Interview: Richard Hamilton
Wednesday November 16, 2011
What started as a routine BBC assignment for journalist Richard Hamilton turned into what he calls “an obsession” with the work of the hlaykia, Morocco’s marketplace storytellers. The Society for Storytelling talks to the author of The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco.
Over three years BBC journalist Richard Hamilton collected stories from Marrakech’s traditional hlaykia, the elderly men who make their livings telling stories amid the cacophony of the market squares. What started as an assignment for the BBC World Service 
became a fascination as he tracked down what he discovered was a fast-vanishing generation of men.
With the help of a translator, Hamilton set about recording the stories told by five of Morocco’s master storytellers, without exception, elderly men at the end of their career. He has transcribed and edited thirty-seven of these stories in a powerful new collection The Last Storytellers, Tales from the Heart of Morocco. As he did so he became aware that he was witnessing the end of a millennium old tradition.
The fact that each story is gathered from one of these living tellers, told in darkened rooms, warm varandas and bustling streets, gives us a poignant sense of connection to Morocco’s vanishing storytelling tradition. “The death of the storyteller has not made front-page news,” Hamilton writes in the book’s introduction. “If someone, were, for example, to go into a famous library such as the Bodleian, in Oxford, and set fire to all its books and manuscripts, we would rightly be aghast… But because the decline in Moroccan storytelling is a tale of gradual erosion, it has passed almost unnoticed.”
“It is fortunate therefore,” adds travel writer Barnaby Rogerson in his preface, “that someone with the imagination and patience of Richard Hamilton is at hand to catch some of this tradition as it falls into the abyss of the forgotten. Let us pray that this book is no more than a bridge to a continuing tradition, and that it will help inspire a new generation of apprentices to learn the craft of storytelling and continue the enchantment.”
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Tell us about what set you of writing this book…
It was the end of 2006 was when I first met them. I was doing a report for the BBC about the storytellers but I didn't know much about them. I met someone who was involved in trying to record their stories for the internet for UNESCO and I thought that would be a nice story to do for the BBC, though actually the UNESCO project lost momentum and faded away. But then when I sat down with one of [the storytellers] – Moulay Mohamed El Jabri – I was swept away by the power of the experience – even though I don’t speak Arabic. Later on I found that there were fewer and fewer of them performing. Of the five I interviewed only one is still performing now. The others are retired.
It’s interesting that you met them because of the internet. In the introduction you suggest that it’s partly a kind of fundamentalism of new media that’s the reason why these stories are disappearing.
It’s my theory – others have suggested this as well – that we are obsessed by modern technology and social networking sites and computer games and television to the point where we struggle to sit down for an hour or so to listen. In Morocco there’s a big black market in DVDs that are burned from one master. You can buy them in the souks. And people would rather sit and watch action packed Hollywood movies than take the trouble to listen to a storyteller. I don’t want to sound like an old technophobe, but I think it’s a shame that we’ve lost that ability to sit down and listen to stories. That said, I was just sitting down and looking at your website and I don’t think we’ve completely lost it. But I do feel that modern technology has affected our concentration span.
You start the book with The Red Lantern, the first story you heard. But in the introduction you say you interrupted the storyteller half way through to interview him, and when you came back a year later desperate to hear the end of the story you discovered that Moulay Mohamed El Jabri was apparently gravely ill.
In a way that's a bit of a morality tale for myself, a lesson to take a bit more time and to have a bit more patience. I think it's something that I've learned from Morocco... I did a piece for From Our own Correspondent when I was leaving Morocco and it was all about how you have to wait – as you do in all African countries. The sense of time is much less urgent. I just found that I was always waiting for something and then I realised that that was no bad thing. We're always in such a rush in Western societies. The other day I was standing on the platform on the central line and it said, ‘Next Train 4 minutes’. And I thought ‘Bloody hell, four minutes!’
