Tuhami

- An author, as Blanchot (1955) insists, is never capable of reading his own works.

-A man's fate rests with Allah; his destiny is written. It partakes of the sacred. A man, as Tuhami explained it, can only remain sincere in his intention (niyya) and act from his heart. This "writteness" of the universe is an implicit component of Tuhami's thought. It provides the limit to his explanations of the chain of events that constitute the history of his world as he had learned it and knows it. It gives to this chain of events a certain weight ---- an almost sacred givenness independent of individual initiative ---- that provodes a ground for the awe he feels before the world in its historical immensity. This writtenness justifies, too, his resignation to the past, his past, and to a future that he envisions with a pessimist's foreboding.

- In the vicinity of the bridge, Tuhami told me, live forty-four saints, the rjal el-bled, who protect him and other pious people who know about them from the evils that befall man.

- The veil is still worn ---- a bit sloppily, to be sure, and below the nose ---- by many young women, and it is not unusual to see a schoolgirl dressed one day in a short skirt and the next in the camouflage of the traditional jallaba. Prostitutes also wear the traditional jallaba and veil, usually in bright colors.

- "Women's intrigues are mighty / To protect myself I never stop running / Women are belted with serpents / And bejeweled with scorpions"

- One of the characteristics of stereotypic thinking is the reduction of movement through time to a symbolic instant that is perhaps psychological satisfying to the thinker but is rarely sufficient to the subject of his thought.

- Within the prevailing image of women in Morocco ---- an image the women themselves often accept as a reality ---- is a changing evaluation from positive to negative, which is reflected in the common belief that women are born with a hundred angels and men with a hundred devils and that over a lifetime the angels move to the men and the devils to the women.

- Tuhami was a very gentle man, immediately likable, soft-spoken, and not much given to the kind of gesturing with which most Moroccans punctuate their speech..... He had brown eyes, and, when he was happy, his large yellow upper front teeth (his lower front teeth were missing) were always showing in a huge, friendly smile; but when he was morose, he would sit alone in a corner of his windowless hovel, lost in himself and in the demons around him, the jnun, whom he alone could see and hear and about whom he could not speak. Or he would walk, often for miles, to a saint's tomb, a santuary, which he had dreamed of or fantasied, in the hope that the saint's blessing, his baraka, would free him from his depression.

- His depression were not un his control but in that of 'A'isha Qandisha and still other demons, often more demanding, certainly more menancing, I was to learn, than his jinn-bride.

- A shpherd in Morocco, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, is often without a family connection ---- he is an outsider, an orphan, too poor to marry ---- and the ordinary standards of sexual behavior are not applied to him.

- But poor Morocsans often feared that their children would be carried off to France...... The stories reflect the Moroccan's ambivalence toward the French and, more generally, the colonized's ambivalence toward teh colonizer.

- Did I offer, even then, the possibility of symbolic redemption?

- Even if I had been there, I couldn't have stopped her from dying. It would have been worse. I would have cried. Thank God we have death. If there were no death, there would be as many people on earth as there are stars in the heavens.

- "Crying is not good for men or women," Tuhami told me once, "It is worse for me to cry."

- Here again I am reconstructing on the basis of both subjective accounts I heard of the circumcision ritual and my observations of it (P49).

- A sheep had been sacrificed earlier in the morning. It had been oriented toward Mecca, and his grand-father had muttered the appropriate ritual formula before he slit its throat. Tuhami had seen the thick red blood flow slowly from its neck. The earth was still stained purple.

- The beggar-orphan is the true son of the queen; the prince is the bastard. Tuhami expresses a wish in terms of the Other's fantasy. The fantasies of the Other, even when we ourselves invent them, are always more real than those we attribute to ourselves.

- The Other, more impersonal here than Jean-Pierre, mediates reality: "People began to whisper that I was making love to Mme Jolan." (This recitation is late; Tuhami could not have admitted the rumor earlier.) Desire is expressed through rumor, through the Other's fantasy. Tuhami had to flee, to the cemetery. The rumor, if not indicative of the real, was perhaps too close to his true desire. His life ended for him then ---- aspiration, hope, sexual conquest, family, warmth, mothering and fathering, the posibility of wealth, marriage, and children. The rest of his story is the story of his being as dead.

- Both clown and storyteller achieve their identity by exploiting, often without awareness, the ambiguities of their culture and the ambivalence of their social position.

- With genius, Tuhami was able to recreate this scene again and again in his later life. He has sat alone among women in traditional Moroccan households! His gift for storytelling and his clowning has enabled him to achieve this anomalous position in his own society, just as they had in the Jolan household. It was a position not without cost, for Tuhami surrendered his real manhood in order to achieve what, I must presume, was a symbolic conquest. His tales were, as I have said, seductions.

- I particularly remember him standing in front of a frail old man, who, having seated himself, fakir-like, on a tiny scrap of oilcloth, proceeded to weep; occasionally the old man would gesture wildly with his staff.

- I felt myself the object of his rage ---- the object of the rage he felt at not being able to submit to the rituals of a brotherhood that might perhaps be of help to him. He had not received the calling. Its idiom was corporeal. At the time, I did not ask myself why his rage was directed at me. Now I think that I may have symbolized both the man ----- always the unnamed man ---- and the European who held him back, who taught him to be mistrustful of the rituals but had not succeeded in removing the need for them.

- The saint had slashed his head in mourning for his master. Tuhami responded by attempting to overcome women and their ways through knowledge and storytelling and not through marriage.

- They were symbolically overcharged, resonating, I believe, with all of the women, both real and fictive (if such a distinction can be applied), who peopled his world.