Windowsill Culture

It has been a week and a half now since I went to Rabat, but the trip seems like a long time ago. The weather has turned, much sooner than I expected, and people walk around wearing scarves and jackets in place of the sandals and (capri) shorts from not even a month ago. The fact that I swam in the ocean during that trip situates it even more distantly in time, place and season.

I have also been spending more time on campus lately, and remembering what it is like to be ensconced in a library, on a campus, buffered from the outside world by several layers of constructed surroundings. News, happenings, and memories from the "outside" are washed through several filters to the point where they begin to feel like the sound from a seashell of waves crashing. That might be getting a little carried away, but needless to say I have reacquainted myself with the academic environment, and with the particularly unique environment here.

The other day I was having nisf-nisf (café olé) with a friend of mine who also spends a fair amount of time in the library. He is from Munich, and studies in Milan, about which he only has unpleasant things to say regarding Italian inefficiency. I'm sure now that, in addition to being an interesting guy, I enjoy listening to him because he fulfills most stereotypes that I have about Germans. He studies the economies of developing countries, and in his fluent English, makes plentiful use of the adjectives "efficient," "rational" and "absurd."

Anyhow, we were sitting on the concrete ridge of a fountain shaped like the star on the Moroccan flag that was only operative during the week of orientation. From the fountain, we were facing two adjacent buildings, one housing the dining hall, and the other housing the café. If the physical center of campus (which can't be more than a couple of acres altogether) is the mosque, which is sunk below surrounding buildings in a way that I imagine of one of the earlier ground zero designs to have been like if realized, then the social center of campus is this tiled courtyard, between cafe, cafeteria and fountain.

On this particular day, there was a dj playing what seemed to be the same electronic music that was played the night of the Newcomer Dinner (and in the same location, too). On this afternoon, however, there hung a banner above him that read Student Publications Day - Under the Theme - Moroccan Press between Censorship and Freedom. I don't know if the music was commemorative, but to me it always suggests the desperate ambiance of an empty dance floor.

Regardless, this courtyard rarely needs to be filled because clusters and couples of students ring the space through most of the afternoon and evening. Because women are not allowed to enter male dorms and vise versa, personal relationships here are pushed very much into campus public space. In addition, because many students do things (dating, smoking, wearing whatever they feel like) that they might not do elsewhere (in their hometown, around their family), this campus becomes an intensely social theater.

If front stoop culture was used to describe working class, in particular black, urban neighborhoods in America, then I think that windowsill culture characterizes the nature of social interactions here. The café includes four pool tables and three arcade games, but more people are usually gathered on, or around, the windowsills outside. There are also rules against Public Displays of Affection, which is ironic since students will presumably get in more trouble if they engage in displays of affection privately. Nonetheless, couples generally find a niche, usually provided by a windowsill, to look longingly at each other, talk at length, and maybe even kiss.

Because it's the only place where they're allowed to practice these post-adolescent relationships, students perform these roles not just in public, but literally in front of one other, as if the campus were barely three-dimensional, with no backstage.

Anyhow, it made for good watching the other day.

Op-Ed: Sex, Violence and the Other - Always Making Headlines

It has taken me a little while to put down my thoughts about an article that was published in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times last week. The headline read: Sex as a Flash Point in Clash of Civilizations. (Though I have tried to find an accessible link, the article may be blocked by the Times' online subscriber program.) The article, by John Vinocur, discusses how two recently published novels, John Updike's Terrorist, and Max Gallo's Les Fanatiques, raise the question as to whether sexual frustration plays a role in Muslims becoming terrorists. According to the article, Updike and Gallo explore this idea through narratives involving a central character whose one, Muslim parent is absent. In each books' plot, this character grows up increasingly disgusted with their Western parents' active, and perhaps careless, sex life. In case the link doesn't work, I have excerpted below:

Each writer points to sex as a zone of incompatibility - or clash - involving radicalized Muslims, desire, repression, and Western sexual freedoms managed imperfectly by Europeans and Americans. And their books insist it's no incidental matter in relation to terrorism.

