Mumkin, chiwa

Did I like Morocco? Mumkin, chiwa. Maybe a little. Although I clown and criticize Moroccans, I actually really liked Morocco. I, mean, I did stay a whole month for some reason. The good: the food, the generosity, the natural beauty, the cultural, geographical, racial, ajdlinguistic diversity, walking swiftly through the medinas, the only place that could have produced gnawa, the heart pound (whenever people greet you the put their right hand across and gently pound their chests), the fashion, cabs with meters, decent public transportation. What I didn’t like: the anti-black racism, their “particular” form of patriarchy, cats don’t smile (they are a sad looking bunch), wack authoritarian government, adventures crossing the street, hustlers and touts, and the Islam just ain’t moderate enough.

Disputed Territory

Everything was smooth, with the bus making stops every 90 minutes for 90 minutes until right before getting to Laayoune. Laayoune is the capital of Western Sahara. There I ran into the first of six police checkpoints. After 14 hours on the bus, I had learned to ignore the stops, only this time I was the sole reason for the stop. The soldier poked my shoulder rudely, waking me up and demanding my passport. He asked me for the essentials, name, date of birth, nationality, and profession, and I felt terrible for holding up the whole bus. An hour and change later, we got stopped again. This time the soldier made me go down to his little office by the road in the middle of fucking nowhere, and took even longer in getting my info. Afterwards, the bus driver advised me to write down all of my relevant information on scraps of paper I could hand out to the soldiers as they stopped me. I thought the whole thing was so silly. The dudes were copying my information in the most random places. One dude wrote it in his planner, another on the back of some other document he had, and the others accepted my scraps with some recopying it and others just taking it as is. Why don’t they just have a form you can fill out? Well, what’s all the fuss about? I was in Western Sahara which is claimed and occupied by Morocco as part of its own territory, while the Saharawis assert that they are an independent nation oppressed by Morocco. Western Sahara was for centuries part of Morocco’s empire, but it didn’t really exist as a formal political entity (as always in Africa) until colonialism. The French and Spanish divided Morocco between themselves, with the French taking the tastier morsels and leaving Spain with the scraps: the mountains in the north by the Spanish border and a large chunk of desert in the south that the Spanish renamed Rio de Orio (Gold River) even though there was no water or gold. Although Morocco negotiated its independence from France in 1956, Spain resisted the tide of colonization and held onto Western Sahara until Franco’s death in 1975. The UN was supposed to administer a plebiscite to decide whether Western Sahara would be independent or join Morocco. King Hassan II of Morocco though interrupted the vote (maybe forever) when he ordered the “Green March” where 350,000 Moroccans marched down into the desert to claim Western Sahara as part of a historical “Greater Morocco.” Really the King just understood the value of nationalism and possible foreign war in distracting people from more urgent domestic concerns, and also the value of the phosphate deposits in Western Sahara. Mauritania was supposed to get a slice too, but quickly withdrew after a new Algerian-backed armed independence movement, POLISARIO arose and forced them to retreat. POLISARIO warred with the Moroccan government until a ceasefire in the 1991, although hostilities never completely ended. The UN has a highly visible presence in Western Sahara and they are still supposed to organize a vote on Western Sahara’s political future but there are disputes as to who is going to be allowed to vote since many Moroccans have moved in encouraged by the Moroccan governments investments and tax exemptions. Most likely Western Sahara will remain part of Morocco and the Saharawis yet another nation without a state. Again, all this meant for me was having to be woken up by soldiers several times who just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t an investigative journalist going to meet the rebels. I just wondered why anyone would fight over this territory. I mean, honestly, it’s the desert. There is literally nothing. I didn’t even see the tall dunes of fine yellow sand that is burned into the Western imaginary, rather it was all dull looking, rocky scrubland. Not very romantic at all, but still if the Saharawis want it that bad I think they have put it up with it long enough to deserve to call it whatever they want and govern themselves however they wish.

Essaouira

Essaouira is a beautiful place. It’s a town on the Atlantic Coast and although it’s mad touristy no tourist could spoil it. We laid on the ramparts, and just concentrated on sound of the waves crashing. There are several amazing views of the ocean. We walked alongside the tidy beach, it was just great.

