Nostalgia for the Beyond

After 18 months in Morocco, I’ve finally set foot in a region I’ve always been curious about: the Rif mountains along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast.

I’ve left behind the now fairly routine rhythm of fieldwork in pursuit of a few days of relaxation. Unable to settle on another good yet economically modest holiday destination (and limited by the Icelandic cloud of ash that obstinately continues to paralyze airway traffic), I managed to convince Farid, my good friend and colleague, to take me north, to his native land.

And so here we are, ensconced in the heart of the legendary Rif. We’re taking day trips west to Al Hoceima, and longer ones east, to Temsamane, Anoual, Nador and Oujda. Other than that we spend most of our days in Beni Bouayach, a small village east of Al Hoceima. It was built only recently, but now serves as a business epicenter of sorts for a number of smaller villages in the surrounding hills. Their dirt roads now meet up on the new main street of this town: a busy, café-lined thoroughfare for tractors and trucks, donkey carts and regional taxis (here painted in a greenish turquoise, in reflection perhaps of the nearby Mediterranean).

The area is full of history, and family trees – centuries old, yet still blooming – are rooted deeply and firmly in its soil. It awakens in my own quite rootless existence a nostalgia for a feeling I’ve never quite had. Each hillside hides a story; each valley is the stage for a family saga. Most of these stories are colored by a theme of opposition against outside forces. The Rif Berbers have long been proud resisters of submission to centralized control, and make subtle claims to separate-ness on a daily basis. It is, first and foremost, a separateness borne by language. The people in this region understand Moroccan Arabic, but their language is Tariffit, and as a matter of principle, they prefer not to speak what they consider the language of the occupier. So as not to grate against local ears, I resort to Arabic only for the most essential communication, but otherwise rely on Farid’s expertise as interpreter.

My own communicative efforts have thereby been reduced to a minimum; as such, the mental complexity of my daily life has been dialed back to a primordial level of simplicity. With my fieldwork in Rabat being so heavily dependent on human interaction, this brief period of virtual deaf/muteness has actually been a welcome respite from my regular life, and amplifies my sense of really being ‘away’. Without that mental exertion directed outward, I’ve been able to focus on turning inward. I’ve had time to think, to process, to formulate new directions for my research. And for the first time in what feels like months, I’m finding time to write again – something other than field notes, that is.

I’ve never spent this much time in a Moroccan village this small, and I adore the snapshots that I am being given of daily life in this region. Traipsing through fields of wheat, groves of olive trees, and patches of coriander plants, making sure everything is growing as it should. Checking the level of water in the well – it’s been flowing generously ever since the earthquake of 2004. Looking in on the presses where, come December, olives will be converted into olive oil. Eating apricots straight from the tree. Bringing bread and fruit to community members in need. Taking lunch to the imam after Friday prayers. Shopping at the market, where you can pick out your own live chicken for slaughter. Whiling away evenings in plastic chairs on the sidewalk, chatting about future prospects over mint tea and sunflower seeds. And spending the occasional night hidden away on a rooftop, furtively drinking wine and whiskey.

The latter, I must qualify, are activities distinctly reserved for men. Women generally do not show themselves outside after dark. In fact, the foundational principle of Riffi social organization seems to be that the family’s women are to be protected from the gaze of strangers’ eyes. I am told that Riffi families place great value on privacy. Life in a city apartment is unacceptable: they could never share a hallway, even a front door, with strangers. All families here thus live in the Moroccan equivalent of townhouses. The entire village is made up of them: boxlike constructions, three floors high, with colorful plasterwork facades. The ground floor provides space for a garage, or even a store; the two floors above are each outfitted as fully functional apartments, including salon, kitchen, and bathroom. This is local logic: with what essentially constitutes two separate apartments for each family, men and women can entertain separately. Male and female worlds seem in fact to constitute parallel, but completely separate domains; beyond the private realm of the immediate family, there is very little informal mixing. Even weddings are single-sex affairs.

As a foreigner and outsider I am exempted from these standards of propriety, and so I get to be there for the nightly tea or wine. But being the only woman who shows herself outside after dark, I am nevertheless an anomaly. And being a blonde woman, I’m an anomaly about which people draw particular conclusions. Farid explained it to me as follows. As we drove onto the main street of Beni Bouayach, he informed me that to those who don’t know him well, the sight of us together will lead to the assumption that he has “found one” – that is, that he’s managed to find himself a European woman who will marry him for ‘papers’.

Departure is a common wish, a shared dream, a notion ever-present. There is common agreement among the people of this region that opportunity – fortune, career, a future – lies beyond. Regardless of how far the beyond on which one has set one’s sights, young adults all feel that there is little for them here among these hills. They’ve grown up with fathers, uncles, older cousins away in northern Europe, and these migrants’ stories have nourished the next generation’s dreams of leaving. Each summer, visiting emigrants’ display of European wealth and worldliness further widens the chasm between reality and desire. For the young men of this region, stunted in their masculinity and adulthood, a woman from the West can – literally – be one’s passport for departure.

For me, in turn, this region illustrates the sadness of stifled potential. The people’s stories of lack and limitation strikingly contradict the beauty of these hills, their obvious fertility. But this contradiction is born not so much of misperception; it emerges rather from the problematic relationship between the Rif and the central government. In a vicious cycle of cause and consequence, the Rif Berbers have always resisted submission to centralized power, and the government has, in subtle and not so subtle ways, consistently and systematically neglected this region. The tribes here are fiercely independent-minded, and always at the ready to fight for their autonomy. This volatile combination has helped Morocco battle for its sovereignty in the past (against the Ottomans, then the Europeans), but now poses what is perhaps the greatest threat to the power of the monarchy. A threat the government attempts to contain through isolation. This is a forgotten corner of Morocco: roads are in dangerous disrepair, there is a dire lack of schools for higher education, and no irrigation systems at all. After an earthquake devastated the region in 2004, the government failed tragically to help re-build. Internet connections are twice as slow as anywhere else, and radios receive more Spanish than domestic channels.

Apart from neglect, there is also silence. The region’s colorful and volatile past – battles, victories, independence and subjugation – has systematically been left out of the Moroccan history books. To the people themselves, stories of oppression are often too shameful to recount. This new generation of stunted young men has thus, sadly, grown up ignorant of its people’s illustrious past, of the sagas that link them to this ground. They are unaware of their rootedness – laboring under a sense of lightness, perhaps, that further nourishes their dreams of a beyond?

Without government investment, the community around Beni Bouayach has become surprisingly self-sufficient. Community funds (much of it from emigrants in Europe) have financed the installation of electricity, the construction of new housing, and the charity that cares for those who are less fortunate. Without government investment the community is, unfortunately, not (yet?) able to create long-term opportunity for its people. But their pride nevertheless refuses to be stunted. The people find subtle, daily ways of resisting subjugation. Their language is alive and vibrant; used often use to tell jokes at the expense of Arabs, or to grunt at the presence of “er makhzen,” the government.

Yet, lest we forget that even this remote and neglected corner of the country still bows under the rule of its King, the government has nevertheless managed to put its stamp on the region. Frequent displays of the Moroccan flag and portraits of Mohammed VI help to remind us that the notion of a Rif Republic remains but a mere nostalgic idea…

Fasting and Feasting* - Two Days of Ramadan Briefly Sketched

This past Friday morning, I went to Marjane for some grocery shopping. As I discovered when I walked onto the parking lot, about half of Rabat had decided to do the same. I had never seen that many cars stationed around the lot – nor had I ever dealt with such a lack of shopping carts. After a bit of scavenging around, I literally snagged the very last one there, and entered the store.

Inside, I met with mayhem. The aisles of Marjane had become a miniature version of Moroccan urban traffic. Thousands of carts, it seemed, were busy making their way through and across aisles, past roundabouts of sale items, without care or regard for any traffic rules. There was no right of way, no yielding, no merging; no system to the direction of traffic and no regulation of speed. Abandoned carts stood parked at random, no rhyme or reason to their positioning. Pedestrians darted this way and that, weaving themselves in between moving carts. Idle cart-pushers strolled along at a leisurely pace, suddenly abandoning their cart mid-traffic to browse an item two feet up ahead – to the great frustration of all speed-devils behind them, trying to get to the tomatoes before they ran out. Maneuvering my own cart through this chaos and barely managing to avoid a few multi-cart pileups, I slightly began to re-think my desire to learn to drive a stick shift and navigate actual Moroccan traffic on my own…

All these people had come to Marjane to stock up on Ramadan-necessities: their carts were full to the brim and beyond with industrial size containers of oil, flour, dates, and sugar. Not only are excess quantities of these staples needed to fashion the copious amounts of Ramadan-delicacies that are expected by hungry fasters at each day’s sundown; but in the interest of avoiding unnecessary labor during long, hot days without food or water, people try to get their major shopping in before the start of this month. The exact start date of Ramadan had not yet been determined, but it was to be either Saturday or Sunday – and people apparently wished to be prepared for all contingencies.

I too was there to stock up on Ramadan necessities: mostly high-fiber items that I hoped would tie me over during those long days of fasting. I decided to participate in this month of fasting - because after all, I figured, as an anthropologist I am a participant-observer. I think that the only way to truly approach some kind of understanding of what this month means to Moroccans, is to engage as fully as possible in the practices and traditions.

And so I find myself, at my time of writing, counting down the last hour until I hear the cannon shot and the muezzin’s call for Maghreb (sunset) prayer – our indication that we are allowed to eat – on my second day of fasting. I am sitting by my open balcony doors, and I can already smell the harira (a Moroccan soup of chick peas, lentils, and tomatoes) being made in kitchens up and down my street. The street is quieting down; anyone still outside is there for some last minute grocery shopping and is rushing home, plastic bags in hand. In about forty-five minutes, the street will be entirely deserted, as everyone retreats to the dinner table at home, ready to pounce as soon as prayers are over.

