Committed to Memory:

Haj Hamed Britel 235 Qla'a

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates. — Patricia Hampl

I can never remember things I did not understand in the first place. — Amy Tan

From the hillside above the city of Sefrou, alongside the saintly shrine of Sidi IAli Bouseghine, it is just possible, in the quiet of the early morning, to imagine Morocco as it was a little over a century ago — before there was a single paved road, before most people had ever seen a European, before electricity or artificial light or the sound of the internal combustion engine. There, with the wind that slopes down the escarpment of the Middle Atlas Mountains carrying away the smell of diesel and the noise of motorized traffic, much of contemporary life seems to dissipate, and the contours of the land seem to bear witness to an earlier form of human imprint. At such a moment, in the slanting morning light, you can often see the glimmer of the river as it cuts through the town, discern the outline of the walls of the old city, and describe the limits of the irrigated gardens before they were overrun by urban expansion. And if, as the sun climbs steadily in the distance, you follow the rim of the hills, past the pilgrims' hotel and the site of the old French fort, past the gravel diggings and restive goats, to peer down the edge of the hillside, you will also see, nestled along the river, the backs of its multistoried houses forming an ancient wall, its narrow streets intermittently visible, the small enclave known as the Qlala. Urban in its own right, yet with one eye cast toward its rural hinterland, the Qlala, when I first saw it in the mid-1960s, had, notwithstanding the many years he worked in the coastal city of Safi, been the home — or at least the home base — for more than seventy years of Haj Hamed ben Muhammad Britel.

We met over lunch at the home of Clifford and Hildred Geertz, with whom I overlapped a couple of months at the beginning of my fieldwork. They had heard from one of the Haj's distant relatives that he was particularly knowledgeable about the history of Sefrou and, by virtue of his many years living in one of the coastal cities, of Morocco as a whole. I can picture him perfectly that first day, for though I had only been in Morocco a short time and was still groping for my way in Arabic, I was instantly smitten with the Haj's boyish enthusiasm, the extraordinary warmth of his slightly sardonic smile, and the way he casually scattered cigarette ash as he gestured his way through a lively story. When, some time later, I began to work with him and to know him, it was as if I had received the gift of a grandfather I had never known as a man.

We began to meet every few days at his home in the Qlala. I would make my way up the narrow streets to the ancient house at number 235, where he and his wife, the Haja, and their daughter-in-law and her children lived. Like all such houses, its interior was totally hidden from the street, its windo