I sat down, dullminded and in total lack of energy. My head was disturbed, my face haggard, and I was seeking an occupation to keep myself busy. But my irritated spirit rejected all what was offered to him, in spite of the tremendous efforts I deployed to know what was going on around me and the fact that I reviewed the events of the day in order to try and find out anything which could bring some light in the darkness of my thoughts. But it was in vain. Sometimes, I sat on my bed, some other times I opened a book, then I held a pen to write, but all this was so heavy for me and weighed on my shoulders as if it were the most imposing mountains I had to raise.

How painful it is for the human being to be in similar circumstances, deprived of his own heart. I do not know how to qualify nor to describe such moments, but it is far more preferable to consider my heart as having left me for the other world where it rests in peace. When one is tired from life, it is as if one condemns oneself to death, at least in a ficticious way if not in fact. The best remedy to which I then have recourse in a situation like this is to stand up and start immediately walking until I am totally exhausted, and then to lie again in my bed to take a rest and keep searching the best means of releasing me from my disgust. And that was exactly what I did. I was in such a state of discouragement that only walk helped me flee from its influence. Then I laid myself down to sleep, while I was reviewing in my memory the images of a recent past during which I was still among my relatives and friends in Morocco.

I remembered my country, my family and the circle of my friends, and was rocked by the reminiscences of the past during more than two hours, reviewing all the situations and all the scenes which were still present in my mind. In fact, my desolation was dissipated with this flash back in the former happy life; but my memory could not be revived despite the strong moral values and the scientific data of which it has been fed, unless it undergoes a real revolution that the feelings represent under an image, attractive or not, but surely emanating from the deepest bottom of the heart. The successive generations are all subjected to the laws of the psychic revolutions of the sensory life, which we observe in the behaviour of the primitive man as well as in certain reactions of the civilized one. The human being thinks, by having a full possession of his spirit and acting on him as he pleases, that he is no longer at the mercy of the emotional and sensitive problems, and that he does not have to fight them any more. He realizes them only if the boredom invades him, diverts him from his activities and reduces his mental abilities on one hand, and if his spirit feels really the need to escape from his lethargy the cause of which is unknown to him on the other hand. He must therefore be wise enough not to follow the course of his feelings on which the spirit must constantly exert its control in order to avoid the undesirable clashes and to remain within the limits of the criteria dictated by the reason.

I reviewed myself in the midst of my relatives and family environment, spoilt and object of all tendernesses, and I recalled that I did not pay them with the same feelings intensity in return. This recall caused me a great deal of upset while I was writing these lines and made me particularly conscious of my almost narcissistic self esteem, without being enough aware of the kind of relations required by the human nature between the child and his relatives and his entourage. I was hard in my behaviour, rude in the conduct of my activities, artificial in the expression of my feelings and my humanity. I was extremely astonished to reexamine the type of behaviour which I had towards my mother, my aunt and the rest of the house personnel. My spirit was without the slightest doubt covered with a veil which permitted to foresee life only in its pure material aspect, deprived of this generosity of the heart, which is the main source of the good by the human being.

Here is my mother looking at me with her eyes full with love and tenderness, willing to take me in her arms to embrace me and satisfy her overflowing heart in which she would so much have liked to lock me up. Nothing could dissuade her from this idea, neither the fact that I advanced in age, nor that I became mature. For her, I was a component of herself, a product of a drop of her blood and a piece of her flesh. Even my feelings and hers are the same because my life came from her life, and I owe her this invaluable good that nobody else could share with me. My mother saw her own image being projected on me. She tried to approach me to her side, with all her strength, but I reacted with detachment and roughness, refusing to answer the nobility of her feelings. Such a behaviour reduced my personality to the image of ignorant people - may God forgive me - or at least decreased the value of a young modern intellectual like me. I do not know with which broken heart my mother received such a terrible shock from her cherished son , but I saw, without being really conscious of the horror of my conduct towards her, that her face became dark and she drew her attention away from me to show me how disappointed she was. But, she continued nevertheless to dedicate me the feelings of a mother with her generous heart which seemed to say: "You are quite hard, my beloved child!" I remembered this scene which made me loose my intellectual aptitudes. My horrible behaviour towards my mother covered me with shame. For this reason, I decided to be henceforth more indulgent for all those who have a bit love for me and took the firm resolution to recognize my last errors to my mother and ask her to forgive me, and since then I started to fill my duties towards her with respect and full humility.

After this long absence, I started, when I was alone with myself, to point out your words and advices, reddening of shame each time the remembrance of a silly thing which I commited in your presence emerges in my memory, but you can be sure that I will never forget that your remarks were all intended to my benefit, and I am now more than aware of the generous care you lavished on me during all my childhood. Today, I carry you more than ever in my heart, and the deep affection I do feel for you incites me to strongly tighten you against my injured chest and tell you how big is my eager to see you in order to express my regrets for my past behaviour. I ask you to forgive me for having been that narrow minded child who sincerely believed that all what the others felt was no less than the demonstration of a requirement which was imposed to them, and was far from knowing that each being was carrying a heart which enabled him to distinguish the good of the evil and was capable of feelings of nobility, the origin of which to be looked after in the depth of the human kindness. But, do the children that we are see this reality and hope to obtain from their mother to forgive them for the faults they commited towards her?

