The Storyteller of Marrakesh - Book Review

“Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be.” – Epictetus

Joydeep Ray-Bhattacharya’s The Storyteller of Marrakesh begins with the proposition that there is no truth, only opinions and their diversity. Hassan, the story-teller and the first person in his narrative, states as much when he ploclaims – “Truth is that which inevitably contradicts itself. Perhaps that is what is borne out by my story in the end. That might explain why, instead of the truth, I offer you a greater consolation: a dream.”

This Hassan is more than a mere narrator – he is a guide, a witness, a showman, a chronicler of Moroccan legend and folklore. His stage is the central square of Marrakesh, Djemaa el Fna, where the myriad wonders of this great city surround and inspire him. “All around me the city spreads out its wares — its many narratives — and I survey them as if from a high place.” It is this vantage point of his – this high round, if you will – that allows him to gather and nourish the raw materials integral to his craft: “It is a landscape filled with allegories, where the imagination is law, and storytellers can spend entire days resuscitating mysteries.”

On this night, however, Hassan is concerned with only one mystery: the story of a foreign couple, a beautiful French-American woman and her Indian partner, who vanished from the square one evening a few years earlier. What happened to them, he wonders out aloud. Were they abducted? Were they killed? Were they naïve and reckless, wandering among the kif-smokers and other unruly miscreants of the night? Were they seeking personal escape, the beginning to oblivion? It is not Hassan’s intention to give a one-person view of the crime (if indeed a crime had been committed) – repeatedly yielding the floor to his audience (who range from fortune-tellers to acrobats, body-builders to tribesmen, merchants to musicians), he succeeds in stitching together a pattern of riddles and truth and memory, hearsay and rumour, art and imagination. “Perhaps only a single thread separates us from the truth,” he declares, “or perhaps an entire ream, but we will know for certain only when we look at the whole weave.” As the evening blends into night, the fabric of the story is increasingly frayed by the members of the audience themselves, as their differing accounts circle around and subvert one another.

Roy-Bhattacharya’s use of folk music is commendable, as is made clear when the fate of the woman in Hassan’s story takes a turn for the worse – “Girl of fire / Girl of fire / Made for my arms / Made for my desires / I have waited for you / I have waited so long / Now all is lost / Now all is shattered. // Now you have hurt me / Now you have ruined me / What choice have you left me / But to stab you through the heart?” The pictures he paints with words are also quite appealing - “Deep in the Mellah, in a dark room criss-crossed with silence, a one-eyed poet was putting the finishing touches to a song about sadness. The first line: What is life, after all, but a passing fancy?” Mustafa – Hassan’s imprisoned brother – and his love for the foreign beauty, which subsequently compels him to make a huge sacrifice, is deeply touching.

Much as the stories-within-stories are aimed at resembling an intricate miniaturist design, perhaps the number of interruptions & digressions are too many – as a result, it often tests the reader’s patience. Also, one cannot help but feel that the story has perhaps overstayed its welcome – it could’ve been much more crisp, without having to lose any of its essential plot points. (Having read Omair Ahmad’s The Storyteller’s Tale, The Storyteller of Marrakesh seems but a poor man’s version of the same.)

And so, as the differing accounts circle around and subvert one another, Hassan begins to stitch together a larger pattern of riddles about truth and memory, art and imagination. As Mustafa, Hassan’s imprisoned brother, who may have been involved in the couple’s disappearance, beseeches him: “Make my story into a fable, Hassan, as only you can.”

And that is what, in the end, The Story­teller of Marrakesh is: an enigmatic fable in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights, an extended examination of its own narrative powers in which the stories within the stories come to resemble an intricate, miniaturist design. The many interruptions and digressions can test the reader’s patience, but it is the evocation of place that truly animates the novel. The Djemaa el Fna is alive in a way many of the characters themselves are not — it is multidimensional, both metaphor and microcosm.