It’s 6 a.m., Sunday. In the light of discussing sudden sounds, fireworks exploded six times, or maybe seven. I can’t remember the exact number; after all, today is a holiday, and it was six in the morning. With my eyes barely open, I wonder about the possible source of these sounds—perhaps they were the leftover fireworks from New Year’s Eve. I remember hearing them then. Maybe some outlaw found it an appropriate game to entertain his night, maybe the 6 a.m. silence didn’t suit his taste, and he thought to himself, “Why not disrupt this silence?” following the primitive man’s footsteps. Assumptions. I pondered this again at noon while sitting in a café, watching the endless videos of massacres and listening to the constant drone hums from afar. I wonder, do hours have sounds? Some are set and expected, and some sneak to surprise the darkness of routine, piercing it. For example, the old man who comes to the café daily at 9 a.m. and sits in the chair in front of me, only listening to Al Jazeera while having breakfast. He remains like this until he dozes off an hour later, routinely, silently, without a sound of his own amid all the surrounding sounds. Who addresses me while I sit with my headphones as I summon absent voices? I wonder about a day without sounds or a day where there is nothing but sounds. A cacophony and a symphony that disparts the ear away from its home. Every hour has its sound. Every state has its sound. Every sound has a voice. The tension of sound lies still inside. I remember that it was intense at one point. To whom does my inner voice listen when my voice abstains from speech? In which voice do I speak in my dreams? In the common tongue, in Shilha, in Arabic, or English? Definitely not in French. Are they all my voices, multiple ones, or are they my singular voice? How do they speak when they are scattered? and doesn’t dissonance occur in their union? Are they an estranged version of my voice? attaching another set of alignments to it? They say thought is determined by language; can we then say that speech determines the energy of voice? The self speaking in the language of mountains, the one I almost forgot, is it present or absent? The self speaking in the language of the street, is it present or absent? The self speaking with the voice of the stranger, is it present or absent? With which voice do the absent ones speak within me, my own or theirs? As Kilito said, for example, “I speak all languages, but in my language,” can I say, in turn, that I speak all sounds but with my voice? I remember the visual studies course I never finished in university, how light is both energy and matter, an irreconcilable contradiction that can only grasp one of the two. I imagine light condensing, passing through a magnifier, how it burns and destroys. I imagine sound gathering in the ear, hitting the head from all sides—does the brain fry with this tension reflecting the city? What about the absence of sound? Isn’t it also a path to madness, as in that room so quiet you can hear the blood flowing in the veins? Sounds stop outside, but the sounds within don’t. We are sounds; our bodies produce sounds that need silence to be heard. What about those who are deaf? What do they hear? For instance, Jacques Lacan suggests that a child begins to perceive the “I” in the mirror stage the moment they see themselves in the mirror for the first time. I ask, in turn, when does a person meet their inner voice for the first time? Who can remember the first time they heard that voice? Was it even a voice at all? I’m certain that no one can pinpoint this moment because the voice feels like it has existed since eternity, and maybe it has because hearing begins in the womb. Sound comes first, then light, then meaning. The theorists on evolution say that the senses developed to preserve life, becoming more refined over time to aid survival and evade forest beasts that devour all those oblivious and unaware. I return to the origin of sound because my voice has no origin. It does not assist, nor does it affirm. Sound is a living tension, dormant energy enclosed within things and living beings, internally and externally, behaving in presence and absence.where do the sounds produced by construction machinery go? Do they fade into the void, or do they merge into the building, forming its inner sound that speaks and answers those who listen? The Burj Khalifa, how many ears did it damage? The buildings of the old village, now crumbling, what sounds did they rise with? Not the sounds of machines, surely, but the sounds of hands, clay, struggles, and perhaps curses directed towards the scorching sun. Deafness has a sound, too: rattling. As for complete silence, it has no sound: it tranquilizes the ear. We are born blind, then we see, but we are also born listeners, experts responding to the sounds around us. Therefore, hearing precedes seeing, and similarly, sound precedes visuals. We hear and hear and hear, and then comes a moment when an inner sound, with an unknown source, rises, but we perceive its presence like the sun.

Sound is a tree; its roots are firmly planted, and its branches reach the sky. But the root is not always stable; it can be uprooted by a strong wind or by a controlling hand wielding an excavator. Even the branches do not remain the same; they change with the seasons, and they change and reveal their true colors. If they remain fixed, they become the cipher of life, holding onto hidden roots, bringing them to the surface, and showing their virtues and flaws to every observer, listener, and scent-taker.

