Tétouan

Tétouan is the destination of Hacine Bouali’s forced stay in Morocco, a place where family duty and a hoped-for reform give way to an unexpected beginning in the drug trade. The city is framed less as a settled home than as the setting for a failed family project and a sharp reversal in Hacine’s fortunes.

Arrival and the unfinished house

Two years before a later drive home, Hacine and his father, Malek Bouali, traveled to Morocco with their car crammed with goods: perfume, coffee, soap, clothes for younger cousins, and Levi’s to resell. During the ferry crossing, Malek cut his son’s hair and prepared new clothes and leather shoes for him. On arrival, Hacine’s mother embraced him while the wider family waited nearby; he felt embarrassed and judged their appearance with youthful disdain.

The trip brought them to the construction site of the house Malek had been having built for years, but it remained unfinished. Partly framed walls, exposed pipes, and steel rods made the project look absurd. The workers blamed delays on time, weather, and permits, while Malek recognized that he had not stayed to supervise. The roofless structure stood as a material sign of the family’s separation: Malek lived in France, far from his wife, and, as Hacine’s recollection puts it, lived like a bachelor.

A destination assigned as punishment

After police detained Hacine for five hours over the motorcycle affair, finding only a few bars of hashish and a knife hidden in his bed springs, he left the station without speaking and was released. The next day, Malek announced that they were going to Tétouan. When Malek later returned to France, he left Hacine responsible for looking after his mother and supervising the construction. Hacine promised, though he would have preferred his father to stay and handle the work himself. Malek’s threat to kill him if he failed carried little force for Hacine: it had been repeated too often to retain its weight.

The journey itself binds Tétouan to a long, exhausting passage between countries. Hacine and Malek stocked the car with large tricolor bags and drove for two days, sleeping for only three or four poor hours at a rest stop near Perpignan. Hacine remembered the semis moving between France and Spain, their headlights sweeping over the night. The recollection makes the destination feel distant and provisional, reached through labor and fatigue rather than through any confident sense of return.

Exile turned into opportunity

Hacine had visited Morocco during summer vacations before, but had kept away from local life. Now stuck there, he began to see the economic system beneath its apparent inertia. His account widens beyond Tétouan to the cannabis economy of the Rif, where resin production and trafficking supported people at many levels, from wholesalers and officials to street dealers. The place Malek had chosen to reform his son thus opened onto an economy that Hacine saw as both pervasive and profitable.

His cousin Driss gave him a few dozen grams to sell to tourists, and Hacine began with small-scale street dealing. He used the proceeds to buy his first kilo and then invested in shipments bound for France and Germany. The contrast between business and domestic life is striking: he could count dollars and francs while sitting down to an ordinary family dinner, with his mother asking whether he wanted more vegetables. The intended reform had produced its opposite.

The location’s reversal

Hacine measures his new position against the working life of his parents. The drug business still required him to find supply, cut, package, and resell, but its irregular pace offered more flexibility than fixed hours and repetitive work. He regarded transporting drugs as carrying a hint of adventure, and his earnings far exceeded what his father had once made in six months. Tétouan therefore becomes associated not with the discipline Malek intended, but with Hacine’s improvised rise and his temporary feeling of autonomy.

That freedom remains compromised by the circumstances surrounding it: Hacine is in Morocco because his father sent him away, carries responsibility for his mother and the stalled house, and makes money through an illicit trade whose ordinary routines echo industrial labor even as its tempo differs. The city’s narrative significance lies in this reversal. A destination presented as a place of correction becomes the setting for a new livelihood, while the unfinished house preserves the unresolved family obligation that Hacine’s apparent escape cannot erase.