nonfiction

by Itto Outini

Who Watches the Witches

Let me tell you about the time I was accused of witchcraft by a crazy woman. One minute, I was on my way home from a tutoring session, using my cane to feel my way between the chairs and tables that restaurateurs had put out on the sidewalk, and the next, I was in someone’s entrance hall, and she was screaming.

In Morocco, in the villages and towns, it’s common for people to leave their doors open to air out their homes, usually while sitting on their doorsteps, visiting with neighbors, and drinking tea. I wasn’t in a village or a town, however. I was in a city. Lost in thought, mulling over that day’s lesson, I’d had just enough presence of mind to avoid the obstacles that littered my path. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might take a wrong turn into someone’s home.

“They sent you!” the old woman was shrieking. “Didn’t they send you? Yes, they did! Don’t lie! Those evil ones!”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, backing out of the entrance hall. “I didn’t mean to come in here. I’m blind.”

“Witchcraft,” the woman hissed. “They sent you. They sent you to leave it on my door! Well, you’re not welcome here. Get away! Shoo!”

“I’m not doing any witchcraft,” I protested. “I can’t even see!”

I retreated onto the street and hastened in the direction of the house where I was renting. The woman stood in her doorway behind me, still screaming. Her accusations trailed me for a block or more, finally getting lost in the sound of the traffic, the brakes and the horns.

I’d just gotten back to the rooftop room that I was renting when a couple I knew came knocking on my door. Apparently, they also knew the old woman.

“I’m so sorry,” the husband told me, “but she sent us to find you. She wants to see you at the police station. She’s already there.”

On the way to the station, I broke down. I couldn’t control myself. This wasn’t the first time I’d been accused of something I hadn’t done, and it wouldn’t be the last. This false accusation came with all the emotional weight of an old trauma, the same wound scratched open again and again.

At the station, the man who knew both of us, who clearly felt sorry for both of us, did his best to mediate, serving as defense attorney to both parties simultaneously. “I know it seems like something those witches would do,” he told the old woman, “but think about it, Auntie. This girl is blind. She’s more likely a victim of witchcraft herself. There’s no way she could be one of them.”

“She’s the easiest one to use,” the woman retorted. “Anyone can put something on her cane and send her to leave it on my door.”

“I’m just a student!” I shouted. “You can ask anyone! I go back in September. You think I have time to go around leaving things on people’s doors? I’m just here to learn!”

“Daughter,” the man told me, “don’t waste your breath. She’s mentally ill.”

“If she’s mentally ill,” I cried, “then what are we doing here in the first place? Why is she allowed to bring me here? I haven’t done anything! I can’t have witchcraft on my record!”

The policeman listened for more than an hour as we argued, our mutual acquaintance attempting to reason first with one of us, then the other. Finally, when it became clear that his efforts were going nowhere, the policeman intervened. “Auntie, I promise, we’ll investigate her,” he told the old woman, taking her by the arm and leading her gently to the door. “If there’s any witchcraft, we’ll find it and put a stop to it. You’ve had a long day. Let’s not keep you here anymore.”

By this time, I’d become so distraught that I thought he would lock me up and begin his investigation right away. As soon as the woman was gone, however, he returned to me, took both my hands in his, and told me, “I’m so sorry, daughter. This has been a long day for everyone. Come, let me take you to dinner.”

Over a hearty meal of chicken and fries, the best food I’d eaten in weeks, the policeman asked me questions and listened to my story. I told him how I’d been abandoned by my family, how I’d spent several years homeless, how I still lived just a step above homelessness, how I didn’t care because finally, after being deprived of education for seventeen years, I was going to school, how I loved school, how I couldn’t get enough of school. I’d made the national news by graduating from high school with some of the best marks in the country, and now I was at the university. I couldn’t stand the thought of anything taking that away from me, least of all false accusations of witchcraft.

“Don’t worry, daughter,” he told me. “Nothing is going to happen to you because of her. She’s just old and sick, that’s all.”

Looking back, far from undermining my academic career, that woman helped enable me to earn my master’s degree in the United States. Because I’d been homeless and never had a permanent address after being abandoned by my family, I wouldn’t have been able to obtain a passport if the policeman I met that day hadn’t intervened. Thanks to him, the official record now lists my place of residence, for all those years, as the home of one of the relatives who’d kicked me out. This made it possible for me to get my passport.

In my life, things almost always work out this way: traumatic incidents later turn out to be blessings in disguise. Given this pattern, you might think it would be easy for me to believe in witchcraft and other supernatural interventions. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong. It’s not that I don’t believe in these interventions. I just think the folk understanding of witchcraft fails to explain its mechanism of action.

