Belated Student

The Balance

2007-06-10T20:06:00.000Z

Because I indulge in nostalgia when I pass the mid-point of any given activity, my long, slow approach toward departing Morocco has brought with it a certain amount of regret. Regret for all of the things I did not accomplish, get to see, do, or write about. This nostalgia seems a bit like Rent-a-Center purchasing on loan. Rather than having an experience, or a product, to oneself outright, the nostalgia, or interest, sets in part way to full ownership and replaces the present with a sense of unattainable distance, one that prolongs the experience into the future, but in a strangely refracted way. (This might be where the analogy breaks down: I’m not sure how appliance leasing can be “strangely refracted.”)

I have also been anticipating my departure for a month now, maybe more, not because I’ve been itching to leave Morocco, but more because I’ve been playing and replaying the logistics of leaving, anticipating the things and places I will manage to see and do, so that I’m prepared for those that I have to leave behind. This anticipation acts a bit more like compounding interest, I've found, self-multiplying with time and spiraling out of control. After leaving, however, this nostalgia might be more like an unsubsidized college loan whose slowly diminishing balance one accepts for the rest of one’s life.

Being in Morocco is clearly not like repaying a loan, however, and for that I figure that I’d rather engage with leaving by describing what I have not done, as a way of giving shape to, or estimating the value of the repayment I might look forward to making:

- I did not get to Khenifra, a city centrally-located in the Middle Atlas mountains which I fatefully passed through without disembarking while on my way to Beni Mellal. A fellow in Ifrane, when I told him I might go to Khenifra, smiled and winked at me everytime I saw him thereafter, insinuating that people (men) only go to Khenifra for the prostitutes. I still think that there are things to see there besides.

- I did not interview any members of Al Adl wal Ihssan, an Islamist social movement led by an ailing 70-something cheikh. While much attention is given to the Parti de la Justice et du Developpement, Al Adl wal Ihssan probably has a much larger, if unofficial, membership. In many ways, less is written about Al Adl wal Ihssan simply because much of it is forced to operate underground. Meetings and press conferences are often broken up by security forces before they begin, and the group is excluded from forming a political party, less for its potential to carry out terrorist acts – among the group’s central principles is pacifism – and more for its populist rhetoric that directly denounces the monarchy and the wealthy classes. It’s potential for substantially changing Moroccan society is probably much greater than any political party, which have all been co-opted to different degrees by the monarchy.

- I did not get to any of the local springs surrounding Fes – Moulay Yacoub, Aïn Allah, Sidi Harazem – which have spa-like open-air baths and, in the case of Sidi Harazem, water that’s supposed to be good for your health. I really have no excuse for why I didn’t get to any of these.

- I did not get back to Khouribga, where I would have liked to interview people there affected by immigration (which is just about everyone), but especially men who had been deported from Italy. Plus, l’Olympique Club de Khouribga just won Morocco’s domestic soccer league for the first time in its history, and I would have liked to feel the afterglow.

- I did not go to see a movie in a theater. I saw a film sponsored by the French Institute that was projected in a lovely old riad in the medina, but I did not find the opportunity to compare a true movie theater in Fes with my experience six years ago of watching the four-hour Bollywood “epic” Mohabbetein with a hundred-plus hormonally-charged young men in Rabat. This oversight can be attributed to the fact that, by my entirely incomplete count, I have seen almost as many shuttered movie theaters (3) in Fes as I have seen still in operation (4). And most of those still showing films generally look half a paint job and one fallen poster away from joining the ranks of the shuttered. The is typical of all Morocco, where there remain fewer than a hundred operative movie theaters across the whole county, on account of the availability of cheap, pirated DVD's streetside.

- I did not get to Oujda where, as Le Monde Diplomatique recently reported, a community of sub-Saharan Africans has grown in and around the city’s university campus. Because Oujda is both the primary entry point for immigrants coming from West Africa via Algeria, and because it is the point of disembarkation for sub-Saharans deported by Moroccan authorities to the country’s border, there is now a permanent community of mostly transient people. People also supposedly travel long distances to Oujda to get cheap goods smuggled in from Algeria. All of this happens even thought Algeria’s border with Morocco has been closed since 1994. And yet, as a consequence of this closed border, many Oujdans have emigrated, or depend on those who have emigrated, to Europe.

