Spring Fashion in Fes – Looking forward/looking back

The rains have arrived late this year, turning the warm, spring weather wet. By contrast, February and much of March were clear and cool, muddying the seasonal distinction in these parts. Nonetheless, there is one lasting look in Fes that has endured throughout the fluctuating weather cycles: argyle. The younger generation have taken to brightly-colored, tight-fitting Diesel and Lacoste sweaters with a smaller, cleaner diamond pattern. The pillars of Fes society, however, remain steadfast in their preference for the traditional look – dotted lines cross-hatching columns of man-sized diamonds. A kind of double-lattice work reinforcing the warmth and security of a good, hearty sweater. This look is particularly well-suited, I have noticed, to the pot belly. Drawing the diamonds at once outward and the V-neck down, the patterned points on the bearer’s clothing are accentuated and offset by the protruding roundness, which these patterns protect and hold. If I can take one observation from my eight months in Morocco, it might be this: Argyle – a look for all generations and all seasons.

On Pistons and Patriarchy

I suppose that I should write something about the suicide bombers in Casa and Algeria this past week, but I don’t have much insightful to say. Last Sunday, I was in a café watching Al-Jazeera reporting on the latest explosions, which were bizarre in their aimlessness, when an older man sitting near me commented that this phenomenon has become à la mode among 18-25 year-old men, the way clandestine immigration was five years ago. He was referring specifically to the form immigration known here as l’ahrig, or burning, referring to the means by which young Moroccan men would rid themselves of their identification papers, then pay someone to get them across the Straights of Gibraltar by fishing boat. These boats often sank, and though the vast majority of most migrants have and still prefer air travel, these became high-profile events on both sides of the Mediterranean.

I’m not sure that this is an apt comparison, since one is intentionally violent and presumably political, while the other risks, but does not aim for death, and is presumably economically-driven more than anything else. But it did strike me that, in spite of the Moroccan government’s official discourse, these suicides are very much related to the marginalized standard of living for the poor in Morocco’s bidonvilles. The man’s comparison also made reference to the faddishness of the recent events, an aspect that, I think, distinguishes these suicides somewhat from those in Algeria, where Islamist violence dates back over more than a decade of civil war. In distilling the source of these suicides to specific neighborhoods (Sidi Moumen, Hay Farah), and even specific families, such as was the case on Sunday when two brothers blew themselves up, the similarity to l’ahrig, however conditional, seems to me to be one of social capital. Risking your life for a better one somewhere else requires knowing the right people to help facilitate that process. And as with clandestine immigration, the profile of the “victim” is always better understood than the shadowy figures who are manipulating them. Just as the network of passers and snakeheads are rarely profiled as clearly as the immigrants themselves, the young, jobless, unmarried men sacrificing themselves in the name of religio-political ideology are more clearly sketched than those nebulous networks of Islamists presumably pulling the strings via the internet. Paradise Now is the most vivid portrayal of this phenomenon that I ever saw or read which explores the very localized and personal nature of a terrorist network.

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Last week, a friend with whom I studied in 2001 in Rabat visited from the States. We visited both of our former host families who live within minutes of one another in the medina. Even though I visit these friends almost every month, I’m convinced by now that I simply don’t fully comprehend their remarkable hospitality, which never fails to surprise me. This was particularly apparent when we knocked on the door of my friend’s old host family’s home, not having been in touch with them for five years. We were concerned about how this would go over, or if we’d be remembered, and if so in what way, etc., and of course we were welcomed warmly. In both of these families the fathers have often been absent over the years, whether because of work, sickness, distraction or some combination. These two women are both the main breadwinners and the main caretakers, and in these families, they pull this off magnanimously. They are, in a word, matriarchs, and in a very patriarchal society at that. Just as I sometimes wonder whether I wouldn’t appreciate Moroccan society so much were I a) a woman, or b) a Jew, I sometimes think that living in this admittedly atypical, unpatriarchal Arab family structure is perhaps why I enjoyed my experience here from the outset.

Another something noticeable in our visit was that each family member of working age who was jobless five years ago remains jobless today. The most common remark, whether high school graduate, medical student or Arab lit-degree holder, is that one needs a coup de piston to successfully attain a position in the gendarmerie, in a hospital or elsewhere. The large number of jobless degree-holders relates once again to the oft-sited cause for terrorist activity – a lack of opportunity, and the hopelessness that it engenders. While these families do not live in the same misery as those in Casa and Rabat’s bidonvilles, the lack of opportunity is, in a sense, socio-economically blind in Morocco save for the elite. It is no wonder, then, that while the main preocuppation in the States with the the 18-25 male demographic is how to attract their attention and purchasing power through beer advertisements, in Morocco the concern is with keeping these guys from killing themselves in one endeavor or another. A crude generalization, but still…

Warm Days, Cool Nights: Fried Bread and Man Cafés

The title has little to do with the content of this entry; it’s just a phrase that was bouncing around my head. That said, I like to include it because I think the next transnational nonsense movie about Muslims could maybe use this title. George Clooney and Matt Damon sampling local forms of cooked starch, watching Al-Jazeera and maybe striking up a conversation or two with “The Arab Street” could still be a box office hit, and perhaps more comprehensible, than Syriana was.

