The Last Chapter

Leila Abouzeid

Written originally in Arabic and published in the same year (2000) in an English translation (by the author and John Liechety), this unusual novel is set in Morocco, the author’s country of birth. The narrator in all the chapters except the final one is a well-educated, intellectual and (above all) feisty young woman called Aisha. She tells the story as a sort of autobiography, stretching from her schooldays as one of only two girls in a school full of boys to (it seems) her mid-twenties as a successful, single and quite lonely woman. The narrative is itself the explanation (particularly) of her unusual, unmarried state (in this society).

The opening paragraph introduces one immediately to Aisha’s sardonic, unorthodox voice:

Studying with boys was reckoned to be hard, like running up a desert mountain at noon. We’d had so many warnings about getting pregnant that we half believed we could do so just by talking to them, as if we were studying with ghouls. Yet I learned to prefer interaction with men. Not that I found them intrinsically more intelligent. But they did not pick at our minds, since they assumed we were born without them. (1)

If we were inclined to think this an exaggeration of the society’s sexist attitudes, Abouzeid builds in a corroborative statement from a former, primary, schoolmate of Aisha’s. It is the reported comment of this (unhappily married) woman’s husband, after seeing Aisha consulted for public comment on television. He says: “I’ll bet you anything she’s dying to exchange that nonsense for a husband. A woman should learn just enough to raise her children and say her prayers”, in response to which the wife, for her part, silently recalls the words of the Prophet: “Seeking knowledge is the religious duty of every Muslim man and woman” (133, emphasis added).

The story of this pitiful woman is, of course, far more representative of the lot of a majority of Moroccan women than that of the well-educated, comparatively privileged Aisha who, even though her series of failed love relationships (or, more accurately: the series of ultimately unsatisfactory men she has unfortunately had relationships with) has left her wounded and defensively cynical, is far better off (precisely because she is single, it is suggested).

The final chapter of the novel (in which this woman’s story is told) is the last and longest in a series of vignettes, dispersed throughout the text, to help us to understand not only why Aisha lives the life she does, but why, despite the deep sorrow and disappointment underlying her flippant cynicism, her sufferings are relatively bearable. Most other female persons in Moroccan society, to go by the author’s depiction, have much harder lives — even though it is discernibly Aisha’s combination of unusual intelligence and an invincible determination not to allow herself to be exploited that has worked to protect her from domestic suffering.

The interesting thing about Abouzeid’s portrayal of Moroccan society is her insistence that it may be mainly women, even more than men, who cause women’s unhappiness by ruthlessly exploiting and abusing them.

For example, the former school friend referred to above has nights and days that she describes as follows:

My eyes stay open until the muezzin’s first invocation before the dawn prayer, and then I’ll spend the day distracted and dazed, doing my best to conceal it from my mother-in-law whose taunts and laughter follow me around like a whip. (134)

Her own mother, who is depicted as sympathetic, tries to console her, but it’s Job’s comfort: using the proverbial image of the olive tree that is “battered for its fruit” (130) she in effect advises her daughter to endure abuse for the sake of her children. As a result, the (evidently profoundly distressed and deeply depressed) woman feels her position to be akin to that of the Palestinians, “living on hope alone” (147) — a very sad but telling political analogy.

Abouzeid elsewhere more sharply indicates the close link between domestic exploitation and political oppression, when Aisha observes drily that “democracy and hunger don’t mix” (89). And she validates the sharpness of her tongue by adding: “I believe in self-criticism for my own good and the good of my country” (89). She demonstrates that when she resigns from her job in the ministry of information, where the link between sexism and corrupt inefficiency has been glaringly illustrated in the unimpeded progress, up to ministerial level, of a grotesquely inept, vulgar, corrupt, promiscuous (and, of course, male) colleague who made her position there untenable.

Aisha views the neglect of women’s education as one of the symptoms of a country failing to produce from within its own ranks the expertise that it needs in order to be able to prosper. Yet she believes that this is to some extent attributable to French colonial rule: it is as a “direct consequence” of forty-four years of French rule, she declares, that upon attaining independence (in 1956) the entire country had only six female high school graduates (43). To which she acidly adds: “All we had got from the colonialists in terms of education was a second-rate knowledge of their language” (44). Travelling from the north of Morocco to Spain, Aisha notices how (as a Scottish expert had once told her) “shanty towns are a disease of the third world” (111), and how, as soon as she enters Spain, “the world [goes] from third to first” — “Their world! Knowledgeable, powerful, developed, secular” (118). She is also made aware, though, of how profoundly Andalusia carries the traces of an earlier colonisation — by her own people, the Arabs; knowledge that “brings a bitter lump [of nostalgia] to the throat”, yet serves as a reminder that any colonisation “amounts to … the imposing by force of an alien language and culture” (118, 121).