Smile!

I won’t be hating on Morocco forever, but I have one more complaint: motherfuckers don’t smile. How you not gonna smile? You see people’s pictures and they aren’t smiling. For women it’s dangerous to smile cause men there take anything as I sign of attraction, so it makes sense, but the dudes? Natasha introduced me to the term ibengoggen, an “only in Morocco” word that refers to men who spend all day at the café buying only a cup of coffee and sits alone or a small group staring at others and when in company commenting on passersby. Although it’s a hobby, don’t think anyone has any fun. The typical face is a mixture of bitterness, boredom and sadness. They might also smoke a cigarette or two. Here is a picture of me and some actually ibengoggen, followed by Currun and I trying to imitate the look.

Relative Heat

I thought it was hot as fuck in Marrakech, but I kept seeing people wearing coats, or sweaters and blazers, with hats even in the middle of the day when I felt like if I didn’t get enough water I would pass out. People in Senegal are ridiculous about the heat too, thinking that anything in the 70s is cold, and the 60s is freezing, but Morocco just took heat tolerance to the next level. It’s like the men were subconsciously trying to understand what it was like to wear a black burka in 95 degree weather, by wearing several layers. It was just weird to be walking around in a t-shirt and jeans and wishing I could be in flip flop and shorts, and then seeing people in wool coats and hats.

Tourism, Power and Authenticity

In Marakech they sell you this image of Moroccans as generic desert nomads/Arabs even though like all stereotypes it’s largely inaccurate. For example, I bought a hookah even though Moroccans don’t really do sheesha, it’s more of an Eastern Arab and South Asian thing. Djaama El Fna was full of tourist attractions, like the snake-charmers, who speak English and chase after you, just like they did 800 years ago. I bet they also accept visa and MasterCard. In addition, there is the lady who yells out to all of the female tourists for henna tattoos. It’s the kind of commercialization of tradition (completely removed from its cultural context) that just reeks of inauthenticity. But then what is authenticity? Is it just something that’s corny? Some authentic traditions, i.e. not Hallmark made up or pumped up like holiday movies did to the mistletoe for example, are genuinely corny like some Europeans really do yodel. And many “tourist spectacles” have both “authentic” and “inauthentic” components (and now I have to use scare marks) like Brazilian and West Indian carnival celebrations. Moreover, cultures are dynamic and change, and people have been borrowing from each other since some cavewoman discovered fire and others began to replicate her trick, so it’s hard to say what is authentic or not. The issue primarily seems to be about power and how much the host society can define it’s own image and how low it’s forced to stoop for tourist dollars. So that for example, Spain is super-touristy and there they sell a stereotypical image of flamenco, bullfighting and tapas, but the difference is, that Spain can decide how cheesy it wants to be. There you get overcharged too, and in many ways it’s worse cause you are getting robbed in euros. Still, it’s done formally, they announce that you will be paying 30€ for a cheesy flamenco show and therefore everyone get overcharged the same. But Morocco is more desperate, more dependent on tourism (that’s the other issue too, economic diversity, New York City for example probably receives more visitors than all of Morocco every year and definitely pimps them for even more dough and would be seriously in trouble if those folks stop coming and buying Broadway tickets, but there the economy is more diverse, so you don’t notice it as much.) Therefore Morocco gets defined, and they are going to sell you whatever you want. They will be whatever you want them to be. They will cater to your every fantasy and fetish. The poorer the more exploitative and “inauthentic” it becomes. These same dynamics can play themselves out within the same country too obviously, whenever (which is always in our fucked up world) there are serious inequalities. One of the authors of one of the books I read on the subject gives the example of Baltimore, where wealthier white folks redeveloped the waterfront and created their own fantasy of a happy, whitebread Baltimore. Or think of the Native Americans in the Southwest, and the long history of misrepresentation, mythologizing and racism there. Although they are better off in relative terms than Natives in other countries, and have greater power to portray themselves to the world. People should visit each other. They always have, and again in an equal world we wouldn’t have these issues. Tourism can be done right, but that’s hard with so much inequality.

