Author Insights

The Story Behind The Width of One Wall: A Novel of Fez

By El Mehdi Said

The Width of One Wall began with stories. Not the kind you find in history books, but the kind passed between neighbours in the old medina of Fez — stories about Jewish and Muslim families who shared walls, fountains, grief, and celebrations for centuries before the world decided they should live apart. This is how those stories became a novel.

In old Fez, the architecture itself told a story of coexistence. Derb el Hafa — the street of the edge — is where one quarter stops being itself and the next has not yet begun. Families lived behind thin walls, hearing each other's lives as clearly as their own. A Muslim clerk's household and a Jewish goldsmith's household could, over years, become one household with two doors. That image — two families becoming one across a single wall — is where Idriss and Ester were born.

The novel turns on a single shift: the autumn the wall stops being a wall and becomes a boundary. I wanted to write about that moment — not the dramatic rupture of war, but the quieter, more devastating moment when a community begins to keep a ledger of who belongs with whom. Idriss and Ester grow up as one child in two bodies. Then the wall changes meaning, and they must love each other the way the street allows: at four paces, for fourteen years, with a whole community watching.