In somewhere like sub-Saharan Africa, if the bus doesn't come today it'll come tomorrow, insh’Allah. And that's something I learned the hard way that. I was stuck between two different worlds, having my deadlines as a journalist. After a while I began to enjoy the more fluid situation where you can also sit and watch and listen. That’s something that’s wonderful about the storytelling experience. In the old days some of the storytellers could read Islamic texts or myths and the story could go on for a year. And people would sit down for a couple of hours – maybe even five hours – every day for a year. That shows an amazing commitment. No one would do that now. Even the Moroccans are in a hurry. There’s a different sense of time you get when you sit down and listen to stories. I think I talked about that when I wrote about the old blind storyteller [Ahmed Temiicha] I tracked down in the old Jewish quarter…
You mention that connection between blindness and storytelling, that maybe if you tell the some of the epics they are so long that by the end of the story you will go blind yourself…
Yes, that’s right. And when I listened to him I lost track of time for a bit. He was blind, the room was dark and I was just listening to that hypnotic voice and I was almost transported out of myself…
And you were listening through a translator?
Yes I worked with a translator. I was very lucky and found a guy who was happy to work together with me on the whole project. In fact it was his idea to do a book so I owe him a lot.
The Red Lantern [which Hamilton finally got to hear in its compete form from Moulay Mohamed Al Jabri] is a nicely symmetrical story with a twist. Some of them are very strange to Western ears though. The Queen and the King, the Son of Amelkani [told by Mustapha Kha Layoun] for instance, has all these strange layers which suddenly appear…
I know. There’s one called Aicha Rmada [told by Mustpaha Khal Layoun] which is a bit like Cinderella and goes on in a very predictable way; she goes to the ball and loses a slipper and the Prince Charming looks for her, but then you get this sudden jolt at the end when a revenge theme appears and Aicha chops the head off the evil stepsister. It’s all very gory and surprising to a modern Western aurience. But then Grimms fairy stories are quite gory – the same with Shakespeare. I don't think the Moroccan stories are any more gory, but you're right, some of them do give you a jolt. With Amelkani it is almost difficult to follow its twists.
A lot of the stories are a kind of morality tale that says you don’t have to be rich or powerful to do well in life if you’re honest. The storytellers are performing to ordinary people who are often poor, even today, so the stories are a fantasy in which, if you’re honest or good, God will favour you. That’s what a lot of stories are about. But some are just plain weird... But I hope that mix in the book gives you a flavour of Morocco. Some are quite poetic. The last one
The Pomegranate and the Talking Drum [a murderer betrayed by a talking drum made from the victim’s skin] is quite strange. The Birth of The Sahara [each grain of sand made by a lie] is very short, but I think that’s a lovely one. I wouldn’t say I had to embellish them, but I did have to polish them up a bit because my translator didn’t speak very good English.
Have you enjoyed the experience of becoming a storyteller through the book?
Definitely. I’m going to promote the book in Marrakesh in January. I also attended a storytelling festival in Jordan to talk about my book and met a lot of North African storytellers – even an Irish storyteller. It was great finding that there’s a lot of overlaps – that stories crop up in different parts of the world. It's been a real creative part of my life. I’ve never written a book before and it allowed me to escape my normal life, just like the storytelling experience. So I loved it.
Was there a sense of duty involved, collecting these stories? That you were burdened with a task?
No. If anything it was the other way. I saw it as a complete escape from my normal life. I became obsessed with it. It became my calling, to record as many stories as I could. I was posted there with the BBC for a year, from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007, but then I carried on for about three years, going back to Marrakesh and I really cherished those trips. I’d go back with Ahmed [Tija] my translator and find another storyteller and we’d spend very pleasant hours with just a cup of tea, building up trust and friendships. Because they would have been approached by people who were like I was at the start, you know, making a commando raid. ‘I just want to get the story and get out again’. So no, I didn’t see it as a burden at all. The more you go back, the more you get the taste for it. It had its frustrations, and it was quite hard work, and we didn’t always find the right people, but I really enjoyed it.
Photos: From top, Moulay Mohamed El Jabri, Ahmed Temiicha, Mustapha Khal Layoun, Abderrahim El Makkouri.
The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco by Richard Hamilton is publsihed by I. B. Taurus.
For more information, see www.richard-hamilton.com