Inspired by his upbringing in Morocco, longtime Cortez resident Abdel Berrada recently published his first novel.
To talk through some of its Moroccan cultural elements – and to sign books and mingle – there’s an event coming up at the Cortez Public Library on March 18 from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Plus, as of Feb. 25, Driss’s Trials and Triumphs is available to purchase on Amazon.
The story is set in the 1990s and early 2000s Morocco, Berrada said.
Like Berrada, the main character Driss is from northwest Africa but moved to the United States when the opportunity presented itself.
Driss and his family moved to the Four Corners area, on the Utah side.
“To Blanding,” Berrada laughed. “I made it up.”
Driss was more than 5,000 miles from home living in the Beehive State, but the “trauma he experienced during his youth in Morocco came back to haunt him,” said Berrada.
“It was trauma as a child, trauma as an adult,” Gina Montoya, Berrada’s wife, added.
“He was still experiencing that trauma, and it was exacerbated by the trouble he had integrating into American society,” she said.
And so Driss returns to Morocco to confront his abusers, his demons.
“His wife, Cindy, told him he had to,” Montoya laughed. “I’m not Cindy.”
Driss heeded Cindy’s advice and returned to Morocco, where he befriended abusers from his past and was thrown into a dangerous adventure as he worked to expose “the sexual abuse that’s there but often not reported,” said Berrada.
At the same time, on the homefront, his marriage was falling apart.
“It’s a story of struggle, trauma, love, hardship, prejudice, perseverance,” he said.
Montoya said she thinks “it’s a book of hope.”
“I think it’s a good book for these times, and the times we’re facing with immigrants. It gives you a perspective from another viewpoint,” she said.
Berrada said readers are sure to learn a lot about Morocco, and that he did a lot of research to make sure all of its cultural elements are accurate.
“I learned things I didn’t know about my own country,” he said.
Moroccan customs are woven throughout the book in both subtle and blatant ways, like in the food they eat or the way Driss loves his wife but won’t publicly show it, a behavior that speaks to some “of the contradictions of Moroccan societies,” said Berrada.
The book’s editor, David Aretha, agreed that it reveals “much about Moroccan society.”
It reveals so much, in fact, that Berrada opted to publish the book under the name Hamza Kaçem instead of his own.
“There are people in Morocco that if they read it, they’re not going to be too happy about some of the things they read,” Berrada said, citing some of the taboos, hypocrisy and abuse the story confronts.
“The ones who know me – friends, relatives, classmates – will know it’s me when they read it, but others won’t,” he said.
“They might recognize some of the characters,” Montoya added. “They have different names, but he thinks they’ll figure it out.”
At any rate, Berrada’s editor concluded that “It reads like a real-life memoir.”
“It’s maybe 60% nonfiction, based on real stuff,” Berrada said. “It’s all fictionalized or dramatized,” though inspired by real events.
Heading back to Morocco last year on a Fulbright research grant was especially inspiring, and it’s where he got a lot of writing done.
Altogether, Berrada said it took him three years to piece the novel together, as it was largely a wintertime project.
“I learned I can write if I put myself into it,” he said, reflecting on the experience.
Though, with his agricultural science background, he admitted that creative writing was challenging. Plus, English isn’t his first language.
“Writing literary is a lot more difficult than technical writing,” he said. “Describing scenes and describing people was the hardest part.”
And something he hopes people take away from the book?
“It shows we’re all the same,” he said.
“We have the same aspirations, some of the same struggles. But because we grew up in different environments, there’s all these perceptions of this race or that race, or this religion or that religion. But basically we’re all the same. We’re all humans.”
