Maps of the Soul

Chapter 6

FOUR

You woke up with the dawn call to prayer and went to the Senoussi Mosque to pray before heading to the forests and rubbish yards around them. You would not return until the middle of the day to collect your four francs. Then you took advantage of the remaining afternoon for your own chores, like washing your clothes. You also borrowed some francs from Abdullah, the owner of the bakery, to buy a jilbab befitting your new profession, and this way the clothes you brought with you from the village would stay in good condition. This free time also gave you the opportunity to look for less exhausting work worthier of a man who had memorized the book of Allah.

You were now guaranteed an amount of money that met your basic needs, and the Shushan Agency could still provide you with a place to live for a few more days, though it was a refuge for travellers and wayfarers, and not a place for permanent accommodation. Anyone who stayed there for more than two weeks would be warned of the necessity of finding another place to sleep.

You continued roving around the large boutique shops, hoping they might need a worker for accounting or a sales assistant to take customers’ measurements, and you went to restaurants and cafés, hoping they might need a waiter, but without any luck.

During one of your rounds, you saw people in a funeral procession heading towards the cemetery, and remembered that among the tombstones and memorials of the graveyard there was one job that you and few others had perfected. The burial ceremony required someone to read the Surat Yasin, so the deceased would be blessed and granted mercy. So you hurried to the cemetery of Sidi Munaider and sat in front of the nearest open grave into which its new occupant was being interred. Without knowing who the deceased was, or asking the family’s permission, you raised your voice and chanted the Surat Yasin.

Your voice came out sweet and resonant, imparting a touch of majestic solemnity to the death, and spreading peace and tranquility in the hearts of the family and friends of the deceased. You saw the people listening closely to you in silence and amazement, and you felt increasingly certain the family of the deceased would reward you with something. But the burial rituals concluded and the companions of the deceased left the cemetery without even bothering to place a franc in your hand, leaving you without anything but words of thanks and praise.

The same thing occurred a second and third time before you realized that no one was going to pay you for reading the Surat Yasin, and what you had first estimated to be an additional source of income, would gain you nothing but words from the family of the deceased, wishing peace and mercy upon your own dead ancestors.

You knew this for a fact after you stumbled across someone from your village one day. His name was Abdel Mowlah, and you had just come out of the Mizran Mosque after afternoon prayers, intending to follow the family of a deceased person from the mosque to the funeral, when you saw him at the threshold to the mosque’s entrance as you were putting on your sandals. He was wearing a long jilbab of the cut worn by Issawi dervishes and his head was wrapped in a white turban. He held a crutch in one hand, while the other was stretched out to beg alms from the mosque-goers.

When he saw you, he tried to hide his face behind the fringe of his turban and turn his body towards the far wall. But you, inexperienced and naive, failed to understand that he was trying to hide the shameful fact that he was begging. You leapt over to him, taking his outstretched hand and shaking it, both happy to have found someone from your village after two weeks in a city where you knew no one, and grieving at the same time for his condition.

The people of your village had been proud of this man, who used to be an important merchant. Curious, you asked him what had brought him to this state of affairs, but he shook his head, putting off answering for another time. A distant family connection related you to this man, but in fact the entire village was tied together by some distant relation, for all of them sprang from the first person to lay roots in the land, Sheikh Al-Kabir, whose famous shrine was in your village. That meant that both you and Abdel Mowlah were descended from the Sheikh, and what disgraced him, also disgraced you, and what bettered his standing and reputation also bettered yours.

Neither you nor anyone else would have ever thought that Abdel Mowlah was in Tripoli. He had told everyone that he was a cloth merchant, which he transported from Fez to Kano and many other African towns, returning from them with ivory, ostrich feathers and ostrich eggs. So it got into everyone’s heads that he was on one of his distant travels to the unknown reaches of the African continent. It would never have occurred to you that you might meet this important trader begging in front of Mizran Mosque.

You knew his family, and knew he had a wife and three children who lived a life of luxury and comfort. They wore new clothes on holidays, owned a rubber ball for the children to play with, which the other children in the village longed to play with, since they had only sack-cloth balls. As Abdel Mowlah’s family was one of the few that could afford a meal with meat in it at least once a week, you considered them among the more fortunate in your village. So how could he provide a life of riches and prestige for his family, despite his humiliating position in the city? You realized that he had never in his life undertaken any journeys, nor any trade, not of ivory, feathers, or eggs, and that it was all a ruse to avoid shame and scorn. But was the begging profession truly capable of earning so much that a man could shower his children with money like this?

