Bébé Bibliophile
Yeah, I read
My appetite for reading was insatiable from a very early age. As a kid, my most persistent obsession was Le Journal de Mickey, a weekly magazine that was part educational articles, and part Disney comic strips.1 Almost every weekday (depending on which magazine was released), I’d walk down to the local bodega near our house in Rabat, plonk the latest edition of whatever off the shelf, and ask Jamal the store owner to keyyid-ha — write it down in his ledger so that my dad could pay for the total amount at the end of the month. I met Jamal again almost 20 years afterward, looking weary and with shelves unusually bare for a Moroccan bodega. I couldn’t tell if he actually remembered the kid who was such a persistent presence within his store, or if he was just being polite.
One day, our family returned from being out of town for a week. I was painfully aware of the back catalog of crisp issues I had missed out on during my absence, so despite being bedraggled from the trip and the late hour, I insisted on going to Jamal’s “just to say hi!” I claimed. It was a blatant lie my dad happily tolerated.
I couldn’t get enough of books. Our apartment in Rabat was very close to Avenue Mohammed V, a wide, prominent boulevard built up by the French throughout the 1920s and 1930s into their unmistakable urban style.
The 5-over-1 buildings that are now the current hot shit with American city-slickers nowadays are banal fixtures in Morocco. Virtually every concrete apartment block is built on top of a honeycomb of shops, restaurants, and cafés (oh god, so many cafés) on its ground floor. Establishments did not really care about having a distinct name; just having a neon sign that announced RESTAURANT loud enough was usually sufficient. On our regular promenades, the one place I was always periscoping for was the bookstore whose banner shouted LIVRE LIVRE LIVRE in unmistakably vivid green lettering. I could never remember where it was exactly, or whether it had shuttered since our last visit, but that never stopped me from subtly pushing my family towards its siren song.
The first library I fell in love with was Le Centre Culturel Français, a product of francophone diplomacy. Since I was at least 8 years-old, I was allowed to walk the 12 minutes on my own to Le Centre, and evaporate hours of my time within it every Saturday. Le Centre’s book allowance allowed us to check out three novels and two BDs at a time, and I’d max out my trove and rush home to devour it.
Moroccan schools adopted the French tradition of having a half-day on Wednesdays, but my school still opened for an optional low-stakes afternoon. As soon as I was given the choice between going to school for arts and crafts and doubling my weekly library sessions, I picked the obvious route. I blitzed through so many pages, then would come back a few days later hungry still for more.
The Centre’s Librarian noticed my omnipresence and offered me a deal:
“If you help me reshelve the books, I’ll let you check out one additional BD at a time.”
“…Is it ok if I check out an additional novel instead?”
He laughed, then accepted my counteroffer. Of course. I was at the library anyway, and the time I spent performing child labor ensured that no stack skipped my attention.
I wish I had somehow kept a list of everything I read. My memory is tarred by the uncanny unfamiliarity of knowing something in French but lacking the ability to easily translate it into a Google search. I still vividly remember the choose-your-own-adventure books and the inimitable immersion I submersed myself in. Grailquest was a pseudo fantasy spoof involving the wizard Merlin and the young hero Pip. Years later, that hero is who I named my cat after.2 For a long time I kept citing La Cité de Kharé — part of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series, which recently had a video game adaptation — as my all-time favorite book, in part because John Blanche’s illustrations added so much bewitchment to exploring that fictional town.
My gnawing appetite expanded my reach to whatever else I could get my hands on, including English books my parents had lying around. I can’t find any trace of its existence now, but one was a heavy tome called Secrets of Health, a collection of folk wisdom and life lessons from a bald courtroom stenographer who was particularly eager to extoll the health benefits of sitting upside down on your head. I have no idea why a 9-year-old would pick this up, but I read through all of it. Whenever I encountered any passage that exceeded my (limited at the time) English proficiency, I’d jump off the salon couch and carry the open book to my dad. I still remember the stenographer relaying a story about his friend known for going on numerous dates, much like someone who “peruses the menu at a restaurant before choosing a meal”. I dragged the book and its open flap with me and asked my dad what this meant, and he demurred. I assumed it was some weird sex thing.
Then we moved to America. The local public library was one of our first and most hyped-up visits. Much more capacious, and spanning a wider reach of human knowledge, I greedily built up a stack higher than I could reasonably digest. I figured there would be a limit just like Le Centre, and braced myself for the painful jettisoning process.
“How many books can we check out?”
“Oh…fifty, I think?”
Fifty? Fifty? Are you fucking kidding me? I can take five-zero books home with me right now?
The librarian couldn’t comprehend the shivering awe I felt at the time.
Worth noting that these comics fell within/adjacent to the Franco-Belgian comic tradition (Bande dessinée or BD for short), which have a very different reputation from their American comic book counterparts. Superheroes are, thankfully, approximately non-existent and BDs are generally respected as an art form, and their appeal cuts across a much broader age range.
The rest of my family insisted on calling him Zazi, based on how my little sister used to mispronounce my name.
as a child in Quebec I learned to read french thru a BD series I couldn't name. it was only thru a google search describing the actions of my favorite characters that I finally rediscovered it: Petzi