Summary
Homecoming
Aziz has imagined his homecoming for five years now, thinking of how he will have a new car and gifts for his family and how wonderful it will be to embrace Zohra. But he has to alter his daydreams now that the moment is here. His father has died and his mother and wife live alone; he is not rich and does not have a fancy car. It is a stressful few days as he prepares to return.
When he was caught by the Spanish Guardia Civil, he was sent back to Morocco two days later. He spent time hustling in Tangier and crossed again, this time helped by the current. He did a farm job promised to him by one of the smugglers. It was hard work but he was luckier than others.
The airport in Casablanca is impressive, but Aziz is nervous, especially when the officer asks for his national ID card. He does not have it, but the man tells him he can go through and to have it next time.
Outside he notices things such as the trash, the metro area with its factories and apartment buildings, people trying to sell things, and the busy marketplace. He feels nervous, especially as he nears the apartment.
When Zohra opens the door, she embraces him, loosely at first but then tighter. His mother starts crying. The apartment is darker and dingier than he remembers. His mother begins an ululation to let everyone know her son is home. Zohra looks thin and small but still beautiful. She brings him tea. He shows them the gifts he bought them and they exclaim over them.
Within an hour, many visitors come to see Aziz. He tells them what they want to hear, not about his job as a bus boy or how sometimes he is treated like a criminal. Zohra’s mother asks him testily why he works there if his wife is here. He meets Zohra’s eyes. He asks where Lahcen is, and Zohra says he moved to Marrakech since no one buys phone cards anymore.
That evening, Aziz’s mother stays with neighbors so the couple can be alone. Zohra is shy. He is honest with her and tells her he has some savings but it does not seem to be enough to move back; the first year was hard, he had lawyer’s fees, etc. He has to go back to Spain, but he knows how much she has sacrificed for him already. He tells her he is getting ready to start her paperwork. She gets up and gets ready for bed, but sleeps on the other side.
The next morning, Aziz is awakened to the sounds of prayers. He smells Zohra’s cooking and tells her how good it is. A neighbor’s kid, Meriem, comes over to play with Zohra. He sees how much his wife loves the girl. Later Zohra asks him who would take care of his mother if she went to Spain, and he replies his sisters. She then says she cannot speak Spanish, and he says she will learn like he did, and they can talk about it later.
They take the bus to Zohra’s sister Samira’s house to have lunch. Along the way he notices new buildings and how more women seem to be wearing scarves on their heads, even Samira. When he asks when she started wearing it, she says two years ago. He asks why, and it is Zohra who replies that it is the right way. This surprises him. Samira and her husband Mounir ask how long Aziz is staying, and Samira tells Zohra she ought to go with him. Aziz can tell this has planted a seed.
That night, Zohra comes to him and they make love. He feels guilty because he has had sex with other women, but, he reasons, he was lonely and only human. He wonders what Zohra is thinking afterward, wondering if she wants children. He knows he cannot support a family right now.
Aziz and Zohra visit his father’s grave. There, Zohra tells him they need to be together and she will go to Spain. Aziz is not as happy as he expected.
Zohra takes the bus home and he tells her he wants to take a walk. He observes how many men there are everywhere, and realizes it is because none of them have jobs.
His second week in Casablanca is slow and dull. He has seen everyone and cannot do certain things he might like to do, like go to a nightclub.
On the eve of his departure, he brings out some money for Zohra and says it is all he has and he will make more and come back. She looks skeptical. He is annoyed, thinking he cannot give up this opportunity. He has to go back.
When Zohra asks when he is sending the papers, he says he does not know. She begins to cry. He awkwardly consoles her, but he cannot imagine her in Madrid. She is used to her habits and people; he is used to his. His suitcase feels lighter than when he arrived.
The Storyteller
Murad is sitting behind the counter at Botbol Bazaar and Gifts reading a book when two female customers come in. He is working with Anas, both of them tending the shop while the owner is away.
Both women are in their late twenties. He hears one is called Sandy and the other Chrissa. They wander around the shop, Chrissa looking for a gift for her cousin. Sandy tells Chrissa not to seem too interested or “they” will jack up the price.
Murad hears them mention going to Paul Bowles’s house, and he wonders why tourists are still constantly drawn to the man. Maybe it is the mystery about his life, the myth surrounding him, or his stories—Murad only knows he is weary of it. Sandy talks about Bowles as they walk around the shop. Murad hasn’t said anything so he wonders if they think he speaks English or not. Sandy announces that Bowles lived here until his death, and Chrissa remarks that he must have known Morocco well. Sandy says better than the Moroccans themselves.
Murad remembers how his father would sit and tell him and Lamya stories at night. This was before the twins and his youngest brother, before moving to the apartment, before his father died. His father’s voice was deep, strong, and reassuring.
He also thinks of how when he came home after not making it to Spain, he stayed inside for a long time. He was embarrassed, for everyone knew he’d failed. He asked his mother for money to cross again and she told him no, incredulous that he would want to try again. He was tired of spending all his time alone with her, so he jumped at the opportunity to work in Lamya’s husband’s client’s shop. He was grateful, but his mind constantly wandered to what it would have been like if he had been able to stay in Tarifa. He realizes he had “been so consumed with his imagined future that he hadn’t noticed how it had started to overtake something inside him, bit by bit” (177).
