’an that Jawad helped her memorize (since, we can surmise, she had little religious education growing up, and cannot herself read). These are recited as part of Sallāh, the obligatory prayers. She is also reciting “verses of supplication,” my translation for ad‘iya (plural of du‘ā’), which are prayers of invocation, supplication, or requests for God’s assistance.
One common dua is "I seek refuge in Allah, the All-Hearing and All Knowing from the accursed Satan" -- عُوذُ بِاللَّهِ السَّمِيعِ الْعَلِيمِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِأ -- which is alluded to later on in the chapter when she sees Jawad and we read that “she begged Allah for forgiveness, strength, and refuge from the accursed Satan.” (My translation of استغفرت وحوقلت واستعاذت بالله من الشيطان الرجيم).
After her husband goes to perform his prayers (Sallah) at the mosque and she performs her own at home, she goes to Jawad’s room to “pray over his afflicted body,” which is how I’ve translated the verb tarqi. This verb can mean to use magic, charms, or invocations on someone, often in the context of ridding someone of a spiritual or physical affliction. The verb’s associated noun might be translated as ruqiya a “spell” or “invocation” or even, in some cases “exorcism.” What I’ve translated as “healing rituals” later in this same paragraph is ṭuqūs al-ruqiya (“rituals of ruqiya”).
In an earlier draft, instead of “to pray over his afflicted body” I had “to pray for his recovery.” But this felt too bland. But something like “recite incantations” seemed too…I don’t know, witchy? In the Arabic, she simply goes to his room to tarqi him (with no mention of ‘his afflicted body’). But I thought the combination of praying over someone’s body distinguished this slightly from simply praying for his recovery (as she was doing with her earlier dua), and specifying “his afflicted body” evokes the sense that her prayers are meant to rid him of whatever has taken hold of him.
For those of you who are familiar with these various terms (dua, ruqiya..), do my translations ring true to your understanding of them? What alternatives might you suggest? And for those of you who were not familiar with them, do you feel like the translation gave a sense of the different valences of Fatima’s spiritual practice?
You will also have noticed that in this chapter, I switched from writing “God” to writing “Allah.”
Taking advantage of the fact that these are draft translations, and I am not beholden, at this stage, to remain consistent with my choices, I wanted to make this switch and see what you all thought. See my notes, and the ensuing comments from readers and from the author, from Chapter Two, for varying perspectives on how to render Allah in English.
One final word I am a bit stuck on in this chapter is sayyidati, which in this draft I have translated as “lady” (when the faqih says to Fatima: “Inflation, lady. Even the jinn suffer from inflation.”) The most literal translation would probably be “my lady,” but that has a much too courtly ring to it. I thought about “ma’am” and “madam,” but they both feel too marked to specific times and places in the Anglophone world. I considered “my dear,” which I quite like, because I feel like it captures the faqih’s slimily ingratiating affect in this moment. But my concern is that it tracks back to something like habibti or azizti, which are common terms of affection too intimate for this exchange. I settled on “lady,” because I thought it came closest to the right mix of formality and irony, but would like to hear your suggestions.
Thank you for reading, and until next time!
PBC
The way I understand ruqiya is that these would be prayers specifically for sorcery and one afflicted by evil spirits, so 'healing prayers' feel like general prayers for good health, etc...
In reading that particular prayer description I'm not getting the sense that it's a very special prayer. 'to begin reading incantations to expel the evil' ??
'Allah' fits in seamlessly .....