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Authors: Mois Benarroch
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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.
But that was not enough, they wanted more, my complete self-denial, my disappearance, my nature. My own name and my self-being. My denial also denied me my manhood and my relationships with women ended without an erection. I had become a shadow of myself and I believed that I could survive. Then I met my wife who saved me from the abyss, from that last step that I couldn't take without falling in too deep, without dying, either physically or metaphorically. I was on the edge of the abyss and I couldn't see it, nor did I know it, and besides I thought it was the right road to follow to be an Israeli. Literature might have saved me, luck, love, and from there I began a long journey back to my name and to my Morocco. I am one of the few survivors of this shipwreck and the commanders who sank the boat want to annihilate me.
Without realizing, a few years ago I became the new Erez Biton, who must be destroyed to be accepted in meetings, some change sidewalks when they see me, old friends pretend they don't know me, and the Ashkenazim say that I've written some good poems but that I'm a racist. Because being a racist in my country is saying that Ashkenazim exist. The Ashkenazim spend their days talking about the Sephardim and how they are, but they don't accept that anyone defines them as a group. Only the non-Ashkenazim exist. Once, they called them Bnei Edot Hamizraj literally the sons of the tribes of the East, and we still don't know which East they meant, like the Indian tribes in the Americas that were later called Eastern, sometimes Arab Jews, Sephardic, and other names considered derogatory, and Zionism always confirmed their hatred of the primitive East. In one sentence they would state the need to create a country that is not like the Arab countries, to later say that the Sephardim want an Arab country and continue by suggesting that they have to remove such ideas from their head, for their own good. The Ashkenazim want to save us from ourselves and from our history and our culture and the best way to get there is by making us poor, not giving us any kind of education and creating a new Israeli. An Israeli who knows very well that the Ashkenazi looks down on those poor Moors who do not understand what is right for them.
That's why now I want to return to the Eighties, but I go back to 1972, to that month of August, between two continents, between Ceuta and Algeciras, between two seas, two worlds. And I can't recall that boat, that prow, the wood, those two hours between the two lands, I have lost those hours, they have disappeared from my mind, and between them it's like going from one world to another, from a wooden to a crystal landscape. From Africa to Europe and from Europe to Asia, where Herzl suggested creating a European avant-garde, and
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.
But that was not enough, they wanted more, my complete self-denial, my disappearance, my nature. My own name and my self-being. My denial also denied me my manhood and my relationships with women ended without an erection. I had become a shadow of myself and I believed that I could survive. Then I met my wife who saved me from the abyss, from that last step that I couldn't take without falling in too deep, without dying, either physically or metaphorically. I was on the edge of the abyss and I couldn't see it, nor did I know it, and besides I thought it was the right road to follow to be an Israeli. Literature might have saved me, luck, love, and from there I began a long journey back to my name and to my Morocco. I am one of the few survivors of this shipwreck and the commanders who sank the boat want to annihilate me.
Without realizing, a few years ago I became the new Erez Biton, who must be destroyed to be accepted in meetings, some change sidewalks when they see me, old friends pretend they don't know me, and the Ashkenazim say that I've written some good poems but that I'm a racist. Because being a racist in my country is saying that Ashkenazim exist. The Ashkenazim spend their days talking about the Sephardim and how they are, but they don't accept that anyone defines them as a group. Only the non-Ashkenazim exist. Once, they called them Bnei Edot Hamizraj literally the sons of the tribes of the East, and we still don't know which East they meant, like the Indian tribes in the Americas that were later called Eastern, sometimes Arab Jews, Sephardic, and other names considered derogatory, and Zionism always confirmed their hatred of the primitive East. In one sentence they would state the need to create a country that is not like the Arab countries, to later say that the Sephardim want an Arab country and continue by suggesting that they have to remove such ideas from their head, for their own good. The Ashkenazim want to save us from ourselves and from our history and our culture and the best way to get there is by making us poor, not giving us any kind of education and creating a new Israeli. An Israeli who knows very well that the Ashkenazi looks down on those poor Moors who do not understand what is right for them.
That's why now I want to return to the Eighties, but I go back to 1972, to that month of August, between two continents, between Ceuta and Algeciras, between two seas, two worlds. And I can't recall that boat, that prow, the wood, those two hours between the two lands, I have lost those hours, they have disappeared from my mind, and between them it's like going from one world to another, from a wooden to a crystal landscape. From Africa to Europe and from Europe to Asia, where Herzl suggested creating a European avant-garde, and
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