I first went to Tarfaya 10 years ago at 16. I felt something magical the moment I arrived, before even getting across what would later become a tremendous source of interest, its castle in the middle of the ocean. Port Victoria, a trade fortress, the19th century slay-queen-shaped type, that failed not long after and transformed into a ruin, also known as Tarfaya’s emblem.
The magical feeling I had when I arrived was perhaps due to the town’s eerie entrance, a cape invisible to the eye while driving along the national road.
Or perhaps magic is just magic and doesn’t need an explanatory statement.
On the map, seven little shapes slightly bigger than dots, too small for their name to be transcripted, appeared on Tarfaya’s left, across the ocean. I had heard they were islands we couldn’t go to as Moroccans. This of course, added to Tarfaya’s mysterious appeal. Needless to say the time of mysterious appeal and romanticism is now long fucking gone.
Some called them Atlantis, others said they dated back to the Elysian’s Fortunate Isles, located at the exact same place. Fortunate Isles, an earthly paradise made for the heroes, the ones judged pure, who chose to reincarnate three times.
But really the more accurate legend and only one you guys should remember is that these islands, and in particular the closest one to Tarfaya, were discovered sometime in the mid- nineties by Poseidon and his brother, two soldiers who made the islands a real thing by smuggling people and other things across the ocean.
It wasn’t until Tarfaya, a town of 7,000 people, became realer, home and no longer a highschool sweetheart to me, that the name of those seven little dots nearby started to unveil before my eyes. The Canary Islands, pieces of land calling out for the brave women and men as nymphs, trapping those who fell for their chants, with no other border than their waters.
The closest one, about 60 something miles away, Fuerteventura, almost bore the name of the Fortunate Isles.
Except the heroes now need a little bit more than superpowers and courage to be let in. They need a Schengen visa.
Often seen by the many travelers from North and West Africa as a stop on their way to Europe, the Canary Islands, but more precisely Fuerteventura, are nonetheless from a Tarfayan’s perspective a deeply rooted fantasy of the West that shatters upon arrival into pieces of deja-vu and despair, often reminiscent of what was left behind.
Slow Days in the Fortunate Isle takes place in a small, personal, kingdom split into a historically fallen east and a chimerical, illusory west. It’s both the shape of a triangle and a broken heart, cracked in the middle by the notorious winds and waves of the Atlantic, but also and mostly by exclusionary policies much stronger than any ocean.