The wild premise of Simo Ben’s SNEAKY SHOWBIZ—subtitled “An Exposé on Morocco’s Top Sorceress’s Ties to the Rich & Famous” and “Her Powerful Spells Bring Everybody’s Desires: Fame, Money, and Sex”—sounds like the stuff of fantasy novels or “Aladdin’s Lamp” cultural stereotypes. But Moroccans do, indeed, often turn to witches, or shawafas, for help with romantic problems or to gain financial and career success. And in his enthusiastically salacious memoir, Ben, a Moroccan entertainment journalist based in L.A., pulls back the curtain on how black magic has infiltrated every aspect of Moroccan society.
Faced with widespread poverty and strict religious laws that impose tight limits on sexual freedoms, witchcraft is frequently used to circumvent legal and economic constraints. Women, in particular, turn to sorcery in response to Islamic culture’s lack of legal protections. T’kaf, for instance, is a “blocking spell” used to cause infertility in romantic rivals or impotence in cheating partners. Kyouba, an “ugliness spell,” can be cast on one’s enemies so that everyone views them as hideous and hateful. SNEAKY SHOWBIZ opens with a long list of trigger warnings, including animal cruelty, sexual abuse, and homophobia, and sensitive readers are advised to take heed. True to its sensationalistic brief, the book is a breathless litany of shocking, often repellent anecdotes, delivered with TMZ-style avidity. A prominent Moroccan soccer player is poisoned with the “spell of the glass,” ground glass slipped into his food, as revenge for spreading gossip about a prostitute. Chameleons are burned alive to counter bad luck. Water used to wash corpses is smuggled out of grieving households and sold for spells. Powdered hyena brains, costing $5,000 or more per gram, are used as magical cosmetics to make their wearers—actresses and politicians—irresistibly charismatic.
SNEAKY SHOWBIZ loses a bit of focus when Ben moves from sorcery to broader social issues, such as the effects of sexual repression and the exploitation of poor Moroccans by wealthy elites. But these stories (such as a lurid description of how rich gay men dazzle and manipulate impoverished strangers into sex) nevertheless underscore the desperation produced by social and economic inequities in Moroccan culture.
Simo Ben’s salacious, sinfully intoxicating book, SNEAKY SHOWBIZ, walks an unsteady line between prurient exploitation and investigative journalism but readers unfamiliar with the subject of Moroccan witchcraft—and those with an appetite for the dirty secrets of the rich and famous—will find the book a fascinating read.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader