The Christian Fig
The opuntia / Creative Commons
The long-time British consul in Essaouira J.G. Jackson wrote amply on Morocco’s geography, climate, slave trade, shipwrecks, and government, but on few subjects did he write with such obvious relish as when describing fruit: Jackson found Morocco’s Mediterranean coast home to “the most delicious oranges in the world.” (Personal experience dictates this may well be true.) More interesting, however, is what Jackson called “the refreshing fruit of the opuntia, or prickly pear, called by the Arabs … Christian fig. This fruit was probably first brought into the country from the Canary Islands, as it abounds in Suse, and is called by the Shelluhs of South Atlas … the Canary fruit.”[1]
Jackson’s “canary fruit” is currently in peak season in Beirut, where it is known as sbaer (i.e. “cactus fruit”). In Lower Egypt, it is called tiin shoki (i.e. “artichoke fig”). Elsewhere, it goes by names as diverse as cactus apple, cactus pear, and Indian fig.
To Americans, the fruit is most familiar—if recognizable at all—as the prickly pear. As Jackson surmised, however, the opuntia’s historical trajectory is certainly west-to-east. So embedded is the fruit in the culture of the western hemisphere that it factors in certain foundational myths of the Aztecs, and it appears on the coat of arms of Mexico, where it answers to yet another inscrutable name: tuna.
The Eagle, the Snake, and the Cactus in the Founding of Tenochtitlan / Creative Commons
Lexical variations this varied are perhaps the most obvious of the weird testimonies to the way novel goods and ideas enter new territories and encounter new cultures and civilizations.
Indeed, many Americans are unacquainted with coriander, which seldom appears in Americans’ domestic cookery, yet readily recognize the herb when it announces itself as cilantro in Tex-Mex dishes. Likewise, the soubriquet ‘Hawaiian’ pizza says far more about the mistaken perceptions of those who named the dish than it says about Hawaii—or about pizza.
To this end, it is not at all surprising that Moroccans would identify the arriviste opuntia ficus-indica as the Christian fig, though it is ironic. For their part, European writers and travelers in North Africa routinely identified the fruit as a distinctly North African oddity; accordingly, they often labeled it the barbary fig, after the derisive name they gave to the Maghreb itself. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans knew North Africa almost exclusively as “barbary,” an appellation that drew on the classical Greek designation for lands outside the Hellenic word as uncivilized, pitiless, and savage. (The inaptness of this label should be obvious from the fact so many European seamen who were held captive in the Maghreb elected to stay on in Salé or Tunis or Algiers after acquiring their freedom. Then as now, Maghrebi food and weather were incalculably better than England’s.)
As such, it has been said “there are, and always have been, two North Africa’s [sic.] available to English eyes: one real, the other highly coloured by our collective imagination.”[2]
Today, Moroccans continue to peddle the opuntia. Cultivators of the fig have realized there is now a rich marketing opportunity in the fruit’s dubious palliative benefits, which rival in number its many names.
A virtual panacea, “barbary fig oil” is said to offer protection against pesky free radicals and to reduce wrinkling in one’s cleavage. These benefits can be had at the efficient conversion of the seeds from one ton of fruits to a single liter of oil.[3]
There can be little wonder in the opuntia’s latest transmogrification. The fruit’s new buyers are not the desperate, addled envoys of the Foreign Office, but credulous luxury travelers, influencers, and the self-anointed cosmopolitan intelligentsia who are incapable of resisting the ‘exoticism’ of Morocco’s ancient civilization, its blue-stained villages, and its souks piled high with fruits unremarkable, save for their apparent novelty to Brooklynites, east Berliners, and the Beirut humanitarian jet set.
USDA Pomological Watercolor / Creative Commons
[1] J.G. Jackson, An Account of the Empire of Morocco (London, 1809), 12.
[2] Khalid Chaouch, “British Travellers to Morocco and their Accounts, from mid-16th to mid-20th Centuries: A Bibliography,” available at: https://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/morocco/Chaouch/Chaouch.htm
[3] “Moroccan Souk,” accessed July 2018, at: http://www.moroccansouk.org/barbary-fig-seed-oil/
