Talking Location With …. author Jane Johnson – MOROCCO

15th August 2023

#TalkingLocationWith... Jane Johnson, author of The Black Crescent, set in MOROCCO.

My new novel, THE BLACK CRESCENT, starts in the village of Tiziane, in the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It’s an oasis settlement, a crossroads for trade from the Sahara to the coast; from the Berber heartland of Morocco, with its mountain villages, semi-arid plains, and the desert dunes to the more developed and modern north of the country.

Oh wait, I’m describing the small town of Tafraout! Well, it’s no secret, Tiziane is closely based on Tafraout, the place where, over eighteen years ago, I went to climb a mountain, got benighted on it in subzero temperatures, and met a Berber tribesman called Abdel, whom I would marry six months later. So it’s a place very close to my heart, whose people, landscape, and culture I know intimately, and I hope that comes across in the setting for the novel.

Tafraout is what Moroccans call a little paradise, and it’s where a lot of them retire after working away in the cities – in Casablanca, Rabat, and Marrakech. It’s situated on the edge of a rift valley – the Ammelne Valley – with quartzite cliffs that rear up in shades of umber and red that shift with the changing spectrums of light, going from dark and forbidding in the early morning to a luminous scarlet as the late afternoon sun strikes the rock faces, to violet hues as the sun sets and night falls. Along the base of this valley lie dozens of small villages, clinging to the foothills, girdled around by orchards and fields, where pure water running down from the mountains feeds sacred streams that never dry up, even in the hottest summer days, when the temperature can hit 50°C, even in the midst of climate change that has brought desertification to every doorstep.

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Palm trees proliferate. These are date palms: you’ll see bright orange clusters of the fruit hanging high amongst the fronds, and they are still harvested the traditional way – specialist climbers scale the trunks using just a leather strap.

Above Tafraout lies the high granite plateau, dotted with argan trees (whence comes the wondrous nutty argan oil), cactus and ancient wells, where nomad flocks are watered and where gazelles and jackals come to drink. Climbers flock to Tafraout from all over the world to climb huge quartzite mountain pitches, or to solve problems of gravity on the complexly technical granite boulders. And it’s a walkers’ paradise. Abdel and I would start each day before he went off to run his restaurant with a long walk up into the hills, or across the plain, and if we were very lucky, we would see gazelles, ears twitching alertly, or herds of wild donkeys, or if not so lucky, the wild boar, who come down into the town every night to scavenge from the bins. Once, before a royal visit, the local council had all the roundabouts planted up with the flowers. The boars descended from the mountains that very night and scoffed the lot! After that, new flowers were planted, and a guard with a gun was set on each roundabout to scare them off – boars are very good for employment!

Here, you will find true Berber culture – the indigenous people of Morocco – known in their own language as the Amazigh – the Free People. They speak Tachelhit – the local Berber dialect, a language suppressed by the invading Romans, then the invading Arabs, and till recently kept alive only orally. It’s fiendishly hard to learn. My attempts to converse have generally made locals laugh, and after one such misunderstanding, I came away from the grocer’s with six eggs rather than a pack of butter.

The local women still wear the tamelhaft or haik – a length of black fabric wound around and around themselves at an angle, to show off the embroidered edges.

You’ll still see people coming to the market riding sidesaddle on a donkey, and I once experienced a culture shock when working on our roof terrace, sending emails to agents in New York while across from me my elderly neighbour was threshing her wheat. But don’t be fooled into thinking Tafraout is a backwater. Even when I first moved there, it had better Internet connectivity than I currently enjoy in Cornwall! Everyone has at least two mobile phones, and you’ll often see women walking around talking into a fold of their headscarf, where nestles their iPhone.

Hamou Badi, the protagonist of THE BLACK CRESCENT, is wrested out of this haven to work as a policeman in the city of Casablanca in 1955, the shining white Art Deco city built by the French regime, just as the Moroccan independence movement is reaching its violent zenith. The social brutalities of his life there contrast sharply with his upbringing in Tiziane, with its folklore and superstitions, its ancient and timeless ways of life. Like Tafraout itself – and like me when I’m living there – he is caught between two worlds.

Jane Johnson

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