Disclaimer Folktales weren’t always cheerful stories to entertain. Sometimes, they were harsh and dark for they needed to be scary to teach a valuable lesson. For instance, every young girl needed to fear the big bad wolf in the woods,…

My great-aunt Nanna used to tell me Moroccan folktales so I would stay still while learning an art she deemed essential, knitting. The magic words at the beginning of each of her stories “hajitek, majitek” [Moroccan Arabic for, “Let me…