I Left my Hat in Beni Mellal

But unlike Q-Tip, who tells a story about leaving his wallet in El Segundo, I don't have to go back. I also had no companion the way Q-Tip had Ali Shaheed Muhammed. And more importantly still, I had no car.

Not unlike Q-Tip's trip, however, my main motivation was simply to go somewhere else, and I had a three-day weekend in which to do so, thanks to Morocco's national(istic) holiday celebrating the Green March. My intention was to drink coffee in three different cities: Khenifra, Beni Mellal and Khouribga. All three are roughly situated in the Middle Atlas region, do not have tourist sites that warrant mention in guide books, and provide a good share of the Moroccan men, women and children who regularly attempt to emigrate to Europe.

Off to a late start, I bought a ticket from the local bus company Murasala al-Atlas (amateur translation: The Atlas Exchange). Having taken local lines when I was in Morocco in 2001, I prepared myself for the many stops the bus would make for anyone hailing from the side of the road. Figuring that I was in no rush, I bought a ticket for Beni Mellal, and settled into my seat. The road from Ifrane to Beni Mellal traverses much of the Middle Atlas range, and I looked forward to the views overlooking cedar forests and rural, mountainous landscapes. What I failed to remember or anticipate is the complete lack of air circulation on these local buses. While this wasn't such a discomfort when I traveled in flat parts of the South five years ago, there would be significant ramifications given the winding route through the Atlas. It wasn't until a slightly crazy and/or drunk man eased his stomach discomfort in full view of everyone that I realized why the ticket collector was disbursing plastic bags the way airline attendants give out headphones. (And in making this analogy, I don't want to give the impression that the man in charge of tickets and money was anything like an airline attendant. His kindest interactions were with young women whose cellphones he took a liking to and would borrow for indefinite periods of time. And he didn't wear a pantsuit.) Anyhow, after a few arguments - usually between the ticket collector and older women who couldn't find a seat - and more than a few plastic bag requests, we arrived in Beni Mellal well after dark.

As Q-Tip notes, the principle cause of his lost wallet was an attractive waitress. This is where my story and his become eerily similar, and slightly uncomfortable. My first night in Beni Mellal, I arrived after dark and after a couple of tries at finding a hotel room without roaches, I settled on a bargain basement establishment just inside the medina. I set in search of dinner while the streets were still lively, and settled on the kind of place that, by appearance, generally serves good food. Brightly lit, white-tiled interior, plastic furnishings, and men in aprons willing to grill some meats, fry some potatoes and ladle some beans at a decent price. The meal was top notch: a number of small plates holding a variety of mostly hot, mostly greasy foods to be eaten with large quantities of bread. I ate while reading a newspaper article, and when I finished, I asked a passing waitress how much I owed. She looked at me and asked what I meant. I was ready to start listing what I ate (chicken, beans, a Fanta), when she told me to wait. A male waiter came by, whom I then paid but, before I left, the woman left a slip of paper on my table with her name and phone number. For all that Moroccan society is bursting with moral contradictions, a woman who winks or provides her phone number without so much as a conversation is, unambiguously, “of the street.” I left the shiny restaurant befuddled, but still in possession of my hat.

As I mentioned earlier, the original intent of the trip was to drink coffee in three different cities, but after the bus ride I reformulated that purpose to involve three different cafés in the same city. Beni Mellal is mostly known, in guide book terms, as a stop on the way to other destinations (Marrakesh, High Atlas mountains, Points South), but I figured that wherever I went my main activity would involve drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. In fact, I sometimes think that my underlying motivation for returning to Morocco was to revisit the nisf-nisf and the, unfortunately, male-dominated world of the café.



Nisf-nisf, at its best, is served in a demi-tasse, and appears, like a science experiment, in three slowly interacting, sedimented layers: frothy at the top, the unadulterated coffee is improbably suspended in the middle above a milky mixture at ocean's bottom. The glass comes on a small, metal dish with three sugar cubes and a tiny spoon. Classier versions incorporate a ceramic dish and powdered additives. The café, at its best, is situated around a wall-mounted television (these days, often flat-screen), with chairs and tables in clusters or rows, generally oriented in such a way so that no one customer has to look another in the face. The same formation is replicated outside the café, but in place of a television one finds the street. The popularity of inside or outside seating depends, I believe, on the time of day, weather, and whether there is Champions' League or Nasrallah on the tube. (Although just this afternoon my friend Doug and I encountered a contingent of men in Ifrane watching Stuart Little.)

The above description would seem unnecessarily superficial, but a friend of mine, researching grant proposals, mentioned that someone received a Fulbright based on the proposed research topic of men's experience of social space in the cafés of Tunis. While I wouldn't want to make the café a place of research (read: work), there is something to be said for the social significance of these places. On Eid al-Fitr, I read an article about the increasing popularity of cafés in Morocco. It seemed like the type of human interest article meant to please the readership on days of leisure (there was a profile of a popular, lifelong parking attendant in the same issue). But the article described the many different social purposes that cafés serve in Casablanca. As would be expected, certain cafés are known for their affiliation with different soccer teams. However, others are popular among adolescent girls looking for a socially acceptable public space outside their homes, others are known gambling hangouts, and apparently used car dealers gather and take over whole establishments to ply their trade.

At the time I read this article, I was also reading My Name Is Red, which I happened to bring with me on the plane ride over. Set in 16th century Istanbul, the book's plot revolves around miniaturist illustrators in the Sultan's court, and the site for much of the novel's intrigue, avoidance, libertine behavior and violence is the coffeehouse. (Incidentally, the book is full of descriptions of attractive pageboys, which made me wonder if this is a characteristic of all corrupt seats of power.) While in Rabat, I went out one night with two Moroccan friends to watch the Barcelona-Real Madrid match. We went to a café not unlike what I described above, only with a pool table that filled most of the room. Everyone was either seated on the table or ringing the walls and: a) young, b) a Barça or Real fan, c) smoking a cigarette and/or a joint of hashish. At the risk of reading too much angst into the situation, it struck me that Pamuk's coffeehouse, and this café in a gritty neighborhood of Rabat were outlets for both the exhilirating and the desperate aspects of social interaction. In My Name Is Red, the coffeehouse is the setting for personal escape and the center of societal conflict. In this café in Rabat, the conflict was displaced for the evening to the action on the television screen, but the idea of escape was still fairly palpable.

In the end, my experience with coffee in Beni Mellal was fairly pedestrian. I watched two soccer matches and, in the third café, read two magazines: The New Yorker (thoughtfully sent by my girlfriend), and Le Journal Hebdomadaire. The New Yorker had an article about the persecuted editor of Le Journal. Both weeklies had a piece on YouTube. It was great. I left my hat somewhere along the way, but at least on the bus ride back a Berber man gave me a sprig of fresh mint that saved me from the fate of the plastic bag.