- I did not get onto a university campus to interview any members of the highly politicized student unions. Perhaps because of rumors of occasional violence on the public campuses (a far cry from al-Akhawayn’s windowsill petting and preening), I was reticent to just drop by. Indeed, last month campuses around the country were the sight of fighting between Amazigh (Berber), Sahraoui and Marxist student groups that led to several deaths. Interestingly, the most powerful student union at present, associated with Al Adl wal Ihssan, was not involved in any of the altercations.

- I did not get to Aïn Cheggag, a suburb of Fes, which a cab driver once described to me as being “full of cats and goats.”

- I did not get to see a professional basketball game, even though Moghreb al-Fes is one of the more competitive teams in the first division.

- I did not get to Nador which is, depending on who you ask, either dangerous or simply seedy. Bordering Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves located on the Moroccan mainland, a great deal of contraband passes through Nador. This includes human beings. Outside of Nador, sub-Saharan Africans have settled in the forest, from which they rush the wall fencing Melilla in. In 2005 Spanish and Moroccan security forces killed a number of sub-Saharan Africans who were rushing the wall that demarcates Europe.

- I did not eat hirr-bil, which my former host-mother ate at a picnic once and later described to me as cracked wheat that gets cooked for a long time. I still don’t have any sense of what that looks or tastes like.

- I did not get back to Salé, where I once dangled my legs from the medina wall looking out over the ocean. Its waterfront now the site of a great deal of construction, Salé sits across the river from Rabat and in many ways serves as the capital’s doppelgänger. Whereas Rabat has rapidly grown during and after colonialism, when it was first established as a political and administrative capital, Salé has an older, larger medina, and a longer history that involves pirates in some way. Today, it has a large industrial quarter and a poorer population. In my distorted imagination, all the secular, government functionaries live in Rabat, while the Islamists all live in Salé.

- I did not buy an R4. They’re supposed to be able to handle all kinds of road conditions thanks to the raised rear axle.

Yacoub al-Mansour: Site of the South-West-East-North Hoedown

2007-05-20T19:40:00.001Z

Filled with the doldrums from early-onset nostalgia, I set out for Rabat to attend a conference sponsored by an organization called Réfugiés sans Frontières (RSF) – Morocco. The conference was held at the Fondation Orient-Occident in Rabat, the kind of place full of European funding and glossy pamphlets, two things that stand out in these parts. Curiously enough – and purposefully I later found out – the center is located in Yacoub al-Mansour, a sprawling conglomeration of neighborhoods that I had visited only once six years ago. The twenty-five minute bus ride from Rabat’s medina took me past a street choked with produce vendors, an outdoor semi-circle of porticoes meant to house small businesses whose plaza served as the site for ongoing games of pick-up soccer, and a shantytown. While Rabat has a distinct downtown, and entire districts full of villas that anchor the diplomatic and political elite circuits, I would guess that Yacoub al-Mansour, with 300,000 people, is at the city’s population density center. Among the neighborhoods inhabitants are many (thousands?) of the city’s sub-Saharan African immigrants, and while sub-Saharan Africans live in various neighborhoods around the city, Yacoub al-Mansour is known for its Congolese community.

The conference took place in a modest, level room, with seating, filled to capacity, for maybe a hundred people. The panelists were five, including a professor, the director of the Foundation, a member of OMDH (a Moroccan human rights organization), the director of RSF, himself a Congolese refugee, and the director of the UN High Commission for Refugees’ (HCR) Morocco bureau, a Dutch man. Behind them stood several men with guitars who were going to give a concert following the debate.

The presentations revolved mostly around HCR’s role in granting refugee and asylum status, and whether it could be more effective (there are reports of people getting deported by Moroccan authorities to Algeria while they wait for HCR to decide on their demand for asylum). There was also a fair amount of criticism for the EU’s immigration policy, which has increasingly emphasized border control over the last decade.

Then, the excitement started. The first man to speak during the open debate was a well-dressed Italian man who identified himself as an invitee representing the European Commission. He denounced the panelists for their irresponsible discourse, questioning the credibility of certain speakers, and claiming that behavior such as that demonstrated at this conference leads to, and indeed invites, immigrant mistreatment in Europe. Directly following this statement, he made for the exit. Two-thirds of those attending, mind you, were sub-Saharan immigrants, so the place was in an uproar.

