“There was one well with drinking water,” my father told me. “You had to walk two kilometers and carry the filled buckets back the whole way.”
The French still occasionally summoned my grandfather or came to the house to arrest him. They told him that he could still get his lands back if he would only cooperate with them. But my grandfather refused. He worried for his family, especially that the French would take my grandmother to hurt him even more. There were rumors of French soldiers and those who worked with them raping women. My father remembered my grandfather used to have a pistol that he kept hidden in the house. Once, when my father was four or five, my grandparents got into an argument and my grandmother threatened to tell the French about my grandfather’s gun. “They’ll lock you up, and I’ll get rid of you,” she said, only half joking. My grandfather didn’t want to go back to prison. He took the pistol to the mosque and threw it in the latrine.
My grandparents were both still active in the Resistance, particularly in motivating neighbors to take part in protest marches against French rule. In 1956, Morocco finally got its independence, but my grandfather never got his land back. Instead the local mayor offered him two kilograms of sugar. My grandparents refused to accept it. Both were deeply disappointed, and my grandfather fell into a depression.
When my father turned seven, my grandparents divorced. Grandfather Abdelkader moved to a different part of Meknes, and my grandmother and her children were on their own again.
“She would wake up in the morning, pray, make breakfast for us, wake my oldest sister to take care of the rest, and then leave in the early morning and come back just before it turned dark,” my father recalled. They had a primitive gas oven, which they used for cooking, or roasted their food over hot coals. They had one small radio that worked only when my grandmother had the money to buy batteries, and they relied on candles and oil lamps for light.
By the time I arrived in Morocco as an infant, to live with my grandmother, she had left the shantytown. Working in Frankfurt, my father had earned enough not just to support us but also to send his mother money to buy a house in the middle of Meknes with three rooms, a kitchen, and an indoor bathroom with a traditional squat toilet and a faucet in the wall.
My grandfather used to visit and would tell me stories of fighting the French colonialists. He also once told me that the most powerful people were those who could read and write, because they would be the ones to explain to the world, and to write history. He feared that people would hear only the account of the French colonizers and that the stories of people like him would be forgotten.
A Jewish family lived three houses down from my grandmother. The mother would often come over on Fridays and bring homemade bread, which she said had been baked specially for that day. I now know that it was challah, prepared for the Jewish Sabbath. In exchange, my grandmother would bring over plates of couscous or cookies. Their daughter, Miriam, became a close friend of mine. She was two years older than I, and fluent in French; we called her “Meriem,” the Moroccan version of the name. Before I turned four, she and her family left for France.
My grandmother had deep, dark eyes and white hair that was sometimes dyed red with henna. She was probably five foot six with very strong hands and a firm, muscular body, shaped by hard physical labor and toned by the medicinal oils she made and rubbed into her skin. She had an irresistible, contagious laugh.
She lived in the city, but her home had the feeling of a farm. She had no land to speak of, but she kept chickens, rabbits, and pigeons in a sliver of open ground between the living room and kitchen. She didn’t trust the local butchers, so she slaughtered her own chickens and we always had fresh eggs. She also fed and cared for a couple of neighborhood cats. She always told me that the Prophet Muhammad took care of cats, so we should treat them well. She would never let a beggar leave our doorstep without giving him something to eat, and when a beggar came, I would often end up sitting on the stoop and talking to him, asking why he was poor and other impertinent questions. My grandmother was so embarrassed. “Why don’t you let the man eat?” she’d say. But I was curious. She didn’t just feed the beggars and send them off. She’d have something to say to them, a good word, something to give them hope. “You’re going through tough times, but God is great, and you’re going to get better,” she’d say. As a sign of respect, they called her hajja, a title usually reserved for people who had completed the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, where my grandmother had never been.
Although she had been born into comfortable circumstances, she had a natural head for home economics. Having her own chickens meant that even when money was tight we never went hungry. She cooked or baked with the eggs, or gave them to neighbors as gifts. Her pigeons were trained to deliver letters, a lucrative side business. She worked on a farm sometimes, milking cows. (When she took me with her, I would pull their tails.) She also still worked as a nurse and midwife and made medicinal oils.
She kept her coins—what she called “small money”—in a handkerchief hidden in her traditional long Moroccan dresses, but she hid her “big money”—bills—in her bra. “Make sure you don’t keep all your money in one place,” she told me. “You have to hide it so the sons of sin don’t see how much money you have.” “Sons of sin” was my grandmother’s term for anyone who behaved badly, from a neighborhood tough to a serious criminal. I thought her bra trick funny at the time but, later, I found myself emulating her. In dicey reporting situations, a bra can be a good hiding place for memory chips and money. Especially in the Muslim world, few people will dare to check there.
My grandmother was stern but immensely lovable. When my grandfather visited her, he’d say, “Why don’t we get married again?” But she wouldn’t let people mess around with her. That was what made her different from other women. She wasn’t afraid to take risks; that’s something I learned from her.