𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐇𝐨𝐭 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐈 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐞 · 𝐍𝐨. 𝟐

Strong Stuff — William Seaton

Our summer series keeps asking what heat reveals—and what it burns away. Here’s the second feature.

𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐜𝐞:

In “Strong Stuff,” poet–scholar William Seaton stands at high noon in Marrakech’s Djema el Fna and reads the temperature of a city without euphemism. Heat clarifies: commerce as contact sport, charity (zakat) as daily practice, hospitality that meets the traveler with a smile even as the sun drills down. Seaton’s field notes move from beggars and bazaars to tanning vats and Eid slaughter, from kif pipes and shopkeepers’ gauntlets to Islam’s stark simplicity—then glint against Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, where one sun burns everything into focus.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞:

🔷 A clear-eyed look at how “pleasure mingles with suffering, generosity with selfishness, civility with barbarism”—each undiluted.

🔶 Notes on zakat and everyday mercy—coins for mendicants, saucers of milk for feral cats—set against a “greed-based economy.”

🔷 A brief turn through history (el Glaoui to today) and a meditation on Islam’s “singularly simple and direct” creed.

🔶 A closing bow to Bowles: heat as the force that “chastens and mortifies even as it vivifies.”

𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮:

“The elements here may feel extreme, but at least they lack hypocrisy.”

“There is but one sun in The Sheltering Sky, and its ferocity overwhelms all else.”

Read the full essay below.

(Editors’ note: We’re publishing originals, excerpts, and reprints throughout the season—plus occasional touchstones from the wider literature on heat.)

Image captured is a still from the movie of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘬𝘺

Strong Stuff

The sweat trickles down the visitor’s back as the afternoon sun approaches a hundred degrees in Marrakech’s celebrated Djema el Fna, but the unapologetic naked intensity of the heat can seem almost bracing. The elements here may feel extreme, but at least they lack hypocrisy.

The vicious cruelty of the old rulers matched Caligula’s, and the slave market in the Souk Zrabia flourished until the French occupation in 1912. Today men’s aggression is for the most part displaced into commerce and socio-economic hierarchy. The assault of self-interested hustlers has abated since the government has got after them, and their importunities are little worse than the gauntlet of shopkeepers who will go so far as to seize the arm of a foreign passerby. Business here may seem recreational, but everyone knows it is always a matter of getting one’s hand into another’s pocket.

Though the beggars are also a result of a greed-based economy, and they sometimes distress the tender-hearted visitor and annoy the rest, they testify also to the vitality of Muslim charity or zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. The Arabic word means “that which purifies [the giver]” and such donations are enjoined by the Koran; to give what one ought is a prerequisite for one’s prayers to be heard. Almost always aged, crippled, or holding a baby, sometimes in orderly rows chanting outside a mosque, the appeals of beggars are regularly heard by the more affluent. Certain medicants make a regular circuit of souk merchants, receiving a coin from each. Have they somehow a franchise on the route? Compassionate giving may extend even to animals. Outside the modern carrefour where one may purchase forbidden goods such as wine and cured pork from Savoy, the feral cats find plates of milk and scraps of rotisseried chicken, perhaps left by a worker who recalled the story of Mohammed’s cutting off his sleeve to avoid disturbing his cat Muezza who had fallen asleep there.

Travelers are one of the categories of people to whom zakat should be given, and hospitality to travelers remains strong in spite of the constant procession of foreigners, now decades-old. Though anti-American demonstrations are at this moment turning violent in Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan, we are consistently greeted with smiles and waves of the hand even from passing cars. The wanderer lost in the medina’s maze who asks directions will receive warmth as well as aid.

Pleasure may be mingled with suffering, generosity with selfishness, civility with barbarism, but each element is nonetheless undiluted and manifests without disguise. The head of household (the king even) slaughters his own sheep for the Eid el Kebir. The stench of the tanning vats makes a miasma of a whole neighborhood. The diner knows the source of his meat and the stroller the origin of his shoes’ leather.

One reads that Thami el Glaoui, Lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, entertained not only the French officials with whom he collaborated, but Churchill as well, Colette and Charlie Chaplin, offering his guests hashish and opium as well as girls and boys snatched from the tribes of the Atlas. He was, not surprisingly, hated even before he turned on the king. The indulgences of his palace were beyond the means of most Moroccans, but a pipe of cannabis was not. If kief is no longer consumed openly, this is the result of government fiat under international pressures. Sebsis and shkaufs (pipe-stems and bowls) for its consumption are for sale in the markets yet today, and the use of alcohol, which I would agree with the imams is less desirable, is surely increasing every year.

Islam itself seems a creed fiercely insistent and singularly simple and direct. When compared to the multifarious maze of Hindu mythology, the subtle metaphysics of Buddhism, the pomp of Roman Catholicism, or the denatured Puritanism with which I was raised, Islam’s requirements are few but absolute. The insurgent dynasties, the Almohads and then the Almoravids were puritan simplifiers out of the desert, and today the Sufis, the marabout cults, and the remnants of Berber animism continue to lose ground to the grand simplicity of orthodoxy. Experiential emotion is replaced by authority and variety by uniformity. The shahada, the basic statement of Islamic belief is a single sentence, stark and simple: “There is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet.” It must impress even those of us it cannot convince.

In Paul Bowles’ Moroccan stories one finds the same extreme forms of friendship, sensuality, betrayal, and agony. There is but one sun in the Sheltering Sky, and its ferocity overwhelms all else. The wanderer in the Djema el Fna can feel in his whole body that animating heat that chastens and mortifies even as it vivifies. Among the multifarious distractions of the square and of the wider world beyond, the joy and the pain of being alive, the love and aggression of the world, are here unmistakable.

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Kit has been rescued by a Tuareg nomad, only to be made his sexual slave.

The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she thought, would allow her to catch up with time. But there was always the immaculate, vast clarity out there when she looked, unchanging and pitiless above the city.

By her pattress was a tiny square window with iron grill-work across the opening; a nearby wall of dried brown mud cut off all but a narrow glimpse of a fairly distant section of the city. The chaos of cubical buildings with their flat roofs seemed to go on to infinity, and with the dust and heat-haze it was hard to tell just where the sky began. In spite of the glare the landscape was gray – blinding in its brilliancy, but gray in color. In the early morning for a short while the steel-yellow sun glittered distantly in the sky, fixing her like a serpent’s eye as she sat propped up against the cushions staring out at the rectangle of impossible light.

(𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘬𝘺, ch. XXVII; Paul Bowles)

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Visit Wiilliam's blog to read more: Poetry on the Loose

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🔥 𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲?

We’re keeping the window open for community submissions. Share a short text, image, or audio/video piece about where your heat lives; selected works will run in the series with full credit. Details in the series launch post.

🔥 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼: giantsteps.submissions@gmail.com