This section ruminates the foregoing statement that “in the weight of the dirt exposed by the joutia, there might be no alternative other than to become an abject.” It dwells on the mikhala8 (sing. mikhali), as a joutia category that is symptomatic of a common sensitivity to the influence of dirt. Mikhala are the darkest characters of the Moroccan joutia. They are subject to a double sense of darkness: they move about in the dark (at night) to collect stuff from trash, and they return, during the day, into their permanent status as “invisible sights.”9 They resort to obvious hideouts like the joutia, where nobody cares to enquire about their names, origin, home and family.
The mikhala’s darkness is augmented by the name by which they are famous: kwilla people.10 The majority of Lmikhala in Souk Sa’a will be seen with glue-filled plastic bags held over their mouths, or with plastic bottles, originally for mineral water, refilled with pure alcohol, which they either mixed with water or leave as is. They do not usually engage in heavy bagging or drinking during the joutia period (between 6 am and 3 pm), because if they get completely wasted, untimely seeing double, they could easily be fooled or ripped off. Nevertheless, sobriety does not necessarily protect the mikhali. Far from being a treasure hunter, lmikhali acts in favour of those who come everyday to the joutia searching their farrashat for lhawta (a great deal).
There is something ironical about lmikhali’s situation. Many a lmikhali considers himself a social victim; he might hold society responsible for his wretchedness. He understandably gets high to anaesthetise the pains of his social reality. Because of his negligence of the world around him and the real value of the things that circulate within, he fails to recognise the meaning of the stuff he collects. In the escapist endeavour to unsee the “other,” who is partly or fully responsible for his current state, he ends up unseeing many other things, including the chances of redemption. The “other” in the lmikhali’s perspective (representative of power, oppression, corruption and inequality) is a reminder of his failure and should therefore be unconditionally unfelt, and unseen. His moments of drunkenness would attenuate the weight of the oppressive presence of the “other,” however, his pursuit of forgetfulness ironically pins him down as a “reverential character,” because he keeps donating his finds, in dutiful ways, to different myriads of that “other.” In a different reading, Lmikhali is someone who involuntarily restores the value of wasted things, by exposing them to market practices, after which their value gets renewed. This act entails a deep unconscious mechanism that is triggered by two facts. First, lmikhali is aware that he is “cast away” by the throwing hand of the rich. Second, he is aware that the reckless throwing gestures of the rich cause some of their valuables to end up in trash
Lmikhali somehow reverses such gestures of the hand, by selling (almost throwing away) the latter’s valuable possessions at a bargain price. In the story of the necklace lmikhali’s honest reply to the rich woman’s query is most surprising. He could have simply lied to her. However, he confesses the find and provokes the buyer to confess his deceit. It is as if he wants to put emphasis on the repercussions of the reckless riddance that rid the necklace off its value. For him, such reckless dispositions had dissociated him before all else from his sense of self-esteem, when the hands of power dumped him in his new trash-bound circumstances. It is as if he wants to confound us all with this rich-man’streasure-becoming-poor-man’s-trash situation, where the poor and rich become equal in the ability to throw away
lmikhala trigger a twofold mention of and reference to rubbish: they socially belong to the bouzebal11 category, hence members and representatives of a trash society. At the same time, they are powerful transformers