Sorry More Politics

It also annoys me that so many Moroccans refer to Moroccan Arabic or darija as argot or slang when it’s the language of the people. Fuhsa, or modern standard Arabic, is spoken only by the educated and (from what I understand, I ain’t no Arabist or nothing, or even speak Arabic except for like three words) is not really spoken anywhere with some Persian Gulf dialects just being close to it. Some Arabic speakers couldn’t understand each other, but for political reasons you can’t say the truth which is that most “Arabic” speakers don’t speak the same language. Which brings me to the other side of the language issue in Morocco: Berber. Or rather the different Berber dialects which are spoken by many Moroccans. A bit of Moroccan history: many groups have invaded Morocco throughout the centuries, the last being the French and Spanish, but before them were the Arabs and before them the Romans and before them the Phoenicians and before them the Berbers. The folks who were there before the Berbers are no longer relevant to the mix, so the Berbers get default native peoples status. The Berbers are notorious for their “fiercely independent” spirit and the Arabs, Romans and others never could quite control certain parts of the country where the Berbers were able to do their thing. Still, they were disadvantaged in a society dominated by Arabic speaking Berbers. The difference now is mainly cultural and linguistic, although some people say that Berbers are lighter than the Arabs. These are also the same people who will tell you that Berbers are from Europe and that while Europe is the head, Morocco is the roots. This self-hating, negrophobic attempt to distance themselves from Black Africa and claim an elusive whiteness (being Dominican I understand and disapprove of the impulse) is laughable. The fact is, Moroccans—including the Berbers—are a diverse bunch and I was constantly surprised by the number of Moroccans that wouldn’t be perceived as “Arab” in the US i.e. wouldn’t get racially profiled by Department of Homeland Security. Some would get away as white, but many more would be profiled for being black. Gnawa, in fact, is the subculture created by black slaves. Unfortunately, coming into Moroccan society mostly as slaves black folks have kept their low status and now traditional prejudice has mixed with modern racism to make life quite hard for dark-skinned Moroccans. Natasha lamented the racist taunts and jokes, people chasing her asking if she was from Senegal. Again I saw many people as dark as Natasha in Morocco. It’s a damn shame. I wonder why God chose black folks to suffer so. That being said, I think it’s cool that the Berbers are trying to pressure the Moroccan and Algerian governments to teach Berber in the schools as one of the main aims of a rising Berber Pride movement after centuries of repression.

Moroccan wives

Lightheartedly, I would tease Natasha that with all of the cooking she could be mistaken for my Moroccan wife, especially when we reached the point where she had to hang my undies on the clothesline. Ok, this had less to do with me being a terrible feminist than with Morocco having a “peculiar” form of patriarchy. Natasha’s neighbor is a young (21 y.o.) newlywed that isn’t allowed to leave her home. Her husband has forbidden her from leaving the home until she bears him a child, preferably a son. She relies on others, usually children to buy her food and other necessary items. The clothes hang on the roof through her apartment, so I couldn’t go. As a smaller town, Azilal is a relatively more conservative place (though for from the worst in Morocco) than say Rabat, but even in the big cities you would see women in burkas. One of the things I will never forget was seeing a woman in Marrakech covered head to toe in a black burka, with mesh across her eyes. She was wearing gloves so that no part of her skin was visible, even though it was over 90 degrees at the time. What’s more, she couldn’t even see and had to be led through the chaotic streets by another woman not as conservatively dressed. I had Granted not all women wear veils, least of all the burka, and many women who do wear the veils still manage to express themselves through their clothes and try to get cute with it. As I have already said before, the veil means many different things in different places and times and therefore my horror could just reflect Western prejudice. There are women who argue that the veil can be empowering. What is undeniably terrible about gender relations in Morocco is the extreme gender segregation and consequent relegation (many would say condemnation) of women to the home or “private sphere.” There are no women in the public sphere, few in government, business, education, health. And sometimes you don’t even have to see things from that macro-level, I had days when I was traveling when I would go 12 or 14 hours without seeing a single female. But then the truth is that as much as Arab Muslim societies get vilified for their treatment of women (did you know that women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia?!) it is wack to be a woman everywhere. The point is that as a woman you basically pick your poison. But it’s hard to decide which country is worse because every country oppresses women, just differently and it’s hard to decide which basket of evils is worse. In Morocco it’s the burka and extreme segregation and confinement, while in the US it’s eating disorders, porn, BET and date rape, and in Senegal it’s polygamy, and FGM, while in India it’s dowry murder and female infanticide and abortion, and so on. To be blunt, what’s the point of being unveiled when they have cut your clitoris; at least the veil doesn’t stop you from enjoying yourself when you know one of these men never could. And for America what’s the point of having all of this money and “freedom” when women are willing to starve themselves and can’t get their head out of the toilet bowl to enjoy the freedoms bequeathed by modernity. Misogyny has many faces, hard to say which is ugliest. Still I can’t shake off the feeling that I would rather be a woman in the US than in Morocco.