A member of the audience and distinguished Moroccan professor in the field of immigration took the microphone and, before the Commission representative had left, engaged him with a rebuttal to his claims. Things seemed almost to be settled when a Congolese man subsequently took the microphone and announced that he felt insulted by the Italian man and therefore was going to reciprocate. He had to be shepherded behind a projection screen and cajoled into giving up the microphone by several compatriots.

The open floor returned to some kind of order, but I have to think that the debate the panelists had hoped for never quite materialized. A sympathetic Moroccan woman repeatedly bemoaned the sub-Saharan Africans’ suffering, suggesting that they come to the Foundations’ center for counseling. Another man got up and talked for a while in an excited manner, referencing Sarkozy several times apparently in an attempt to rally support for a new world order. He had to be asked to stop talking. Throughout all of this, cellphones rang and my neighbor’s handbag repeatedly spilled change onto the floor.

The only really interesting exchanges took place between immigrants who posed questions directly to the HCR director, who replied in an admirably measured way given the fact that he was being challenged to defend his bureau’s performance by members of a community that had staged a sit-in in front of the HCR offices the night before. Questions were raised as to how much material assistance HCR can offer, and who and why individuals of certain nationalities (DRC, Ivory Coast) are being granted refugee status while others (Mali, Niger, Senegal) typically are not.

Things were getting academic again when, in closing, the Euro Commish fellow felt the need to defend himself (as almost everyone else had used the platform to do, save certain immigrants and the distinguished professor). In doing so, he claimed to wish only the best for all of Africa and all Africans and, as proof, he said that his wife (not in attendance) was herself an African. Unsurprisingly, this was met with derisive applause.

In the end, I think I was taken as much by the stereotypes fulfilled in the “debate” as anything else: the Junior Berlusconi, well-dressed and poorly-spoken, the Dutch technocrat, evenhanded and good at everything but making jokes and mastering the French accent, the first Congolese speaker, angry, and the human rights militant, full of rhetoric that failed even to stir enthusiasm. Even the musicians behind the stage, waiting for the boggy words to end so that everyone could presumably forget about the issue temporarily and enjoy some old-fashioned African creativity, seemed to be filling a pre-determined role.

I left before the music with a bit of a headache, perhaps from concentrating on so many words that had been thrown about in the hot air. Yet, while I paint a picture of discord and disorganization, the debate also represented very real, lived concerns and needs. As one immigrant noted, people need to have the right to work and take transportation, two things notably restricted for sub-Saharans in Morocco. The immediacy of this issue, then, is anything but academic for those who fled one country and find themselves without rights in another one. At the same time, the reality of the issue, as several people noted, requires the interaction and cooperation of many actors, not by any means limited to HCR, but including the Moroccan state (notably absent at the conference), and the EU (unfortunately misrepresented). I guess, then, the headache could have also been the result of overstimulation, what with a kind of North-South confrontation taking place at the East-West institute.

Post-script: the nature of the immediacy of this situation, is evident in the ongoing sit-in led by Congolese immigrants before the HCR seat in Rabat, which, in response, has closed it's doors.

Spring Fashion in Fes – Looking forward/looking back

2007-04-25T21:05:00.000Z

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

2007-04-18T12:24:00.000Z

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

2007-04-05T20:57:00.000Z

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.

A Pilgrimage of Sorts

2007-02-24T14:45:00.000Z

I recently read about a retired Chechen man who rode his bike to Mecca. The story, as I took it, seemed to illustrate a particularly curious way of fulfilling an already curious phenomenon - the pilgrimage. I'm not sure that I could define what constitutes a pilgrimage without resorting to obvious examples. Catholics go where there were saints; everyone goes where their prophet received or delivered the message. Unitarians, if they were to formalize such a thing - which would go against their religion - might go to Cambridge to worship at the Temple of Well-Educated Open-Mindedness.

Last week I went to Khouribga. Readers of this blog (i.e.: those burdened by filial obligation) might recall previous mention of the City of Phosphates from a description Al Akhawayn University's 2006 Ramadan soccer tournament. In fact, the actual Khouribgui soccer team, L'Olympique Club de Khouribga, is undefeated atop the Moroccan First Division, thanks to the well-considered financing it receives from L'Office Chérifienne des Phosphates.