In standard Arabic, the sunset meal is called iftar; in Morocco it’s referred to as ftour,** the same word used to denote ‘breakfast’ any other time of year. It traditionally consists of dates, chebakia (very sweet, very sticky pretzel-shaped things), harira, bread, hard-boiled eggs, milk, and a variety of other things that may vary from table to table. Ftour is a meal to eat in the company of loved ones, of course, but for those whose family ties extend beyond the city limits, restaurants put a prix-fixe ftour on their menu during Ramadan. And so it happened that yesterday, I joined Farid to break my first day of fasting at a local restaurant, where we were served a luxurious ftour for 30 dirhams. I do not think I have ever appreciated food and drink as much as I did at that moment – I remember being hyper conscious and appreciative of the taste and texture of every item on my plate: the stickiness of the dates, the sweetness of the chebakia, the softness of the bread. My stomach was filled to capacity way before my mind was done relishing the cornucopia in front of me.

Nevertheless, spending a day without food or water was less difficult than I had feared. I felt listless, my muscles seemed to have no strength, and I very consciously felt a tugging emptiness in my stomach, but I was able to hold out, and I was still able to concentrate on my work. Day two was easier than day one, and I hope day three will be easier than day two. But for now, I’m looking forward to that intense feeling of appreciation for the food I will be eating in an hour – that ultimate satisfaction of filling an entirely empty stomach. Tonight Farid joins me at my house, where we will be making instant harira from a box – I intend to make my own at some point, too, but have not yet found the time.

While we eat, we will be watching 2M, one of Morocco’s public television channels. Whereas everyone watches satellite channels from Dubai during the year, Ramadan is a time for a bit of national pride and identity. 2M will let us know when we’re allowed to eat, and will subsequently intersperse the broadcast of a new sitcom with lavish, special Ramadan-oriented commercials for food (I’m getting the sense that this month of fasting is in fact all about eating).

After dinner, we will head out for a stroll through town. Whereas the streets are deserted between sunrise and sundown – everyone avoiding the sun, and unnecessary expenditure of energy – the city comes to life again about an hour after ftour. At 8 pm, the streets are as empty as one will normally only experience long after midnight, but an hour later, stores and cafés re-open and everyone comes out in their finest clothing to see and be seen. We’ll have some coffee at a café, and then we’ll each head home. I’ll eat a small bite and then go to bed, only to wake up again at 4 am for a last light snack before the muezzin and another cannon shot lets everyone know the sun has risen.

And my third day of fasting will begin.


* I’ve stolen this title from the English version of Marjo Buitelaar’s book about Ramadan.
** ftour comes from iftar, I’m pretty sure

On Otherness

A few weeks ago, as we discussed a recent blog post I had written, my mother mentioned that some of my pieces seem to suggest a great preoccupation with my conspicuous otherness here in Rabat. Why did I focus on my foreignness so much, she wondered?

I did not have an immediate answer to that question. She was right, but why was I so preoccupied with my own foreignness? What was this sense of Otherness, and what brought it about? Was that preoccupation just me, or was it an inevitable part of the expat experience? Did I feel as foreign now, as a NIMAR employee with her own apartment, as I did when I lived with my Moroccan host family? Over the next week, my mother’s question continued to float around in my head. It wasn’t until the following weekend, as I discussed this same subject over breakfast with a new friend, that I began to realize more clearly how to answer those questions.

The thing is, that if you’ve grown up ethnically white in an American or Dutch middle class neighborhood, Otherness is probably not a feeling you are accustomed to. I’m not talking about that sense of ‘being different’ that we all experience from time to time, or that feeling of just not being able to ‘connect’ to any other individual in our environment. What I am referring to is not an internal feeling, but rather an externally imposed sense of difference. A perception of Otherness in the eyes of our social environment that is based on unchangeable (and often inborn) aspects of our appearance, and that we ourselves are unable to control or change. That sense of Otherness that anyone who has grown up as part of an ethnic minority will be overly familiar with.

Being seen as Other is an almost paradoxical form of being labeled on the basis of your appearance; it means that you are being categorized as falling-outside-of-all-culturally-established-categories. And as happens with any application of a stereotype, being ‘otherized’ forces you to confront difficult questions about who you are. About how you relate to the label you have been given, how your self-perception matches the way you are perceived by others – and about how you as a designated ‘outsider’ relate to the categories that are part of the socio-cultural establishment.

I have been an immigrant for much of my life, but until I came to Morocco, I never looked (or sounded) different from the majority in my environment. It wasn’t unless I myself chose to verbalize my non-American cultural background, that those around me would ever see or treat me as ‘different’. In Rabat on the other hand, it is not I, but rather my environment that chooses to underscore my difference. My status as an outsider is continuously and inescapably made explicit, regardless (it seems) of what I do or say. This Otherness is new to me, and I must admit that it is one of the aspects of expat life in Morocco that I have found most difficult to grow accustomed to. It makes me feel a little powerless, and I miss the anonymity of blending in with my environment.

I know that I do not look like a tourist. Most likely we are all sensitive to the little markers that tell you where a person is from, and what he or she is doing in their current location. You can tell by the way they walk, and the way they look around at their surroundings. It’s their dress, their choice of bag, and the style of nonverbal communication. All of these things can clue you in about a person’s nationality, or the length of their stay here in Morocco. But as much as it seems clear to people on the street that I am not a holiday traveler, I will nevertheless always be instantly recognized as an outsider, a visitor. Again, it’s in little things that this perception hides.

It’s in the things men choose to say to me as I walk past the table where they sit with their coffee and newspaper. All women receive attention on Moroccan streets, but I doubt a Moroccan woman is told in syrupy slick English that she is “very niiiiiice,” or that he “likes your size.”

It’s the fact that, after walking up and down the same streets for nine months, men still wish me “bienvenue au Maroc” when I am on my way home from work in the afternoon.

It’s the fact that I will never be able to rent a house for the same price as a Moroccan tenant (and that a landlord will always be more eager to rent to me), or get as low a price on a set of handmade cedar side-tables as my Moroccan colleague.

It’s in the fact that taxi drivers in Marrakech will persistently address me in English, even when I speak to them in (broken) Arabic.

And it’s in the fact that my French teacher had trouble remembering a few students’ names until the end of the course, but knew mine from the moment I introduced myself. In a strange and stubborn effort to refuse special treatment, I remember once waiting around along with everyone else at the end of class while the teacher called roll, not wanting to leave until he’d noted me as ‘present’. When he finally did come to my name, he looked at me with a slightly patronizing smile. Why did I wait around, he asked? Wasn’t it obvious that he’d noticed my presence? Didn’t I know that there was no point in me waiting around ‘just like the others’?

Aside from inescapable conspicuousness, being Other also means being judged by different standards. On one hand it means being afforded a greater lenience when it comes to abiding by the norms of social interaction. Foreigners are not expected to understand the rules, perhaps, and they are therefore more easily forgiven for trespassing the boundaries of propriety. But with that lenience also comes a different set of expectations. It is often assumed, for instance, that I have (lots of) money, that my rules of sexual or romantic propriety are radically different from those upheld in Morocco, that I harbor certain Orientalist impressions of Morocco, that I do not know how to cook, that I am Christian.

In the sense that all foreigners receive this particular kind of attention, I do think that the experience of Otherness is an inevitable part of expat life. But I am sure that my preoccupation goes a bit further than ordinary levels of awareness. It may in part be the newness of the experience that makes it so acute for me, but it might also simply be the fact that I’ve been preoccupied with the question of otherness ever since I first left the Netherlands as a 7-year old. Ever since that moment, I’ve been intrigued by questions like what it means to be an ‘insider’, how it is possible to combine two or more identities within a single ‘self’, or why it is that once you’ve uprooted yourself, you will never again be the ‘insider’ you once were. I think it’s because these questions are so central to the practice and theory of anthropology that this discipline appeals to me so much.

And most of the time, I can smile at this sense of Otherness. Given my pre-existing intrigue with the issue, the experience of it is interesting; it is a part of being in Morocco, and of being an anthropologist in general. I even think that this externally applied Otherness played a large role in helping me come to terms with the internal experiences of Otherness I’ve had for most of my life. But there are moments, more than I’d like there to be, when I am tired and give into frustration, when I become a little overwhelmed by the sense of powerlessness this constant perception of foreignness elicits in me. At those moments, my attempts at fitting in – at learning the language, dressing appropriately, abiding by the local rules of conduct – seem so futile, and a real inside-understanding of Morocco seems impossibly unreachable. At those moments, I want to retreat to my apartment, to the comfort of familiarity, and complain about Morocco’s own foreignness to me.

But for every person who reminds you that you are an outsider, there is someone else who embraces you and all your efforts to integrate. Such as the woman on the street who once asked me for directions in Arabic. Or the friendly shopkeeper at the mini marché across from my apartment, who always chats with me in Darija. Or a Fassi friend who refers to me as a Rbatia. And it is these brief little moments that make all those others seem very, very unimportant…

Participant-Observation Reconsidered

I want to pick up on the thought I ended my last blog post with: where does the research end, and where does my life begin?

This question has come up in my blog posts before. I struggled with it when I returned to Morocco this past January, and found that I was now personally part of the daily life I tended to write about. It blurred the lines between observation and participation,* and I found that I had to re-think the tone and purpose of this blog. Months later I am much more comfortably settled here, but the issue remains; the question still sits there in the back of my mind, pressing ever so subtly against my brain’s centers for speech and reflection.

