A Psychogeographic Stroll at Jamâa Lefna

Written by Touria Nakkouch

At the east end of the Jamâ Lefna square was 'Chez Chagrouni', a three-storey café formerly known as the Street Criers Café. It was getting late as I stood on its second-floor terrace, looking down at the square. I contemplated the night show with the same voracious avidity with which I had sat down, a while ago, to the plate of couscous that the boys at "Salon 114" served us, with chicken meat and hot pepper sauce.

Next to me, Juliet was also trying to get a photo of the square. The smoky vapours rising from the grills fused with the lamp lights and produced wavy and heavily fragranced clouds that drowned the world below us in the atmosphere of A thousand and One Nights. The passionate tunes of the Nay now and then gave in to the insistent shouts of the salon criers. Their primal symphony added to the exotism of the place.

In the snapshot that I took, the Koutoubia Mosque proudly erected its tower from the bowels of the moving earth beneath it. For a moment, the place drifted off, outside of time, outside of sentences. Only the lavish smell of cooked meats and the lush, exuberant movement of dark and fair bodies melting together in the night cadence stung me back to consciousness: we had to be at the west end of the square in five minutes if we didn't want to miss the bus to our hotel.

©Touria Nakkouch