The Expelled (7 page)

My problem was that I was part of an extinct race, I came from a society that had disappeared: the Moroccan Jews. But it was more than that. Tétouan was the last settlement of Sepharad. It was the last city still living that dream, which was also a nightmare and sometimes both at the same time, that distant and close dream that was Sepharad. A city of expelled Muslims and Jews. With the end of the Jewish community, Sepharad was over.

But shortly before came what the Sephardim called "The last visit of health", which was the strange Spanish colonialism in northern Morocco. It was as if they had returned to greet the people they had expelled, without apologizing, but that wasn't all, they also made up a good plan where Franco would conquer Spain from the city of those expelled. Because Spanish colonialism was a strange and inexplicable event in modern history. They arrived at a place where the language of the new conqueror was still spoken, primarily by Jews, but for the Moors it wasn't such a distant language either, they kept using it until the early nineteenth century, and there the reverse last days of Sepharad were re-created.

At first it was my name that separated me from the others, as a sign, a curse, a mark on the forehead, and before seeing me my compatriots believed that I was something I was not. They believed that I was violent, sometimes they said it with a glance and sometimes more clearly.

“But you're very pleasant.”

“And why wouldn't I be?”

“I don't know. You write very violent things.”

I never understood what those violent things were.

But later on, discrimination became personal, I had finally caught up to it and I said it, I said the reason was the discrimination against Moroccan and Sephardic Jews, and since then I have become an enemy of the people. Today, you can find online discussions in Hebrew about my alleged racism. By claiming that I was a victim of racism, I became in the eyes of others a racist, the pure logic of the illogical. The pure reasoning of the Jew who never becomes a citizen of a democratic country.

The Israeli society tries to create an advanced society erasing the entire Sephardic culture, to save it from its savagery. But when you yourself say that it's something savage, you become the savage one. This is how a new colonial Occidentalism was built on a Middle Eastern land, where most Jews are from the Middle East, and there is also an Arab minority of about twenty percent that is either indigenous or that comes from that same Middle East. The Europeans have taken it upon themselves to convert everyone into Europeans yet those same Europeans were victims of European racist thinking. This situation didn't lack humor.

Then who was I on that boat from Ceuta to Algeciras on that August day in 1972 and what did I become a few years later, a few months later. I had arrived at a full-fledged country in which it was normal that I was abnormal, it was normal and that the average Moroccan was poor and the new generation almost couldn't read, Moroccans did manual labor, so it was normal to be told "But you don't look Moroccan," which at first seemed very strange, and then I adapted it as well as I could to my daily life. I still remember one of my first few weeks in Israel, in that uneducated and primitive town called Pardes Hanna, when an Israeli tried to convince me that I was not from Morocco.

“You are from Marseilles.”

“I'm from Tettauen, Morocco.”

“It can't be, you have a southern French accent.”

When I thought that was finally over, in the nineties, in 96 or something like that, in a friend's record store, a Russian who had just arrived argued with me about the fact that I couldn't possibly be Moroccan. This time, I took out my ID which stated that I was born in Morocco and he said he didn't believe me. He was already drunk at 11 a.m. But I was the one who still had no right to be born in the forbidden country.

It is forbidden to be born in Morocco.

That's what signs should say at the airport in Lod. On grounds stolen from some Arabs who didn't know where to be born or what religion to choose. Those fools. You've got to be an idiot. I was an idiot, my mother said that I was born in Spain, and I without understanding much I don't know why I insisted on saying that I was born in Morocco. Even today I am not willing to let anyone impose where I was born on me, or what my native city is, like a mother tongue, even if it's a forbidden country, even if I understand all the historical reasons for my exile, even if I am guilty of being born in the forbidden country, although they are all right (and they aren't)... For that reason I said, without understanding very well that what I was saying was forbidden, that I was born in Morocco, and with that I created the distance between the society and myself.

