Internal music

Amma has a new phone, a gift from her father. Apparently phones are Moroccan teenagers’ mp3 players. She and Yunus have been swapping songs between their phones for the past few days through Bluetooth (‘Bluetoot’). Now that she clearly has a fair amount of songs on her phone, she’s inseparable from it. Day and night she is listening to music, and usually singing and dancing along with it, seeming not to care that the rest of us can’t hear a thing. She listens to it when she’s doing homework, when she’s in the kitchen helping out, even when she’s watching TV or talking to her grandmother or aunts. My parents would have told me long ago to turn off the music, but no one here seems to mind at all. But then again, everyone in the family plays around with their phone day and night. Even Khadija, who is indeed illiterate (but who is going to school – this morning she came back and proudly showed me a paragraph she had written), has a phone that she carries with her everywhere.

So I am not the only one whose phone is a lifeline.