I should pause here to clarify that I don’t actually think the old woman who accused me was mentally ill. Fearful, yes. Hardheaded. Set in her ways. Paranoid. But not delusional. Not in the technical sense. Technically speaking, a delusion is a false belief that a person holds on to, even when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in the absence of social reinforcement. The woman’s fear that I’d been sent by witches was not a delusion because it had been reinforced for most of her life by everyone and everything around her. She grew up in the rural Atlas Mountains of Morocco, in a time and a place where everybody’s hopes and fears revolved around witchcraft.

I know because I grew up there, too.

Let me tell you about the time my aunt took me and her daughter to the graveyard to harvest a dead woman’s hair.

The neighbor had just died, and the hair of a freshly dead woman happened to be just what my aunt needed to cast a spell on her husband, whom she suspected of cheating on her, and forcing him to remain faithful. The moon was bright and full that night, and I was terrified. In the Atlas Mountains, people said that if a man died and his widow slept with someone else during the period of mourning, she would start turning into a mule overnight and wandering around in moonlit graveyards, draped in chains. If you met one of these creatures, known as a bghlt el-kaboor—literally, the mule of the graveyard—she would trample you. You wouldn’t make it home alive.

I suspect that this story was invented in the ancient past to scare kids so they wouldn’t roam around at night whenever the moon was full, getting into trouble. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on my aunt, who was determined to harvest that dead woman’s hair. It did work on me, though. Approaching the graveyard, I could’ve sworn I heard voices whispering behind the headstones. Waiting for my aunt to finish digging, I caught glimpses of dark shadows moving between the trees. On our way home, I heard footsteps on the path behind us. It was the bghlt el-kaboor. She was going to trample us. We would never outrun her, not even with all those chains weighing her down. We had two legs. She had four.

That night, my cousin and I both deployed the only line of defense we had at our disposal: we wet ourselves. The smell of our urine must’ve been enough to dissuade the bghlt el-kaboor from trampling us, for we survived to tell the tale.

We were never told that witchcraft was evil—not in a moral sense, anyway—but because the whole point was to do things that couldn’t be achieved by honest means, it had to be practiced with the utmost secrecy. Years later, when the old woman accused me of witchcraft, the outrage that I felt was tinged with anxious guilt as well as indignation. Her accusations stirred up memories of the times that relatives had sent me to leave magical bundles on people’s doors, sometimes in the cracks beneath them, sometimes on the transoms. Summoned for these errands, I would hover in the doorways of the rooms where men sat writing spells on scraps of paper—this part was always done by men; the women couldn’t read—before wrapping those scraps in fabric stained with feces or menstrual fluid and giving them to me. Sometimes, the men would even summon jinn to help them. More than once, I thought I saw objects moving on their own.

Witchcraft was how we dealt with every problem, from instigating conflicts among rival families, to dealing with unfaithful lovers, to making sure breakfast was served on time. The thought that witchcraft might be there at your disposal whenever you needed it made our hardships easier to bear. Need a birthmark removed from your face? Ask a witch. Need relief from an ongoing drought? Ask a witch. Need harmony restored to a marriage? A witch can help you out with that. In this way, whether or not they were capable of supernatural feats, witches made our communities more optimistic and resilient to hardship. Witches were a source of hope as well as fear.

Hope, not fear, was the reason I hired a witch myself once—though I never would’ve done it if not for a friend, who desperately wanted to marry her boyfriend and who, on her way to visit a witch, invited me to tag along.

My friend hoped that the man she loved would come to love her in return. I hoped to strengthen our friendship. I’d been an outcast all my life, orphaned, shuffled from household to household, treated like a pariah, relegated to life among the animals. I’d never had a human friend. This girl’s companionship was precious to me, a treasure that I desperately hoped to preserve—not through witchcraft itself, but through shared experiences and knowledge of each other’s secret trysts.

To reach the witch’s house, we had to walk for over an hour along a dusty mountain road. I started feeling like the bghlt el-kaboor, weighed down not by chains, but by the gifts my friend was bringing to pay the witch: a white scarf, a box of candles, several other items wrapped in bundles, and wads of cash. To me, it seemed over the top, but she wanted results, and with witches, you get what you pay for.

When we reached the witch’s home, I was happy to stand in the shade, breathing the sweetly scented air and examining the cramped but tidy room, packed full of candles and Tarot cards, while my friend explained her situation. The witch was a schuwaffa, a type of witch who, in addition to casting spells that influence people’s feelings and behaviors, can also perceive hidden things. Literally, schuwaffa means “one who sees the future”—though her powers of perception aren’t limited to future events and also encompass things that happen far away, in other people’s homes, or even in the depths of their hearts.