Conversation has also been on the mind since learning Arabic is why I received funding and therefore why (in an official sense) I'm in Morocco. Modern Standard Arabic (fausha) is not, however, a language of conversation. It differs substantially from Moroccan Colloquial Arabic (darija), to the point where speaking fausha is almost as much of a performance for Moroccans as much as myself. While I originally learned darija concurrently with faussha, and therefore am more comfortable speaking the former, when my accent is off, or when the dissonance of hearing Arabic from a foreigner is too much, someone will respond in fausha, and it feels a bit as though our conversation is a dialogue in a play, where case endings and pronunciation are consciously of specific significance - - and one actor knows her lines and the other stammers and stalls through them.

Because it is not a vernacular, fausha is associated with more specific modes of communication, from diplomacy and media broadcat to theater and storytelling, and religion. Indeed, besides the classroom, I associate it with the prayer call or Friday sermon, broadcast beyond the mosque through crackly speakers, on television - where the familiar voice of the state-television narrator carries the broadcasts of all the King's visits with a remarkable, sustained excitement (His Majesty Mohammed VI, God protect him, is disembarking from the bus!), and most memorably, on the back of the famous Atlas Express bus ride to Beni Mellal, during which a young chap boarded, high as a kite and with a straw hat tilted over his eyes, and lay in the aisle talking in the lyrical style of storytelling, making his friend laugh.

It is only recently that I’ve gotten to a level where I can vaguely compare the process of learning Arabic to learning French in that I can make (basic) sense of sentence structure and grammar, but when I sit down to write or read, I am constantly referring to the dictionary. This, in fact, is a rather liberating moment in learning language. Granted, one is constrained by a lack of vocabulary and complete dependency on the dictionary. However, because we are not yet capable of expressing ideas in a terribly nuanced manner, our exercises are generally open-ended prompts that allow for any kind of response. E.g.:

- What sort of things make you angry? (um…)
- In your opinion, what should a government provides for its citizens? (garbage pick-up, weekly at the least)
- Or, write a dialogue about anything. (Tariq Ramadan, a DHS functionary, and a Jew walk into Federal Plaza…)

Conversation is, of course, less open-ended, and any form of sarcasm or joking (particularly, perhaps, the one above) is a guaranteed failure. On the other hand, conversation has its advantages in that, generally speaking, people respond with disproportionate warmth when someone unexpected speaks a little Arabic. There are exceptions, of course, but the positive reaction has made me think that, if I were perfectly honest, it may be that I have pursued learning Arabic simply because I’m a sucker for the gratification inherent in unmitigated approval. Following the rules and getting rewarded has always been my forté, and that counts twice over with language itself (grammar), and the encouragement I receive in learning it.

Though it has been useful to note certain similarities in the process of learning Arabic and French, in so far that these benchmarks reassure me that some rate of progress and achievement is possible, my relationship with each language is vastly different. The slightest bit of conversational idiom in French trips me up, to the point that when, in emailing a friend at Al Akhawayn, I knew that my use of the word “la boume” would come across as hopelessly outdated and maladroit. I can almost picture the page in my 1990’s textbook from which I learned the word, complete with cartoon children, a balloon and perhaps some confetti, which only confirmed that the word was most appropriate for describing a twelve-year-old’s birthday. My aunt once gave me a great book called with all kinds of fun and dirty expressions, but having never had the opportunity to air them out ( and college papers being less than ideal for this exercise) I'm still at a loss when it comes to food, adjectives, greetings - in a sense, the content as well as the wording for "party."

Arabic, on the other hand, I learned from the outset in the context of conversation and human communication. I learned spices and foods and certain turns of phrase that enrich, facilitate, constitute, whatever, daily interactions. In this sense, the title above does relate, in that I know the names of the different fried breads and beverages served in the man cafés of Fes and Rabat, but not in the gender-integrated cafés or brasseries of Paris and Nice.

Another dimension to the “meaning of language” is that people – Moroccans and fellow foreigners alike – often would like to know why I’m learning Arabic. To help deal with the underlying political query behind this question, I've boiled it down to: “Do you want to work for the CIA, or not?” However simplified, it has helped me to gauge both the questioner and to package my response, a necessity for any dully repetitive Q & A.

At the same time, the positive reaction to my speaking Arabic in Morocco often leads, with varying degrees of swiftness, to a conversation about religion or, more specifically, about conversion. This takes place in taxi cabs, shops, cafés and, once, as part of a conversation with two ten-year-old boys as we were watching the police repel groups of young men pressing to get into a soccer match. Five years ago, I was struck by the warmth of this evangelism, perceiving it as a genuine wish for me to share in the sense of love and belonging, I supposed, that one gets both from faith, and from being a part of a community of believers. More recently, I heard someone say that it’s somehow different from Christian fundamentalists in the States. This view, I believe, is a false sort of cultural relativism that spares Moroccans the same judgment as Alabamans simply because they don’t vote Republican. All that I can tell is that this relationship between language, religion and happiness can be discomfiting or inspiring depending upon the context, but I get a hell of a lot more inspiration being in Morocco simply because of the gratification inherent in learning a language. I'd like to try the fried breads in Alabama, though.