249. Shortening the Night - Hédi Jaouad
Official poster for the 2022 Gabès Cinema Fen
Before the coming of radio and television to Gabès, and apart from the occasional wedding in the family or neighborhood, the only evening entertainment was storytelling, especially during the long, cold winter months.
Night falls suddenly and quite spectacularly in my native town of Gabès in Southern Tunisia. The neighborhood would, seemingly in an instant, plunge into total darkness, except for our house, which was the only one connected to the town’s rudimentary and erratic electric grid.
In those days of ambient superstition, nighttime and darkness were a real menace: it was when the forces of evil came out to taunt the weak and confound the unbeliever. People hastily retreated to the safety of their dwellings, and when they had to go to the bathroom—usually in a traditional outhouse tucked in some remote corner—or venture out of the family compound to tend to an emergency, they did so by candlelight, almost always with a companion or in a small group.
The moonless nights were particularly frightening to us children, for it was a time considered in our local mythology most propitious for the apparition of ghouls, djinns, and other demonic creatures. Every shadow and whisper became ominous. People groped their way in the darkness, murmuring in the foreboding stillness of the night the famous Ayat al-Kursi, or the Verse of the Throne, reputed as the most powerful verse of the Quran to ward off evil spirits and other maleficent forces and spells.
Before the coming of radio and television to Gabès, and apart from the occasional wedding in the family or neighborhood, the only evening entertainment was storytelling, especially during the long, cold winter months. At night, the temperature dropped, and the cold became biting. We’d huddle under heavy blankets around a kanoun, a clay brazier filled with embers, to listen attentively to haunting stories of sorcery, magic, and the supernatural. These stories completely mesmerized us until we fell asleep.
Three matriarchs, all in their seventies or older, were particularly gifted at telling stories. My aunts Oumi Zohra, Oumi Salha, and Oumi Fatma were all widows, lived by themselves, and were our surrogate grandmothers. Either my mother, one of my siblings, or I would beg them to come to our house to “shorten the night,” the expression we used for passing time together, and they would often spend an evening of enchanting storytelling with us.
These women wove fanciful tales like they wove baskets. They always obliged our insatiable appetite with encores. My favorite storyteller was Oumi Fatma, who was almost blind. When she came, usually after many entreaties because she dreaded walking, it was a rare treat. On that special occasion, even the adults would stay to listen to her tales of witches, sorcerers, and magicians, for she had a knack for speaking of the uncanny.
With the advent of radio in Gabès in the early 1950s, such evenings began to lose their appeal. We began to gather around the wooden box, listening to distant voices and alien tongues. When we quickly grew tired of the radio, the matriarchs were no longer there to tell us stories, and since we had no books to read—not even the Quran, as my older brother liked to joke—a vital link was forever broken. I look back and feel a sense of loss, not only for our matriarchs and their stories, but also for those long and dark nights when we saw things that didn’t exist, when our imaginations were most alive.
- Hédi Jaouad
