The Expelled Read online

  I can already imagine that if I have success in Spain they'll say that I haven't triumphed here because I don't know Hebrew, but I do know Spanish. Of course that is kind of a contradiction because when I try to get a job as a translator what I find most difficult is to convince the publisher that not only do I know Spanish, but that it is my first language. The absence of my entire country, Morocco, of the Moroccan Jews, makes for some comic situations as long as you don't live them personally. When I suggested to one of my publishers, I think he had read my two novels that he had published, to translate a book by Camilo José Cela, he asked me from what language I was thinking of translating it. The best part is that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Spanish translators have learned it in class and rely on English or French translations.

  We started getting there around five o'clock but D-S, who was B-S's close friend, was already there. Occasionally I arrived at noon on Saturday or Friday and the two would sit down to eat a hummus they had bought at a restaurant called Pinati, they dipped the pita in and said "Life is hard" with each bite they took. It was an almost religious ceremony. B-S lived in a room that was a former waiting room to an office and we were not allowed to enter, and in front of that room there was a kitchenette and a restroom. The room was at the entrance of the lobby that started all the way from the end of the stairs on the first floor. There were many other rooms beyond this one, where on weekdays the administration of the Israeli philharmonic orchestra worked.

  Quite often it would just be the three of us. D-S was taking his first steps, huge steps, in Hebrew, and he continued writing in Hebrew and Spanish. B-S was a Sabra, born in Israel, and he had already written some short stories and many poems, especially poems about his family, his mother gone mad and hospitalized in a mental institution and about his dead and foolish father. He lived with his grandmother, an old woman who was really evil, that had come to Israel from Tbilisi at age six and who didn't stop yelling at him. A few times we had meetings regarding the magazine Marot at his house. Because he took care of his grandmother, his family paid the rent of the house and sometimes offered to pay a financial assistance for his literature studies that he never finished. All three of us went through the department of literature at the University of Jerusalem, but none of us graduated with honors. Creativity always put us on the opposite side of our professors who taught literature but could not write it, or how it was written and what hell you had to go through to get to a poem. At that time, literature was still a mad people's devotion and visionaries and just a lifestyle, not another economic project. Many publishers still believed in the written word. One of them was the late Yaron Golan, and the agency that bore his name, and I always said that he was crazier than the writers that he published. Which was not a simple thing to be.

  Then the three of us would sit and discuss the future of Hebrew literature. They were both supporters of Pinhas Sadé and at that time I was in favor of David Avidan. I hated Erez Bitton, who later on became my favorite poet, because he was Moroccan like me and he spoke of Morocco and I didn't. To be Israeli it was important, it was instilled in me, to stop talking about Morocco.

  “You are not like those Moroccans right?” My friends from college said to me, to help me.

  “You don't like Brera Hativit, do you?” (A band that played music influenced by Andalusian music.)

  And that idiot Erez Bitton, does he really think he's a poet and he writes poems about mint?

  “No, of course not, I hate them, anyway I don't remember Morocco.”

  As a good immigrant, I had even accepted to lose my memory and I didn't remember anything I had experienced in the first thirteen years of my life. I had really forgotten, it wasn't a lie. I do not understand the reason for this amnesia that lasted until I was thirty. I couldn't remember and that was a great cover in the new society. But I soon realized that it wasn't enough to forget, I had to ease down the growing fear of the other Israelis, fear of remembering or that I would suddenly start acting like other Moroccans and forget normal behavior. That meant that I would suddenly start screaming or hitting people or injecting myself with drugs or speaking Arabic.

  Because, in their minds, the Moroccans were not different from the Arabs and they represented the enemy within.

  D-S and B-S often went to see Pinhas Sadé, who at that time was a kind of guru, and authors went on pilgrimages to his modest home in the poor Hatikva neighborhood of Tel Aviv. And there Sadé praised himself and said he was the best writer and poet in the world, and he criticized the poems of the newcomers, saying that he had already done better and that's not how one should write. I never went to see him. Although years later I saw Sadé, a sort of Napoleon shorter than five foot three, when we crossed paths at the post office branch where we each had a PO box, close to where I worked for twelve years as an accountant. Sometimes in the same day in King George street, I crossed paths with Sadé and Amijai, who did not exceed five foot three either. They both seemed like human concentrated matter in such a small space, they always seemed to be out of the racket and within their flesh. But I didn't greet them, although Amijai was my neighbor for a while and I met him once or twice and we talked about poetry. He was a good neighbor.

  I like the word asshole, it reminds me of my childhood friends, before I knew it was a word that wasn't supposed to be pronounced in public, I don't like the word desasosiego[1], probably because of ciego[2], I don't like the word alféizar[3], although it reminds me of, or because it reminds me of, the word albaisal[4], a soup that I've always liked a lot. In 1996, I traveled with my brother to Tétouan and we ate fish in a restaurant by the sea. The smell of bean soup came to us, the albaisal, that the waiters were eating two tables away from where we were sitting. We asked the waiter who served us what that smell was and he said "That no, that's food for pirsons" with that he meant it was not tourist food, but we asked if he could bring one for each and he came back with two bowls of soup. We ate it like starving children after having played soccer and we asked if they had more, but that was all they had left for the pirsons.

