Moroccan Bureaucracy and you: Some Thoughts on a Successful Relationship

Europeans and Americans who arrive in Morocco are permitted to stay in the country visa-free for up to ninety days. You enter the country, and upon handing over a short, white immigration form and exchanging a few pleasantries with an officer seated in a small glass cage, you are given a stamp in your passport and good-naturedly sent onwards to begin your Moroccan adventure.

If you plan to reside in Morocco for a longer period, you have two choices. The easier option is to leave the country for a few days (most choose Melilla and Ceuta, the two Spanish enclaves whose painful presence is almost literally a thorn in Morocco’s Mediterranean side), return, and simply obtain a new entry stamp that legally extends your adventure for another ninety days. This is indeed the route preferred by many, although the occasional story emerges about passport control officials unhappy with the many entries recorded in a passport.

The more laborious option is to apply for a ninety-day extension of your non-visa-visa. Weighing the labor-intensive value of paperwork over what must be at least a three-day return trip across the border, you may wonder why I bill the latter as easier. Let me explain.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that applying for a visa to the United States is no walk in the park. Apart from the stacks of paperwork to be filled out, the process involves endless errands to obtain all manner of official documentation explaining (and legitimizing) the various facets of your existence. Then there is the endless waiting in lines, the quiet acceptance of disinterested treatment by INS officers, and the subtle embarrassment of being fingerprinted and blood-tested. Though I cannot tell you what an application for an actual Moroccan visa would entail, requesting an extension of your visa certainly does not involve as many steps and items of documentation. Easy as pie, I initially thought when a NIMAR co-worker explained the process to me and the various NIMAR-students in need of a visa-extension.

There were two application forms, she told us. In addition, we were to provide eight passport photo’s, a statement testifying to our residence in Rabat (to be provided by the NIMAR, who organized host families and other stays for most of us), and a statement testifying to our connection with the NIMAR (proof of the internship in my case, of a study program for the others). We were to complete our file, and to deliver it to the police chief at the headquarters two streets away.

When I arrived at the police quarters one sunny morning about ten days before my visa-free period was to expire, I was told first by the officer who stopped me at the front door, and then by the officer at the old rickety reception desk inside, that the chief in question (whose name I had carefully written out on a post-it so as to pronounce it correctly) no longer worked at these headquarters. I was sent upstairs to speak with his replacement, a skinny smiling man who delivered my file straight to a civil servant seated in the room next to his office.

Her office was a bare room furnished with four haphazardly placed wooden desks, each paired with a chair. A single bookcase stood along a wall; boxes of paperwork were scattered across the room. Behind each desk, empty but for a single, modest stack of files, a few stamps, and a flat box of red ink, sat a female civil servant. As they chatted away the hours, either with one another or with invisible conversation partners over their cell phone, they would occasionally and absent-mindedly take one of their stamps, and hammer it on the form in front of them.

One of these ladies was handed my file. She smiled at me, then glanced at the forms I had brought her. The first application form, in threefold. The second, two copies. The statement of internship, the statement of residence.

“You need a rental agreement,” she told me without looking up.

Trying my best to keep smiling politely, I nervously pointed to the statement of residence and explained, “Well, madame, my director spoke with your police chief, who said this statement would be all that’s necessary.”

She looked at the statement again. She had just begun to tell me once again that all applications needed a rental agreement, when her phone rang. A friend or family member, I gathered from the smile that appeared on her face and the informal tone of her conversation. Unsure of what to do, unwilling to interrupt her conversation, I waited. As though she suddenly remembered my presence, she looked up and, with a wave of her hand, told me, “You’re fine. Your application is complete.” With a sigh of relief, I motioned a thank you to her. I was about to exit when I remembered. Worried about interrupting her, I whispered, “madame, how long will this process take?” A little annoyed, she looked up. “Come back in 15 days,” she told me curtly, then immediately returned to the soft tone of her telephone conversation.

With uncertain relief, I left the station and returned to work. It was done – I had turned in the file, and all there was to do now was wait, return, and get a stamp in my passport. Incha’llah.

Upon my return after said processing period, I was dealt with by another one of the four civil servants. She asked for my name, sauntered over to the bookcase to pick up the box of files marked ‘accepted’, and proceeded to absent-mindedly leaf through the stack of red stamp-covered forms. Mine, as I had half expected, was not among them. “Come back later,” she pronounced, and dismissed me.

“Well, you see,” I carefully explained, “I have to leave the country for a few weeks fairly soon. Would it be possible to – …”

I was not able to finish my request for a piece of paper to show passport control that I had, in fact, applied for a visa extension (Now that I was officially illegal in Morocco, I was getting nervous about leaving the country without at least some kind of proof that I’d requested this grace period). Curtly, the civil servant asked me, “when is your flight?”

