Father and What He Fathered

The subtitle of the second part of Ahmed Toufiq's autobiography, "The Way to the City," describes the author's move from his childhood home on the southern slopes of the Atlas Mountains to the city of Marrakesh in 1955. The timing is significant, because 1955-6 was to see the widely celebrated return of the Moroccan Sultan from his enforced exile. The boy's father, still as prominent a figure in his life as he was in the earlier volume, places his son with a branch of the wider family living in the city. Throughout the author's physical and intellectual development during his teenage years, he experiences a number of new, exciting, and sometimes disturbing phenomena, both within the wider family structure and beyond. Perhaps the most significant for a teenage boy is the increasing public presence and role of women and girls, countering centuries of tradition as they attend co-educational schools and, in some cases, even adopt Western modes of dress.