The Old Stories
I just had mint tea with an old Berber woman.
She wore a deep blue blouse, and a black velvet skirt. Around her head was a dark shawl with gold threads woven through it. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were almost black with henna. There were ornate rings on her fingers.
When she posed for the camera, she held her hand to her face in a coy smile. She must have been very beautiful once.
And I see her now, I see her dancing in the desert forty or fifty or sixty years ago. It is night, night under the stars and there is fire nearby and drums made of the skin of sheep recently slaughtered. It is very dark and otherwise quiet in the village which has no electricity. She is from the mountainous country a little inland, and on the side of a broad hill the town has gathered for the festival. Her betrothed looks on as she whirls, spins, gyrates, flirts with dark eyelashes. She has a tambourine and she plays it in coy counterpoint to the throb of the drums, that thousand-year old pulse which speaks of history and ecstasy and the heavy scent of roasting meat. She moves her hips and her hands slap against the skin of the drum, those same henna-ed hands which I see now before me as she sips her tea in the little room…
They’re very wrinkled now. In the corner a television plays Moroccan reality TV. The village today is full of hotels for French tourists, and a man who works in real estate has informed me that all of the empty seaside fields have been purchased by developers.
I have been sold a myth. I have been told of a mystical desert people and I’ve found them wearing Diesel jeans and drinking Coca-Cola. Their children crowd the internet cafes at night.
The stories are just stories now, fast fading. We need new myths, new things to believe in amidst a world of condominiums. I don’t know what our new stories are yet, but we need them badly. We need them, we are desperate for them, because the old stories will just break our hearts now.
It feels like death. I want to say her culture is dying, but I know it can only be change.
And still, I am thankful to be able to know that the old stories were true. I can see it in the way this old woman poses for me. And that drum beat – the throb of trance, of heartbeat, of sex – the drums will live forever. This is not a metaphor. I’ve already heard those strange desert rhythms on other continents. They are too old to die.