My excuse for going to Khouribga came from the opportunity to meet with members of AFVIC, an NGO working with illegal immigrants deported from Italy, and not because of anything soccer- (or phosphate-)related. Since my 'field research' over five months had amounted to three cups of coffee in Beni Mellal and a couple of bus rides around Fes, it seemed fortuitous that my first opportunity to use an expensive digital voice recorder would be in a city that I had fetishized over months and even years for its nothingness.

It turns out that much of Khouribga lives in, depends on, or wishes to be in Italy, usually around Turin. The connection probably derives from the fact that sometime in the 80's Fiat management chose to follow the example of Renault and Volkswagen and recruit 'main d'oeuvre' from a specific region of Morocco. Khouribga and the surrounding area was, apparently, as yet unclaimed. Like colonial spheres of influence, however, this decision would have unforeseen consequences, as (EU) Schengen visa requirements could not cut the social ties already established between Khouribgui's in Italy and the community in Morocco and the now-illegal immigration that followed such ties.

In any case, I set out for Khouribga without much reliable information on it. Anyone to whom I mentioned my destination would invariably ask why I would want to go there. Some people fortify themselves by reading tea leaves, or palms or Tarot cards. I first believed that Khouribga would live up to my baseless expectations when, after arriving by train well after dark, I bought some peanuts. They came wrapped in an off-white, letter stock sheet of paper with the typewritten following:

Page 3

- ne pas donner à boire (augmente la débit circulatoire d'où augmente l'hémorragie)
- évacuation d'exrême urgence à l'hôpital

C - HEMORRAGIE EXTERIORISEES
1°) Saignement de nez: compression avec le doigt, de la narine qui saigne en appuyant su la cloison nasale. Si le saignement persiste voir le médecin.

2°) Vomissements et crachements de sang.
- mettre le malade en position horizontale
- tourné sur le côté, immobile
- pas de boisson
- appeler le médecin ou transport à l'hopital

3°) Autres hémorragies extériorisées:
- hémorragie rectale ) pas du ressort du secouriste
- hémorragie urinaire

Khouribga has the markings of a city conceived and developed under French colonialism. It's monument, as such, is a clock tower that resembles a large paper-weight hoisted in the air. It stands at the center of four, long, straight, wide boulevards. The neighborhood marked 'old medina' looks a lot like the others. And there is a far-reaching 'administrative district' literally on the other side of the tracks that evokes Levittown without any building code updates or sidewalk improvements since 1956. It is in this neighborhood where the Italian-financed, twice-vandalized AFVIC offices are located. People read whatever they want into silence, and after looking through the profiles of some of the Khouribgui's deported from Italy, I sensed the absent presence of immigration in Khouribga's flat, tree-lined stillness.

Khouribgui's tell relatives that Turin is fantastic, even if they're sharing a room with other grown men, working for low wages as a mason. Not unlike other 'belated travelers' I seek fulfillment in the authenticity of the non-authentic (Khouribga, peanuts, argyle sweaters). Just as religion is an irrefutable ideology to its believers, the pilgrimage is inevitably inspiring because it is imagined even as it is experienced. In other words, Khouribga did not disappoint.

Author's note:
(Though in reality undetermined, I may well have betrayed a potential future as a post-whatever cultural anthropologist with that second-to-last sentence)

Comparative Living in Fes

2007-02-15T11:45:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-25T12:22:00.000Z

In a departure from the diary-like entries that characterize this blog, this is about Moroccan society, or the censorship therein. Two weekly magazines have recently been brought to their knees by the combined blows of an executive authority bent on self-preservation and a judiciary doing the former’s bidding. As described by Jane Kramer in last October’s New Yorker article entitled “The Crusader”, Le Journal Hebdomadaire’s editor-in-chief Aboubakr Jamaï has been engaged in an ongoing critique of the monarchy for a decade. In the last month, court functionaries have twice demanded payment of 3 million dirhams (≅US$350,000) following a 2005 court decision holding the magazine liable for defamation. The decision stems from Le Journal’s suggestion that a study conducted by the Centre européen de recherche, d’analyse et de conseil en matière stratégique (ESISC) on a question related to Morocco’s claims over the Western Sahara, were by the monarchy. Le Journal’s sin was to breach the oft-mentioned triptych of Moroccan taboos: God, king and country (i.e.: territorial sovereignty). In response to these demands, Jamaï has resigned in an effort to save Le Journal from insolvency, since the periodical’s assets will be seized to pay the fine if Jamaï remains the owner and operator.