In both books, the central character, in growing older, engages with radical political Islam. I assume that this is where the hijinx ensue, but I haven't read either book.

What is troubling to me is that the article, rather than questioning the basis on which each author is psychologizing terrorism, takes the notion that there is a clash of civilizations as a given, and suggests that sex and its role in terrorism might be cutting edge social theory. If we are to assume that Islam is a singular, monolithic entity that in its uniquely, unchanging form predisposes its believers toward terrorism (and a lot of people believe this), then Vinocur's article might be worth digesting. What seems much more plausible to me, however, is that the popularity of radical political Islam - and its virulent anti-Semitism and martyrdom - has a lot more to do with social, cultural and political contexts in which many Muslims find themselves, and less to do with whether a Muslim has sex on a regular basis.

In dismissing this viewpoint, Vinocur misses the view. He writes:

It's certainly a less than welcome subject for those Westerners, like Gallo's fictional professors, who do not want to hear of civilizations' collisions - and believe that if just Bush, Blair, Merkel and/or Israel vanished, all would be cool, and life suddenly revert to one without Islamic bombers.

What Vinocur (and Updike and Gallo, I think) fail to recognize is that these social movements have less to do with, Bush, Blair, Merkel, or the kinds of lives led by the writers above, and perhaps more to do with decades of repression and failure in the postcolonial states in which many Muslims live, as well as the frustrating encounter with modernity - an encounter begun with colonial violence whose scope continues to increase through immigration to Europe and North America.

Of course, I find it admirable for a writer to attempt to imagine the human condition of someone presumably very unlike themselves. And again, I have not read either book. What I am criticizing is Vinocur's review of these novels, and his amateur psychological take on "the roots of terrorism." The consequences of accepting the clash of civilizations quid pro quo - and it is served up as such on a daily basis through various mass media - is the subsequent assumption that "we" are forever at odds with a people because of their inherent, unchanging, different values. This lends itself well to the endless war on terrorism.

Lastly, and perhaps randomly, the outline of these books plots' got me thinking to the best work of art that I have ever read or seen about parental separation and infidelity. I loved The Squid and the Whale because, to me, it captured the emotional strain inherent in a difficult human condition - without suggesting or presenting any formulaic conclusions.

Freshman Orientation: on transience, insecurity, and being a newcomer

After over a week of living and studying at Al Akhawayn University, I have had my fair share of ups and downs, and so in some respects it is best that I waited to write so as not to post every crisis and euphoria, most of which were largely wrought by anxiety and little more. It should be noted that I was skeptical of coming here to study. My M.O. was check out the place, and transfer if studying here just wasn't going to cut it.

AUI is an elite, relatively expensive Moroccan university modeled after the English university system. Not unlike my alma mater, the campus is walled, well lit, and the green spaces are carefully maintained (though here you cannot walk on the grass). Classes are conducted in English (which is why I enrolled), meaning that Moroccan students speak better English than most foreign students speak Arabic, removing the immersion aspect of language learning (hence the skepticims). AUI is also located near, but not in, Ifrane, a resort town in the Middle Atlas mountains. Town is a good 20-30 minute walk away, and curfew is at midnight.

If a lack of exposure to Arabic was my greatest concern, then probably my greatest insecurity, as the week of international and newcomer (their term for freshman) orientation got underway, was the fact that I had at least five years on most of the students. I found myself increasingly uncomfortable when the "get to know you" phase of conversation reached the point of disclosing age. I don't know if I have ever so closely identified with middle-aged womanhood as when I wanted to answer these questions in French: "Je suis d'un certain age." The benefits of learning about exciting, new technological advances from the younger generation (read: Skype), were outweighed by this unfortunate insecurity.

The international students came from places as diverse as Sewanee State, University of Idaho, Sciences-Po, Ethiopia, Oxford, and West Point. Technically, we were categorized as being either international, exchange or transient students. I fall under the last category, which I assume means that, should I inexplicably disappear for some length of time, it will be attributed to those characteristics associated with being a transient student. The orientation, which included sessions on "Health, Travel and Safety" and "Adapting and Adjusting," left plenty of time for us to get to know each other, particularly before the Moroccan upper-classmen arrived.