“Don’t worry,” she said after listening to my friend. “We’ll make sure he marries you.” Then she turned to me. “And you?”

“What?”

“What can I do for you?”

I hadn’t expected this question. Without thinking, I blurted out, “I have a guy, too!” It wasn’t true. I had no boyfriend and no interest in acquiring one. I just didn’t want to be left out, or to spoil things for my friend.

“And you want him to marry you, too?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’ll need a piece of his clothing,” said the schuwaffa. “Whatever he was wearing the last time you had sex.”

“We haven’t had sex,” I said. “He doesn’t even love me yet. That’s why I need your help.” My mind was racing: whose clothes would I steal? If I didn’t follow through, I was afraid that my friend would lose her trust in me and stop inviting me on her adventures.

“How about a photograph?” the schuwaffa asked. “Do you have a picture of him?”

“No.” A picture would be even harder to steal.

“All right,” the schuwaffa said. “No problem. When you come back on Tuesday, bring me a handful of dirt from his footprint. And some more candles. And a live chicken.”

Sure, I remember thinking as we headed home along the winding road, so you can have a tasty dinner. I knew she was a fake already. If she were really a schuwaffa, she would see into my heart and know I had no interest in a boyfriend. I was invested, though. Over the weekend, I collected the candles, the chicken, and the handful of dirt as instructed. I spent a long time thinking about whose footprint I should take the dirt from before deciding on the perfect candidate.

On Tuesday, my friend and I made the trek all the way to the witch’s house, our bundles slung over our shoulders. She was pleased to see us—eager, I’m sure, for her chicken dinner. “Just you wait,” she told me. “Within a week, he’ll be following you around like a dog. He won’t be able to get enough. You won’t get a moment’s peace until you’re married.”

I couldn’t help myself. I started giggling. The more I tried to get ahold of myself, the harder I laughed. I felt lightheaded, weak at the knees. It was all I could do to keep from collapsing right there in her home. My friend and the old woman both thought I was giddy with excitement, but that wasn’t it. I was the only one who knew why I was laughing.

The footprint I’d taken the dirt from was made by a donkey.

The whole way home, I couldn’t control myself, couldn’t stop laughing. I kept breaking down in giggles, even having to sit down on the road at one point because my legs couldn’t carry me anymore. That night, though, my mood took a nosedive. It’s one thing to laugh at the thought of deceiving a supposedly all-knowing witch in broad daylight. It’s quite another to realize, after nightfall, that you’ve hired a woman known all over the Atlas Mountains for being a very competent witch indeed to make a donkey fall in love with you.

The thought of being trampled by a bghlt el-kaboor was terrifying, but at least it could happen to anyone. The fate that I’d just brought upon myself seemed worse in every conceivable way. “He won’t be able to get enough of you,” the schuwaffa had promised. “You won’t get a moment’s peace.” Hugging myself beneath the blankets, I strained my ears for the sound I knew would was coming: the lusty bray from just beyond the wall. Maybe the beast would find me that very night and jam its huge head through the open window to propose to me. Or maybe it would wait until the morning and follow me around while I was going about my chores, ears twitching, tail flipping, professing its love.

The worst part wouldn’t even be the donkey. The worst part would be the shame. My friend would realize that I’d been making fun of her. She would never trust me again.

I didn’t sleep for a week, not until I was certain the schuwaffa had been bluffing—or, perhaps, that the donkey had died, or been sold to someone in another town. The details didn’t matter. What mattered was that I had learned my lesson. I would never trifle with witchcraft again.

I’ve never heard of anyone successfully making a donkey fall in love, but I have heard countless stories, not just in the villages and towns, but also in the cities, of people suffering, losing their health, and even dying thanks to witches. I was already a student, already skeptical, when I listened to an episode of the radio program Hdi Rask—Be Careful—in which the host interviewed a woman whom witchcraft had put in the hospital. With rapt attention, I listened as she told her story from the hospital bed: how she’d managed to teach herself French despite not having gone to school; how she’d found sponsorship to work abroad; how, the night before her departure, her aunt had hosted a farewell party for her, during which she’d served her couscous on a separate plate instead of letting her eat from the same pot as everyone else; and how, within a few short hours, she’d begun to suffer from terrible abdominal pain. By the time she reached the hospital, she’d begun to bloat. Within a few days, her body had swollen, and she had gained three hundred kilograms. Then, just as rapidly, she lost the weight, ending the week at just ten kilograms.