Meanwhile, on January 15, an editor and a journalist for an Arabic-language weekly, Nichane, were both found guilty of publishing material attacking Islam, the king, and morals in the form of jokes that Moroccans tell about…religion, sex and politics (everything but territorial sovereignty, it seems). The punishment handed down by the court consists of three years’ suspended sentence for both defendants, a 80,000 dirham (US$9300) fine, and a 2 month ban on publishing.

The Nichane affaire has gotten much more attention than the “Moniquet Affaire” (so-named after the Belgian director of ESISC who filed suit, in Morocco, against Le Journal). Both publications are, however, representative victims of the different reactions taken by a monarchy on the defensive. As Jamaï pointed out in one of his final editorials, demand for payment came shortly after Le Journal published a cover story asking: ? A provocative question as to whether the former king, generally considered an old-style autocrat, was in fact better at leading the country than the present incarnation. In typically trenchant fashion, the storyline was based on recently-released World Bank indices that compared unfavorably with Morocco’s standing in the late ‘90’s during the former king’s reign.

The Nichane affair, as with Le Journal, seems related to the executive authority’s determination to eliminate it’s adversaries, only in a less direct manner. After the offending issue was published on December 9, an Islamist website posted a complaint, followed by demonstrations in Gulf countries which, culminating in student protests outside a university in Kenitra, led the Prime Minister to ban the publication, an act that exceeded even the wishes of the protesting students, and was done on questionable legal ground. A month later, the decision was handed down.

In the case of Nichane, the government appears to be making an effort to outmaneuver Islamists in a parliamentary election year. The largest opposition party in the lower house, the Parti de la Justice et du Développement (PJD), is Islamist. Based on public polls (by an American group associated with the Republican Party, interestingly enough), the PJD is considered capable of winning an outright majority if elections were to reflect public opinion. The king’s advisors have already held meetings with the majority parties (a conglomeration of groups representing everyone from post-cold war no-longer-really-communists to rich men who create a party around themselves) on how to block the PJD’s ascent, and punishing a publication associated with secularists fits easily within the blueprint.

Thus, one act is taken to stem criticism of the monarchy, another to stem the popularity of the opposition Islamists. None of this, it should be noted, is all that new, and in this sense I am writing about myself after all. Le Journal notes a dozen court decisions over the last several years that have punished Moroccan journalists with sizeable fines and jail time, including one journalist banned from the profession for life for venturing into the debate on the Western Sahara on the “wrong” side. In light of this consistent intimidation of journalists, my reaction reflects, more than anything, the shocked sensibilities of a Western visitor. The fact that I read and value Le Journal and TelQuel means that I have followed these developments and felt, suddenly, effected by them. An Arabic weekly in Oujda could publish an interview with an Islamist leader and subsequently get banned – as has happened – and I would know of it only as a passing news item.

Nichane is published by the same editors who publish TelQuel, another francophone weekly whose chief editor, Ahmed Benchemsi, spoke at Al Akhawayn last semester. When I asked Mr. Benchemsi about Kramer’s article, he admitted that Jamaï was a crusader in a way that Benchemsi’s magazine is not, yet I enjoy reading them both. TelQuel is critical and entertaining in a way that links it to the interests of a younger generation (hence, Benchemsi’s appearance at Al Akhawayn). Almost every week, there is an article on changing sexual behaviors (internet dating, sexual harassment in public). A recent issue exemplified the magazine’s editorial priorities - topical social problem, Islamist threat, changing sexual mores – when the cover simultaneously addressed cold-related deaths in a rural area, the ailing leader of Morocco’s largest Islamist movement, and the booming market for condoms in Morocco.

Le Journal, by contrast, devotes more attention to uncovering financial and commercial corruption when not otherwise bluntly attacking the regime and its method of governance. My favorite issue to date, and what may well have precipitated the functionaries' second demand for payment, was a resplendently negative year-end special that identified (“The 60 people who are ruining Morocco (sic)”). The king was not on the list, but everyone around him was. In the end, I will take the resplendent negativity, because it is more about furthering the project of social change, and less about the division between secularists and Islamists.

Interestingly, the language in both of these francophone publications used to describe this censorship evokes progress: that these are acts contributing to a regression away from democracy, etc. As I mentioned last week, progress is not so linear, but it certainly feels as though regression is.

