I do not have much to say about literature other than that I have many works of English, American and Irish fiction, as well as translated European literature on my shelves, and have certain likes and dislikes. I have read the Bible and Homer many times, so I declare the Odyssey to be the first “psychological novel.”
I like Shakespeare, Edgar Alan Poe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Borges and George Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien. I like Conrad most of all (and he was Polish). I like Flaubert and I am a stalwart Conan Doyle fan.
I have read many examples of British, American and post WWII Canadian poetry from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot and beyond. I have also read the two volumes of criticism by Northrop Frye who argued that the Bible has provided most of the archetypes underlying the last thousand years of English literature. Because of my interest in Morocco, I have read all the American writer Paul Bowles’ novels, short stories, and most of his essays.
One day, not so long ago, I felt inspired to write my own short story about a Moroccan oasis dweller and his smuggling activities across the Algerian/Moroccan border. I have now written more than twenty Moroccan stories and there are more to come.
They are told from the point of view of an Israeli who has been recently appointed Cultural Attache of the State of Israel to the Kingdom of Morocco. I started these stories three years ago when I was sixty-eight.
For the first time in my life, I have come to understand from the inside out what writers have often described as “characters that come alive in the writing.” As my stories include a group of Moroccans and Israelis who work together daily, I find the back story and dialogue of some of them astounding. Their words and dialogue often just jump off the page.
I have much to learn from these characters, as they explain to me the intricacies of Moroccan culture. The most exasperating and enlightening of them is my main character’s cook, a Berber Riffian woman who tells us what it feels like to be a non-literate Moroccan woman in the 21st century. No doubt my unconscious mind has sublimated so much of what I have read about Moroccan ethnography and in newspapers that it emerges unexpectedly in these tales. It is a strange and wonderful experience.
I am grateful to the muses for allowing me to tell these tales. I never thought I would become a writer of fiction, but it has finally answered a question I have often asked myself of why I went to Morocco so many years ago. It turns out that I was looking for good stories. It just took a little time.