HAJ GLOBAL BLOG

THE GIRL WHO FELL FOR A GOAT HERDER IN THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS (PART 2) ********** I could have screamed. I could have thrown the remaining shards of the love potion jar into the river, or run barefoot until my feet bled on the shale-lined paths above the terraces. But instead, I went home and scrubbed the soot from the bottom of our bread oven. It took two hours. I didn’t cry. In our world, women were expected to fold grief into the dough. Bury it in herbs. Knot it into a carpet design. But I—I folded it into silence. For weeks, I said nothing of Idris. Not to my sister. Not to the old women who stared with curiosity when they saw me walking alone. And not to the goats, who surely sensed the shift in my rhythm and bleated at me with more confusion than usual. But I watched. I watched her. Her name was Samira. Her teeth were too perfect, like she’d never bitten into anything tougher than boiled eggplant. Her voice was gentle but commanding, the kind that made the village boys forge...

THE GIRL WHO FELL FOR A GOAT HERDER IN THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS. ********** The first time I saw him, I was holding a copper basin full of sheep’s milk and trying not to cry. My name, though no one remembers it anymore, was Yamina. I was the daughter of a man who had once traded dates to the Moors and figs to the French. But now our orchard was dry, our father mostly silent, and our mother long buried. We lived in a Berber village tucked inside the folds of the Middle Atlas Mountains. The year was 1724, though we didn't say years that way. We counted the passage of time in olives—how many presses we could do before the rains came—and in love potions. Yes, we made love potions. Or at least, we believed we did. It was my grandmother, Leila, who gave me the jar. It was small, with a blue stopper and something that looked like burnt sage tied around its neck. She had whispered that it contained a blend of saffron, orange peel, salt from the Dead Sea, and dried bee stingers—though I thin...