Wedding by the Sea     by Abdelkader Benali, Translated by Susan Massotty Original title: Bruiloft aan zee Original language: Dutch Original year: 1996 Published by Arcade Publishing Format: Hardcover, 211 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.95 x 8.57 x 5.78 ISBN: 1559705302 Edition: 1st USA Edition List Price: $23.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $23.95 Published by Phoenix House, London Pub. Date: 1999 Format: 187 pages Not available for ordering Published by Arcade, New York Format: 187 pages Not available for ordering

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This is a Moroccan tale by an author who, like Hafid Bouazza, hails from North Africa but has been living in the Netherlands for most of his life and writes in Dutch. The story line is relatively straightforward, if a trifle bizarre. It consists for the most part of twenty-year-old Lamarat Minar’s taxi ride, in ‘Bucket of Bolts’ Chalid’s taxi, in search of his uncle Mosa, who has disappeared on the day of his wedding to Lamarat’s sister Rebekka. They eventually track Mosa down in Lolita’s Bar, a brothel in Mellila, the Spanish enclave in northern Morocco. Mosa, a good-for-nothing loafer and womanizer barely five years older than Lamarat, had gone there to bid a last farewell to one of the girls. Lamarat brings Mosa back to the enraged bride, who insists on taking Mosa down to the beach near their home village of Touarirt and wreaks a bloody revenge on her unreliable husband.


The story itself, however hilarious and gruesome it may be, is not really what matters, though. The joy is all in the telling, and in the sheer gusto and panache of it. Just as the taxi ride takes Lamarat Minar along a winding mountainous road full of hairpin bends and involves all sorts of detours and checking of rearview mirrors, the narrative moves back and forth in time, employs a range of styles, delights in digressions and keeps its spirits up by foregrounding an energetic, humourous story-telling voice infected with an unstoppable Rushdie-like inventiveness. In this way a richly embroidered picture is painted of a sleepy village sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, with three generations of a family of larger than life characters who themselves thrive on gossip and tall tales.


If Chalid the taxi driver is the local man who hears more gossip and therefore knows more secrets than most of the villagers in the region, young Lamarat actually grew up in ‘Ollanda’ or Holland, where his father went in search of work and perhaps a fortune. Lamarat is and is not part of the local scene. He knows but does not always fully understand the nods and winks by which the locals communicate, or the way in which religion to his compatriots is both deeply serious and a matter of convenience. Wedding by the Sea is not, however, a disquisition on cultural conflict. It is much too good and too outrageously funny for that. It demonstrates by example how different forms of story-telling can co-exist and mingle and produce an utterly engrossing blend.

By the way, the three sisters, who had been looking forward to the wedding and especially to the wedding night ‘How big will the bloodstain be, what colour, and what if he can’t get it up?’ weren’t on hand for the red-letter day because all three of them had died, within a few weeks of each other, before the nuptials could take place. The youngest, thirteen-year-old Batita, was the first to go: bitten by a snake on her virginal Achilles heel the very first time her mother sent her, over her wailing protests, to fetch water at the spring. The second sister, seventeen-year-old Zuleikha, exchanged the temporal for the unknown a week later: she cut her hand on a nail, a nail that had sat in the wall for years, inconspicuous and shy, waiting for her fat fingers and warm blood. ‘Ha, gotcha, you snooty bitch,’ the nail said. Zuleikha was the only one to hear it. The nail was rusty, and she got lockjaw. The third sister, Minora, simply up and died at the ripe young age of nineteen. She passed away quietly, her blanket clutched to her plump body, on a weekday afernoon three weeks after the second sister had died at an hour when the other residents of Iwojen were snoring and siesta-ing. (p. 13-4, tr. Susan Massotty)