Elegies

Written by Touria Nakkouch

Touria Nakkouch

Ex-Commander M'hamed Nakkouch in the army

of deceased King Hassan II

Elegy on My Father

Epitaph:

Bear witness of my grief, you meek Mosque dwellers,
And take heed of these my exhortations and tears,
I mourn one you're carrying, today, on your briars
One who, of those I loved, is dearest of the dears.

Bear witness of my prayers, neighbouring yours
For never shall I to your temple come around;
Your vibrant sermons, I know, and Friday prayers
Are dirges which shall to his suffering be uncouth.

Let me weep all the more, because I weep in vain
Even if my pious tears will suffer his bones to hell!
I would rather he and I end in flames than abstain
From mourning him whose love I can't measure or tell.

Often I jumped upon his knees, played in his lap
Fighting th' other siblings for the most envied kiss
And often he raised me up, to stand on mountains
Giving me a larger share of parental bliss.

Often I touched the core of my moral being
In his generous bearing; in eyes bright with glee
Often I touched his lively soul in our garden
In his trim of a flower, his converse with a bee.

But great is my solace and solaced is my pain,
When I brood on this timely parting of death an' life,
My father's weary soul is now raised to heaven,
Liberated from love, delivered from strife;

He, father of many sons and knight of a nation
Kind as a husband, as a captain without respite;
He who to me was a lord and a Prince Charmin
To whose like only I accepted to be wife.

Albeit this child dream my adult life could not meet
My memory of you, father, will stay for ever sweet.

 
Elegy on a Little Girl

She was most fortunate,
This other victim of primitive law
And ancestral biological scorn:
She passed away under a lucky star!
They found her body, almost intact,
Half covered by some stones.
They marshalled her coffin through the little town,
Remonstrating, shouting their anger,
Until they made sure the abuser  
Was safely put in a dungeon, awaiting trial.
They lit candles, ate the Last Supper
And went to their homes in a silent,
Almost acceptable oblivion.

They weren't so lucky, the many others,
All having her tender age,
All blossoming into premature womanliness.
Caught, in the frenzied and awkward
Bounds of their first flights, by the ruthless
Hands of wanton boys,
They lie, abus'ed, dismembered, and unseen
In different parts of the country;
Mourned only by a sad, aging Moon,
Who witnessed their sacrifice;
And by night winds who,
After nursing their little hostesses'
Agonies to sleep,
Move on to the city,
Roaring their anger, crying revenge
Through ill-made roofs and open doors.
Then, turning in, hungry and unappeased
They lament abus'ed innocence
In a latent, almost
Decent forgetfulness.

Ex-opposition political leader and national

symbol Mehdi ben Barka

In Memoriam

(Mehdi ben Barka) 

They have been searching for a Mountain
The way one seeks a needle in a haystack.
They connived in his fall by silence or action,
Now they are looking for his body!
More than forty years the search has lasted;
They owe him a decent burial ceremony!
In Parisian suburbs they investigated,
In places where acids would have been used;
They also looked around Tazmammart:
Graveyard of hope, birthplace of all infamy.

They finally dug up a tumulus of mortal relics
These bore acronyms
Of a dismembered, dissolved national identity:
"U" was one; "S" was another; "F" a third;
While the fourth relic bore the letter "P".
He had been a friend to the nationalists,
A rebel most feared by imperial authority.
The bone relics were all dried out,
Rubbed clean of all memory;
Still they smelt of treason, of murdered hope,

Of kindness where there was none,
Of greed winning the day; of men's duplicity.

I had a vision of disintegrating grace:
Of a fine Arab brow still unravished
By cunning blows and brutal humiliations;
Of limbs, ill-visited by vultures and flies,
That yet retained the glory of his heroic actions;
Of a little big man
Whose grand ideas with hope shone bright,
Were unsettling, by their will and determinacy;
A man who could rise as high as Mount Toubkal
But who, for the love of his countrymen and women,
Chose the bowed, furtive life of a cave in exile.
"Are these the remains of Mehdi Ben Barka?"
They asked; I answered:
"It's what remains of our third world democracy!"

Elegy on a Relative Sublime

Ever since the casting of their Law
They used me to account for the violence of land,
I, Fatima, the twice- orphaned.
They called me a rebel for saying No
To fundamentalists who dispossessed me
And who never acknowledged
It was their misogyny that turned my people
Into enemies; my home land into Fitna grounds.
Selfless, loveless, denied my very senses,
My mind stunned by too many instances
Of a disfigured political faith,
I left Medina behind, crossed seas and deserts.
I have done the best I could
To make my way to the 21st century
With relatively safe limbs, and a broken soul. 

Miming, mimicking,
Or simply knocking my crazed head
Against the stiff wall of patrilineal sham,
I am never my old Mecca self again; there,
Single or betrothed, white or coloured,
Muslim, Christian or Jew, I lived peacefully among men;
Brothers they were: in blood, water, space; and
In the shelter of the Prophet's relative sublime.

Veiled and shamed like a leprous beggar
I now walk alongside street corners
For fear of arousing my benefactor's want;
Because, they say, I am all a'awra :
Flesh on bone with not a speck of the divine.
Or I lie awake in one of Bluebeard's castles
A Scheherazade awaiting her doom;
With no brothers to save me
-They all turned into foes-
And no sister to whisper tales or satires:
Her tongue was cut on an incident in Baghdad;
And my mother, whom another, more stout,
Had carried up on her mount,
Fell off the horse on the way to me.

Abandoned, Jugurtha-like , I cry,
From behind the walls of my prison,
My rebellion in the face of the Romans,
My apostasy in the face of fundamentalists,
And my hunger in the face of taboos.
I pull my sword-song at the ribs of silence:
"Vast is the prison engulfing me
Wherefrom wilt thou come, O deliverance?"