|
by David Leser
I met a woman this year with broken wings. Her name is Malika
Oufkir and her life is 2000 light years from where we find ourselves
today, in Byron Bay, but I tell her story briefly here so that
we might, perhaps, ponder our blessings.
Malika is now 48 years old. When she was five she was taken
from her parents to live in the palace of the Moroccan king
and his retinue of servants and concubines. The king had wanted
a permanent playmate for his only child and chose Malika because
she was the daughter of his most trusted adviser, General Mohammad
Oufkir.
For the next 11 years, Malika lived behind palace walls, in
splendid isolation. Every luxury was hers, except the human
contact of her own family.
When she was 16 she was finally allowed to return home to her
mother and father and five brothers and sisters. It was as if
she were meeting them for the first time. This was 1970 and
her father was by now Morocco s defence minister, the second
most powerful man in the kingdom.
In 1972 her father tried to assassinate his old friend, King
Hassan 11. The attempt failed and General Oufkir was executed
on the orders of the king. Thus did Malika s adoptive father
kill her natu- al father. But he went further than that. He
decided to wreak vengeance on the entire Oufkir family by sending
Malika and her brothers and sisters and mother to prison for
the next fifteen years. Malika was nearly 18 at the time. Her
youngest brother was three.
From 1972 until 1987, the Oufkir family languished inside three
remote desert prisons, completely cut off from the world. They
fought off plagues of scorpions, ats, lice and cockroaches.
They endured bitter, howling winters and scorching summers.
They wasted away from hunger and disease. They struggled with
their sanity. They attempted suicide.
In 1972, the first year of their incarcera- tion, I arrived
in Byron Bay on holidays. I was 16 and I still hold inside me
that first glimpse of the curve of the bay and the dolphins
on their leisurely patrol. I can still smell the patchouli oil
and the terriyaki burgers at the top end of Jonson Street. It
was my little north coast tenderloin, my first fragrant whiff
of free- dom.
You can do a lot in 15 years. You can travel, read, study, work
odd jobs, make plans, fall in love, bring children into the
world. I did all that, and more.
Throughout these years, the Oufkir family waited until they
could wait no longer. After their failed suicide attempt, Malika
and three of her brothers and sisters decided to escape. They
dug a five metre tunnel and a three metre shaft with a spoon
and the lid of a sardine tin can. For three months they dug
by night, being careful always to cover their tracks by the
time the guards arrived each morning.
In April 1987 they finally clawed their way to freedom. For
four nights and five days they kept the Moroccan secret service
and army at bay. They roamed the countryside like four hunted,
famished animals scavenging for food. They returned to their
neighbourhood in Rabat but found their house razed to the ground.
They sought help from old friends but were turned away. Eventually,
after suspicions were aroused, they were arrested, but not before
they had contacted the French media.
King Hassan was so embarrassed by the news of their ordeal and
miraculous escape that he released the rest of the family from
prison. It was beyond him, though, to grant them freedom, so,
instead, he placed them under house arrest for five more years.
In 1992, they were allowed to walk free except they were kept
under police surveillance for another five years. It was only
in 1996 that the Oufkir family was finally granted permission
to leave the country. Malika was by then 43 years old.
Today Malika Oufkir lives in Paris with her French husband,
Eric Bordreuil. She is a avishing beauty with dark, flashing
eyes and if you didn t know her, you would think she was a woman
who moved through the world with effortless grace. Nothing could
be further from the truth.
For fifteen years, Malika dreamt of food in all its wild, delicious
varieties. Today she can barely eat. For fifteen years she dreamt
of being held by a man. Today she can only make love when her
husband takes excruciating, painstaking care. Fo fifteen years,
she imagined the natural light outside her cell. Today she arely
leaves her bedroom. It is small and dark, just like her desert
prison.
For Malika her bed is now her spectre. She is desperate with
fatigue but can only manage one or two hours sleep a night,
and only then, when the television is on. When she dreams, it
is always of her escape down a long, dark tunnel. She is always
cold.
" Where do you live in Australia, " she asks me with
a slight tremble. " Byron Bay, " I reply. " Tell
me about this place, " she asks. And so I try. I try to
describe Mount Warning and the ainforests which have sprung
from her eruptions and which tumble down, all lush and fecund,
onto white sands and a translucent sea. I talk about an old
place of slaughter loggers, miners, whalers, meatworkers -that
has given way, slowly, to something new: Board riders looking
for their point break. Hippies looking for their bag of weed.
New Agers looking for their chakra points. Film-makers looking
for their location. Musicians looking for their inspiration.
The misbegotten looking for their salvation.
As I talk, I see Malika s eyes begin to shine. " Are people
happy there? " she asks. " Many of them, " I
reply. " Deliriously so, " and so I continue on in
my florid descriptions of Bacchanalian nights in the hills;
of train stations that throb to the sound of the blues; of Middle
Eastern lunches that turn into jam sessions; of desultory days
at the Pass with swarming pilchards and naked children; of festivals
of food and books and music and whale- watching; and, of course,
most essential- ly, of friendships new and strong and mutually
supportive that have come to me so unexpectedly in this mid-life.
Of course I tell Malika, that here there are poor people too
and squabbles like you would find in a Jerusalem square; 6000
mayors here, I say, all looking for somewhere to pitch an idea.
I tell her about the development pressures and the coastal erosion
and the Barbarians arriving each day at our Gate. I tell her
about the fights that have been and the fights that are surely
to come, much worse than ever before.
But then I return to the human factor because, after all, what
is a place, what is physical beauty, without a collision of
hearts and minds? And so I tell her about the invisible thread
that I believe binds so many of us to each other in this old
slaughterhouse- by-the-sea. I tell her how you can hug a friend,
o even a stranger, for min- utes at a time in the main street
without the slight- est embarrassment. ( Well not too much anyway!
) And I tell her again about the friends I have made in two
shorts years who I now know I will know for- ever and what that
does to my sense of having come home at last.
" I want to live in Byron Bay, " she says eventually,
and with the kind of resolve that might come from a woman who
has returned from the grave. And so I think about this when
I am back in the Bay and seeing my friends at yet another party,
lying around on a day bed, lis- tening to music, laughing and
cuddling and telling uproarious, asinine tales about nothing
in particu- lar. And it makes me won- der whether a woman with
broken wings on the other side of the world might, by some miracle
or act of faith, also be saved by an imperfect, precious, fragile
place such as this.
David Leser
|