A friend of mine recently questioned the possibility of balancing work and private life in one of her blog posts. Sharing both her own experiences and those of some she knows, she wrote about the importance (and difficulty) of setting limits and making sure that work does not swallow up your private life. She emphasized how crucial it is that you guard the time you have for relaxation, for rejuvenation, and all other things that sustain your mind and body – but how easy it is to forget about these necessities when a deadline approaches. Her story made me think about my own situation in a new way, and I wondered if my ‘issue’ might simply be solved by being a better guard at the border between ‘work’ and ‘private life’.

The thing is, I’ve never thought of my research as ‘work’. In San Diego, ‘work’ was my teaching job. The development of my research proposal and everything that involved, that was me. Sure, it was difficult at times, there were externally imposed deadlines to keep, and I had moments of utter frustration – but that project was my creation, constructed through a smelting together of the questions, ideas, and geographical regions that I have had a passion for as long as I can remember. Developing that research project felt as much like work as playing the piano, or writing in my journals. And it still feels that way – perhaps even more so, now that I am ‘in the field’, as anthropologists are wont to say. I ‘work’ at the NIMAR, but my research? That’s me.

In reality, of course, that research is my work – it’s the foundation for my career, I’m being paid to do it, and it’s what I (hopefully) will be making my money from for a long time to come. And I am utterly fine with the fact that in that sense, the border between my ‘work’ and my ‘private life’ is a large and undefined gray zone. This is the nature of academia, where people personally identify with the research they do to such an extent that it becomes an inseparable part of them (sometimes to an unhealthy extent, perhaps), and it suits me. I’m a workaholic by nature. This may or may not always be good for my health, but at least I have a ‘job’ where I set the hours as well as the pace – and where I can thus take a break for an hour at any time I choose, to eat a healthy meal, go running, relax with a book or movie… or buy furniture for a new Moroccan apartment.

So my issue isn’t this. It is not the porosity of the border between work and personal life that bothers me. I don’t mind the fact that I sit behind my desk at home working on ideas for my project until late at night, or that an hour’s relaxation at a café in the city suddenly becomes fodder for observation when I engage in an interesting conversation with a Moroccan friend.**

What I do mind – and this is what the issue comes down to – is that the gray zone of work/personal life creates a constant sense of role confusion. The question that I began this post with (where does the research end and my life begin?) ultimately comes down to this more fundamental question: am I, and is my personality, an involved part of my daily life and the relationships I build, or not?

We’ve accepted the fact that one cannot ever be fully ‘objective’, and that all anthropologists observe and interpret from their own personally and culturally constructed vantage point. We even refer to our primary method of data collection as ‘participant observation’, the idea being that you cannot truly come to ‘know’ how something works unless you yourself participate in the act. But despite all this acceptance of subjectivity, the goal remains to preserve at least a kind of neutrality in your engagement with the field. This neutrality is necessary, I think, to ensure that informants will feel free to share their personal opinions with you, a stranger, without concern for judgment – but it still sets the participating and subjective anthropologist apart from members of the community in which he or she is conducting research.

In other words, an anthropologist behaves differently than an ordinary ‘participant’. And being in Morocco full-time, where any situation can turn into an opportunity for data collection, I am confused sometimes as to whether I should act as the anthropologist, or as a ‘person’. Let me illustrate.

Earlier this week I had a brief exchange with another student during our French class. Having just heard me mention that I did research on psychiatry, the young man asked me what I thought were the main differences between psychiatry in Morocco, and that in France or the United States. I responded by telling him that that was exactly what I intended to find out. He took this as cue to share with me his own opinion on the matter. The difference was, he explained to me, that there is no market for psychiatry in Morocco, because individual sufferers are able to solve their problems within and by virtue of their familial support network. Westerners on the other hand, who live individual lives cut off from any form of social support, will need a professional to help them solve their problems.

I reacted as an anthropologist. I told him that was an ‘interesting viewpoint’ and would have asked him how exactly that “soulagement” (relief) within the family circle worked, had monsieur Aziz not changed the subject and reminded us that we were in a class with twenty other students.

But the exchange left me frustrated. As monsieur Aziz talked, I reflected: had I not felt the need to react in an anthropologically correct manner, had I decided to engage as a regular student in the class (which I am, after all), I would have responded so differently. I would have reminded him to bear in mind that the ‘western world’ is not so radically different from Morocco on this count: we are not as extremely individualistic as some like to think, and for that matter, I don’t think the average Moroccan network of family support is as soft and springy as it is sometimes made to seem. Plus, what about the other side of collectivism: that sometimes suffocating form of social control, the fact that people are judged on the basis of their behavior, the fact that people are afraid that one black sheep will taint the entire family’s reputation? Couldn’t those issues lead to a whole new range of psychological troubles from which we lone cowboys of the West are blissfully spared?

When I act as an anthropologist, I leave myself and my opinions out of the interaction. My goal is to learn what Moroccans think, and any clearly voiced disagreement on my part would certainly not encourage them to freely share their thoughts with me. However, personal relationships are impossible to build on this kind of mental distance – you can’t forge a personal relationship (not a satisfying one, at least), if your personality is completely left out of the equation.

At my primary research site, it is clear what kind of situation I am in, and which role I am to play. But what confuses and sometimes frustrates me are these other contexts of social interaction. As I’ve said, any situation is potentially an opportunity for data collection. But does that mean that I am always supposed to be the (subjectively) neutral anthropologist? If I take a French class in Morocco, am I supposed to behave like an ethnographer and swallow my personal disagreements because I happen to be in Morocco? Or do I let myself be just-another-student – and if so, what do I do when a topic of interest to my project comes up?

For that matter, who am I supposed to be when I interact with the Moroccans I meet at the NIMAR? Like that female researcher working on gender issues. Do I try to be her friend, and hope to finally establish my first real friendship with a Moroccan woman, or is she someone who could help me in my research?

Then again, establishing a ‘real’ friendship with a Moroccan woman – the kind of friendship based on personal connections and openness – may not be as easy as I’d like it to be anyway. I’ve written before about the issues many of us foreign women have in connecting to our Moroccan counterparts. We seek personal connections, only to find out that there often isn’t a lot of room for our personalities in these relationships. Pleasant exchanges and meetings for tea go a long way in keeping loneliness at bay, but the true sense of mutual understanding that I sometimes crave is hard to find.

Seeing as there is no point trying to change this situation, perhaps the best thing to do is see this as an answer to my issue of confusion. To consider the guarding of certain opinions as my standard modus operandi, and thus free myself from worry about overstepping boundaries, falling out of character, and misjudging situations.

If there are any anthropologists among the few who read this blog, I’d love to know whether you’ve felt this same issue – and if so, how you dealt with it.


* I’ll get into the notion of ‘participant-observation’ a little later on, so hold that thought.
** My project concerns the institution of mental healthcare, but that does not mean that my ‘work’ ends at the hospital doors. Since I am interested in how these practices of mental healthcare relate to and are affected by larger socio-economic dynamics that dominate Moroccan society, any given setting or conversation provides me with data, in a sense.

Postscript: Cheating on your Samsar

Yesterday afternoon, I ran into samsar number one at a neighborhood grocery store. After a friendly exchange of ça va’s he asked me, had I found a place yet? I nodded.

“I found a great place,” I told him, “I’m very satisfied, and thanks for all your help showing me all those other places.”

He smiled politely. “That’s great,” he responded. “Where is it?”

As it happens, the apartment I found is located in a building that this samsar had also mentioned to me once. He knew of an apartment on the first floor; what I actually saw with another samsar and took, was a unit on the second floor. But as soon as I explained to samsar number one where the apartment was, I became a bit uncomfortable with the suspicion that he might conclude I had rented the same apartment he had first mentioned to me. I was right.

He was hurt. It had been him who had first alerted me to that unit, he lamented. I responded by reminding him that he’d mentioned a first floor place and I was now renting on the second floor, but this made him angrier. First floor, second floor, it was the same place! How was he supposed to remember exactly on which floor the apartment was?

I tried to reason with him by reminding him of other facts – that he’d offered to show me that place, that I’d nodded in agreement, but that he had never taken me back there to see it.

He did not want to hear it. He was hurt, and he wanted a commission. He insisted I have Farid call him to discuss money.

Before I even had a chance to share this story with Farid, the latter’s phone rang. I could hear the samsar’s protests about my two-timing on the other side of the line, as Farid listened with a smirk on his face.

Farid isn’t worried. So what if he’s mad? He says. He doesn’t deserve a commission, and he won’t get one.

He’s right. But I can’t help being a little worried. I never like the idea of people being mad at me, and I definitely don’t like the idea of a Moroccan samsar being mad at me. I don’t want an enemy in the neighborhood. I also don’t want to give him money, though. I hope I don’t run into him any time soon. If I do, I kind of hope that calm reasoning will make him understand.

But that’s probably wishful thinking…

Fashion Forward

I don’t have enough appropriate summer clothing.

I have about five outfits that I consider fitting for the Rbati* summer streets. By week’s end, I’ve rotated through them, and my sense of fashion-consciousness dreads having to bore my colleagues with the same ensembles during the next week. Once my financial situation stabilizes a bit, I definitely plan to devote some time and funds to the pleasant task of shopping.

Rbati girls and women do not walk around in the long black abayas you may associate with women in Saudi Arabia. You may be familiar with the Moroccan jellaba – the hooded dress/coat that is worn by men and women alike and comes in all colors of the universe – but even this garment is worn mostly by generations over forty years of age. Moreover, I’d estimate that no more than thirty-five percent of young women wear a headscarf, or veil. Fashion in Rabat, in other words, comes across to me as a colorful and very eclectic mix of styles and tastes, where nearly anything goes.

