Hafid, the main character in this collection of colourful, often bizarre stories, grows up in a village in the mountains of Morocco. He does all the exciting and unpleasant things boys habitually get up to, and more. After his father’s death he takes over his shop. Eventually he goes off to live in Amsterdam for a time but returns to his native Morocco for a traditional Muslim wedding.


Hafid’s name is mentioned only once, in passing, and he is not the main figure in all the stories. What we have, therefore, is more a series of vignettes depicting a local community in North Africa, its desperate struggle to maintain a semblance of order and dignity and the young men’s floundering, impish attempts to find a place for themselves in a world dominated by religion and ceremonial authority. The overcrowded parental home, the remote father, the larger-than-life local eccentrics, the strong sense of ritual, the conspiratorial bonds between the youngsters and their illicit sexual adventures, all are described with obvious, mischievous delight.


The supernatural constantly makes itself felt in the humdrum lives of these village people. Curses are for real and when someone is changed into a tree, that is exactly what happens. The modern and the traditional coexist but, contrary to what we might have expected, the one does not replace the other. The collection opens with a story about the grandfather and his boy slave, but Hafid’s move to Amsterdam does not stand for his transition into modernity; it’s simply another adventure, a clash of cultures and climates and sexual mores.


The real hero of these stories is not Hafid, nor any of his cronies, but the author’s extraordinary style. Even though Abdullah’s Feet is Hafid Bouazza’s debut, the collection as a whole, and each story in it, is beautifully paced and shot through with irony and humour. Again and again Bouazza conjures up vivid images and strikingly visual metaphors, coining new words as he sees fit, and keeping his readers on their toes with the unusual twists and turns of his brief but utterly engrossing narratives.


Hafid Bouazza’s family hails from Morocco, and he is one of a new generation of writers (Abdelkader Benali is another) who write in Dutch but have their roots in more than one culture. The added dimension brings genuine enrichment.

One day, during the siesta, there was a sudden call for prayer. The muezzin made his summons with such strident insistence that even the old folk, for whom the siesta was sacred, were rudely awakened and made for the mosque without preliminary ablutions. The hungry dogs in the street froze, a hind leg pof grave sadness. The good men of our government had long been striving to curb wantonnes and loose behaviour, especially among women, who were most susceptible to the nefarious influences menacing Moslems. The government was vigorously engaged in abolishing every activity or object that might excite the female imagination. A major decision had now been reached: the first of many that would follow. For reasons that did not require further explanation, it was henceforth forbidden for women to either purchase or handle cucumbers and aubergines. (p 48-9, tr. Ina Rilke)