After this introduction, which dispenses with common definitions, four trees speak in turn:

I am the fig tree standing tall along the path to the bakery. My scent evokes memories of the wall surrounding the old neighbor’s house in the village and the two children racing barefoot on its cemented ground, leaping like cats, unafraid and indifferent. When one of those children grew up, he began to knock on Sleep’s door to expand his space in Sleep’s celestial bed. I have close twins in the city; the nearest one seems as if it pleads towards the sky with its bare branches during shedding season. (Remember: imagination reflects the beholder’s soul.) Another of my relatives mesmerized a passerby when it ripened into green; he inhaled its fragrance, reminiscing his roots. They cut it down, and so God cut some of their origin.

I am the eucalyptus tree; I originate in a forest separated by a steel fence from a football field, and my branches stretch higher into the sky than the fig tree’s branches. My presence opens memory lanes leading to Muhammad, who introduced the one cut from its roots to a forest with a well. He didn’t notice the well until two and a half years ago, when he ran daily and then meditated with open eyes while sitting on a hill next to an ant colony, contemplating my resistance to the stillness of death through movement. My upright form resembles that of my distant relatives lined along the national roadsides that lead the wanderer back to the city, where the wandering noises are waiting.

I am the palm tree, my spring leaves with yellow tips remind the lost soul of its origin through a long walk, accompanied by a friend from the mountains, along a path near the beginning or the end of the Atlantic Ocean. In my presence, the reflection of the sun on my fronds appears at noon, between one and two, as one lies on the grass, a wanderer perplexes his place two years ago with his place in two years. The reflections also summon the sea and the distant summers scattered by the wind in all directions. It also recalls a scene from the film “Exiled on the Moon” where the protagonist lies on the grass for the first time, relishing the boredom of simple life after successfully escaping the city.

I am the bamboo tree; I remind the wanderer of kung fu and action films, as well as Japanese anime films that create sonic cities from paper. I also remind him of the house near the American high school and the experimental garden he first entered two years ago, where the wind’s collision with my leaves showered him from both sides. I implied that coming to the garden alone was a great mistake, one that didn’t cancel or negate the greater mistake that followed him. Anyway, his younger sister loves me, and in her fascination with me, there is some of his own.

I am the Argan tree; I am supposed to be in the beginning, I do not need the first-person pronoun to speak; I speak all pronouns, and all pronouns speak through me. In my memory, everything that was is remembered, and in my absence, everything that was is absent. The wanderer did not climb me as the sons of his village did, and so he strayed. He never reached the summit, never saw his village from my peak, and he was not a god as he wished to be, he did not observe everything, hear everything, or see everything stored in memory. He cut off half the distance and then left for the cement city, where he took refuge in silence to conceal the fog that began to form in his path, surrounding him until he nearly lost his connection to the land that nourished me and nourished his blood, despite its dryness, despite its indifference. That’s why he missed the mountains for a long time while in the city, mimicking a voice that was not his own, like a crow that forgot its own walk after a lifetime of mimicking the military march of a parrot. Those who search for their roots seek me; those who miss me find a part of me, but they must forget they have reached the summit. Those who search for the origin do not involve me in the maze of numbering, for I am beyond numbering; I am the beginning and the end. In the city, there are figs, palms, eucalyptus, and bamboo, but the missing one is me, the argan. My roots do not accept the city; they do not grow there, for the city is a beast that plants artificial trees in its belly to replace the trees whose roots it uprooted. It is written for those who search for me there to remain lost, searching for a mirage, like lost souls in the desert of Nasser Khamir. They will never find their way, not today nor tomorrow.

The trees speak together: We have sisters in greenery who await their turn. One day, the wanderer may open the door for them when the time is right.

A Question: O trees, if I enter, for instance, a forest that gathers you all, as in the Japanese Shinrin-yoku ritual, will I be healed from the search for the roots of the original tree?

Each voice is a tree.

Roots grow, no one knows when

Roots vanish, no one knows when

The seeds remain

Returning in other forms

Traces of ancient voices reappear in new voices

And so on…

Some trees stay

Some vanish

And some are petrified and in need of watering.

In an industrial area, the French artist Antoine Dubarry discovered, inside a forgotten cupboard in 1977, a set of identification cards for Moroccan manual laborers who were brought to France between 1939 and 1940. These images haunted Dubarry for years until he decided to translate the emotions they stirred in him into reality through a traveling exhibition titled “The Break.” This exhibition gave life to the faces of those workers who had been uprooted from their lands to serve colonialism. One of them caught the attention of the French writer Jean Genet because the birth date on the card matched his own. Genet took a closer look at the card, which led to a text titled “Number 1155,” shedding light on the violence hidden within those cards, given that they contained the bare minimum information and erased the individuals’ personal histories, branding them with a brief language that avoided any clarification. The text by Genet evokes the figure of Salih Ahmed Salih in an attempt to challenge the erasure imposed by the colonizer on the colonized. These fragments, inspired by Genet’s text, attempt to listen to the history scraped from official records, offering an approximate representation of some of the absent yet present voices, drawing from oral and written narratives.