Of course there is the occasional individual with a somewhat challenged sense of style, but overall I get the impression that Rbati girls and women take pride in their appearance. Their outfits are always perfectly put together. They are color coordinated to the smallest details (the colors and patterns may be a bit too bright for my taste, but I think this is a cultural difference), their shoes always match their purse, and they never forget to accessorize. A headscarf always matches the color of the clothing, and some women even skillfully combine multiple scarves to create an intricate pattern effect of colors on their head. And by the way, a headscarf by no means implies that you can’t wear fabulous earrings (or even flowers pinned by your ear), and the effects of eye-shadow and kohl always beautifully accentuate the eyes.

This fashion sense comes in all varieties of modesty. There are girls and women, of course, who choose to cover themselves. Underneath their brightly colored spaghetti-strapped dress they’ll wear a turtleneck sweater, and underneath a knee-length skirt they’ll sport a pair of leggings. Should they choose to wear (tight) jeans, they’ll combine it with a longer cardigan or top that covers their behind. Some women go a step further and noticeably take care to hide the shape of their figure, choosing loose-fitting ensembles such as wide skirts and a longer variety of the headscarf.** But you will also come across the occasional girl who wears less than what I grew accustomed to among the eighteen year old Californian college students I taught last year. I see girls who’ve chosen to wear leggings as pants and pair it with a low-cut halter top, the straps of a brightly colored bra conspicuously showing on her back.

I often find myself at Marwa, a home-grown chain of stores not unlike H&M, fingering ambiguous clothing items. Among the harem pants, leggings, summer dresses and checkered blouses hang certain patterened and multicolored items (further adorned with bows, lace, pleats, and so on – nothing is ‘too much’, it seems) whose purpose I can never determine. They’ll be too long for a top, too short for a skirt, and I’ll wonder, how on earth one is supposed to wear such a thing? And these slightly see-through pants, are these meant to be worn on their own, or underneath something else? Unsure of what to do with such items, I usually abstain from making any purchases. The girls I see on the street, however, have clearly chosen to interpret this ambiguity as they see fit. I’ve seen the same item worn as a top by one girl, as a dress by another. I guess these multifunctional garments are ideal in a society where the meaning of ‘modesty’ can vary so greatly from person to person.

So what do I mean when I say that I don’t have enough ‘appropriate’ summer clothing? What implicit rules am I referring to, if this truly is a city where anything goes?

The truth is, of course, that it’s not. One might see all varieties of skin coverage, but this does not necessarily mean that everything is equally accepted. Modernization, and the tendency to associate this development with ‘westernization’, have certainly led to a greater acceptance of more revealing style, and lends girls more freedom to dress themselves like the women they see on satellite television or in French magazines (in fact, this style now shows up in Moroccan magazines, as well). But the ambiguous value that always sticks to the whole notion of ‘modernization’ also colors evaluation of these new trends in fashion. A short skirt means ‘modern’, but for many it also still means ‘loose’, ‘immodest’ – and thus suggests ‘immoral’. In a society where people are often judged by behavior rather than intentions, this can be a dangerous and harmful association.

The reason these styles are worn and seen more and more commonly in Morocco’s larger cities has to do, for one, with the fact that this ambiguity does create space for it (‘ambiguous’ is a step up from ‘not done’, of course). But I also think it has something to do with the fact that judgment seems to be more important for some than it is for others. I don’t mean that some girls simply don’t care about their reputation. What I mean is that I’m getting the impression that some girls have certain buffers to protect them against the harmful effect of social judgment. Perhaps it’s money, perhaps it’s a good education and a respectable job (though these are always bought with money, of course) – but whichever it is, I am starting to get the sense that a certain social gravity, or position, elevates one’s reputation above the harmful effect of someone’s gossip. Though it may, of course, depend on who’s gossiping. I’m reminded of a comment Ilyas made to me, that night that we went to see Amours Voilées. In this film the protagonist gets pregnant out of wedlock, and the movie remains strikingly non-judgmental about the whole affair. Ilyas suggested that this had something to do with the fact that the protagonist was a doctor. This elevated status bought her a certain freedom of action, he explained. He did not elaborate and I retreated into silence as I tried to make sense of this seeming moral relativism.

This greater freedom to experiment with the traditional rules of propriety seems a lot like the same kind of situation. Come to think of it, we see that same kind of relativism every day in the US and the Netherlands. And so I’m left to wonder, what is the logic behind it? Are moral rules ultimately pragmatic, designed only to keep us on the straight and narrow until we ‘make it’ – and do they thus fall away once we do? Are girls more free to dress revealingly because they’ve already ‘made it’ by virtue of their money, education, or profession? Or does this say something about the corrupting effect of such status symbols, the immorality of them? About the corrupting effect of social power, perhaps?

My reputation as a western woman is weighed on an entirely different scale, of course, with an ambiguity all its own. Always already considered as outsiders, western women are not judged by the same standards of propriety as those that apply to Moroccan women. So why not wear whatever I want? I don’t have to worry about being considered ‘loose’ and unfit for marriage. But at the same time, I always already am considered ‘loose’. Created for us by the worst examples of televised western promiscuity, our reputation in some sense always already is that of someone who would never live up to Moroccan standards of propriety. And as much as we’re explicitly not being judged by Moroccan standards, everyone is aware of the fact that we’d never pass if we were.

I feel that wearing spaghetti strap tops ultimately only confirm a reputation that we don’t deserve. I know that my personal choice to cover up just a slight bit more than usual won’t make a dent in the larger reality, but at least I feel like I’m doing my part in promoting some kind of deeper cross-cultural understanding. Also – despite the fact that some Moroccan girls are getting away with ‘new’ styles of clothing – it’s a matter of respect for local mores, to me.

And secretly? I see it as a way to set myself apart from the average tourist. It’s my way of trying to blend in just a little bit more. Of trying to look as though I belong here, walk around here every day, and have accustomed to the surroundings.


* The –i suffix makes a noun into an adjective; ‘Rbati’ thus means something like ‘of Rabat’. I don’t write ‘Rabati’ because the capital city’s name is actually pronounced something like ‘Rrrbat’.
**Yes, you will also see the occasional woman dressed head to toe in black and who leaves only her eyes for the public to see. But this happens very, very rarely.

Scene on a Train - A Curious Instance of East Meets West

After a rainy weekend in Marrakech, my mother, Fatima, and I find ourselves on the three o’clock train back to Rabat. We’ve had two wet and cold, but enjoyable days of strolling around the Marrakech medina. My mother has enjoyed this famous city, and I am happy that she will be leaving Morocco on a positive note.

When the train begins to move at a few minutes past three, our compartment is filled up to capacity. My mother sits by the window, facing the direction of travel, a book on her lap. I sit next to her with a sheet of wrapping paper, intending to write. Fatima sits by the window on the other side. Next to her, a young woman in a grey army officer’s uniform quietly stares out in front of her. She has thick black hair tied back in a ponytail, and wears large black sunglasses. She does this because her eye is “ill,” she will later tell us. Her face is covered with a visible layer of powder, which makes her look as though she is made of plaster. She reminds me of Michael Jackson in his later years.

Next to this young officer sits a modest man dressed in shades of brown. With deep-set dark eyes and a smile that reveals un-straightened teeth, he looks shy but sympathetic. Across from him – next to me – a pair of young men quietly converse with one another about the issue of TelQuel that they have brought with them. They wear the typical costume of Moroccan men in their thirties: dark jeans, a short jacket, a patterned sweater underneath. Apart from a five o’clock shadow on both men’s cheeks, they look cleaned up.

There are seven of us, which leaves one seat in our compartment unoccupied. But – there is a leak in the ceiling above this seat. Someone has taped a piece of tissue paper over the little hole, but (obviously) this has now been soaked through, and drops of rainwater slip through its pores. With rhythmic frequency they splash down on the orange leather of the seat below. We point this out to the last minute travelers who have a hard time finding a place to sit, and they quickly move on.

However, soon after the train pulls out of the station, a European tourist opens the compartment and moves toward the seat. In four different languages, we all immediately alert him to the falling raindrops. He seems a little dazed, and it takes a while before our warnings register with him. He looks toward the ceiling, shrugs, and announces, in loud English, that he doesn’t care. After the day he’s had, he says, he just wants to sit down. He crashes down next to the modest man in brown, spreads his legs and puts his backpack on the floor between them. I watch as raindrops splatter down on the inseam of his left upper leg.

This man is not the kind of person to turn quiet when exhausted. I suspect as much after his first reaction to our warnings, and indeed, he begins to elaborate on his difficult day soon after sitting down. He continues to speak English, and directs his words to no one in particular. The modest man in brown is polite enough (and conversant enough in English) to respond. He smiles, softly pronounces a sentence here and there as the European man continues what is, for all intents and purposes, a monologue. Before the first twenty minutes of our trip have passed, we have learned exactly what made his day so difficult: he has traveled to Morocco with a Moroccan lady friend with whom he was supposed to take the 1 o’clock train to Casablanca. Nervous about being late for the train, she left him with all their luggage (from the looks of it, no more than two bags) and ran to catch the train – which he then missed. We discover that he is Norwegian, that he has traveled all over the place, and that he has lived in the United States of America for a year. We also learn that he is full of stereotypes (a choice snippet from his monologue: “Americans eat French fries for lunch every day. Every day! I’m not surprised they’re all so fat.”), ignorant of Morocco, and arrogantly unable to look beyond his own limited perspective. After carelessly asking the modest man in brown if it’s true that the Moroccan government has “some kind of problem” with the Western Sahara, he compliments his interlocutor and the female officer – who has joined the conversation – by telling them their English “isn’t bad.” He meets their occasional questions about his own origins with disdain. He sees the army officer’s name on her identity card and completely tortures it in his pronunciation. Out of politeness, she then asks for his name. “Oh, I can tell you,” he responds, “but you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it anyway. I go by John in the US, but you probably can’t pronounce that, either.” She makes a courageous attempt and hits the mark much more closely than he did in his attempts at pronouncing her fairly simple name, but gets a patronizing smile in return. “Yeah, see? Forget it,” he tells her.