Marrakech

We took a grand taxi to Marrakech, through a less scenic but safer route down from Azilal. Marrakech was a reintroduction to heat, fashion boys, tourists, pollution and too many people on motorcycles. Progressively, there were also many women riding around on motorcycles, although I didn’t see many being as annoying as the men and driving around the narrow, crowded streets. I had seen and been irritated by motorists in the medina in Rabat, but it was much worse in Marrakech. We stayed in a hotel in the narrow alleys behind Djaama El Fna. The area was touristy as fuck—dominated by foreigners—but I still liked it. I enjoyed the orange juice stands, and the food stalls. Still it was annoying to be constantly pestered by all the vendors, after the calm of Azilal and Rabat. In Marrakech, discerning eyes could tell I was a tourist even if their guesses of where I was from were often way off. Although I had heard vendors try to hook you by yelling out a greeting in whatever language they think you speak (hello my friend! Mon ami, c’est pas cher, etc.) but had never encountered so many people that just yelled out the names of countries. Did they seriously think that if they could guess correctly we would reward them by buying their overpriced leather bags? Walking around Natasha we got some outlandish countries, Cameroon, Jamaica (Natasha’s twists elicited lots of Jamaica), Martinique, Belgium, France, and some more sensible ones like Brazil and the US. If one of them had said Dominican Republic I would have let them name the price.

Market Thursday

Azilal is also small enough to have a weekly market which the whole town goes to. We too headed out, Natasha cause she lives there and has to get food and other necessities and me, cause well I was curious enough to wake up early. There were rows of fresh fruit laid down on the floor and collected in buckets blackened with what I can only describe as “food soot.” But you could buy pretty much anything at the market, from blankets, electrical sockets to clothes and raw wheat. The ingredients bought at the market made for damn good meals.

Azilal

In Azilal I stayed with Natasha. It is a beautiful town in the mountains that is postcard ready with snowcapped mountains, lots of green and waterfalls. One of my first days we walked around and picked fresh olives. It was also cold, and small. The cold was difficult because it’s the kind of cold that gets into your bones cause due to the poor insulation it’s just as cold inside as outside. Consequently, there is nowhere to be warm but in your bed under several covers. It’s also a small town, and therefore shuts down early. Not much to do at night, especially when it’s cold outside.

Yet it was in Azilal that I ate best. Natasha cooked much amazing food, including another of the greatest meals of my life (and yall wonder why I was in Morocco for a month). We went to the slaughterhouse where we bought a chicken, saw it murdered before us, and then defeathered and gutted. The first night Natasha made—I cut some tomatoes or something too—some delicious fried chickens with its left side. But the next day she outdid herself with a Moroccan couscous dish with the right side of the chicken.

