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2000s: From the slums to the white terraces of Casablanca
Secret Son
What you need to know before your trail
Raised by his mother in a one-room home, this is the home, the Casablanca that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Casablanca’s stinking alleys surround the house and they are his hideaway, his usual stomping ground and the streets where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.
Nevertheless, he dreams of escape – until, one day, the father he thought dead turns out to be very much alive, and whisks him from the slums into the luxurious life of Casablanca’s elite.
But a gilded cage is still a cage..
Travel Guide
Casablanca
Mum’s house – Hay an Najat
..a whitewashed house that huddled with others like it along a narrow dirt road. The house had one room with no winds, and a room made of corrugated tin held down by rocks. The yard, where his mother did the cooking and the washing, was open to the sky. It was in the yard that she cleaned the sheep hides she took in on the day of Eid, and there Youssef received the rare friends who came to visit.
Father’s house – Qubbet Jjmel. This too is a fictional setting but more than encompasses the two sides of one city and two sides of a boy’s life and fortunes
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Secret Son
Author/Guide Laila Lalami Destination: Casablanca Departure Time: 2000s
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