Abdel Mowlah walked ahead of you, and you followed behind him on a long journey from the modern and affluent parts of town, through the suburbs of Bu Mushmasha and Bu Harida, and onto the Sidi Khalifa area, and the crowded huts of Bab Akkara, at last entering a shanty-town district of huts made from branches and corrugated tin, where he had built himself a rickety, rusty domicile.

When you arrived, the tin hut was still radiating heat absorbed by the midday sun. You ducked your head when you entered so as not to hurt yourself on the sharp metal edges and protrusions. You instantly felt its heat and narrowness strangling you.

You wanted to ask him again why he contented himself with this life, but he preempted you, ignoring the curiosity that shone in your eyes.

He said, “Why did you leave Awlad Al Sheikh and come to the city?”, gripping your shoulders in his hands and shaking them violently, as if you had committed some grave crime.

Clearly the irony of the situation was lost on him, for it would have been more befitting if he had directed the question to himself, but from everything you had seen you realized that in actuality he was directing it to himself as well. Through this question, he was saying that he had been forced to come to this city, to earn insult and humiliation with his own two hands. He had come knowing that there was no place for him, just as there had been no place for you, and he knew that these immigrants came from Italy to Tripoli to remake Libya for themselves according to their standards, making it a place for their enjoyment, and theirs alone. He knew that they didn’t welcome any natives among them, except as workmen, servants, or beggars.

Abdel Mowlah had come to Tripoli after his camel had died. He had used it to transport commodities between the south and north of the country. And because he didn’t have enough money to purchase a new camel, he fell into his current dilemma, for which he saw no other solution but to leave and never show his face in the village again. His family had become used to a life of leisure, which he had been able to save for through his work as a desert merchant, so he had journeyed to Tripoli looking for a chance to restart his work in trade, and to find any temporary work that could earn him enough to buy a new camel. This required him to move back and forth between many different jobs, but while he made enough to meet his bare necessities, they didn’t leave a surplus he could send to his family. So he began trying to make extra money by begging.

By day, he orked as a porter at the harbour, or as an occasional construction worker or a stone-mason at the Al-Dahra quarries. Once the sun set and the evening prayers were done, he would would lurk enshrouded by darkness for people coming out of mosques, begging for alms to send back to his village.

Abdel Mowlah told you that it was under the influence of a man from the desert who had come to the city for work that he became a true beggar, and found himself going to a new place to beg. This companion had informed him that there were better people who would be more generous to the wretched and unfortunate than the people at the mosques were, namely the patrons of the nightclub in Musheer Market. But because an evening in front of the nightclub waiting for the customers to come out went on until the small hours of the morning, it became impractical for him to wake up for work at the harbour or quarries, which left him free to beg full-time. Habit and repetition made him forget humiliation and disgrace until all he cared about was that he made plenty of money without suffering or exertion.

Abdel Mowlah burst into bitter tears in front of you before he could finish his story. You didn’t know what you could say to console him and only managed a melancholy silence. He had told everyone he was a merchant who traded in the desert regions between Fez and the heart of Africa, neglecting to realize that his presence in front of the mosques of Tripoli would not remain hidden for long from the eyes of his village. He couldn’t return to the village – nor in any other place – and find work more profitable than begging.

Abdel Mowlah continued to sob as he told you that he was trusting you, and knew you would conceal the circumstances you had found him in from the villagers of Awlad Al Sheikh, sparing him the scandal and infamy that would surely ensue. You said that you couldn’t guarantee that others from the village who came to the city would not expose him, but you promised that you would never do such a thing.

For several years, Abdel Mowlah had refused to enlist in the Italians’ police force or army, despite the guaranteed wages. But now he might find himself forced to go to them, for working with them and joining the police or army was no longer considered an act of betrayal against one’s nation as it had been during the times of resistance and warfare. At that time, Lkbyans in the Italian army had feared to find themselves on the front, bearing arms against their brothers fighting in the resistance. But now that this was no longer a danger, and the resistance had been defeated, working with the Italians was no longer deemed disgraceful in most of the country.

You thus hastened to tell Abdel Mowlah that despite surrendering to the reality of life under occupation, the people of Awlad Al Sheikh still considered enlisting in military service with the Italians to be a loathsome, despicable thing, and whoever did so was disowned and turned out. You expressed your sympathy that a man could find himself torn between the humiliation of begging and the disgrace of becoming a soldier for the Italians.

He got up suddenly, shouting in your face that this curse would haunt you too if you didn’t return immediately to Awlad Al Sheikh. You would find yourself in his exact position, facing a difficult choice between begging and donning the Italian military uniform.

You replied in a confident voice, “Perhaps death is easier than either option.”