Medina of Meknès

The Medina of Meknès becomes both a physical refuge and an interior battleground in the narrator’s account of his wartime stay in Meknès. He wanders through its unfamiliar streets to escape the voice of his mother, whose call to continue the fight follows him through the city; the crowds and sensory abundance offer distraction, but only fleeting freedom from her influence.

Setting and Atmosphere

The narrator remembers the Medina as a world newly opened to him, an “exotic sea” of colors, sounds, and smells. Its crowded, shifting life stands in contrast to the urgent political struggle occupying his thoughts: he tries to lose himself in unfamiliar impressions while his mother’s voice continues to summon him to battle. The Medina is not merely a backdrop to his distress. Its bustle gives him somewhere to wander, pause, and attempt to recover a sense of physical well-being.

In the bazaars, he studies leatherwork and metalwork, bending over the wares as merchants watch from their counters, seated cross-legged with chibouks between their lips. The air, as he recalls it, carries the odors of hashish, incense, and mint. He also sits in Moorish cafés, smoking cigars and drinking green tea, hoping that bodily comfort might steady his troubled spirits. These deliberate stops slow his wandering, but they do not silence the voice he carries with him.

Wandering and Escape

The narrator tries to make the city’s varied spaces serve as an escape from his mother’s commanding presence. He visits the red-light district, though he says he does not yet know that he will soon undergo what he considers the most abject adventure of his life there. In the Medina’s cafés and bazaars, meanwhile, his mother seems to follow him everywhere, and her imagined commentary turns even sightseeing into a reproach over the condition of France and his failure, as he hears it, to embody the Frenchman she expected him to become.

At times he abruptly leaves a café and plunges into a side lane among veiled women, beggars, hawkers, donkeys, and soldiers. The swift flow of people and impressions can momentarily overwhelm the voice: on one or two occasions, he manages to give his mother the slip. The respite is brief, and the narration makes clear that physical distance from her is not the same as freedom from her presence.

Route, Memory, and Significance

The Medina also serves as a point of passage. Later, after deciding to hide from military patrols and eventually make his way toward Casablanca, the narrator gets off a bus in the Medina and proceeds to Meknès Bousbir, the separate, walled red-light district he has chosen as a place to go unnoticed. The distinction matters: the Medina is the route into this next episode, while the intended hiding place is the enclosed district beyond it.

In retrospect, the hours of solitary wandering acquire a deeper significance. The narrator believes that his mother’s nature prevailed over what was still weak and irresolute in him: her violence, aggressiveness, theatricality, and excess became qualities he recognized in himself, contributing to his reputation among comrades and superiors as a hothead. The Medina thus records not a clean break from his mother but a paradoxical change: he searches its crowds for release from her, yet comes to understand her influence as having entered his own character.