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.