Allal the Snake Boy
__________________
“He formed a thorough
hatred for the people of
the town, who never
allowed him to forget
that he was a son of sin,
meskhot—damned.”
—Paul Bowles, “Allal,”
A Distant Episode:
The Selected Stories
The story was pretty cheesy. Not very scary at all. But what should one expect from a book of short stories entitled: “The Campfire Collection: Ghosts, Beasts, and Things That Go Bump in the Night.”
Later I found “Allal” in Bowles’ “The Selected Stories” sharing the pages with that simply exquisitely scandalous & subtly sophisticated gay short story “Pages From Cold Point,” about a father who slowly comes to the understanding that his young son is gay like he is. In fact, even more gay…
_________________________________
The thought occurred to me that what an interesting short story “Allal” could have become if Bowles had approached it in the same shamelessly seductive and suggestive manner as he did with “Pages From Cold Point.”
The original “Allal” story is about this chicken who gets high and turns into a snake. He’s somewhat of a social outcast having been born out of wedlock to a 14-year-old girl who gets abandoned by her lover when she predictably becomes pregnant.
___________________________
The girl keeps working at the hotel where she got pregnant but abandons the boy soon afterwards. The boy grows up at the hotel working in the kitchen for an old childless couple who raise him.
The town treats him rather shabbily. They call him a son of sin, meskhot—one of the damned. Without a mother or father, born into this world totally and completely alone.
___________________________
The boy Allal is an outsider very much like Racky the young protagonist of “Pages From Cold Point.” There isn’t that much difference between being young and queer and being young and a snake in many people’s mind and that’s what I liked about both stories. Except “Allal” needed a little more development along gay plots lines, I thought to myself.
Both boys eventually get caught, of course. Racky gets criticized by the servants, the islanders and the local sheriff for putting the make on all the boys and even some of the men on the island after his father retires and his wife dies. His solution is to fly the boy to Havana, buy him a new convertible and set up a trust for him with his mother’s estate.
__________________________
Allal isn’t so lucky. After living with it, worshipping it, getting this big black snake loaded on kiff-paste and then becoming it—Allal the boy-snake unfortunately gets caught and can’t wiggle back into its hole in time.
He’s vulnerable and doesn’t have time to change back out of being the Other and back into his human body again in time. Instead he gets his head cut off by some irate townspeople and his leftover human body without its decapitated snake-soul ends up screaming in an insane asylum.
______________________
Surely, I said to myself, Bowles’ writerly pal Mrabet had to have come up with that kind of Edgar Allan Poe melodramatic kiff-storyline? Either that or maybe Mrabet and Bowles got loaded and didn’t have time to finish the story off more smoothly like “Letter from Cold Point”?
But I couldn’t find anywhere any footnote or acknowledgement that “Allal” was a Bowles-Mrabet collaboration. Actually it reads like a Bowles-Poe collaboration—going back to when Paul’s mother read Poe mystery tales to him as his boyhood bedtime stories. Many critics have commented on the gothic supernatural aspect of Bowles’ fiction.
_______________________
But who knows? The story still sounds like one of the Bowles-Mrabet translation collaborations they were good at—one of those over-the top kiffed stories that Mohammed Mrabet dictated to Bowles after they both kept smoking the pipe much too much late at night?
__________________
“He formed a thorough
hatred for the people of
the town, who never
allowed him to forget
that he was a son of sin,
meskhot—damned.”
—Paul Bowles, “Allal,”
A Distant Episode:
The Selected Stories
The story was pretty cheesy. Not very scary at all. But what should one expect from a book of short stories entitled: “The Campfire Collection: Ghosts, Beasts, and Things That Go Bump in the Night.”
Later I found “Allal” in Bowles’ “The Selected Stories” sharing the pages with that simply exquisitely scandalous & subtly sophisticated gay short story “Pages From Cold Point,” about a father who slowly comes to the understanding that his young son is gay like he is. In fact, even more gay…
_________________________________
The thought occurred to me that what an interesting short story “Allal” could have become if Bowles had approached it in the same shamelessly seductive and suggestive manner as he did with “Pages From Cold Point.”
The original “Allal” story is about this chicken who gets high and turns into a snake. He’s somewhat of a social outcast having been born out of wedlock to a 14-year-old girl who gets abandoned by her lover when she predictably becomes pregnant.
___________________________
The girl keeps working at the hotel where she got pregnant but abandons the boy soon afterwards. The boy grows up at the hotel working in the kitchen for an old childless couple who raise him.
The town treats him rather shabbily. They call him a son of sin, meskhot—one of the damned. Without a mother or father, born into this world totally and completely alone.
___________________________
The boy Allal is an outsider very much like Racky the young protagonist of “Pages From Cold Point.” There isn’t that much difference between being young and queer and being young and a snake in many people’s mind and that’s what I liked about both stories. Except “Allal” needed a little more development along gay plots lines, I thought to myself.
Both boys eventually get caught, of course. Racky gets criticized by the servants, the islanders and the local sheriff for putting the make on all the boys and even some of the men on the island after his father retires and his wife dies. His solution is to fly the boy to Havana, buy him a new convertible and set up a trust for him with his mother’s estate.
__________________________
Allal isn’t so lucky. After living with it, worshipping it, getting this big black snake loaded on kiff-paste and then becoming it—Allal the boy-snake unfortunately gets caught and can’t wiggle back into its hole in time.
He’s vulnerable and doesn’t have time to change back out of being the Other and back into his human body again in time. Instead he gets his head cut off by some irate townspeople and his leftover human body without its decapitated snake-soul ends up screaming in an insane asylum.
______________________
Surely, I said to myself, Bowles’ writerly pal Mrabet had to have come up with that kind of Edgar Allan Poe melodramatic kiff-storyline? Either that or maybe Mrabet and Bowles got loaded and didn’t have time to finish the story off more smoothly like “Letter from Cold Point”?
But I couldn’t find anywhere any footnote or acknowledgement that “Allal” was a Bowles-Mrabet collaboration. Actually it reads like a Bowles-Poe collaboration—going back to when Paul’s mother read Poe mystery tales to him as his boyhood bedtime stories. Many critics have commented on the gothic supernatural aspect of Bowles’ fiction.
_______________________
But who knows? The story still sounds like one of the Bowles-Mrabet translation collaborations they were good at—one of those over-the top kiffed stories that Mohammed Mrabet dictated to Bowles after they both kept smoking the pipe much too much late at night?
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