Irregular Transport

After a small eternity in Rabat, I finally got my ass off of Currun’s couch (if I had stayed any longer I would have felt obligated to pay rent and change the litter box) and made my way to Azilal. Leaving Rabat, I also left “development” behind and enter the world of irregular transport. Rather than the sterile CTM bus station, I had to go to Rabat’s bus station where before I had even crossed the street dudes were already coming at me promising the cheapest rate to Casablanca and Marrakech. But I wasn’t going there, I was headed to Beni Mellal a random town in Morocco (honestly I know nothing about it) on this bus that I had to wait an hour to fill up before it would take off and then stopped for every couple of large Berber women standing by the roadside the whole way there. It reminded me of Dominican voyages past, when people would be standing in the middle of nowhere by the highway with live chickens waiting for the bus to the capital. Again I sat next this really nice women who offered me food when she saw that I was hungry (do all Moroccan women just carry food around all the time?) even though she was pregnant and I would have survived without the bread and milk. Somehow we managed to communicate all of this even though I don’t speak Berber and she doesn’t speak French. When traveling you realize how little you really need to say with words. In Beni Mellal, the final stop was a gas station which was convenient for me because the grand taxi station was right behind it. A grand taxi is a shared taxi or what we would call a bush taxi if it was slightly more beat up and driven by other kinds of Africans. Again I paid for a place in this dude’s four-passenger ride only of course they cram six people, don’t leave until they have all six, and then drive like maniacs. This was one of my worst crazy bush taxi driver experiences, as we were whipping around all of these narrow mountain roads and this fool wasn’t even trying to attempt to stay in his life even though often you could see who was 50 m from you around the next bed heading at you in the same middle of the road. I made it alive and met Natasha at the post office. Even though, to be honest after four months in Senegal none of this felt crazier than a stopover at Port Authority.

Gnawa

One of the best things about travel is finding things you never knew existed (even if millions know about it, and it’s not necessarily hard to get exposed in our global media age). In Morocco, besides the fashion boys this was gnawa music and subculture. Two of Currun’s awesome friends were gnawa musicians and we spent Eid ul-Fitr, the feast to end Ramadan at one of their homes. There was great live music and pastries. Gnawa, I’m a fan.

What White Folks Eat

Ever since I was in Brazil I wondered what it is that white folks ate, or at least what they ate before their former colonial subjects introduced them to flavor. I learned (and yes this was a great revelation at the time) that there are different kinds of white people and they ate, yes, different things. A random morning in Rabat, Currun and I met these French girls and we invited them over for a raif lunch. I took advantage of the opportunity to ask them what they ate in the Netherlands. Boiled potatoes, vegetables and “really long sausages.” God forgive european folks, I understand now why they had to go out there and rape, murder, conquer and exploit the rest of us. I mean can you imagine eating that crap?

Flag-Off

Once at the bar we paid more than normal for these tiny bottles of Flag, only it really wasn’t the Flag I know and love from Senegal. In its place there was this watery knock-off that I can’t call even call Flag. Spain-style though, you could get a contact high from all the hash and tobacco smoke in the air.

Only in Morocco

After megamall, I hung out with several Morocco peace corps volunteers at one of the few bars in Rabat (and there really aren’t any in the smaller cities and towns, where it’s hard to get any alcohol). Before entering we saw a pair of drunk female prostitutes fighting. They were tearing each other’s clothes off, and after being separated one of them continued to undress, getting down to her bra. Several men rushed to force her clothes back on. Where else would you see men putting clothes on women? I guess there won’t be a Girls Gone Wild Rabat video anytime soon.