The conversation continues. As the Norwegian talks about sex with his Moroccan girlfriend, religion, and the Western Sahara without any awareness of the sensitivity of these topics, Fatima and I notice that the two men sitting next to me are as intrigued by this blunt foreigner as we are. They are observing the conversation going on across from them, giggling and quietly commenting to one another. They notice us observing the interaction as well, and give us a knowing smile.

Then the mood begins to change. I’ve been smelling a somewhat foul odor coming from the Norwegian’s general direction, and it seems to dawn on all of us at the same time that his slightly dazed appearance cannot simply be chalked up to fatigue: this man is drunk, we realize – and it’s getting worse. That clear liquid he drinks from a Fanta bottle is no water.

The modest man in brown has stood up to get some air, and the Norwegian takes advantage of this situation by moving closer to the army officer. As he gets more flirty and inappropriate, she gets increasingly uncomfortable – regretting her initial friendliness, most likely. From this moment on the rest of the compartment gets involved in the interaction. My neighbor – one of the two friends with the TelQuel – leans over to the Norwegian and tries to save the army officer by telling him that “cette femme, c’est ma femme” (“this woman, she’s my wife”). The Norwegian looks at him with confusion. “I don’t speak French,” he announces. My neighbor tries again, adding exaggerated gestures and signs to his sentence. The Norwegian shakes his head. “Clearly,” he states, “we have a problem with communication. If only you spoke English, I would understand you.”

This we all understand – and we all instantly feel compelled to respond. “English??” asks my neighbor’s friend. “Arabic!” He then exclaims, patting himself on the chest. The rest of us likewise cry out, in four languages, that when in Morocco, one should adapt and speak the language of the land – but the Norwegian is too drunk at this point even to comprehend simple English.

My neighbor’s friend, meanwhile, has taken the Norwegian’s behavior as cue to set forth his own passionate political agenda. He reveals himself to be at once critical of all status quo, yet conservative in his nostalgia and anti-westernism. He criticizes the inequality and corruption that colors Moroccan society and politics,* yet valorizes Hassan II** as the best head of state ever to have lived. He is critical of the west, and contrasts this drunk, inappropriate Norwegian to the religious-looking old man in jellaba who has entered our compartment and soon after fallen asleep.

I sit next to my mother, growing more and more uncomfortable. I am angry at the Norwegian. I have left Marrakech slightly frustrated at having been treated like a tourist for two days. Of course I was a tourist for those two days, but I notice that I have a difficult time being treated as a foreigner here, despite my fervent attempts to blend in. It gets to me when I walk around trying to speak Arabic, trying to do as Moroccans do, and then to be addressed in English by a Marrakchi shopkeeper, restaurant holder or taxi driver who sees me as the average tourist and accordingly tries to take advantage of me. And so I am sitting here observing this rude Norwegian, more aware than usual of my own outsider status – my own status as an obvious westerner. I am angry at him for being so inappropriate, for confirming the negative stereotypes about Westerners – because I know that his behavior reflects on all of us. I cringe at the thought that the Hassan II aficionado might associate me and my mother with this drunken buffoon. I feel a vicarious sense of shame for his behavior, and desperately try to think of a way to ameliorate his disastrous impact on the compartment’s impression of westerners.

But I can’t bring myself to condemn the Norwegian to his face. I am scared of confrontation, even toward someone as barely conscious as he is. A few times I try to explain in English what others in the compartment try to tell him, but I leave it at that – even that makes me nervous. I do attempt to display to the others that I speak a little Arabic. I make efforts to demonstrate that I understand some of what is being said, and try to answer questions about us – directed at Fatima – myself.

It seems to work: they notice me. They praise my few words of Arabic and comment on the fact that I am writing. Writing is great, the Hassan II aficionado proclaims. While speech evaporates and dies, writing is fixed and lives on. He asks me what I do, and I explain that I am a researcher. This he also approves of, and he takes it upon himself to help me in my studies by explaining to me what anthropology is all about. He tells me to read Bourdieu, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss. I try to engage, to respond – but he, in striking similarity to the Norwegian he so disdains, seems more interested in monologue.

Despite this seeming approval, I am completely unable to balance out the Norwegian’s damage. His behavior has spurred conversation throughout the compartment, and he now feels left out of the Arabic and French being spoken around him. Increasingly drunk, he slurs out his objections and tries to get the army officer’s attention – but she has now decided to ignore him. He grows increasingly confused, and gets increasingly worried about getting off at the right station. He keeps telling us that he needs to go to “Casa-centrum,” but seems unable to understand any of us when we explain how many stops he has left. He constantly repeats, “If you only spoke English. We have a problem of communication.”

“Un problème,” my neighbor sighs, to no one in particular. “Un problème, comme d’habitude” – “a problem, as always.”

It is as though this sentence says it all. We are now all engaged in conversation. The Norwegian’s obnoxious behavior has in a way brought us all together in communication. But in the end, I get the sense, we will always have this problem of understanding. We are interacting, yes, but in a sense we are all talking past one another. The Hassan II aficionado does this as much as the Norwegian does. We all fall into dialogues that devolve into simultaneous monologues. As the Norwegian laments the fact that no one else speaks English, the Hassan II aficionado lectures to us all about the laudable works of his favorite monarch. We all have our ideas, and seem more interested in sharing them with the world than we are in hearing other viewpoints.

I try to bridge this gap. Every day that I am here I try to prove that it is, in fact, possible to communicate between west and east. That it is, in fact, possible for a Westerner to be truly interested in adapting to local culture. I try to speak the language, I adopt the idioms and modes of speech. I try to engage with people in the way that Moroccans do, I try to respect the rules, and to show an interest in Morocco’s music, food, art, history. What I ask in return, is an acceptance of my efforts. To be heard and seen, rather than just lectured to. To not be treated like an outsider, to not be made to feel as though none of my efforts can make a dent in the stereotypes that people harbor about my part of the world. Most of the time, I receive the kind of treatment I wish for. It is one of the reasons why I love Rabat: when I assert myself as a local, I am treated as a local.

But sometimes, I am unable to bridge this gap. Sometimes, I run into people who cannot see past the blonde exterior, the broken Arabic, and the unfamiliarity with local custom. I run into people like the Marrakchi taxi driver who refused to turn on his meter and insisted, in a mix of French and English, that we pay twenty dirhams for a five minute ride to the station. I run into people like this Hassan II aficionado who, despite all his approval of what I do, still chooses to view ‘the West’ in a particular way. And I run into individuals like this Norwegian tourist, who make me understand why it is that people feel that way about the Western world at all. And I wonder if we’ll ever get anywhere.


* Is he allowed to express such criticism in the presence of an army officer, I wonder? And if he were, is it appropriate to express such criticism in the presence of someone professionally linked to (and, more importantly, representing) the authorities? Would this kind of talk affect her in any way, make her uncomfortable? Is she herself allowed to engage in such conversations?
** Hassan II is Morocco’s former king. Though some nostalgically praise his skills at ruling the country, he is generally known as a dictator who ruled with an iron fist and implemented many of the institutional inequalities Morocco is still plagued by.

Guiding/Guided

Apart from my main responsibility to the conference on migration, one of my new jobs at the Nimar is to help coordinate two cultural programs organized for our sizeable group of students. One of these is a mandatory lecture series on themes relevant to Moroccan culture and issues present in Moroccan society – about which I’ll write more in a later post. The other is a more recreationally-oriented series of field trips and interactive forms of entertainment, one every other week, meant to facilitate students’ exploration of their surroundings in a more hands-on way.

It was in connection with this latter activity that today, I found myself in charge of a tour through the old medina of Rabat. Seeing as we’d hired a guide to take care of the tour’s content and ended up with such a small group of students that we looked more like a group of friends than a group of tourists, my responsibility did not involve much more than carrying with me the envelope containing payment for the guide.

The guide was a friendly jellaba’d man in his sixties who had a clear love of languages. We had hired him because he spoke German (which is close enough to Dutch that most of our students would be able to understand him well enough, we reasoned), but he made clear early on in his conversations with us that he spoke a whole collection of tongues: aside from German he mastered French, Italian, Spanish, English – and showed himself amazingly adept at picking up our Dutch. Once he learned that our students were studying Arabic, he took it upon himself to turn his tour into a veritable cornucopia of linguistic variation. It became a pleasant exchange of languages and words; through his combined Franco-German explanations, he threw in a few Arabic terms here and there, playing around with the students’ budding knowledge of that language. Motivated by this man’s linguistic energy, some of us began to eagerly feed him new words in Dutch, to add to his collection. With such a small group – five students, and the two Nimar interns, me included – his tour became more of a conversation than a lecture, and as we walked down Rue Souika, turned left onto the Rue des Consuls and headed toward the lookout point at the far end of the Kasbah des Oudaias, the guide eagerly answered our multitude of questions with additional stories and anecdotes.*

I have to say that I didn’t participate as much in this conversation as I might have liked to, because I had taken it upon myself to trail behind a little bit. I already knew the medina, I figured, and so I thought to keep some distance from the guide – not only to leave the students more space to stay within listening range, but also to pick up on any stragglers that might lose sight of him and get lost. This last worry seemed a bit pointless even at the time – with only 5 students and a relatively straightforward medina, I didn’t have that much to be concerned about. Mais bon, I remembered how intimidated I used to feel by medinas, and my own worries about losing the group and getting lost, four years ago on a tour of Fes.