But in those Eighties I was already the new Israeli, I hated Erez Biton, the great Moroccan poet, and I would say it to all the writers, at that time it was an important ritual to say how someone could write this way and insert words in Arabic in his poem, and on top of that say that he is from Morocco, “Anna Min El Zagreb”, I also had to tell everyone that I didn't like the band Habrera Hativit, that incorporated Middle Eastern music with modern music and was run by another banned Moroccan artist, Shlomo Bar. The only thing that was left for me to do was to change my name and speak of Morocco as if it were something that had happened to another person.

But that was not enough, they wanted more, my complete self-denial, my disappearance, my nature. My own name and my self-being. My denial also denied me my manhood and my relationships with women ended without an erection. I had become a shadow of myself and I believed that I could survive. Then I met my wife who saved me from the abyss, from that last step that I couldn't take without falling in too deep, without dying, either physically or metaphorically. I was on the edge of the abyss and I couldn't see it, nor did I know it, and besides I thought it was the right road to follow to be an Israeli. Literature might have saved me, luck, love, and from there I began a long journey back to my name and to my Morocco. I am one of the few survivors of this shipwreck and the commanders who sank the boat want to annihilate me.

Without realizing, a few years ago I became the new Erez Biton, who must be destroyed to be accepted in meetings, some change sidewalks when they see me, old friends pretend they don't know me, and the Ashkenazim say that I've written some good poems but that I'm a racist. Because being a racist in my country is saying that Ashkenazim exist. The Ashkenazim spend their days talking about the Sephardim and how they are, but they don't accept that anyone defines them as a group. Only the non-Ashkenazim exist. Once, they called them Bnei Edot Hamizraj literally the sons of the tribes of the East, and we still don't know which East they meant, like the Indian tribes in the Americas that were later called Eastern, sometimes Arab Jews, Sephardic, and other names considered derogatory, and Zionism always confirmed their hatred of the primitive East. In one sentence they would state the need to create a country that is not like the Arab countries, to later say that the Sephardim want an Arab country and continue by suggesting that they have to remove such ideas from their head, for their own good. The Ashkenazim want to save us from ourselves and from our history and our culture and the best way to get there is by making us poor, not giving us any kind of education and creating a new Israeli. An Israeli who knows very well that the Ashkenazi looks down on those poor Moors who do not understand what is right for them.

That's why now I want to return to the Eighties, but I go back to 1972, to that month of August, between two continents, between Ceuta and Algeciras, between two seas, two worlds. And I can't recall that boat, that prow, the wood, those two hours between the two lands, I have lost those hours, they have disappeared from my mind, and between them it's like going from one world to another, from a wooden to a crystal landscape. From Africa to Europe and from Europe to Asia, where Herzl suggested creating a European avant-garde, and where I became a different person. Because others viewed me in their own way and with every glance I was becoming someone else. The destructive glance, the anxious glance, the distressing glance of the others.

They were afraid that I, one of so many, would destroy their way of seeing the world. This world where they saw themselves as the rearguard of the European world and they saw me as the wild one coming from the trees. The savages had to see themselves as they were, look at their own violent faces in the mirror, and so they turned the mirror toward me and there they witnessed their violence, but they pointed it to my face. I was the violent one now, and I had to demonstrate the impossible, that it wasn't my face but theirs, that they couldn't see. They wouldn't see.

Well, anyway. Someone decided to put an end to Moroccan Judaism, or no one did. In the twentieth century, things happen. There are no mighty kings who destroy, there is bureaucracy, democracy, different people do different things in their offices and suddenly an atomic bomb drops. The decision was made by many, some here and there, experts and politicians, and they turned us all into nomads. Hey, you, listen, it's your turn to leave, there is no more place here for the Jews; Because of Zionism, colonialism, nationalism and the possibility of making a few dollars. But how can one explain that the Nazis ended Judaism in Arab countries and not European countries and that Jews left Northwest Africa and headed to France or other European countries. What kind of domino are we playing?

Time was playing a sick joke on me, damn it. I was facing a new inquisition, the worst that I could imagine. It was such an inconceivable inquisition that I'm afraid to see it even today, and nobody around me can see what I did. How could they? It took me fifteen years to begin to see it myself. Those who want to convert me today are the Jews themselves, and they want to convert me into a European and Christian version of Judaism, a very Christian version. And nothing is enough, but there is always a court that says I'm not a good Christian, that I still have to leave more parts of me behind to become a new Jew, this is how you create the new identity, a new Jew like the first Christians were the new people of Israel.

