Comparative Living in Fes

I had a coffee for breakfast the other morning at a crémerie that took me right back to my homestay in Rabat in 2001. This coffee differs substantially from the nisf-nisf, consisting of warm milk flavored with Nescafé and sugar. On this particular morning, with the television tuned to Quranic recitations and a variation of grilled dough as accompaniment, the breakfast coffee triggered a strong memory. Each morning in Rabat, with the television on and before going to class, I would drink sugar/coffee/milk and eat some form of semi- or non-leavened dough (baked or grilled), along with the three boys before we all headed off to our different schools (primary, secondary, high school, university). A daily and ordinary occurrence that returned in a pang of nostalgia brought about by this narrowly physical sensation, as if the sweeter the coffee the stronger the memory.

I knew before returning to Morocco that in my mind I had constructed my previous stay as a halcyon time in my life, full of love and learning. Wary of this mental artifact, too carefully wrapped in the shiny packaging of nostalgia, I realize that I have been both seeking out and avoiding the places and experiences that left the most enduring impressions from that time. When I return to Rabat, as I plan to do for the fifth or sixth time this weekend, I am both pleased to visit the family, and slightly ill at ease. Each time I stay with them, this connection is renewed. They talk to each other, shout at each other, watch television, eat, have neighbors over, and go about their ways. I return to my semi-domestic standing, helping with women’s work, talking to the grandmother, sometimes getting invited on son-errands, which include going to buy a forgotten ingredient needed for cooking, or on son-excursions, which include watching or sometimes playing soccer. The rest of the time, I sit in their midst with my face compressed by mental effort and incomprehension, trying to follow conversation or whatever is showing on the ever-present television. And I eat when told to eat.

At the same time, I am glad that I only revisit this place and these particular sensations on occasion. I have now been in Morocco for a longer period of time this year than during my semester exchange in 2001 yet, clearly, I am living in inescapable comparison with my memories. For that reason, I sense that I evaluate Fes by and through Rabat, never mind the vastly different circumstances this time around, (alone, apartment, Ville Nouvelle, 2007).

Still, the bilan:

Fes is lacking for street food. Maybe it’s my neighborhood, but the only thing regularly offered is snail soup, served in a bowl with a safety pin for ease in removing the escargo from its shell. Among the absent ambulatory eating opportunities: steamed chickpeas or fava beans with salt and cumin, macaroons, fresh-squeezed orange juice, toothbreaking brittle candy, and more. This may all be a function of not living near the medina. However, the wide avenues and sidewalks in Rabat’s Ville Nouvelle, particularly rendered to convey colonial pomp and power, now make for excellent street-newspaper kiosks. Men stand in rows, reflecting the overlapped newspapers which are arranged in a comfortably wide arc, and bend forward slightly at the waist usually with hands held behind their back, reading, it seems, each paper from the centerfold up, for five, ten, fifteen minutes. Lastly, and probably, least uniquely, I enjoy the way that, in Rabat, roasted peanuts come wrapped in a page from some student’s notebook. As with the newspapers and street food, this phenomenon is by no means unique to the capital city, but somehow I attribute the prevalence of schoolwork-cum-peanut packaging to a particularly well-educated and sophisticated metropolis.

What Fes does have, however, are 53 bus lines administered by the municipal transportation agency. I know this because I went, by bus, to their administrative office, out by the Coke bottling plant, and asked for a map. A standing, window-sized, display map that once lit up to show various stops stood in the waiting room of the building. There were no portable maps available, but I was given a chart furnished with each line’s total distance and termini. I’ve used it to visit two neighborhoods I wouldn’t have otherwise stumbled upon. In Sidi Boujida, I watched Al Jazeera coverage of the anti-war protest in Washington while clutches of men on the sunny slope opposite the café played cards and checkers. In Ben debbab, I ate an extraordinary potato-pancake sandwich in a very small eatery, a young man next to me making conversation as he stirred a big pot of soup. Both comparatively and unto themselves, these were good experiences.