But I also think that I perhaps took this task upon myself more for my own benefit than anyone else’s. It was a way for my to extend my sense of responsibility for the expedition – and this is a feeling I reveled in a little. Because it underscored how different this new Morocco experience is from previous ones; it illustrated my change in ‘status’. I was no longer the wide-eyed student: I was now part of the organization, the guiding framework attempting to facilitate these other wide-eyed students’ introduction into this different world.

It feels so good to be on the other side. It feels as though I have finally gotten somewhere, after this investment of time and effort, and it adds to the feeling of independence I have finally found in Morocco - the feeling that I can make it on my own. But of course, I can’t avoid also feeling like an impostor sometimes. And in a sense perhaps that’s what my behavior on the tour was about as well: I needed to underscore that transition I’ve made in order to convince myself that I really do belong on the other side – that I really have blossomed from stranger into person-in-the-know. Because as far as I know I’ve come, I’m always one to focus on everything I haven't yet mastered. The ease I don’t yet have with either French or Arabic, the things that still surprise me every day.

But – I’m trying to channel that into motivating energy, using it to propel me ever-forward…

On a side-note: something I found myself wondering about is how a man like this comes to be a tour guide. He was clearly a well-respected guide himself; this he emphasized himself with numerous stories in which his expertise in both cityscape and language was called upon to oblige various groups of high-ranking VIP visitors to Rabat. Nevertheless, as far as I know the job of tour guide does not lend one any elevated sense of respect. It is not a job for the sons of the middle class, and is often described as the kind of profession one rolls into when one has few other prospects (see, for instance, Laila Lalami's 'Hope and Other Pursuits'). This man, though, clearly had a talent for languages and learning – a linguistic competence that went far beyond the conventional spiel that most guides must, for the sake of making money, learn to be able to rattle off for groups of tourists. This man’s speech was not performance, it was not learned – his interaction with us reflected a comprehension, and a true engagement with language. How does someone with such a clear talent end up in this line of work? What was his background, what does his life look like, now? To what economic class does this man belong, and how does that compare to the class in which he grew up? Can he lead a comfortable life? Do his children have prospects?

* Apparently the guide was not universally liked; we received less-than-positive reviews from at least one student. I guess everyone looks for different qualities in their guides...

Windy Weekend

It is breezy and rainy this weekend. A strong wind howls past my new window, causing my new shutters to clatter nervously. It plays with my hair and makes umbrella’s difficult to wield, as I venture out a few times a day on expedition to explore my new neighborhood and acquire some basic necessities for survival.

In reference to these pursuits, I have to declare this weekend to have been a big success. I found myself a stovetop coffeemaker, and located the supermarket I vaguely remembered being around here. This store sells nearly all the staples of my diet: Nutella, bread, spaghetti, olive oil, spices, garlic, onions, fruits & vegetables. The only necessity I have not yet found here: parmesan cheese. But there’s a little import-looking shop at the marché centrale by the medina that looks like it might have just the thing, so I’m not worried.

I still do not have a working fridge, so I’m holding off on the meat and dairy for now. I can buy my fruits and vegetables on a daily basis for now and love black espresso as much as lattes, but I do kind of wonder when someone will come by to start it up…

The other thing I have found: a liquor store. As I was checking out at this neighborhood supermarket, I noticed a sign on the far wall with an arrow pointing down a flight of stairs, marked with “cave d’alcool.” Very curious to witness the selling and purchasing of alcohol in Morocco, I decided to go explore, and descended.

What emerged as I stepped down the stairs was an atmosphere of utter seediness and apparent mayhem. A policemen standing by the stairs, overseeing the goings on in this “cave d’alcool” made me wonder if something alarming was perhaps going on here. The empty bottles and plastic bags strewn across the floor added to my growing suspicion that some kind of looting was taking place, as did the throngs of men, nervously and energetically moving up and down the aisles, hoarding baskets full of bottles. But no, I decided, judging by the calm expression on the cashier’s face and the ‘bienvenue’ someone wished me as I walked past, nothing out of the ordinary was taking place here. And so I walked in. I felt particularly self-aware in this bizarre atmosphere, highly aware that I was the only woman there (save for the cashier), and taking great notice of the space my body was occupying amidst these men hurrying about with their arms full of bottles. I was uncomfortable with my aimlessness, not being able to discern any rhyme or reason to the ordering of products. A few shelves of wine here, next to the whisky, and a few aisles down, more wine, this time next to the rum. Varieties of beer all over the place, no wine-selection by country or region.

But despite this sense of heightened self-awareness, I felt somehow immune, more comfortable and anonymous than I usually do in unknown Moroccan situations. My obvious otherness didn’t seem to bother me at all this time, I think because I experienced it suddenly as a kind of shield. In a weird way, my European appearance actually makes that I do not look out of place here. Technically, I have more right to be here, by Moroccan law, than these men nervously scurrying about. Moroccan law forbids the selling and buying of alcohol to or by any Muslim. And as wrong as this is, usually this identity is judged on the basis of appearance (incidentally, Moroccan ID cards do not indicate one’s religion, as is done elsewhere). I am fairly sure that I was the only one in the place who did not ‘look’ Muslim.

It made me wonder what the role was of that cop standing by the wall. Clearly he was not doing anything, verifying any religious identifications (in whatever way one might choose to do this) or stopping anyone from purchasing alcohol. Why, then, was he there? What was the purpose of him standing there, and how does that work, legally? It was a bizarre sight, all these very Moroccan-looking men, not only openly buying alcohol, but doing so under the eye of a policeman. Did the cop perhaps stand there to enforce a sort of implicit honor-code? Did his presence intend to play on the internal mores of the Muslim and remind him wordlessly of the sin he would be committing, should be enter?

Whatever it may be, I decided I had seen enough, and tried to leave unseen. But no luck: just as I was approaching the exit, an employee approached, a basket in his outstretched hand. “No thanks,” I said, I don’t need one. He looked at me a little strangely. “Nothing?” He asked. I smiled and shook my head, “Not today.” He shrugged, smiled, and walked away. Judging by the way others were filling up their baskets, I have a feeling that it doesn’t happen often that someone should descend into this cave of sin and liquor, and not come out with at least a few bottles of the forbidden substance.

Going, going, back, back...

For six weeks, I struggled to think of anything I might write a blog post about. Geographically removed from my purported subject of analysis, my inspiration was lost. Nothing I thought about seemed relevant, and nothing that was relevant, seemed interesting enough.

But today, as soon as I set foot in the airplane that was to take me on the first leap over water toward Morocco – my flight from Chicago to Madrid – the words instantly came flooding back. I spent most of my waking hours on the flight writing notes to myself in the blank margins of the pages in Iberia’s in-flight magazine. Notes on how different this journey felt from the one I undertook in September. Notes that looked ahead and made plans, and notes that reflected on the past and tried to learn from it. Notes that fantasized, and notes that pulled me back into reality.

It is a new world, this time around, both inside and out. Instead of alone, I feel strong and confident. Instead of afraid and unsure, I am full of excitement. I remember the dread I felt in September – the sheer inability to even imagine having the energy to get off the plane in Casablanca, get myself admitted into the country, pick up my bags, and haul myself onto a train. I also remember how I felt three months later, in December – I remember that I wasn’t ready to leave, and that I had started to love being in Morocco. And it is that flow of energy that I am still riding on today. I dread hauling that same huge black bag onto two trains and up several flights of stairs, but other than that I am bouncing with energy, excited to speak Arabic to the customs officials, and make them smile once again when I tell them I’m studying Moroccan Arabic. I’m excited to arrive at the Nimar, at the apartment where I will be living for the next month, to start work, to see my friends again, to walk around Rabat, to travel around the country, to speak French and Arabic.

Looking back at Chicago as it got smaller and smaller underneath us, tranquilized by a muting white and hazy blanket of snow, I did feel acutely how much I was going to miss being ‘home’. I did feel a bit of apprehension. I already miss the comforts of home, the ability to take certain things for granted, the not-having-to-wonder-how-things-work. I already feel the nervousness of an approaching unknown – because many new issues will arise this time around, with my living circumstances being so different, and my rise upwards on the ladder of independence. And (as always) I am nervous about my French and Arabic, because despite my best intentions I’ve been unable to prevent my comfort level with both from lapsing significantly. But with this energy and motivation I feel, all that ‘unknown’ seems much less threatening already.

I can’t help but think that apart from my increased familiarity with Moroccan life and the headway that I made this past fall, this new positive outlook has been engendered also by the new sense of hope in which Obama has swept up (most of) the United States. I’ve definitely been pulled along with it all and I have high hopes that, even if nothing major changes any time soon, at least we all have once again found the energy to work on improvement of our world. After a little bit of disillusionment on this issue last November [link], I’ve convinced myself once again that real cross-cultural communication perhaps is possible, after all – and that I want to contribute at least to seeing if that’s true.

In that respect, I think these next four months will strike a slightly different tone from the preceding three. I hope to resume my efforts to establish a kind of inside-understanding of Morocco, to come to know its own internal logic. But rather than pursuing research and total immersion, I will be working within a European frame of reference. Rather than trying to blend in (as impossible as that may be in Morocco, sometimes), I will be explicitly representing an outsider’s point of view. Rather than looking in on the lives of others, I will be attempting to build up my own version of life in Morocco.

I wonder how I will experience that shift of perspective – if it will even change anything about my experience, at all. To anyone else here in Morocco, native and foreign, I’m fairly sure there is no real difference between the status of an anthropologist, and that of someone working for a European cultural organization. Either way, there is an a priori assumption of difference, no matter how fervently anthropologists may wish to transcend it. As much as I tried to blend in, I cannot pretend for a minute as though that assumption was ever absent during those three months I spent with Khadija, Lahcen, and their children.