Dinner, it turned out, was a difficult time. On the first night I went into Ifrane with a guy from Nebraska and a Polish fellow studying in Italy. The Nebraskan spent most of dinner talking about how tanned brunettes were really his type, and how to get around the rule barring alcohol on campus. The next night I sat at a cafeteria table with, among others, an Arab-American who blithely claimed that the Holocaust could not be confirmed. Later in the week, though I wasn't there, one of the West Pointers allegedly called another international student a lesbian. I can only hope that, liberated from the constraints of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, he was testing out his gaydar in a collegial manner. Regardless, I was feeling discouraged.

A couple of nights later, there was a dinner/party at the center of campus, for international students and Moroccan newcomers to get to know each other. Tables and chairs were arranged outside, and a turntable was set up nearby. As a transient student, I decided it would be best to arrive by myself. I truly felt like I was going to a high school dance, I was that nervous. I sat at a table with two young Moroccan men who weren't really talking with each other or anyone else. They welcomed me to their table and we had an excellent conversation that lasted until the DJ set to work with some dreadful rave music.

Ghassan and Wissam, it turns out, are "newcomer" roommates, and seem perfectly suited as such. Ghassan is gregarious in a slightly formal manner, while Wissam is very earnest, though friendly. Ghassan is from Rabat, the cosmopolitan capital; Wissam is from Khouribga, known for its phosphate mines. (One of two jokes in Arabic that I know is about the men of Khouribga, and it goes like this: they go from their house to the bus, the bus to the mine, the mine back to the bus, the bus to the bar, and from the bar back home. Only in Arabic all the nouns rhyme.) Ghassan is part of a delegation sponsored by the British Consulate that is going to the UK in the fall to promote cross-cultural understanding. Wissam is a fan of Real Madrid. Ghassan is studying literature and showed me his music collection, which includes Georges Moustaki, Enya and Air. Wissam is studying business and engineering and suggested that I join the math or science clubs to broaden my interests.

Both, however, eschew the campus cafe, where students are always hanging out and playing pool and arcade games, saying that it is a waste of time. Both, also, speak excellent English and ask me about the difference between the words to insinuate and to imply while I ask them about the Arabic words for to sleep and to wake up. In short, despite all of my insecurities about age, it turns out that I have most enjoyed, this past week, getting to know two 18-year-old Moroccan students. Part of my orientation to Al Akhawayn, it seems, has been reorienting myself to the experience of being a newcomer, and all of the enjoyable aspects inherent in that status.

An Explanation

The title of this blog is in reference to a book by Ali Behdad, entitled Belated Travelers. In that book, Behdad discusses several writers, including Flaubert and Kipling, who were to varying degrees counter-cultural within the context of their contemporary Western societies. Behdad examines how, when writing in the colony or about colonized people, even these writers were driven by a fruitless search for authenticity in the Orient, and escape from their own, rapidly industrializing societies. Though I don't claim to be all that counter-cultural, I am interested in the search for escape and authenticity and how it affects the way we perceive and write about other people.

Being a blog, the title is also used in reference to something more personal. In Morocco again for the first time in five years, and studying again for the first time in three, I am interested in how the word belated captures my sense of return, and how I remember what I am returning to. Five years ago I was living with a Moroccan family in the medina of Rabat. Each morning, my first fifty steps took me past the same family members, neighbors, peanut vendors, fish sellers and boutique owners. I found the intimate sense of community that existed in that quarter of the medina edifying, and I loved being familiar with it. There was also a part of that experience which I no doubt enjoyed because of what I perceived to be its authenticity.

In the coming year, I'll be enrolled at Al Akhawayn University and then, hopefully, at a language institute elsewhere in Morocco. In short, I will be reconciling my memories of Morocco from five years ago, as well as my perceptions as an American with my experiences now.

What follows may be no more than a glorified travelogue, but I still welcome any feedback, belated or otherwise, for when you feel the writing might be too romanticized, esoteric, boring, full of cultural relativism or otherwise.