Berber New Year

Berber New Year is celebrated on 13th January and dates from the year 950BC and the time of the Berber pharaoh Shoshenq – which means that it is currently 2965. Spending half my year living in a Berber village in a country which follows Arabic custom in which the current year is 1435, and the other half in England, I often feel as if I am straddling different time zones.

Morocco is like this at the best of times – part medieval, part ultra-modern, even futuristic: it’s not an unusual sight to see an old man coming into the weekly market sitting sidesaddle on his donkey with one of his two mobile phones pressed to his ear. And everywhere you go in Morocco, no matter if they’re working in the fields or in IT, people will talk of, and believe in, the ‘djenoun’.

Djinns are spirits of smokeless fire, creatures that existed before human beings came into existence. They are sometimes malevolent, sometimes beneficent, almost always mischievous, living a parallel existence alongside us, with their own families and domestic animals, their own beliefs and concerns.

13th January marks the start of the agricultural year, in accordance with the old pastoral traditions that pre-date Islam. On the eve of the festival it is the custom in Berber villages to make ‘orkimen’ as a sort of thanksgiving meal. Orkimen is basically a sort of porridge, with a little of everything thrown in: a bit of all the cereals, pulses, herbs and oils that have been used by the family in the previous year – couscous, wheat, barley, millet, corn, chickpeas, beans, lentils, and any of the dried leftover meat from the Feast of the Sheep at Eid – mixed with olive oil, argan, water - and a single date kernel. To find this in your bowl is considered lucky, unless you crack a tooth on it... This porridge is boiled over an open fire for 4 or 5 hours, so that it is ready for sunset and the 4th prayer.

But the first guests to be served are the djenoun – the djinns – and it is for this reason that no salt is added to the mixture, for djinns abhor salt, which represents the life force of beings whose veins run with salty blood and thus inhabit the opposite realm to those of the spirit world. Likewise, no spices are added into the orkimen; for djinns are too sensitive to strong tastes to abide spiced food. Add either in and you invite disaster! But appease the djinns by offering them a little of your very best orkimen on New Year’s Eve and they are much more likely to help your family through the coming year and not play too many tricks on you or bring the Evil Eye to bear on you. Your sheep and goats (and children) are less likely to sicken, your crops more likely to thrive. It’s an ancient superstition and certainly pre-Islamic, but you’d be surprised how many families in Morocco still observe it.

I remember once accompanying my mother to put out the orkimen for the djinns. I was about 6 at the time, a curious, annoying child, always dogging her steps, always asking questions, and this time she could not shake me off. Once the sun had gone down she spooned some of the porridge into a dish and we walked out of the house to an open space under an old argan tree about 300 yards from the house, an area apparently well known as a djinn hangout, which was a surprise to me since it was where during the day we played football with balled- up socks.

“What do the djenoun look like, Mama?” I asked as we stepped outside into the falling twilight, and she answered, “They look like themselves.”

“Where do they live?” “They live all around us.” “Why have I never seen them?” “You are not looking hard enough, or in the right places.” “But I thought you said they were all around—“

I stopped, fixed by the hard stare that often preceded a swift clip round the ear. When you have 8 children (with 2 more still to come) your maternal patience may not be infinite... All the way there she chanted in what I thought of as her prayer-voice – high-pitched and singsong – the special prayers to bless our family, our animals, our house, while I stared into the growing gloom and tried, unsuccessfully, to spy the djinns that must surely be lurking around every corner.

At last we reached the special place and my mother stopped her chanting and placed the bowl between the gnarled roots of the old argan tree we so loved to climb. Then she turned to leave.

“Aren’t we going to stay and watch?” I asked, disappointed.

“The djenoun do not like to be watched while they eat. Like everybody else, they prefer to be left in peace.”

This was highly unsatisfactory, but she took me firmly by the hand and hauled me away. But once we got back to the house she had the needs of an entire extended family to see to, not just one unruly six-year-old, so as soon as her back was turned, I slipped outside and ran back towards the old argan tree. Where the last houses gave out onto the dusty square I stopped, and peered fearfully around the corner, expecting to see dozens of wispy black shapes swarming over the bowl, for my mother’s orkimen was known to be the best in the village and was sure to attract many, many djinns, and this was how I imagined they looked.

There was something under the tree, but it didn’t look like any djinn I’d ever imagined. After a long, increasingly puzzled, time I watched it there, doing what it was doing, then turned and sped back home.

I burst into the kitchen, where my mother was ladling the last of the family’s orkimen out of the cooking pot into the bowl from which we all would eat. “Mama, Mama!” I cried. “There aren’t any djinns eating the orkimen, just a big black dog!” I glared at her accusingly, my unswerving childish trust in the honesty and wisdom of adults beginning to crack apart.

To give her credit, she didn’t shout at me, or clip me around the ear, but just put aside the ladle and said patiently, “Don’t worry about that: djinns can shapeshift. They will often take on the appearance of a dog so as not to scare us with their real form.”

But that just served to make me very curious about the nature of dogs.