Khal (Uncle)

I was reborn, from a living memory to a memory that only finds life in writing, reborn on a yellow note, in a semi-smart phone with a long black line on its side and a screen that turns whiter day by day, perhaps from the weight of what it encounters. I was reborn like a poem, but with no name, unlike Salih Ahmed Salih. I am the uncle who got lost in France. I was born kilometers away from Anzi, the place they attributed to Salih, with brief letters that truncate the narrative of the story. They took me along with others from the rifle-resisting mountains, carried me to a land I didn’t know, and then sent me to dig the land that the French colonizers avoided stepping on. They dug me into a foreign land until I broke my skin and scattered some worthless francs in my pocket. My memory was buried with those whose names are lost in the French underground cemeteries. But my name has not been erased from memory. My voice, and the voices of my kind, flow in the veins of the plants that have grown on the registered land.

Hammad Ouali

I went to cross the valley, and I became a proverb. Strangely, part of a person remains alive in memory while they are dead. I came to cross the valley and drowned. But here I am, back to tell the tale, just as I used to tell it before I became a lesson thrown in the face of the living. How strange is this presence in death! If I were given the choice, I would prefer to be present in life every time because only the living know the full story. If I came to tell my story, I would mention the details of my days under the sun, near the argan trees, and on the road the French paved, which remained the same even after they left against their will. I would mention the seasons of planting, harvesting, heat, and cold. The seasons, the shrines, the meat that came once a month, the drought, the water revealed after the blast of dynamite, and sometimes after the rush of the crowds. I would speak of the stories in which one dies if they steal a pomegranate to satisfy their hunger. And the strength that once lifted people who were humbled by the curse of the oppressed. I would also recall the joys, the hunting, the spring flowers, the bread of Tafarhnout, argan oil, Amla oil, tea, and the only car within a few kilometers radius. I would mention all this and more, but what I certainly would not mention is how I went to cross the valley and became a proverb.

Hassan

I am the one in whose ear they recited the Adhan, then erased me. The only witness to my existence remains on the third page of the civil registry book, present in an incomplete presence, next to the name that replaced mine. We share the same line but not the same fate. After seven days, my name was struck by a government official’s pen. I lived gently, embraced in a woman’s lap; then they decided to abort me. What did they see in my future? Did they see the full words said in their place? The father went against the grandfather’s namesake as ordered by the brother. He was displeased with them for a moment, then forgave. As for me, I remained in the wrong. I am the dreams that were never completed, the wishes that never came true. Who would have stayed by the grandfather’s side in Tiznit, driving him to where the foundations of the children, stripped of individual desire, were? Who would have opened a shop to sell silver mined from sources other than the fenced mountain mines? I am the one who was supposed to visit, call for mercy, and embody the voices of the forgotten. The only one who still calls me is my baker neighbor, who always mistakes the name, saying Hassan instead of the Tailor Prophet. This pulls me out of oblivion even though my neighbor doesn’t know any chapter of my story. I say a chapter, even though my story is barely a verse, but it would have been a book if not for the government’s hand.

Unknown

An undocumented immigrant, an illegal immigrant, an immigrant in an unlawful situation, an irregular immigrant, an immigrant from Sub-Saharan Africa, then a charred corpse in the “Bakar” area next to the Zian’s Sons station. A summary of a shortened life by an arsonist, as the yellowed tongues say, those who learned the government’s official idea of liberty. According to them, the arsonist is either me or another immigrant like me. The secret buses carried people like me to the south, to the eastern borders, far from the cameras. As for me, I was left in a morgue, subjected to a medical examination to determine who I am, to uncover the details of the incident, and to arrange responsibilities and penalties. Before I reached the European police station, I crossed the desert devoid of seagulls, Franz Wright. Crossing it while dreaming of joining my brothers who had already reached Europe, the promised land of illusions. Thirst and hunger clouded my consciousness on the way as they dragged others into the paths of death. The story fell apart with those who died and the ones who lived, they lived to tell the horrors that befell the violated bodies and those buried in the sand. They retold their stories from within tents that cameras overlooked unless it was time for liberation.