bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1988) — Summer 1988 // Été 1988, p. 31
Helmet of Flesh, by Scott Symons,
McClelland and Stewart 1986. 513 pp.
$24.95.
Scott Symons’ Helmet of Flesh is a comical romp through the sexual landscape of Morocco and an eloquent paen to the fascinating culture of a country relatively unknown to Canadians. Helmet of Flesh is fun for those curious about the land of “A Thousand and One Nights” and of interest to any who’ve been to Morocco or who may end up in the Kingdom on a posting. Scott Symons writes with a deep and thorough understanding of his subject. He knows the territory well, having lived between Morocco and Toronto since 1971. Most of his time in Morocco has been spent in Essaouira, a small fishing village on the Atlantic coast made famous during the European hippie invasion of the late 1960’s and briefly as home to Jimi Hendrix and to the Rolling Stones.
This is Symons’ third novel, after Place d’Armes and Civic Square. Symons also operates as the Globe and Mail correspondent in Morocco but for the most part has been working on Helmet of Flesh for the last decade. Written in a stream of consciousness style akin to James Joyce, with a touch of the cosmic comic insanity of Tom Wolfe, Symons’ narrative is raucous and rich. He recounts the sexual meanderings of one York Mackenzie, scion of a prominent WASP family from Rosedale who comes out of the closet and leaves his wife and family for a boyfriend named John. John and York move to a tiny Newfoundland fishing village called Osprey Cove and then to London, England. York finally leaves for Marrakesh to test the strength of his commitment to John and as part of an “orgasm odyssey.” Marrakesh, York tells us, is “an aphrodisiac.
I knew that before I came.” In Marrakesh, York finds a young Morrocan lover named Kebir and embarks on a hilarious party on wheels south along the Draa Valley to M’Hamid, at the edge of the Moroccan Sahara, accompanied by two aging, aristocratic English gays. Throw in a touch of high adventure in a forbidding chateau deep in the Atlas Mountains owned by a mysterious sheikh from Morocco’s famous El Glaoui family, a comical flashback to Osprey Cove and vignettes portraying life in Marrakesh’s eclectic homosexual community, and you have a most entertaining read.
Morocco is the perfect setting for a novel with an overtly homosexual thrust that doesn’t take itself, or gays, all that seriously. The Kingdom has always been a sexual Mecca for Europeans, North Americans and visitors from the Arab world, particularly the Gulf, a country where sexual identities are not always clear and where homosexuality and bisexuality are tolerated. As one of York’s European companions describes it, Morocco is the “land of zeb and plenty.” (Zeb is the Moroccan word for the male organ). And Marrakesh, with its temperate climate, palm-tree lined avenues, rust-coloured stucco homes and High Atlas mountain-backdrop, has been home for decades to a thriving gay community.
But Helmet of Flesh is more than an ode to Eros. Symons pays great attention to the details of Moroccan life — cuisine, values, language and dress. For instance, Symons describes York Mackenzie’s painstaking efforts to master Moroccan dining protocol
– first, which hand to eat with, where to find the best morsels on the plate, how to serve and drink mint tea, even how to wash your hands after the meal. Or the extensive ritual of dance, pageantry and feasting that accompagnies a Moslem wedding and woe befalls he who should set eyes on the bride before the ceremony, as York finds out, much to his chagrin, in M’Hamid. Or the widespread fear of the “Evil Eye” — that a madman or malcontent will put a hex on you or your household – and how Moroccans rely on the Hand of Fatima to ward off bad luck. (Symons is enough of a believer that the Hand even appears on the inside covers of his book). Or reference to details such as the use of smen, or rancid butter, in Moroccan cooking. Smen gives a distinctive flavour (rather unpleasant to the Western palate) to traditional Moroccan dishes such as couscous. These sort of references are found throughout the pages of Helmet of Flesh and make for a novel rich in detail and images, one that goes beyond the banalities found in much of the tourist brochure-style commentary on Morocco.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1988) — Summer 1988 // Été 1988, p. 31. Read the rest of this issue →