The two women ask Anas about a rug. Anas tells them a little bit about it in Spanish, and asks if they want tea. Sandy sighs that they are going to get suckered into buying something so they might as well have tea.
Murad brings out the tea cart and serves the two women. He asks Sandy if she is interested in Paul Bowles and she delightedly says yes, that she loves what a wonderful storyteller he is. Murad asks if he can tell a story, and Sandy says yes.
Murad begins: there was a rug weaver named Ghomari, revered throughout the land. He was in love with a young woman named Jenara who was promised to him. She asked when he would have enough money for her dowry and told him to hurry up. One day Arbo, a grotesque dwarf, saw Jenara. He began to harass her, then told the Sultan about the beautiful woman who was betrothed to a simple rug weaver. The Sultan brought her into his harem, and poor, despairing Ghomari wove a stunningly lifelike piece that he showed her father and his father. Word got out about the piece and people all over came to see it every night. Arbo heard of this as well, so the Sultan threw Ghomari in jail and brought the tapestry to his palace. Jenara did not grieve, so the Sultan assumed she was over him. She told him she wanted a bracelet, so he dispatched Arbo to the jeweler. After Arbo was gone, Jenara went to the Sultan’s bedroom with a knife in her hand. He screamed in fear but his attendants said it was just the tapestry. After they left, Jenara killed him; she and Ghomari had their revenge.
Chrissa and Sandy are suitably impressed by the story, and Chrissa bargains for the rug. After they are gone, Murad thinks it is time to stop telling other stories and tell his own.
Analysis
Aziz and Murad may have started out with commonalities in their situations, but now the glaring reality is their lives are completely divergent. Murad did not make it to Spain and Aziz did. Neither ending is perfect; both struggle with the hand they’ve been dealt, which almost feels arbitrary.
Aziz’s story is one common to those of immigrants. He makes it to the new land and discovers it does not have the sorts of opportunities he expected; regardless, he continues to try to get a foothold there and thus becomes further and further estranged from his former life. In terms of the first point, he works on a farm and then as a busboy, finding it difficult to make enough money to fully support his goals. He avoids telling eager friends and neighbors in Morocco about how he was once “treated as if he were a criminal,” how people’s “eyes always gazed past him as if he were invisible,” and that there were “constant identity checks that the police had performed these last two years” (155). He has to “alter the details of his daydreams” (146) when coming home. Yet he does not feel at ease there anymore, and his earlier plan to return permanently after a certain amount of time has shifted. He has to go back, he tells his family, and while waiting out the duration of his trip, he has trouble connecting with his wife, finds the city dull and simply “[waits] for time to pass” (166), and notices the rundown appearance of his house more than he ever did before. He initially thought he wanted Zohra to come back with him, but after she finally agreed to do so he “didn’t feel the sense of joy he expected” (165). Their relationship is in limbo at the end of Aziz’s story, with him symbolically shutting his suitcase and realizing how much lighter it feels.
Christian H. Ricci argues that Zohra, who is a more minor character in Aziz’s section, is actually the “empowered character in Lalami’s narrative. Zohra outshines [Aziz] by remaining firmly entrenched in her community and finding economic personal fulfillment in her woman role while Aziz is in Spain. Zhora is secure in her community, has strong family support, and is close to her sister. Like Jenara, she is firmly grounded, and she is the daughter of a well-off family who thought that she married beneath her because Aziz was unemployed. She knows that she is technically left behind, but her material and community life will not change substantially with her husband’s departure.” Zohra did agree to go with Aziz, yes, but only reluctantly and after her sister said something. She knew that it was not the right life for her, and although she was upset at the end when Aziz intimated he might not send for her, her fate does not seem as lonely, hollow, and exhausting as her husband’s is likely to be.
As for Murad, he is stuck in Morocco, back at the tourist trade until he is offered a salesman position at a bazaar. Life is still heavy for him, as he has not yet extricated himself from his parents’ house or found a way to define his identity now that he is not a success in Spain. But Murad is willing to interrogate himself, and realizes a painful truth—”He’d been so consumed with his imagined future that he hadn’t noticed how it had started to overtake something inside him bit by bit. He’d been living in the future, thinking of all his tomorrows in a better place, never realizing that his past was drifting” (177-78).
No longer, though, Murad decides. After telling a story he remembered from his childhood, he decides “to write his own” (186). Ricci sums this up: “While in his shopkeeper job, [Murad] has time to read. He then begins to remember his father and grandfather’s stories as well as to concretize his own depictions of his homeland. Significantly, it is after recounting Jenara’s tale for two American girls that Murad realizes ‘he needed to write his own’... culturally centered stories and to reject the poor foreign imitations, like those of Paul Bowles.” Murad decides to embrace who he is, where he is from, and the choice he’s made. He will not privilege the future over the past; he will use his present to find meaning and sustenance.
