Brion Gysin - The Process

Women are wicked but she is the worst of them all: Aissha Kandisha, Aissha Amoka or that Macarena I saw with you, once, in the streets of Sevilla, she’s the same. Beautiful, deadly but she can be tamed, if you’re a brave enough man and quick. You jerk out your knife and you plunge it deep in the ground between her two feet. That makes her your slave. It is then you will see her legs are all hairy and they end in two cloven hooves instead of two feet — like Bou Jeloud. They are, really, the same kind of people. When you’ve got her pinned down by your knife, you can ask of her all that you will. I’ve met her and jumped her: I, Bou Jeloud. I’m not afraid but I don’t want to meet her again. The first nights of our dancing we dance out that Fear. When our music catches you alone in the dark, you’re choking with panic. All the people down there in the valley are shaking with fear so they fall into bed with their chattering teeth. Ha, Bou Jeloud! High up in the Rif, they can hear us and shiver. Ha, Bou Jeloud! The rest of the nights go by like a dream.

This is our play: Bou Jeloud leaps like a goat from a thicket, falling on Aissha, who’s crazy enough to be out dancing around in the moonlight. When Bou Jeloud first came up to Owl Mountain — Jajouka — Aissha was already here. She’s so big and so powerful, she has to be danced by a whole troupe of young boys dressed as girls who, all of them taken together, are Her. Our women don’t dance to this music in public. Oh, no! That would be shameful. Our women are good. They run from Bou Jeloud. They sit on a hillock and throw him out one wriggling little boy-dancer they’ve dressed up as a girl. It’s the women who teach them to dance when they’re little, the real tiny kids who haven’t been circumcised yet. They never made me. I never danced for the women, not me! When the time came for me to be cut, it was the Caïd of our village who held me in front of him on the silver-studded saddle of his horse and he cut the skin off my little zib with his very own knife. I never cried out: I was Bou Jeloud all of my life!

We have comic characters, too, like the Three Hadjis who dance with wobbling crowns on top of their turbans but one cannot hear, one cannot speak and one cannot see. Then, a man in big baggy pants comes on pretending he’s pregnant, screaming for help. The Three Hadjis jump on his belly and pull a big monkey out of his pants but the monkey’s a boy, naked and furry because we grease him and stick yellow wool all over his parts. The man leads his monkey around on a rope, beating him and screwing him for hours and, then, the monkey grabs the stick and beats the man, leading him around and screwing him for hours. It’s crazy: it’s fun!

When Bou Jeloud was, finally, married to Aissha that last night of dancing under full moon, I slipped away to Kebir with a boy of thirteen or ten who had been dancing for Aissha all of those nights. I needed a clever assistant if I ever was going to get back my spot on the train. He was a good-enough lad but he didn’t have luck. In a day and a night, we walked down to Kebir, where I showed him how to get under the train. I could see he was scared. You have to get in there wedged tight and never look down at the wheels. When we got to the old border of Tanja, the train ground to a halt and the Customs got out to walk up and down and show us their legs. They never looked under the train except on market days, sometimes, when there were too many smugglers in there who hadn’t paid up. Then, all of a sudden, the train gave a jerk and my boy fell under the wheels. His hand and a piece of his arm flew up to hit me so hard in the eyes I nearly let go. His scream and the scream of the brakes stopped the train. People peered in trying to pull him out from under the car with his arm spurting blood like a fountain. A man tried to tie up his arm with his belt but nothing would stop it until someone in the back of the crowd started shouting: “Oil! Boiling oil!” It was some old thief who remembered the days when they cut off a hand for a theft, plunging the stump of the arm in boiling oil. Moojood! It was ready, the oil! Right there on the platform was sitting a man making doughnuts he looped in his fingers and dropped in his bubbling cauldron of oil. They picked up my boy gone white as a turban and ran dripping his blood right up to the man. Before he could stop them they’d plunged this boy’s stump deep in along with the sizzling doughnuts. What a terrible smell, like burning kebabs! I thought for a moment my poor boy was screaming but he slumped there like dead. It was only the doughnut man screaming for money from someone, anyone, because they had spoiled all his trade.

It took us a week to walk back to Kebir. When we slept in the rain, my boy got the fever and caught a djenoun . It wasn’t the boy’s fault, because he was amok , but I could see his djenoun wanted only one thing, my knife and my life. I was so afraid for my throat that I slept with my eyes open. When we got to Kebir, I went to a blacksmith I know and I told him: “Make me an iron collar and chain for this boy or I’m a dead man.” He could see he had to do it for me, with money or without. I’d looked after the boy like a doctor all day and all night for so long without sleep that I was half gone crazy, myself. I took him to Sidi Bou Galeb. You know, the shrine on the highway through town by the traffic lights where the tourists all want to stop with their cameras and one crazy Christian once tried to take photographs even inside. Only Muslims can go in there, of course. It’s a holier place than a mosque. If you have a rich family they chain you to rings in the wall under the arcades near the tomb of the saint. There were so many crazy people chained up in there I was afraid. If you’re poor, they attach you outside in the courtyard to trees. I began to feel so crazy, myself, I nearly fell on my knees when a guardian came up for a tip and asked with a leer: “Which one of you stays?” When I threw him the chain he laughed till he cried as I ran from that place. I sent word to our village for someone to go tell the boy’s mother to bring him some food. She sold the tin roof over her head to buy the boy bread and pay his way out of that place. Now, they both live in the bushes, stealing eggs from nesting chickens and milk from strayed goats.

I went on down to Tanja and, there I found you.

Oh, now I know how you Nazarenes think about things! I know how you think about things like radios, suits! You never could forget that radio, either, now could you? I remember how it happened, perfectly well. One night about midnight — oh, long after the affair of the suit — you were toiling slowly up the stairs of your street, just as I — oh, quite accidentally — happened along down the steps. I could see you’d been drinking. You said: “Hi, Hamid!” and five minutes later we were both smoking keef and listening to Radio Cairo on the shortwave, inside of your house. In the morning, you loaned me the radio of your very own free will, I remember, and I swore on the head of my mother to bring it right back. But, who can weigh his words in the face of the Unknown? A policeman I know, a very good friend of mine on the train, dropped into my room in the fondouk and he fell in love with that little radio as soon as he saw it. I swore on the head of my mother the radio belonged to an American friend who trusted me like a brother. “Why, then,” sneered the policeman, “he’ll buy you another.” I shrugged and forgot it, right then and there. “ Mektoub ,” it was written: what else can I say? But you — you never forgot that radio, right down to this very day. That’s the way all you Nazarenes are! You hold grudges for years where a Muslim forgives and forgets.