  I reached the Israeli prose as a tourist and not as a pirson. I always viewed things from another perspective. First I started to write about the Moroccan bourgeoisie in the world. A Moroccan writer should always write about the Ashkenazi bourgeoisie, like A-B Yehoshua does, a Moroccan's sole purpose is to give snacks to the bourgeoisie, it's simply a kind of shadow that makes him perceive himself as the light, the Ashkenazi calls a person that comes from the Maghreb an Easterner in order to feel like a Westerner, and he will always inquire why his writings are a mere reaction to the Ashkenazi, especially if they are not. The Moroccan is different, he's an Arab when he criticizes, he's a Jew when he bows, but he's a Jew that bows. I came with another language, with a Hebrew that no one expected or knew, a Hebrew I had learned in Morocco, my Hebrew, a Hebrew that didn't need Zionist symbols. Moreover, my literature always includes Europe either France or Spain, and it's more European than any other Israeli literature. But it is not Eurocentric and it creates a geographical space that goes from Morocco and Africa through Spain to Tel Aviv in Asia. So they criticize me for being too European, or for writing solely about Morocco, when the Israeli is nothing more than a mentally colonized subject who thinks he's European and who believes that if he repeats it from morning till night like Amos Oz does, then Europe will cease to see him as an Easterner from the Middle East who could never be a true European. But I am and I don't want to be European, or at least I don't want to be only European, I also want to be Moroccan and African, I want to be Asian and Jewish, and I want to be Sephardic Jew and not Ashkenazi, and I am all those things, they are the opposite of what the Israeli society wants to be and it is not. For that reason, and I can tell you that right here, every Israeli, writer or cultural attaché in an embassy, will do everything in his power to discredit me, and that's what I get when I move in the world. There is a lot to say about this dichotomy, this paradox, I, who writes in a European language which has been my firs
t language for a thousand years, who speaks three European languages, am considered an Easterner in Israel by those who only speak a Semitic language.

  I like that, contradictions, paradoxes, a world in which logic doesn't explain anything, the moment when the one who believes he is logical loses track and is confronted with something that cannot be logical. That's why I have stopped writing prose in Hebrew for the time being, I still write poetry, an internal and external process that was complemented, on the one hand my Hebrew confined me and the audience didn't come to see my books, and, on the other hand, I felt that I had to go back to my mother tongue, without thereby losing other languages. I feel very innocent again to think that if I have success outside of Israel, publishers who have disappeared and stopped talking to me five years ago will come back. It's innocent because the publishers want to showcase other voices to turn mine off. And above all other Eastern Jewish voices to drown out Moroccans’ voices, because for an Ashkenazi Iraq is the same as Morocco, they are both as nonexistent as the other, and it is all lost in the same mass, what comes from Europe and what it is not Ashkenazi.

  The Uruguayan redhead D-S approached me and made friends with me through the Spanish language, and because he was still unaware of the segregation of the Israeli society, like many immigrants arriving from South America. After five or six years, by intuition, they start realizing to where the wind blows and they begin to distance themselves from those who are not Ashkenazi, but that's normal and human. The immigrant tries to be like the others, such as the Arab in France, he shows his resemblance to the French by displaying his anti-Semitism, and so in a few years I lost many friends. That process was a bit baffling to me and even inconceivable. Of course, there were and there are always other reasons. Today they don't publish you because you don't sell, although you do sell, before it was because you weren't writing about socialism or the true Zionist values, values that mean that you can only write about the Ashkenazi society.

  Nowadays Jerusalem is peaceful it's been months and years, and that is something that in this city you simply cannot say or even think, because it seems that the moment you begin to think that peace is normal an attack takes place, that's why we don't talk about it. In summer, streets are full of tourists and you can't find a place to sit in cafes and restaurants.

  A-H came at 10 p.m., after having dinner with her family, she often called and asked if she could come or played hard to get, she was older than all of us, she was over forty. I had met her in a poetry workshop. When she arrived she would tell us she had a horrible week and that she had not written a thing, and she would make us beg again, “well almost nothing”, and then the bargaining began. She was good.

  “Yes, I wrote a little something.”

  “Come on,” the Uruguayan would say, “let's see what wonderful verses you bring to us.”

  “I can't believe you haven't written anything,” B-S would say, “there is always something.”

  I smiled.

  “Alright, she said after about seven minutes and a half, “yes I wrote something.”

  She wrote ultra-modern poetry with street language mixed with almost Biblical verses and that left us all stunned at that time. She would take out her notebook and read for half an hour or more, thousands of verses, which were always verses that she had not written during that week. D-S and I were prolific, but A-H was a machine gun of verses, she had no sense of criticism and her poems could be great or complete crap and that was of no importance. But I think that what always emanated from them was an unmet mature sensuality. I believe that those readings, hers and ours, were a sort of orgy and a frustrated sexual initiation of a mature woman towards students who were trying to find themselves.

  The sessions ended around 2 a.m. and A-H drove me home in her car. On the way, we engaged in small talk but mostly I talked about my virginity. She often told me that she was sure that with her I would get an erection, which I couldn't achieve in two previous attempts. It was all very theoretical until one day, when she stopped next to my house, I threw myself at her and put my right hand on her tits, then he leaned back and said she couldn't, that she was a married woman and other stuff. I didn't try again since that time and we kept talking about poetry and literature.

  I was part of that group, but I wasn't in it. I was the expelled one before I had even entered. Because what I wanted to write I did not write, or couldn't, or I didn't know what I wanted to write. What I tried to do was what every immigrant does, be part of the society in which he lives. But all that this society wanted was for me not to be part of it, or maybe I was, only in one way, by supporting what is not mine. The problems that interested them were not my problems, nor could they be.

  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.