Here is my paternal aunt who was the only person who gave me the chance to blossom out in her breast. She was for me the model of the best teacher a child of my age could dream of. She combined kindness with the spirit of sacrifice, taking care the whole nights on my rest, so that I could always sleep in all peace. Sometimes, she washed my feet while I was in full sleep and took care not to awake me. Some other times, when the weather was very cold, she covered me with an additional cover which she withdrew from her own bed, so that I could spend the night in a warm bed, without risk of catching cold.How many times she tightened me against her breast, in the manner of a real mother who was used to maternal care. How many deprivations she suffered because of me; and when anything which might provoke covetousness came home, the part which was intended to me was always the largest one, with the motive, so my aunt, that the delicacies must always be reserved to the smallest of all.

Thus was my aunt - I rather have said my mother - . Did she know at least that I filled in my art the duties owed to her benevolence and unique conduct when she spoke or acted on my behalf? When her husband passed away after a long disease, she associated us with the condolences presented to her by saying: These are the sons of my brother, whom I raised as if they were my own children. I feel related to all of them in a link of relationship close to a real bond of filiation. May God preserve you and keep you under His protection, my gold hearted and full with noble feelings aunt. I will be always faithful to your motherhood. I will take care of your rest. I will serve you with all the means at my disposal, but I know that I can pay only a very small part of my debts towards you.

I do not know how to describe the feelings that the maidservants had for me as well as for my brothers who saw me growing among them. They are innocent fraternal feelings and a mark of regard which reflects the purity of their heart. I was never rude with them, nor have I ever behaved myself as a boy always ordering about with the expectation to be obeyed. On the contrary, I respected them and felt sorry for the miserable fate which did not spare them, when they told me, with a luxury of details which upset me, the misfortune to which they have been submitted since they were removed from their families. One of them remembered how she went out with her mother and some other relatives to attend a small feast which was organized at the edge of a waterside and how, in a moment she was by herself, she was approached by an individual who offered her some cakes and kept talking to her until she saw herself on the back of a camel riding along the sand dunes of the desert. She kept crying and calling her family for help, but her only consolation was blows of a stick on her back in the most savage and inhumane way. She told the mishap of her removal while she was sobbing and crying, and foresaw her family within an image behind a veil as dark as worthy of pity. Then, she abandoned herself to despair and became aware that one day she would suffer the privation of this image when the curtain of the forgetfulness will fall down and withdraw it definitely from her memory.

Almost all these maidservants are removed from home in their early childhood and grow up in the adoptive families where the fate wants to call them. When they are well treated, they grow attached to their new environment and integrate into it in the most natural way, but when they do not find a convenient atmosphere in their adoptive milieu, they resign to work under the harsh conditions of forced labour, and thus until the last day of their unhappy existence.

I learned when I was far from home,that our maidservant in chief passed away. My heart was broken and I burst into bitter tears. I felt a very sharp pain, and could hardly believe that such a wonderful person whom we loved as a second mother was dead. We loved her at the same time for the impeccable behaviour she had with each of us and for the exccellent control of the family affairs for which she was unanimously appreciated. I have read again and again, and thus several days, the letter announcing the news of her death with the hope I have been mistaken in what I have read, but the destiny was relentless and the judgement of God without appeal. Deeply affected by this death, I remained in a great sorrow, without knowing in which state I will find our house in the absence of such a person who always acted with dignity, a person with a lot of sense in what she said, listened with much attention, and was even considered as the family general practitioner, hastening of going to the bedside of whoever fell sick or was in prey with a physical suffering. Although she was far away from the studies of medicine, she carried an extraordinary interest to this science. She was always ready to help those who called upon her experiment in the application of therapeutic based on medicinal plants. May the Almighty have her in His holy mercy and assist all the victims of the infamous slave trade in the process of the abolition of the slavery.

As for my friends who represent half of my memories and my thoughts, they occupy a significant share of my mind and my heart, and are the inexhaustible source of my tears. We have left one another for nearly two years, breaking the bonds which linked me with the majority of them, without knowing the reason of this rupture. And now, here I am mobilizing all my forces and what I feel as affection for them in view of our next being together which will enable us to strengthen the bonds of friendship that seem somewhat to have been slackened during these last two years. But this will require some patience and laissez-faire of the circumstances. In other words, if I am not hard enough with myself, and not sufficiently equipped with an immense will to contain my emotions, I will be in prey with a constant desolation by continually feeding my psychic state with my emotional tendancies.

My heart is split and the tears roll down from my eyes each time I am alone. I wonder were are my former strength and the moments of hapiness of my elapsed life. The human being projects himself in an animated image when he starts reviewing by himself the completed days of which he keeps a certain remembrance in his memory and engraves the image in his heart. As far as I am concerned, I feel in this very moment a weekness and a fear beyond all description. I feel invaded by a desolation the root of which is to be searched in my affliction and my state of indecision. The sobs make me feel a lump in my throat and the tears, by covering the paper on which I am supposed to write, prevent me from taking the pen to express all what I have to say. The thought never crossed my mind, while I was far from my homeland, that I was going to feel all this pain or, rather that I could imagine that such a pain and such concerns were going to monopolize my spirit at the point to prevent me from working.

I knew that my heart was immune to this point and was enough solid to fight the emotional currents which dispute every inch in its sphere of influence. But what about a person like me, that the fate condemned to such a separation, a person who suffers from a deep wound which opens dangerouly every day more to reach a crucial point - that no one had ever known before - at the moment when the ship sailed away in the mediterranean, and I started to foresee my country through a drizzle and patchy fog. And that was all. It was enough that I closed the eyes so that I could imagine a headlight whose only head was emerging from the fog. That was the last image I perceived from my country by leaving it. My so much beloved country!

From left to right: Saïd and Abdelkrim Hajji en route to the Middle East - November 1930