Progress and Whatever It Means

2007-01-13T00:02:00.000Z

There was a billboard that occupied two sides of a five-story, L-shaped building at 42nd and 8th Avenue. Maybe it's still there. A couple of years ago, when I was working in Times Square, I would pass this advertisement regularly and at the time it was filled with a message from Johnnie Walker, the bourbon(?) company. Against a black background, the advertisement showed a linear graph with points along a positive slope that marked generic housing situations: share, rent, lease, own. The progression of the points, and the company motto, suggested that perserverance leads to a steady improvement in material living. And most pointedly, to me, the idea seemed to be that responsibility and maturity were on corresponding x- and y-axes, vaguely associated with a variable amount of liquor that should lead, ultimately, to home ownership, located somewhere near the roof of this scrubby, awkward building that housed Show World at ground level (whose heydey is wonderfully described in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning - now a series on ESPN?).

The reasons http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifwhy I remember this billboard particularly well seem to have much to do with how I felt about progress in my own life at the time, and therefore how this message weighed on my conscience. The fact that a liquor ad was deepening my crisis in confidence only made matters worse, and made me want to drink Johnnie Walker less. It was as though I had an uneasy feeling that my fortunes were threatening to dive all the way down to ground level, which would place me in a porn shop two decades past it's prime.

Another time, I was walking past the Greenwood Cemetery with my girlfriend, and just inside the fence I saw a full bottle of Johnnie Walker (red? blue? black? I don’t know), lying prominently beside a gravestone embedded in the ground. It appears that the bottle was left to accompany the spirit of a former police officer of Italian heritage. In a cemetery known for its eclectic range of famous remains (the founder of Tiffany’s, the man who ran Tammany Hall, Basquiat), who knows the reasons behind the bottle being planted where it was. All I know is that it was perfectly appropriate that Johnnie Walker was there to remind me of the absolute outcome of Progress.

Having recently moved into an apartment here in Fes that is larger than anything I rented in New York, I have been thinking more about the notion of progress. From the fellow who said that capitalism and the end of the Cold War has delivered humanity from conflict (Fukiyama) to the fellow who said that the nation is the ultimate expression of collective thought (Heidegger), the simplistic idea of a single Progress is easily and repeatedly deconstructed in an academic context.

But I have experienced as well the much more personal sensation when time seems not to matter, and a month's beginning middle or end feels one and the same, with no temporality to passing seasons, which in the mind easily slip into years...And being conscious that time is stretching out like an undifferentiable low-lying grey skey, Progress and Its trappings become much more compelling. Give me a walking stick and some bourbon!

I don't have either of those accessories in this apartment in Fes, but I do have a remarkable amount of space to myself, which brings me the solitude I was hoping for, and the lonelinhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifess that accompanies it. I do have a wonderful view over part of the city, where the old medina sinks into a valley below my line of sight, and the white agglomerations of newer neighborhoods climbing the hillside to the north and east reflect sunlight throughout the day. The minarets, blinking pharmacy crescents and ubiquitous satellites remind me of the work of Nicola Lopez, an artist who was briefly a classmate in an Arabic course in the City. Her work is generally described using the term dystopic, and while the view from my balcony is much less so, she captures the aesthetic of the architecture through the lense of an alienating political environment. In truth, I am simply getting acclimated to the new surroundings, fewer acquaintances, and the smell of diesel exhaust in place of the wood smoke in Ifrane. However, the apartment here and the Johnnie Walker ads that I have been seeing, inexplicably, in a couple of Moroccan publications, remind me of the multiple effects resulting from every movement: that with love comes sadness, with solitude, loneliness, but that time remains a rather compelling motivator to retain some measure of progress, whatever that really means.

I Left my Hat in Beni Mellal

2006-11-17T19:00:00.000Z

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.

Living Vicariously and Politically (a.k.a.: New Hampshire is Blue)

2006-11-09T19:24:00.000Z

Originally, this was going to be about Rabat, which I've visited three times now. Then, it was going to be about coffee, and cafés, in Morocco. For a while, I blamed the delay in posting on Ramadan, but it might be that this whole time I was preoccupied with following the campaign season (and, occasionally, the Mets) online.

