Wow! eBook
Zohra's Ladder: And Other Moroccan Tales 2nd Revised edition
Author(s): Pamela Windo (Author)
- Publisher: Eye Books
- Publication Date: 1 Sept. 2011
- Edition: 2nd Revised edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 158 pages
- ISBN-10: 1903070686
- ISBN-13: 9781903070680
Book Description
‘A lively window on the traveller’s hard love affair with Morocco’ Lonely Planet
Pamela Windo lived in Morocco for many years, falling in love with the country and its people. In Zohra’s Ladder she recalls her most memorable encounters. Her stories peel back layers of history and the finally embroidered fabric of daily life, discovering the mysterious and exotic.
Her writing describes the colours, flavours, sounds and textures of an almost dream-like place: a world of fleeting affairs, warmth and subtle moments.
Experience Morocco as it comes alive in this entrancing book.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Pamela Windo writes beautifully, with such honesty. She conveys an experience so few have lived through and yet so many want to have’ Sir Richard Branson
‘Subtle, compassionate and well observed’Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House
–.
About the Author
Pamela Windo was born in Brighton, England, in 1942. She left school at 16 to travel, first to Paris and Berlin, then to North Africa, where she lived with the family of a Tunisian student she had fallen in love with in London. While there, she worked in the U.S. Embassy and as a radio operator on the construction of a dam.
Back in England, after a first marriage and divorce, and with two young sons, she married childhood friend Gary Windo, a gifted saxophone player who’d just come back from New York, and who encouraged her to play piano. Soon, she found herself alongside musicians like Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt, Brotherhood of Breath’s Louis Moholo, and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, with whom she recorded and played her first gig.
When the couple immigrated to Woodstock, New York, Windo joined the Gary Windo Quartet with bass player Steve Swallow. She went on to form a band of her own, Pam Windo & the Shades, and after a showcase at the Whisky-a-Go-Go in L.A., was signed by Albert Grossman.
In 1987, Windo bowed out of the music scene and began to write, and was first published in New York City’s Village Voice. With a novel in mind, she went to Morocco where she lived, traveled, and wrote for the next seven years. During her stay, she taught English to the children of the governor of Tiznit, became a member of the Moroccan-American Circle headed by Ambassador Marc Ginsberg, and worked as location assistant for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, shot in Ouarzazate.
On returning to the United States, Windo wrote several books and magazine articles about her travels in Morocco, as well as giving presentations at New York University, and The American Museum of Natural History in New York. As a publicist for tourism, she was chosen by the Moroccan Ambassador to the United Nations to present Morocco to the United Nations community.
In 2004, twelve years after Gary Windo’s untimely death, a retrospective collaborative CD titled Anglo-American was chosen by the BBC as Jazz Album of the Week. Another retrospective CD―a series of free-improvisation tracks recorded during the couple’s years together―was released in 2007.
In April 2014, Windo released her new book, Him through Me: making love and music in the Sixties & Seventies. She lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Zohra’s Ladder
And Other Moroccan Tales
By Pamela Windo
Eye Books Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Pamela Windo
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-903070-68-0
Contents
Prologue,
An Afternoon at the Hammam,
Rabiah’s House,
Pilgrimages to the Post Office,
The Adventurous Frenchman,
A Beach Encounter,
The Desert Sky,
The Colonel & The Judge,
An evening with the General’s Wife,
The Night of the Fiftieth Birthday,
A Fateful Meeting,
The Night I Thought I Would Die Before Morning,
An Unforgettable Cup Of Coffee,
Zohra’s Ladder,
The Street Cleaner’s Clothes,
Observing Processions,
Mr. Idrissi’s Advances,
A Day in the Courthouse,
Abdelslam: The Fassi,
A Neighbourhood Exorcism,
A Session with the Shiwofa,
Healing my Foot,
The Days of Ramadan,
A Marriage Proposal in the Kasbah,
Riding Low in a Country Bus,
A Litre of Olive Oil,
Games with the Tourists,
Vodka with the Caid,
In Search of the Argan Tree,
Lunch with the Sheikh,
Baba Halou,
Leaving,
CHAPTER 1
An Afternoon at the Hammam
It was March, the end of my first week in Morocco. The air was damp, and I was chilled to the bone because after the first few days of hot sunshine, the spring rains had come and hadn’t stopped for four whole days. Disappointed that I couldn’t go out to explore Marrakesh, I lay curled up under a blanket in my little room off the courtyard, listening to the monotonous rhythmic splashing on the ceramic tiles. Fatima had offered me a larger room with stained-glass windows on the upper floor, but I’d preferred to stay in the courtyard, in the heart of the house, to observe the comings and goings.
Fatima lived deep within the massive ramparts, in the labyrinth of the Medina. Najib had accompanied me, as he doubted I’d ever find the house on my own. A ‘petit taxi’ dropped us as close as it could get to a narrow sandy alley, lined on either side with high, salmon-pink, windowless walls. It was hard to imagine that homes lay behind them; the only signs of this were the doors, low and solid, with great iron hinges, knockers and bolts. The walls protect the inner life as veils protect the features of the face. We wove our way along the teeming thoroughfare among women in rainbow-coloured djellabas, men in sombre turbans, boisterous children, mopeds, mules and bicycles. The sun beat down, intensifying everything, casting dark shadows beside brilliant bursts of sunlight, and the heady scents of musk, amber and incense mingled with the stench of animal and vegetable waste.
We stopped at a door, and Najib rapped loudly. A young girl about ten years old wearing an apron led us through a cool, dark passageway that brought us suddenly into a wide, sun-drenched courtyard. At its centre stood a marble fountain surrounded by bitter orange and lemon trees, and above it was a broad square of dazzling blue sky, framed by luminous sea-green roof tiles. It was an elegant old house – perhaps a hundred years old or more – and in need of repair, but the electric-blue doors, arabesque window grilles, whitewashed walls and colourful ceramic tiles shone with freshness and gave it an aura of timelessness. I had stepped out of reality into a dream. I fell in love with Morocco in that moment.
Fatima had been widowed some ten years before and had two sons and two daughters, all of them grown up and living away from home. She lived alone now, with a young orphan girl she’d taken in to train as a maid. An Arab from Fès, known for its fair