But I wonder what it will do to my own perspective. Like any other anthropologist I did try, at least in part, to transcend that sense of difference. Disillusioned with the realistic possibility of ever succeeding, I chose not to give up and underscore my otherness, but instead to be silent on those aspects of my identity and outlook that did not seem to fit into any Moroccan framework of reference. It frustrated me not to be able to ‘be myself’ (even if I did, truly, enjoy myself in the process of this immersion), but I was there on a mission to learn about Moroccan ways of thinking, not to contrast them with my own. I think ‘anthropologist’ has become a state of mind for me rather than a concrete job description, and I don’t believe I’ll be able to turn it off this spring. Nevertheless, I am going back to Morocco not to immerse myself, but to be a Dutch employee, representing a Dutch cultural organization. To underscore and highlight my difference, so to speak. Will that encourage me to ‘be myself’ more toward the people I am trying to learn about Morocco from? And if so, will I experience that as a good thing, or will it hinder my learning process? And come to think of it, how will it affect my already existing sense of hybridity? Will I begin to emphasize my Americanness more, now that the Dutch part of me is put in the foreground?

But as much as it feels like a highlighting of my difference to come back to Morocco in this new position, it may also be a position from which I have an underscored responsibility to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and try to facilitate a measure of cross-cultural understanding. That idea appeals to me. And that, perhaps, will be my way to bridge the gap I sometimes perceive between an anthropologist’s state of mind and this outsider’s position.

Change of Plans...

My departure is rapidly approaching: only two days remain of this three month period in Morocco – this period that had seemed so long when I was on the other side of it, back in September.

This fact compels me to look back and examine what I’ve done with my time here. Unequivocally, I can say that these past three months have been an absolute success. I may not have gotten two of the three grants I had applied for, but I have obtained research permission at the hospital, gone through a very intense and deep familiarization with Moroccan family life, vastly increased my command of both French and Moroccan Arabic, made new friends, learned a lot about myself – but most importantly, I have come to genuinely love this country and to fully appreciate being here. This, in all honesty, I had not expected. My love-hate relationship and frustration have, by grace of a newly discovered sense of comfort and freedom, made way for serious contentment. I know that Morocco can make life very difficult for very many people. I know that Morocco has its dark sides. I know that I will continue to meet with frustration as I continue my relationship with this country. But I also know that I’ve discovered that there is room for me here, that it is possible to be myself here. I’ve discovered that I can lead the life I want and find the things I need to be happy, right here. I know that I can live here comfortably and pleasantly for a number of years, while I do my research.

With all of these reflections in mind, I had been growing steadily more melancholy as the days raced on and the moment of my departure rapidly approached. Especially because it was completely uncertain when I would be able to return, I really, really did not want to leave – to abandon everything I had begun to establish here. And also because it meant no more blog... this blog, that has been my lifeline these three months, would have no more use.

From my use of language you may have already guessed that something about this situation has changed. And indeed, over the course of one weekend, a sudden and unexpected opportunity radically changed everything…

Because I have been offered a temporary job – an internship, really – at the Dutch cultural center in Rabat! From February to the middle of May, I am going to help organize a Dutch-Moroccan conference in honor of the 40th anniversary of the two countries’ labor migration agreement – the agreement that lies at the foundation of the Netherlands’ current relationship with Morocco. Not only is this right up my alley – I have been doing research on Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands for years – but it is the perfect way to spend more time in Morocco as I wait for more grants to come in. It will allow me to continue studying French and Arabic, to continue solidifying my relationship with the Clinic in Rabat, it’s going to look great on both CV and grant applications, and most importantly: I get to come back! And all that while being paid… honestly, it can’t get any better than this. I am so, so incredibly excited…

And I am no longer sad to leave! What I thought was going to be a separation of indefinite length, has become a six week vacation… They will be six busy weeks – much will have to be done before I come back here (grants, IRB…) – but a great vacation nonetheless, with the prospect of more Morocco-fun in February…

This also means I get to continue with this blog – so stay tuned for new posts in about a month and a half!

Time Flies

I am realizing that I only have three weeks left to go here. Time has flown by, and it is difficult to believe that I will be heading back to Chicago so soon. I react to this idea with mixed feelings. On one hand, there are reasons why I cannot wait to leave: the comforts of home, seeing my family, snow, indoor heating, showers every day, being able to cook again, have a glass of wine when I want, being master of my own schedule, and privacy.

But there are so many reasons why I want to stay. There is so much left to do, and I need so much more time. To learn Arabic, to further get to know Morocco, to reach a deeper level of comfort with this city and its daily rhythm, to find my niche. To start my research. Apart from the language frustration (see previous post), I feel as though I am making inroads. I am beginning to establish myself here, and I want to keep going on this wave. I hate the idea of leaving just now that I have made contacts – what if they forget about me?

And I am sorry above all that I have to leave Morocco, just now that I am for the first time truly becoming comfortable here. Just now that, for the first time, I was actually enjoying myself with a sense of freedom.

At the same time, I am also beginning to realize how much more time I need for preparations before I can actually start the research. I may have gotten research approval at the hospital, which was hurdle number one to get over, but I clearly need further language study – both French and Arabic – before I can comfortably interview people. Sure, I could devise a list of questions right now, but it will take a while before I can actually understand how people answer my questions, and before I can improvise follow-up inquiries on the basis of what they say. Then there is IRB approval, money, the standardized diagnostic interview protocols that I need to obtain. I even need better recording equipment – mine apparently only records up to two hours of material – not convenient if you want to do a full day of interviews.

In other words: there are good reasons to go home. I’ll consider it not as a step back, but a necessary new stage of research preparation. How about that?

I will be sorry to leave this blog, though. It’s been my lifeline these past few months.

A Sunday Interlude

Yesterday afternoon, the host family and I went on an outing to a park of sorts. Manal had identified it as “la forêt” beforehand, and what it was, basically, was a green area by the side of a busy road heading east away from Salé. There were trees, indeed – trees that had lost all but a few dried up leaves – and some open spaces in between. It looked like it had once been lushly grassy, but was now more of an old carpet whose green had been worn away in places by heavy traffic. And indeed, everywhere, there were parked cars, and other people who had decided to spend their Sunday in the outdoors. They stood around, leaned on their cars, or sat on the tablecloths they had brought. They were eating lunch from plastic containers, drinking tea, taking their afternoon nap. Some had brought entire mattresses with them, others a whole stove, and made their tea from scratch. A few had even brought tents, and had constructed for themselves a little home-away-from home out there in the green.

Other than two cars, we had brought only a thermos full of hot, black, delicious coffee. We stood around, people watching and chatting, as we drank. Manal and Alma always on opposite sides of the group, both chatting along pleasantly, but conspicuously ignoring one another. Manal, as always, was chatting busily and loudly, either laughing excitedly at things she saw, or denouncing it as ‘hshouma’, shameful. She tends to touch people, pull or prod them, or otherwise make sure that they’ve heard what she’s said.* And as always, Alma was close to Fatima, with whom she seems to share an almost physical bond. Theirs is not necessarily an intense verbal relationship; they don’t talk to one another any more than to anyone else. But they share something that others are not privy to, it seems. Something wholly implicit. Something that means they are not constantly in conversation (because they don’t need to be), but means, for instance, that they sleep on the same sofa section, head to feet, under a single blanket. Their relationship is the exact opposite of that between Alma and Manal. It makes me wonder how the three of them relate to the fourth sister, who lives in Marrakech. What happens to the dynamic when the triangle becomes a square?

Amma and Khadija, the last two of the group, floated in between these three sisters, chatting with each. Khadija is always the automatic epicenter of everything, even if she is not the loudest; she is simply the force of gravity that keeps all others close. And Amma is always there in orbit, joining in the conversation occasionally, but mostly lost in her music, fed to her through the earphones that are always in her ears.

Yunus and Mustafa, meanwhile, had run off with a group of other young boys whose families were also here for the afternoon. They had each brought props: Yunus a soccer ball, Mustafa a deck of cards. Clearly these were great ice-breakers. Later, as I strolled around with the women, I saw them at a distance, both making good use of their items: Mustafa was involved in a game of cards with three others of his age, Yunus wholly immersed in a game of soccer. Si Mahmoud had also retreated: he spent the afternoon in the front seat of his car, the window rolled down, smoking a cigarette while doing the Sudoku puzzles in l’Opinion. Much like he does every weekend, in the kitchen or at the coffee house.

There was music: about 25 meters away from our cars we saw a small crowd surrounding a group of jellaba’d musicians. About 10 men with drums stood there, singing and swaying to their own beat, while a few of them broke into dance: a kind of rhythmic thumping of their feet on the ground, and a lot of shoulder shimmying. It made me laugh to see these old, grey men shake their chest like that; it reminded me of belly dancing. We joined the crowd, and just as I realized I had forgotten my camera, Fatima and Alma asked me simultaneously to take some pictures. I have become the official family photographer, it seems** – and taking pictures was clearly what everyone else was doing. Everywhere in the crowd I noticed hands holding up cell phones, recording the performance. A grey man in white jellaba, the star dancer of the group, made sure to give each photographer a good shot; he would pause in front of each held-up phone and give them an extra-long shoulder shimmy, staring straight into the lens. Manal, who had brought her own camera, actually broke straight through the crowd and took place right in front of the group to get the perfect shot. The grey man gave her an extra-special performance.