I didn't realize how much expectation I had built up for the election until I received my absentee ballot in the mail several days before Nov. 7. My ballot was meaningless in that the Democratic nominees for judge in Kings County civil court had in all likelihood already bought their seats, and my ballot wouldn't arrive on time anyway. (It did, however, remind me about the <Rent Is too Damn High> New York State gubernatorial candidate). Nonetheless, riding on optimism, I carried the ballot around with me for two days wanting to show it to everyone I knew before mailing it off.

On Tuesday night, following a day of willfull self-denial, I left my laptop positioned within reach of my bed for easy access the following morning, and wondered what I would do if
the results were disappointing. Then I wondered when I had got so caught up in the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Some of my excitement was generated by the general optimism surrounding the campaign, to be sure. But I realized as well that I have been starved for some kind of political discussion (hence the foisting of the ballot on my unwitting classmates). It's not as if significant political developments aren't taking place within Morocco, where the contradictions between modernization, secularization, political Islam and a traditional monarchy are played out every day. In September, a dozen people were arrested, some of them wives of Royal Air Maroc pilots, allegedly for planning a terrorist attack. Last month, following elections for one of the houses of the rubber-stamp parliament, there were allegations of rampant vote-buying . And on the same weekend recently, one of the country's largest political Islamic groups held a convention while socialist groups were organizing vigils and soccer matches to commemorate the 41st anniversary of the still unresolved death of Mehdi Ben Barka, an opposition leader and social icon from the 60's.

Then I realized that there isn't a single political group on campus. Certainly, there must be plenty of political discussion that I miss on account of language. But when I asked a couple of students, one of them told me that as part of their matriculation to Al Akhawayn, Moroccan newcomers sign an agreement not to participate in political activities while at the university. I haven't been able to confirm this, but it certainly stands in contrast to Moroccan public universities (those not created by royal decree), where Islamists and socialists have been fighting over control of the student unions for some time. The atmosphere at Al Akhawayn also contrasts with my undergraduate experience where, in certain social circles, going to political protest, with little discrimination as to the subject matter, was a badge of honor. So, I realized that, in the last month, I've been rather pleased and felt rather lucky to be able to live, politically and vicariously, through these midterm elections.

Rather than simply take away the obvious lesson that "Democracy is Good (except, perhaps, when introduced through military invasion by crusading ideologues)," this election made me think of how I felt six years ago, when I was living the undergraduate experience that I just dismissively described. At the time I was idealistic and engaged with many ideas, explicitly political or otherwise, that I found interesting and inspiring. What I realize now, however, is that like love and hate, idealism and cynicism are closely related, and that my ideologically-driven disgust led me to cast a vote six years ago that my Uncle Frank will never (and should never) let me forget.

So this year, while identifying with Democratic success makes me feel a fair bit older, it's refreshing, for the time being, simply to find inspiration in the election outcome, at both a national and grassroots level. I found this dispatch from a couple of up-and-coming political operatives, who attended every schnitzelfest and bean supper in Southwestern New Hampshire this fall, the most uplifting of all:

The N.H. Democrats have captured the Senate, the Executive Council and even the House and of course the Governor's office. The voter turnout for Hancock was 71%. the highest in the region. Gov. John Lynch got 80% in Hancock and 70%+ statewide. Janeway beat Flanders for the Senate. A large number voted a straight Democratic ticket. In Keene Molly Kelly beat Tom Eaton for the N.H. Senate .

There is a man from Nelson, John Shea, who allows his name to be put on the Democratic line whenever no one else wants to run. Peter Spaulding, a Republican on the Exec. Council is quite popular and a moderate. Shea opposed Spaulding. After helping with the vote count at 10:30pm we decided to go to Henniker because others were meeting at David's Restaurant there. We only knew of the Hancock results. We were in the car listening to NHPR when we heard that Bass conceded to Hodes. Then that Jeb Bradley in the other Congressional district had conceded to Carol Shea-Porter. She ran on a shoestring, on a anti-war platform. At that point we felt the car levitating. Someone at the station had tried to reach Shea. The announcer said no one in Nelson, (population 600) seems to be answering their phones. They said that the message on Shea's phone said that he was away for a few days. He spent not a nickel and still won. It was a political tsunami. The gathering in Henniker was ecstatic. We got home and to bed at 1:30am Wed. What a day.

