The Happy Marriage

Foulane’s jealousy wasn’t incomprehensible. I certainly spent more time with Lalla then I did with him or the children. Which was not unusual considering that every time he saw her he would start shouting at her and insulting her, which I couldn’t stand. He was just like all those other bourgeois men he frequented, who were all prejudiced against her because she’d dared to divorce her husband because he didn’t satisfy her and was almost always absent. They had managed to separate without any acrimony and were still friends. I too would have liked for my marriage to end like that. But my husband was a grotesque man who thrived in conflicts and wanted to control everything to suit his own ends. Lalla had understood all that. More perceptive than any psychiatrist, she had seen through to our biggest mistake: that we’d decided to continue our relationship which had actually been doomed from the start.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Lalla was wonderful. There were five other women, all of whom had been disappointed by marriage and betrayed by their chauvinistic husbands. All of these women were looked down on by Casablanca’s petty-bourgeois society. We would meet and share our problems, trying to analyze them. Lalla would burn some incense, put some nice Indian music on the stereo, and we would sit there contemplating one another in the warm glow of our friendship.

Lalla, who’d been born into a large family that could claim its descent from the Prophet Mohammed, had a gift for eloquence and knew how to open up our senses. We would sit in a circle around her and listen to her in silence, pierced by the truth that rang out of her words:

We are here to allow our energies to combine, to merge, to channel what is best in our souls into our collective soul so we can then walk hand in hand down the path of our primal wisdom, freeing our humanity from minds that no longer trouble us. We sit here in our purity, refusing to let in the weight of others’ selfishness, those who see us as fields to plough, or incubators, or inferior beings who are meant to submit and resign themselves. Sisters, it’s time for us to be free and we have to keep our ears pricked to listen to that freedom’s rhythm and song. We are energy, and our positive waves can repel the negative ones cast out by our enemies. We are not objects enslaved to their desires, we are not objects at all, we are living energies climbing toward the summits of the highest mountains, where the air is as pure as the contents of our hearts and souls. We are on the right path, we won’t submit ourselves any longer to men who think they are strong, we won’t allow ourselves to be humiliated by their demands any longer, or to be sacrificed on the altars of their ambitions. The freedom of our energy is in our hands, the sensuality of our energy is in our hands, the beauty of truth is in our hands, so let us take charge of them and use them to eradicate our fears, our shame, our submission, our resignation, our conformity. Our energies will meet, converse, and propel us forward in a liberating momentum. Yes, we’ve freed ourselves, freed ourselves for good. Let us walk ahead without looking back, because the men who exploit us know we’ve become stronger than them and are ready to take our destinies, lives, and energies into our own hands.