One of the embedded faults of Moroccan society, Aisha believes, is its backbiting, mean-spirited quality. “Moroccan intellectuals,” she declares, “dedicate themselves to tearing each other apart.” When they aren’t doing this, they are engaged in trivial, selfish complaining (102). In its sexist practices, she believes, the “partition” between genders has brought the society “to the point where we are two distinct species” (2).

Not even parents can be trusted to behave lovingly. Aisha’s own father, considered an intellectual, behaves like a mere “petty dictator” in trying to force her into an unsuitable marriage lucrative to himself (51). And it’s “not just fathers who bring their children up with an iron fist” either, as Aisha observes when she watches a mother “slap[ping a small girl] hard across the face with a scowl and a curse” for a trivial mistake (92).

A former school friend of Aisha’s, disinherited and denounced as a “whore” by her father for marrying a divorced Frenchman, catches him out when he picks her up, initially unrecognisable as a professional prostitute. Taking off her wig and dark glasses in the car with her father, she says: “Well, now that you know how I got to be such a slut, shouldn’t we call your father so he can disinherit you?” (11).

Whereas “husbands, in our country,” Aisha says, “are born with an instinct for betrayal”, so “burdened” are the women, in consequence, so frequently left to cope with numerous children without support when the husband leaves to take up life with a younger woman, that they will unburden themselves to any stranger — almost a parody of the caring and interest that is unavailable from their own families (28).

It is important to stress that Abouzeid’s book is in no way an attack on the Islamic faith (in this she is comparable to Nawal el Sadaawi of Egypt as a novelist). Aisha is scandalised by a friend’s Marxist mouthings because, she feels, Arabs who “close their ears to the Prophet’s words … deserve to stew in their own bile” (8). She tells an anecdote of how “Musa ibn Nusair conquered Morocco and presented Islam to the people”, upon which “they said, ‘We’ll think about it.’” Some “thirteen hundred years later,” she adds, “they’re still thinking” (19)!

The “personal” line of development in the story (to which all its public comments are connected, since Aisha is such a sharp social observer) takes the form of a narration of her series of failed love affairs. “The truth is,” she says, “that it’s always the wrong man and the wrong time” (45). When one of the lovers ends a letter with what seems to be his first explicit declaration of love and commitment (“I am not worried. I trust myself, I trust you, I trust life. Oh, my love …”), she immediately smells a rat: “Where had he got all this stuff? Was he reading the French tabloids along with Baudelaire?” and she thinks that “he must have become unhinged sitting amongst the flowers” (39)! Of course her suspicions are confirmed soon after this, and the relationship ends somewhat bitterly.

The most poignant and serious of this series of affairs is with Karim, a man from Western Sahara. Because of the strained political relations between Morocco and that region (often referred to as the “last colony” and seeking independence from domination by Morocco), there is an edge of rivalry and tension in the fast-blossoming relationship, evidently based on an intense and passionate attraction. They are constantly critical of each other’s mores, yet, Aisha feels, “something was being woven between us, a lovely tapestry on the loom of a master artist” (100). Perhaps the unusually tender — even sentimental — nature of that metaphor should have alerted Aisha to its basis in insufficient knowledge. When Karim is posted to Spain and she receives a letter from him ending with the words, “Do not forget I need you” (110), she decides to look him up in the course of her visit to that country — only to discover that he has both a wife and a baby.

The Polisario may be resisting Moroccan rule, to continue Abouzeid’s political analogy, but in the sphere of sexual relations the exploiters still tend to be on the male side. Aisha rather admired her “insolent Saharan” (118) — until the lack of respect proved to be directly aimed at herself. Vividly, the last image in Aisha’s direct part of the narrative (which continues until the end of the penultimate chapter of the novel) derives from a painting she saw in the Prado of children yearningly looking up a haystack — “you cannot climb the haystack … It’s slippery!” (127)

Meanness of heart is one of the poles of Moroccan society:

Moroccans are accomplished sorcerers, my dear [Aisha tells an American researcher]. Or sorceresses. We cause miscarriages, make men impotent, turn girls into spinsters, tear husbands from their wives. Meanwhile, we talk about our “peaceful society” and delude ourselves that violence is a foreign disease. Because our violence can happen without guns or bloodshed, it’s beyond the law. (54)

There is, however, also another pole, as she shows us both in the portrayal of Aisha herself, and in the long, reported speech of a political leader (32-36) whom she respects: a genuine and committed public concern. This may not be much in evidence, and it is greatly overshadowed by the contrary kind of behaviour, but it makes what would otherwise be an unconvincingly and unremittingly gloomy picture, balanced and believable.

This is a most interesting text: tangy and (mentally) nutritious, like Moroccan cuisine. Abouzeid is a talent to watch.

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