Having seen enough of the music, Amma, Alma and I took a turn on the child-size motorcycles and ‘quads’ (they look sort of like tractors, motorcycles with four wheels) that a group of young men had for rent: 4 dirhams for a small tour down the main road leading into the park. We climbed onto one of them, together. Amma insistently assured the proprietor that she knew how to drive this machine, but he clearly did not trust her and hung on to the side of the vehicle for our entire tour, not allowing her sole command over its gas pedal and brakes.

Other than that, it was a place for strolling around through the trees. We walked, splitting off into small groups, chatting quietly – Manal and Alma as far away from one another as they could get. Each person I walked next to would remark to me on the beauty of the place – but it was such a shame that it wasn’t kept cleaner. Indeed, there was trash everywhere. Old plastic bottles, yogurt containers, dirty diapers. Bits of plastic bags clinging to the bushes and plants. Even some worn and abandoned clothes here and there. Yes, I said. It’s a shame. I guess it’s difficult to convince people to take their trash with them. Then they asked me, is it the same in the United States?

This is a question I get often, any time my host family becomes aware that something is an ‘experience’ for me: when I make note of something, comment on something, or when they themselves decide something is interesting for me to see. Do Americans eat meals like I am served here? Do Americans go out like this on Sundays like this? Do Americans have anything like the soap we use for the hammam? Do Americans have grand taxis? Are Americans also worried about high electricity bills?

I am never sure how to answer. In part because I always have a hard time answering a question with a simple yes or no – and anything but that takes a while to think about in Arabic. Yes, I always want to say, Americans do something like this, but it’s a little different, because… I am also never sure how to answer because I wonder, what exactly are they interested in? They know I am a Dutch person who lives in the United States. So when they ask me this, are they truly interested in the United States (and if so, why don’t they also ask me about Holland?), or are they simply interested in ‘the West’ in general? And finally, I don’t know what to answer because I am not sure what answer they are looking for. Do they want me to affirm their difference, and perhaps some kind of superiority? Or are they interested in learning about differences and other lifestyles? On my part, I want to give them an honest answer, give a true impression of the United States. But I also want to affirm our similarities, to emphasize those habits, viewpoints, and customs that the United States may have in common with Morocco. To give some kind of sense that there is a certain kind of kinship, grounds for affinity, even. To give my host family the sense that they could understand something about the United States, maybe.

But most likely, I am just over analyzing these questions. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is probably fine, and most likely all that these people are looking for… over-analysis can be exhausting, sometimes.


* She is someone, I think, who is often in need of recognition. She often emphasizes the part she had in organizing something, and always makes sure I know when it was her who cooked something, and how much work it was. She is someone who, perhaps, may have been a little unrecognized, as middle child in a house full of other siblings? Alma is loud as well, but less consciously so. She does not directly ask for attention; she gets it much more automatically than Manal does.
** Whenever we go somewhere, I am usually asked to bring my camera, because they have decided mine is nicer than theirs.

On A Quest

Sometimes the littlest things can seem so difficult to get done in Morocco. Buying mouthwash, for instance.

My Listerine is running out, and so I decided it was time to purchase a Moroccan replacement. I looked up the French word for mouthwash in the dictionary (“eau dentifrice”), and armed with that knowledge I went on expedition into the medina. I didn’t expect to find Listerine anywhere, but did not think it would be difficult to find something similar; the numerous “parfumeries” all over the city are stocked full of any kind of drugstore product one might need.

These “parfumeries” are little holes in the wall, tiny drugstores that sell everything from shampoo, shower gel and hair dye to deodorants and toothbrushes, and they have all the big western/European brands.* And with so many Western products, I was sure any of these parfumeries would have what I was looking for. No such luck, however.

Like most other small shops here, a parfumerie is not a place for browsing; everything is displayed behind a big counter. This means that shopping always requires intensive interaction with the shopkeeper, who must be asked to fetch all the products you want to look at, and whom you must then bargain with for a good price. And so, armed with my French word, I stepped up to the proprietor at the first parfumerie I found. “Wash ‘andek de l’eau dentifrice?” I asked in perfect Aransiya.** “Dentifrice? Bien sûr,” the proprietor responded, and pointed to a shelf full of toothpaste behind him. Which brand did I want? No, I told him, not “dentifrice,” but “eau dentifrice.” He gave me a puzzled look, and I repeated myself. “Eau, de l’eau,” I told him. He processed this for a while, and then shook his head. “La, ma kaynsh.” And so I thanked him, left the store, and walked straight to another one, where the exact same conversation took place. This exact exchange took place, in fact, at every single parfumerie I went to. I began to wonder: does mouthwash not exist in Morocco? But hadn’t I seen it in Casablanca? Was I using the wrong word? Or were parfumeries not the place to go?

Back home, I asked Amma and Alma about it. They did not understand me either, until I showed them my bottle of Listerine. Oh, they said, like a “bain de bouche”? Eagerly I nodded, and they urged me to come to the bathroom with them, where they showed me bottles bearing those words on the label. Yes, I said, I think it’s something like that – and took a look at the label. Not what I am looking for at all: their bain de bouche is more of a salt solution than the acidic alcohol rinse I am in search of. All members of my host family are in the process of getting various dental work done – a tooth pulled here, new braces there – and their bains de bouche come from dental prescriptions. I tried to explain what I had in mind precisely: something against cavities, and to prevent bad breath (what is the word for gingivitis in French?). Sort of like what toothpaste does, I said. Alma gave me a puzzled look. “Then why don’t you just use toothpaste?”, she asked me, “why do you not like toothpaste?” No, I said, I love toothpaste; I use both, first toothpaste, then bain de bouche. Ah, she said, with a smile and a wink, “that’s why your teeth look so good.” She finally told me to check at a pharmacy – and then immediately called a pharmacist-friend to ask him if he knew what I was talking about. Alternating on the phone, she and I tried to explain to him what it was that I needed. Eau dentifrice didn’t register with him either, but bain de bouche did. Something acidic, however, he hadn’t heard of. Still no luck.

I was confused. There is no shortage of beauty products in Morocco. If people actually have a bathroom, it is stocked full with deodorants, creams, shampoos, conditioners, fragrances and other products. Why does no one know what mouthwash is? I began to regret my decision not to bring more Listerine with me. Thanks in part to a hyper-vigilant dental office that has a dramatic flair about their care for the health of my mouth, I am a little hyper myself when it comes to my dental routine. I had just sadly resigned myself to a fate of tooth decay when I walked past the Mohammed V medina exit and noticed another parfumerie-looking store and decided to give it one more try. I walked in to what turned out to be an actual drug store – no hole in the wall, but an actual store with aisles that allowed customers to browse the products for themselves. And there, in the very first aisle, next to the toothpaste, stood not just one kind of mouthwash, but four different brands of it. All acidic, all exactly what I was looking for, in my choice of price ranges and brands.

It had seemed so impossible to find mouthwash, and then finally turned out to be so incredibly easy – once I had found the place to go. It seems to work that way with a lot of things here. A lot of everyday transactions seem to be a matter of simply ‘knowing’ – where to shop for what, where to get the best deal, who to talk to when you need something, how best to get from one place to another. This is true for any place in the world, perhaps, and my difficulty probably stems from the fact that I am simply unfamiliar with this culture. But I maintain that there is something different about Morocco. It seems to me that here, there is no way to acquire this knowledge but through trial and error. There is no system; there are no chain stores to rely on (yes, there is Marjane, but this is not the kind of place you go to for your everyday needs), no bus schedules to pick up at the station, no consumer reports to advise you of the best choice of vendor.

And it does not always help to ask a Moroccan. The logic of these things seems so self-evident to them that they have a hard time putting it into words. For instance, asking my host family for directions to somewhere in the city is hopeless. They don’t navigate by means of street names, and when I mention one I am given blank stares. The same happens when I show them a map; they are not used to looking at their city this way, and get confused when they try to work it out. In turn, I am often unfamiliar with the landmarks they navigate by. A complete miscommunication, in other words.

For the same reason, my hopes at flying back to the United States with some authentic Moroccan recipes will most likely remain unfulfilled. My host family is perfectly happy to explain to me how they make certain dishes, but the way they conceive of cooking is just completely different. A fair number of ingredients seem to be taken entirely for granted: I see them putting eggs or butter into their dough, but they are never mentioned in their recipes. Measurements are also different. Again, they seem entirely intuitive: everything is given to me as “shouiya diyal…,” ‘ a little…’. I would need to take a seat in the kitchen one day and observe something being made from start to finish – but would probably mostly be in the way if I did that.

And so learning how these little aspects of daily life work is probably a matter of observation, combined with a lot of trial and error experimentation. And shouiya-bishouiya (little by little) I’m finding my way. At least it’s another interesting ethnographic challenge…

And apparently I am at least starting to look like I know my way: this morning on my way to the internet cafe, a woman stopped me and asked me where she could find a taxi to Temara (a Rabat suburb), in Arabic. And in Arabic, I directed her to the grand taxi stand at Bab Chellah. The few odd bystanders looked at me with as much surprise as I felt myself. That she would ask me, the most obvious foreigner, for directions in Rabat, in Arabic. and that I was actually able to help her. I have to say I'm pretty proud of myself.


* Only some of these products seem to have been produced for the Moroccan consumer; most of it is, I think, contraband destined for the Benelux (the Netherlands/Belgium/Luxemburg) or Germany. That is, they come with Dutch/French or German writing on the back instead of French and Arabic, and have been produced in the Netherlands, France, or Germany rather than Ain Sebaa in Casablanca.
** ‘Aransiya’, or ‘Faranbiya’, is a combination of the words ‘arabiya’ (‘arabic’) and ‘faransiya’ (‘french’), and refers to many people’s tendency to mix a lot of French words and phrases into their Arabic. As an imperfect speaker of either, I have become quite adept at this hybrid language.