Morocco Pentagraph

Settle down in your reading chair! Here are a group of stories that will enable you to take a trip without ever leaving the farm. All of them are set in Morocco. You can link to the two longer stories (short novels, really) and a nonfiction memoir from this page; they are described below. Two of the shorter stories in the collection can be gotten to from the main portal page, which is here; you’ll find them near the bottom of that page.

Divided in Halves: In this atmospheric novella set in a village in Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains, four people (three men and one women, of whom two are natives, two are foreigners) develop a delightful ménage that enables them to transcend their dull surroundings, until it eventually collapses under the weight of its own secrets.

Fatima Meskina: This is a nonfiction memoir of one of the most remarkable and singular women I have ever known. It’s about 40 pages long and chronicles the three years that I spent time with her.

Post Script: I learned in January 2006 that Fatima had died. It is completely fitting that in the end, she didn’t die alone and friendless as I feared that she might and predicted that she would in this memoir. What actually happened was far stranger than anything I could have imagined. She spent the last four days of her life in a semicoma. On her last day, one of her early employers, one-time Peace Corps Volunteer Debra Snell, was passing through her town and came to visit her. Debra announced who she was. Fatima opened her eyes, and died a couple of minutes later. When you read this story of her life you will not be surprised to see that this pillar of individuality in a conformist society stubbornly held on to life until she could leave it in the company of one of her “girls.”

Man and Maid (link coming soon): a comic novella that charts the relationship of young American in Morocco and his housemaid, whose designs on him go pretty far beyond just keeping house.