The Balance

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

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

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.

A Pilgrimage of Sorts

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

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.