Sport: The Fall and Rise of Ittihadi Khouribga

2006-10-06T03:22:00.000Z

If the posts are increasingly about campus life rather than life in Morocco, then I'm afraid that the following will only contribute to that trend. Ramadan started over ten days ago, and it took me a while to adjust to the schedule. People routinely stay up until 4am and, when not in class, they sleep during the day. What's more, the communal sense from fasting is somewhat fragmented here since students tend to break fast in small groups in each other's dorm rooms. There are, however, plenty of things going on outside of Al Akhawayn so the "A Different World" series will sooner or later come to an end. Recent news includes the discovery of several bodies that were unearthed near a small town east of the Atlas Mountains. These are presumably the remains of political dissidents dating to the 1960's or 70's.

But anyway, one of the main activities that brings students together during Ramadan is an indoor soccer tournament. It's popularity is such that I'd heard about it weeks in advance, and had been told that someone had bribed a referee during last year's playoff. After some harried negotiating that included a failed attempt to recruit a German and Pole onto our side, I joined a team being organized by my friend Wissam. We patched together a squad that included myself, Wissam and his friends, Chris, a sporting fellow from England who looks like he could play rugby or football, and a classmate from my French class named Ahmed, who has a mustache and is a member of the video game club. We were the last entry into the field and, because I was delegated to register the team, and because Wissam is from Khouribga, our team name translates to Khouribga United.

I have a vague memory (or I think I remember, the way I think I saw Peter Dinklage on the streets of Manhattan once, but easily could have imagined it) of going to a soccer tournament during Ramadan in Rabat five years ago. As I remember it, the setting had a gladiator-like feel. Concrete stands surrounded a small gymnasium, echoes flooded the small confines, and netting separated the players from fans. Al Akhawayn's tournament takes place in a similar setting, with certain refinements (i.e.: no netting) befitting a university environment.

The games are played between the hours of 9pm and 2am, and students often pack the stands, particularly around 11pm and midnight. The crowd generally cheers a good move, laughs at mistakes, and will sarcastically mock anyone who looks overmatched. The endlines and the stands are the only out of bounds, meaning players can bounce passes of the wall, and the action is frenetic. Shots - from far or near, on or wide of goal - generally receive applause.

My goal was to have fun by avoiding embarrassment. In our first match, against a team with the inscrutable name of Khiz-Khiz, we barely held our own, losing 2-1, but giving up at least five times the number of shots that we took. Khiz-Khiz was supposed to be a real contender, though, so the team took heart.

Our second match ended in disaster. We lost 2-0 to a team with no substitutes and our inability to create an attack became painfully obvious. One of Wissam's friends, who clearly prefers swimming and tennis, became the target of the crowd's taunts. After the game, Ahmed's friend Eyman, our goalkeeper, announced that he wouldn't play with us any longer. This was particularly disheartening given the number of shots that we allow each game. Save Wissam, we were never from Khouribga, and now we were no longer ittihadi.

Last night we were scheduled to play at midnight. As of ten o'clock, Eyman was still holding out, but on our way to the gym we found him playing video games in Ahmed's room, and he agreed to join us. I still don't know why he quit or why he came back. Anyhow, the game started, against All-Stars, and we were lucky enough to convert a penalty for our second goal of the tournament. By halftime we led 2-1, but the pattern of giving up a startling number of shots continued.

Then, near the start of the second half, Eyman was given a red card for reasons that I think could have involved the exchange of money. I became impromptu goalkeeper, and the rest of the match was essentially target practice for All-Stars. At one point, we were down two men because Zakariya was penalized for leaving the field at the wrong time.

Remarkably, however, we played with a desperation and focus that brought the crowd to our side. They booed All-Stars like they were the evil empire (and they were, in the sense that they all wore Juventus jerseys), and chanted and clapped every time we stymied their attack. We stopped shot after shot, Ahmed converted our only shot of the half on a slow, a knuckling take from near mid-court, and we won, 3-2.

Our chances for advancing are still slim, particularly since Eyman is suspended for the next game, but regardless I will take the euphoria from this one match. However superficial, it's a wonderfully galvanizing feeling, as much to be cheered and carried by the fans' sentiment as to actually win.

Now, hopefully by next time I will have traveled some or studied more and thereby have some "real news," but for now it's Khouribga, ittihadi again.

Windowsill Culture

2006-09-19T22:54:00.000Z

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

2006-09-11T20:20:00.000Z

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

2006-09-03T15:34:00.000Z

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

2006-09-03T13:20:00.000Z

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.