Hassan, a Berber from the green valley of Ourika, in the High Atlas Mountains is a professional storyteller who every evening imaginatively weaves “a magic carpet of words that will soon take you away from this place…with one eye on reality and the other firmly fixed in fantasy” — an inheritance from his father. He sits in the Jemaa el Fna, the main square of Marrakesh, El Amara, “a landscape filled with allegories, where the imagination is law, and storytellers can spend entire days resuscitating mysteries.”
The Storyteller of Marrakesh is about Hassan narrating a “tale the like of which I promise you have never heard before. It is a love story, like all the best stories, but it is also a mystery, for it concerns the disappearance of one of the lovers or the other or perhaps both of them or neither. It happened two years ago, or it might have been five or ten or twenty-five. These details are unimportant.”
There are plenty of witnesses from that ill-fated evening, many of whom as members of his audience interrupt Hassan's version of the tale to contribute their point of view. Whether it is the night maid at the hotel where the couple were staying, or Youseef, the bodybuilder, or Toufiq, the artist who was commissioned to draw a miniature portrait of the girl or Khadija, the fortune teller or Azziza the beggar woman or the various merchants who stopped to listen, all of them seem to speak confidently of knowing the “correct” story. Although they agree about the French girl Lucia's exceptional beauty, no two people agree on the physical description of the couple or even their nationality.
The husband, who is never named, is considered to be dark; he could be from India or Iran. As Samir, the Berber merchant says, “It is certainly safe inside a house… but safer inside a story where everything connects, which is more than can be said of our story, where we cannot even seem to agree upon the most basic elements, such as what the two wanderers looked like.”
Hassan's favourite
This story is particularly dear to Hassan, because it implicated his younger brother, Mustafa, in the couple's disappearance (possibly murder) and to life imprisonment. Mustafa was “unusually fair-skinned for a Berber, tall, wide-shouldered, tousle-haired, with light-coloured eyes and a penetrating gaze, he was the envy of all the men in our village.” The tale, its embellishments and different incidents involving the couple take up the entire evening. By the end, it is never clear what really happened to the couple or who is the ideal and true storyteller. It leaves us — the audience/reader/listener — eager for more.
When the novel opens, just as Hassan is about to begin the story, a cleric arrives and questions him about the art of storytelling. The cleric dismisses it as “nothing but imagination… Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Armed with your arsenal of intentions, you are setting out to explore the events of that evening — but as fiction, not as remembered fact. Where is the centre, the point of orientation, in this game of shadows?” Hassan, on the other hand, is in constant search of the truth: In “my breath I form my work,” he says. He realises that “the truth is precisely that which is transformed the instant it is revealed, open to debate, disagreement, controversy, but also, inevitably, to mystification. In other words, there is no truth.”
Traditional storytelling in Marrakesh is a thousand years old. The oral tradition continues to be vital in Morocco (in 2007, more than 40 per cent of the population was illiterate). UNESCO has declared it a world cultural heritage.
Muslim world
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya made a conscious decision to set his novel, the first of a trilogy, in a Muslim world, since he is appalled that “every Muslim dictator has stood in the shadow of amoral Western puppet-masters…. That is why, as a writer, and especially as a non-Muslim writer, I feel an obligation to stand by my Muslim brethren and help expose my readership to the cultural glories of Islam, and our own indebtedness to that heritage.” He studied German philosophy and Romanticism. The discourse on beauty that forms a large chunk of The Storyteller of Marrakesh seems to lean heavily on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's view that a work of imagination requires a “willing suspension of disbelief” from the reader.
Like the fantastic yet believable, Kubla Khan, the story within the story is open to many interpretations. After all, Coleridge did say that our apprehension of the world is wholly subjective:
“we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live,”
...from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth.
In an interview, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya says that “There are at least two dominant traditions of oral storytelling. The first, and older, has the storytellers making up the story as they go with the help of a few framing themes or phrases. This is the practice of the oral storytellers in tribal Muslim societies.
The second comprises recitations that follow a fixed frame of reference and are exercises in memory, handing down narratives that combine culture and history…. Writing introduces, almost immediately, the impulse to amend, refine, edit. Every story births multiple commentaries; every storyteller many more scholiasts. Soon the scholarship smothers the imagination and fetters it.” This is corroborated by dastango, Danish Husain, who says that every retelling of a tale brings out a different nuance. The seductive nature of telling the story depends more on the embellishments by and personality of the storyteller than on sophisticated narrative techniques like allegory, allusions, literary tropes, and metaphors. The tenor and textuality of a story that is told to an audience is one thing; reading it silently to oneself is quite another. The Storyteller of Marrakesh, a brilliant novel that it is, works even better if it is read out aloud.Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is a publishing consultant and critic.
Storyteller 0f Marrakesh,Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Fourth Estate, Tranquebar/Westland, 2011. Hb, p. 238, Rs. 499.