For weeks, she remained bedridden, beset by rapid and alarming fluctuations in her weight. She had to cancel her trip, of course. She lost the job. Then, the host revealed, she’d died. The interview had been recorded just days before her death.

“You see,” said the host, “this is serious. Very serious. Whether witches can help people or not remains up in the air, but it’s one hundred percent certain that they hurt people.” The couscous that the woman’s aunt had served her, he explained, had been contaminated. The aunt, jealous of her niece’s accomplishments, had hired a witch to take revenge, and the witch had instructed her to serve her couscous stirred with a severed human hand. “A dead, rotting hand,” the host said. “Just imagine! Think of the bacteria. The toxins.”

Dirt, menstrual fluid, body parts from human and animal corpses, and feces—all belong to the standard toolkit used by witches.

As I listened, I remembered the hair that my aunt had collected from the corpse in the graveyard. I remembered the bundles of fabric stained with blood and feces that I’d been given to put on people’s doors. I shivered.

By the time the old woman accused me of witchcraft, I no longer believed that witches could see the future, or observe events happening far away, or read people’s minds. I’ve never believed in those things. In Arkansas, I met a woman who called herself a witch and promised to do anything for me. She was in love with me, she said, and wanted to win me with gifts and good fortune.

“There’s one thing I want you to do for me,” I told her, “and the good news is that I’m pretty sure it is within your power. I want you to leave me alone!”

A few years later, another self-proclaimed witch hired me to help her write a grant proposal. During our first meeting, after explaining her project and how she wanted to use the grant money, she started telling me about her witchcraft and how she could use it to get anything she wanted.

Because she was paying me, I didn’t ask her what I really wanted to know: “Why don’t you just write your own damn proposal, then?”

Just because I’m a skeptic, however, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in witchcraft, or in witches. I’ve seen them in action. I know all too well what they can do. When the old woman accused me, I was indignant and traumatized, but looking back, I no longer blame her for being afraid. That night, after the policeman took me home, I lay awake wondering whether she might be right after all, whether a witch might’ve used me, as they’d used me when I was a child, only this time without my knowledge, sneaking up to me while I was reading or listening to my radio and stealthily attaching something to my cane. It didn’t seem likely, but still, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility altogether. For weeks, that thought haunted me.

I live in the US now, far from the moonlit graveyards of my childhood, but I still tremble whenever I think of the bghlt el-kaboor. I know that unfaithful widows don’t turn into mules, but the thought that they might—that maybe there really was a bghlt el-kaboor that night in the graveyard, and we were simply lucky not to cross her path—is still stuck deep down inside me, like a shard of stepped-on glass, in a place where my rational mind cannot reach. It is the middle of the day. My husband is here. We’re nowhere near a graveyard. Yet I am afraid.

There are reasons that trials often yield opportunities, and they have nothing to do with witches. When you insist on looking for the best in every hardship, and attack every challenge with a can-do spirit, and work smart, and work hard, and treat others as they deserve to be treated, you will find that life starts working out for you in unexpected ways. This is what I tell myself. What I believe. Yet there’s still a part of me that wonders now and then whether I might be better off seeking help from those who promise to make my troubles go away and ask for nothing in return besides a box of candles and a chicken, easily obtained.

Witchcraft is the art of preying on our hopes and fears. It will not be put to rest until our hopes and fears are put to rest—and this will never happen. We are restless beings. In the modern world, witchcraft is alive and well, although it goes by many names: in the US as well as Morocco, in the cities as well as the villages and towns. The woman who accused me was not crazy. Just afraid. Her fear did nothing to protect her—quite the opposite—but she had every reason to be afraid considering how quickly things could turn: one minute, safe and secure in her home; the next, losing ground in a fight for her reputation, surrounded by people who questioned her sanity, who saw her as nothing but a crazy old woman to be pitied and humored, then sent on her way.

The witches were still out there somewhere, whether I was one of them or not, and now she knew that when they did come, as they would sooner or later, there would be no one to believe her. No one to protect her. No one on her side. Maybe this had been their scheme from the beginning, the role I’d played, the end I’d served. It had worked. They’d cleaved her from the herd. They had her now.

Soon, she would be in their clutches.

Itto Outini is an author, book coach, Fulbright Scholar, Steinbeck Fellow, and MacDowell Fellow with publications in The North American Review, Fine Lines, Jewish Life, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Gargoyle, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere around the globe, and she’s spoken for organizations including Cal Tech University, Verizon Wireless, The International Trade Centre, and the United Nations. Itto and her husband, Mekiya, are collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, a full-service author support platform. Itto holds an MA in journalism and strategic media from the University of Arkansas.