Megamall

It was also in Rabat that I met Natasha and the other Peace Corps Volunteer at Megamall. Megamall is one of these high-end commercial centers for the privileged in poor countries, where you can go bowling, watch a recent Hollywood film (that is sitting in a theater and not a bootleg DVD in your home), pay a lot for American fast food at the food court, and buy expensive European name-brand clothing. It’s a perfect symbol of the inequality that chokes so many of these countries, and how their insecure middle and upper classes ape American excess and consumerism. It’s the kind of place that could be anywhere in the world where people spend themselves stupid on a weekend, and that’s the point. Of course it’s seen as progress and development and government will often laud these “developments.” In Dakar, they are trying to get into the game building their first megamall and planning on an even more luxurious second one. But Morocco is more “developed” and therefore already has a couple. Rich folks in Morocco have a lot of money, I need to look at the numbers but from my short stay there Morocco seemed to be suffering from damn near Brazilian levels of ridiculous economic inequality. You see people who have nothing to envy from North American and Western Europeans (who have been to these countries) next to people who may as well be in Senegal they are so broke. In Morocco there are places where you can forget that you are in an underdeveloped country, something that only happens in Senegal if you stand in front of the Presidential Palace and nowhere else. But the politics in Morocco are even more wack. The king, Mohammed VI, is still too powerful, being both the most important political and religious figure, in his dual role as monarch and “commander of the faithful.” His father, Hassan II, who ruled from 1961 until dying in 1999 was essentially an autocrat. Of course he was supported by the US and France, imprisoning, torturing and murdering dissidents on both left and right. He also IMF-ized the country for the benefit of the Americans and French, leading to more “development” and emigration. As it stands Morocco has one of the largest and most far-flung of the recent diasporas. Even though the current king has gotten a lot of love for democratizing the country, the government still doesn’t protect basic freedoms like freedom of press and speech and is still drinking too much of that neoliberal kool aid for the good of the Moroccan people. They need to get rid of their monarchy or at least Queen Elizabeth-ize his ass.

Fashion Boys

Rabat was also my introduction to that most Moroccan of phenomena, the fashion boy. Again Morocco is one of those countries that lives the cliché of being stuck between tradition and modernity. Although it was Ramadan and more people than usual were rocking their traditional jilabas (which look frightening similar to Klan hoods) the fashion boys does the eurotrash thing. Hard core. Although there were fashion girls, it wasn’t the same. Even the women who didn’t wear the veil, usually tried to keep it modest, with only a couple going over the top. The girls who wore the veil often tried to pretty it up matching it to the rest of the outfits (which I am almost certain defeats the whole purpose of wearing the veil). Still, because of the veil the women just didn’t have the freedom of action to be as vain as some of the teenage boys. It was high-larious.

Perfection is Hard

Everything would have been perfect in Rabat except for Currun’s evil cat Shameesha. Shameesha was a street cat from the pretty gardens in Oudayas full of fat strays well-food by tourist tour groups feeding them that Currun had taken in (in Morocco dogs are considered dirty. I didn’t ask why because I know from asking about the pork is dirty maxim that there is probably no good reason. Still it means that you see many more stray cats than dogs. In Senegal dogs are only physically not metaphysically dirty.) Shameesha still had her street instincts though and had the bad habit of attacking fingers and toes. She could not be tamed. Currun is in the process of helping her recuperate from the traumas and tribulations she suffered alone out there hustling in the streets, like the white teacher in those “ghetto-school-against-all-the-odds-everything-is-going-to-be-fine-just-donate-to-Teach-For-America movies” where the new teacher inspires his ghetto fuck up kids to learn and pass the SATs or something. So I am sure eventually Currun will make sure Shameesha is the first street cat to go to kitty Harvard, but count me as one of those other students in the class who hates. I think she is pure evil and will never change.

Chilling

Tired of the hustle in Fez, we took the bus to Rabat and were happy to find that it was over air-conditioned, and a much shorter ride. Once there we settled into Currun’s place. Sadly, Tracey left for Spain at the end of the weekend as planned. I stayed for another few days or fifteen. It was damn near impossible to peel myself off of Currun’s couch. He had a great place in Bab Oudaya an old Kasbah or fort (yes the man lives within the walls of an ancient medieval fort), with a view of the beach from his terrace. Although the neighborhood was full of tourists during the day, it was still a normal neighborhood inhabited by regular Moroccan families, albeit being in a fort by the beach. We took to watching the sunsets off the ocean from the terrace (behind us the oldest mosque in Rabat, dating from the 12^th century), cooking random veggie dishes (Currun’s concoctions actually worked, although I don’t know if I would eat the harira with canned tuna again), going through walks through the medina for sandwiches, and watching funny videos on YouTube. I even got Currun to start saying that everything was high-larious. It was high-larious. To Currun and his awesome roommates and friends, thanks for a great time in Rabat.