Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

In 1994 it was plowing and planting season, all in anticipation of rain. But weather bulletins and climate forecasts had other things to tell the farmers in their particular form of language: don’t expect your region or the country as a whole to see winter winds blowing or copious pouring rain accompanied by thunder and lightning, bringing with them the kind of downpours that people in the know refer to as “rains of charity and mercy”!

Fat chance of that ever happening. . unless, of course, the miracle of miracles were to happen, the Merciful God were to take pity on his human servants and animals and revive His moribund earth!

So in anticipation of what might or might not happen, the observant eye can spend time measuring the sheer impotence of mankind through clouds of a different kind, the ones that sneak their way into your gut feelings.

The same observant eye can also lean over an individual plot of land and observe the relentless march of drought, the way the dust begins to pile up and the color turns ashen because it is so parched. All kinds of opportunistic plants and nasty insects start to emerge through the cracks.

That same eye can give the ear information about the cracks and crevices in the soil as it disintegrates and the cancer spreads. It can also let all the senses know how the soil’s creviced tongues dangle downwards, driven by thirst and heat in a desperate quest for water and moisture.

That same eye can move toward the trees scattered across the landscape, they being of a particularly stolid and tolerant species. The leaden weight of the heat will show itself in the pale leaves and scanty fruit they produce. The only birds that will perch on them will be ones that can make do with a minimum of pecking and find it hard to hover and fly away.

I used to take pity on that wretched species of bird and gaze at them with my own sad expression. My own stomach was often deprived of meat, and so I started targeting them with the catapult I’d been given as a child; by now I had become quite a good shot. However I had my own rule, indeed my special restriction: I had to be very sparing and stingy with myself. No putting sticky stuff on the branches, and no more hunting than was needed to keep hunger at bay. That kindly and environmentally friendly limit was to avoid giving the birds taking refuge in the trees any notion that they were being subjected to a kind of universal assault, expulsion or extermination. In fact I was so anxious — and God is my witness — to keep the situation the way it was and the possibility of their returning to their nests after flying away that I put some seeds and various kinds of food in cracks in the trees and even moistened them with some drinking water. So God Almighty can testify to the fact that my very parsimonious and stingy hunting escapades were conditional on the birds reproducing themselves in sufficient numbers. If that did not happen, you would see me amusing myself by aiming my catapult at stray rabbits. I could usually hit the young ones or others that were not fast or crafty enough.

A persistent feeling of misery and impotence began to take hold of me about four years ago. It happened immediately after my father dropped dead over his plough in the field where he used to work, the place where he had struggled and sweated his life away. He was a simple, crude famer who had married twice before without having any children, so he had simply divorced the women. My feelings had only intensified when my mother remarried, that farmer who had housed her in his humble home with its cursed plot of land attached. It so happened that this new husband of hers brought an end to my studies when I was seventeen and made a habit of forcing me to undertake really hard tasks and insulting me in the process; it was just as if I were a pack-animal ready for work in field and house, all in return for a meager bite to eat and a bed of straw and alfalfa.

I’m someone with big ideas but little power to implement them. I have to admit that words are incapable of describing the kind of oppression and misery I feel in a land where, every time the plowing and sowing season comes round, all we get is drought, occasional drizzle, but no real rain. Whenever that happened, my mother’s boor of a husband used to get even crazier than ever. He would yell in my face that I had to take care of myself and find something else to do far away. He explained the tensions caused by the drought as being God’s punishment on people like me who were recalcitrant and thus merited His anger.

The entire scenario was one of oppression and misery: no sustenance from the land, and a mother’s husband who would never stop threatening and cursing me.

My poor mother in her fifties!

If it were not for her, at the very first sign of violence from her husband, I would have severed all bonds of obedience and sought my own path somewhere else. However, it was my mother who served as the invisible thread tying me to this wasteland, the shackling bond that, growing ever more feeble, could never envisage the possibility of leaving her desert landscape even in her own dreams. This then is a portion of my autobiography. Anything in it that may seem expansive or overblown represents the excess of a stupid mind. .

At this point I added a few paragraphs, exculpating myself with regard to the death of my mother’s husband and explaining my forced departure from Ouad-Zem for Oujda.

The hall was abuzz with voices taking turns to recount the list of charges that had led to their imprisonment in some completely unknown location; all of them were challenging the legality of their arrest. It was difficult to hear, and there were constant interruptions, so I could not make out a lot of what they were saying. Not only that, but I was still distracted by the need to write everything down; I wanted to get the weight of the judge’s demand off my shoulders as soon as I could. All of a sudden, the prisoner closest to my cell asked me to recount my own charges and to raise my voice as much as possible. Thanking them for their concern, I made do with reciting the contents of what I had written as a response to their questions.

“I’m accused,” I told them “of killing my mother’s husband with a deadly catapult shot, an accusation that I totally deny and reject. I am completely innocent. That said, however, I don’t deny that I occasionally dreamed of killing that oafish farmer, especially when he set about beating and cursing my mother. Whenever I took refuge in a cave, I used to have that very same dream. I used to read there and memorize passages till sleep overtook me; sometimes I would grill a bird or the occasional rabbit along with some bread, cumin seeds and salt. However, as everyone knows, there’s always a large gap between dreams and actual implementation. Then there’s the fact that a catapult shot may hit a bird or rabbit, but often won’t necessarily kill it. So how is someone firing a catapult from a distance supposed to be able to kill a human being who is larger in every dimension? The worse that a catapult can inflict is a bruise or a surface wound of some kind. How can that possibly compare with a shot from a silenced revolver or a Kalashnikov?

“I came to call that cave ‘my cave’ because I claimed ownership to it; no vagrants or wayfarers ever came by. It was there, deep inside and in complete silence, that I was able to pose my frustrated, wounded soul the question of all questions, the answer to which potentially opened up all other answers: ‘Is this really a life I’m living, or simply a dreadful nightmare?’ After innumerable periods of contemplation, I came to the conclusion that my only solution and escape lay in leaving this miserable desert region and looking for a more hospitable environment in a city.