Issue 9: July – Sept. 2025

The rays of the setting sun colored the walls of Hawikuh an orange color, the color of the gold that the servants of empire so desperately sought and so rarely renounced. Of all the places I had visited in the Land of the Indians, none looked to me so much like my hometown in Barbary, with its houses huddled together against the light. I thought of Azemmur in the spring, when the fig trees bloom and the fields are a sea of green and white. How I longed to see those fields again, to lie in them and listen to the humming of the bees, to swim in the Umm er-Rbi again, to sit on a boulder at the edge of the river and watch the shad swim against the current. How I longed to lay eyes upon my mother, to visit my father’s grave and whisper a prayer for his soul, to sit by my uncle’s side as he built chests or divans. How I longed to be woken in the morning by the call of the muezzin, to be tempted to go back to sleep, and then to feel my brother’s hands gently shake me awake. None of these things would be mine again, but if my destiny had been to travel west and see this vast, mysterious, beautiful land, perhaps it would be my child’s destiny to travel in the opposite direction and see my homeland, which will seem just as vast, just as mysterious, just as beautiful to him – or will it be her? In my mind, I could almost hear my childhood self intone, together with the other boys in the msid, our bodies moving forward and back to the rhythm of Qur’anic verses, that to God belong the east and the west. Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God.