Night of the Living Harma

Against all logic, on the afternoon of Eid Kbir, belly full of fat-wrapped sheep liver, I found myself feeling a little underwhelmed. The much-hyped slaughter and butcher of the sheep happened more quickly and with less fanfare than the Luby family can get up the Christmas tree.  I was under the impression that at some point I would stare into the sheep's eyes and thank the noble beast for laying down his life, but once the butcher arrived wearing his knee-high wellies, things progressed quickly. There was blood; but I saw more blood on TV when the royal sheep was killed (special effects?). There were guts: the butcher's most impressive maneuver involved pulling a length of intestine from the strung-up sheep, nicking the end with a knife and then flushing the contents of the sheep's stomach with water and air, applied by human mouth to sheep's rear. Little pellets of dung traveled up and around the translucent intestine before spilling out onto the ground, like boba pearls spit through a krazy straw. Actually, that part blew my mind. But after that it was all business, no razzle-dazzle.

It’s easy to guess what desensitized me to our up-close sheep autopsy: spoilers.  Peace Corps staff and Moroccans have been telling us about Eid for nine months with grisly precision; prepping us with “best-of” slaughter compilation videos so that we wouldn’t faint at the sight of blood. By now I’ve eaten mechoui and tangia in Marrakech; I no longer flinch when a gazzar’s cleaver hits a chicken breast and –oops a little blood flecks on my shirt. All that preparation worked a little too well, so that by the time lunch was through, all there was left to do was unbutton my pants and wonder about the Moroccan TV executives who had the sick sense of humor to program the adorable anthropomorphic sheep of Shaun Le Mouton during Eid.

That was when we heard an animalistic groan come from the street, and then the screams of children and a dozen tiny feet scattering on the pavement. The harma.

Suddenly, our town was a zombie movie come to life. The harma are young men dressed in sheep and goat skins who lumber through the streets, armed with switches made from olive branches and assorted hoofs and paws, threatening and glowering and demanding money from bystanders –and sometimes whacking them with a dead dog’s paw until they pay up.  In their costumes –sometimes amended with rubber Halloween masks- they look like a cross between Chewbacca and Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko. In other words, spooky as hell.

Nightmares.

Reports conflict on how the harma spend their earnings. Depending on who you ask they either throw the town a party, donate their money to the mosque or else blow it on hashuma bad habits. Their real purpose seems to be to torment and delight children, who spent the next four days running and hiding and screaming until they ran out of breath. And to entertain those of us hanging out windows and over rooftop banisters with their compelling, sometimes creepy, sometimes hilarious theater.

Super fun until they start hitting you.

Eid's been over for two weeks, but there are still little harma-in-training running around our street.

The harma –also called boujloud or bilmawen- are a strictly Amazight tradition with no ties to Islam. The practice isn’t found everywhere and seems to have a different manifestation in each town and village that puts it on. Maybe that’s why the harma got such a soft sell when people described Eid. But the timestamp on the camera tells me that the time from the knife across the sheep’s throat to its liver on the grill was less than 30 minutes. The 40-plus harma stalking up and down the streets lasted four days. With a full moon rising and ominous growls and playful screams hanging in the cool October evening, something about the harma felt awfully familiar and at the same time perfectly unspoiled.

 So for your viewing pleasure this Halloween, the best of our grainy, shaky glimpses of that elusive beast known as the harma.