I don't want to, I object, like my ancestors, those expelled, but I can't refuse, and my children don't even understand what Judaism I'm talking about, nor can I write about it in the new Hebrew kidnapped by that same new Judaism. A Judaism that wants to defend European values, the same values that led the Jews to Auschwitz. There is a complete exclusion of the Sephardic Jew in the society and it's what is considered most normal.

And that brought me to a wall, a wall that I couldn't cross. A wall where I couldn't pray.

3

“Well, I can see that it makes no difference at all, I don't know if you're even listening to me or not.”

“Yes we're listening and what you read was very interesting, but what we want to know is what happened next.”

“We turned back. You really find this notebook interesting? Well, I'll leave it here as a gift, and if you can send me some more tuna sandwiches, I'm hungry again. I don't know if you give breaks here, but I've been here for six hours and I would like to take a shower and get some sleep, go home or to a hotel, anywhere.”

“When you get to the accident.”

“For the record, there is a lot more to tell, we were driving around for three more days.”

“Be concise and don't tell us a lot of stupid stuff, and don't read notebooks from back people.”

“You don't like back people either?”

“We haven't said anything, nor are we saying anything about back or front people, we're just listening to your story.”

“But I was reading the notebook of a back person.”

“And now it's time to confess.”

“Confess what?”

“We don't know, to confess to something, there is always something to confess. Some secret.”

“Secrets, we all have secrets, but do you want to know my secrets or what happened on the bus, you have to decide. If it’s a secret you want, well here's one, at twelve I stole my mother's gold ring and they accused the maid and fired her. I sold the ring to a gypsy, a street vendor, and kept this money that bailed me out of difficult situations for many years.”

“Well, you better keep telling us about the bus and leave your childhood where it belongs.”

“Can you send me some more sandwiches...?”

“No.”

“Then we turned back, which was not simple. The trees reached up to the road and the forest was so thick that it was hard to find a space the size of the bus, so we drove in reverse for one or two miles until we found a gap, or more or less a gap. The men got out and we cut some olive branches with our bare hands so the bus could turn around. The bus was still full, but I think one or two passengers stayed back in the mount of olives. I don't know who, I can't remember everything. I watched the landscape that had changed into an infinite Scottish green field after we turned back. Then a guy came and sat next to me and told me that what he wanted was to forget, to forget his brother’s death...”

“Here we go again, let's try something new, can you tell us who you are? Your story.”

“My story?”

“Yes, your life. What you do, where you were born, where you come from.”

“Me?”

“Yes, I believe you're the only one in this room. You.”

“Alright, I was on the bus and I was going to my city. Or what is probably my city. I don't know where my city or my town is, somewhere. I was born in France, in Blois, my parents were Moroccan immigrants, in the Loire. I was born there but I was never French, I wasn't legal there, my father wasn't a legal migrant, and at school they called me the Moroccan, ‘le marrocain’, and they told me to go back to Morocco. My parents came from the Riff and sometimes they spoke to each other in Tamazight, but I don't understand a word of Tamazight. Don't tell me you don't know what Tamazight is, it's the language of the Berbers, but don't say that word to my parents, they would kill me, they are Imazighen, not Berber. Anyway, what happened is that when I was twelve the French government decided to clean up a little bit its streets from Moroccans and they offered a few thousand francs to those who wanted to return to their village. My parents were fed up with being Moroccan and having bad jobs so we went back to Morocco. Actually, they went back, because for me it was my first trip to Morocco. We went to Tangiers, where he had a brother who had a photography business that he built thanks to six years of work in Germany. Then I returned or I traveled or I moved to Morocco, and there everyone at school began calling me the French guy, ‘El Fransaui’, and it was true, I was el fransaui, I only spoke French. When I was twenty I went back to France and since then I travel around Europe in search of the boy I was when I was twelve years old, before history parted my life in two, the one before and the one after, I go from sea to sea, here and in Morocco, I go from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and I am the one who splits in two, I am the land that prevents the seas from becoming the world.”