“Uhm, the 18th, and then I return on June 1st.”

“Alright, come back on the day before you fly, and bring us your airline ticket, to get a form for the passport control.”

I did as I was told, and returned to the headquarters on the day before my scheduled departure, armed with a printout of my reservation. This time, the civil servant (yet another one), took the time to deal with me. She fished another stack of files from the bookcase – those marked ‘not yet processed’, and leafed through the forms. One by one, I recognized the passport pictures submitted by NIMAR students and smiled with pity – I wasn’t the only one going through this process. My paperwork showed up at the bottom of the stack. The servant looked at my airline reservation, and jotted a few numbers down on my file. She then asked for my passport, and just as a brief spark of hope had me wondering if I might just get that visa extension after all, the servant turned to me. “What time is your flight tomorrow? Can you come back in the morning before you go to the airport and get a number for the passport control?”

I was confused and nervous. What number? Wasn’t I going to get a form of some sort? Something official-looking? Stuttering a bit, I answered, “well, my flight is in the afternoon, but it’s transatlantic and it’s from Casablanca, so I have to leave Rabat very early. Is there any way we could do this today? And don’t I need a form? I was told by my director, who was told by your police chief, that I’d need a form for the douane.”

The lady shook her head. “You can come back early tomorrow,” was her only concession.

“Are you open at eight? Because I will have to leave at 8.30,” was my last attempt to convince them to help me today. But alas – “yes. Come back at eight,” was her answer.

“Would it be possible to get an actual form tomorrow?” I asked, trying one more time. Again, I was met with a shake of the head. At this point another civil servant, seated across the room, got involved.

“Actually,” she said, “You don’t need anything at all. You’re not the first foreigner in this situation. The passport control will see everything on his computer screen. Don’t come back at all, you don’t need a number.”

My heart sank. No form, and now not even a number? I would be going to the airport without any kind of physical proof that I had applied for a visa extension? I was unwilling to take that risk, and pleaded with the civil servants, backtracking on my arrogant dismissal of the number they had offered me before. But they were done with me. I was met with more shaking heads. “You don’t need to come back, just go to the airport.” And that was their final answer.

Dejected, I returned to work and reported back to the co-worker who had made the original arrangements with the police chief. A little offended herself by this lack of respect for those arrangements on the part of these civil servants, she offered to go over to the headquarters and speak with the new police chief herself. She took my passport – just in case they’d be willing to stamp it, after all – and went on her way. She returned an hour later, stamp-less, but with a renewed invitation to return on the morning of my flight for that coveted number.

That morning, I returned to the police headquarters, my co-worker by my side. We waited for 30 minutes as a civil servant occasionally attempted a phone call to whomever gave out these numbers. She tried to reassure us, again, that I had no need of this number. We know, we responded, but we’d appreciate it all the same. Luckily, my co-worker’s words seemed to carry a bit more weight. Albeit with an annoyed look on her face, the civil servant tried the phone again – and two minutes later, she had written a number on a piece of paper, handed it to me, and sent us on our way.

An hour later, I took the train to the airport. Passport control had no knowledge of my application for a visa extension. Did I know I had overstayed my visa-free period? I nodded, summarized my month of back-and-forth with the police headquarters with a simple “yes, the police gave me this number to show you,” and handed him the scrap given to me by the civil servant. The officer stepped out of his glass cage, walked to another office, deliberated for what seemed like an hour, came back with an official form, stamped both it and my passport, and sent me on my way.

Immensely relieved, and thankful to my NIMAR co-worker, I celebrated in the departure lounge with a coffee and chocolate.

The frustration of these interactions, however, I had a hard time shaking off. I simply did not get it. Why was I so powerless? These civil servants seemed bored to death, filled their day with nothing but chit-chat, and yet could not take time out of their schedules to spend five minutes on my file, or two minutes to stamp a form on my behalf. Why? It seemed to go against every basic rule of human interaction. Why not help someone, if you have the means, and the time? There was an inequality of power in this interaction that I was completely powerless to shift. What was lacking in required paperwork for this request was made up for by complete uncertainty and an apparent lack of any system to the process. I had anticipated this – I had been warned about this by others, and I knew that the collection of papers we’d been asked to provide was agreed upon between my NIMAR co-worker and the former police chief; it was not a standard list. But still.

Even now, I keep thinking about this episode, and I keep bumping into my frustration. The only difference now is that I have a bit of distance from its acuteness, and I’m able to see that perhaps the frustration had less to do with the way I was treated, than with my inability to change that treatment. What I mean, basically, is that contrary to its appearance, I do think that there is a kind of system to all this madness. Moroccan bureaucracy is not run by anarchy; it’s just that the system differs quite fundamentally from the one we in Europe and the US are used to. It’s not that there’s a lack of rules; it’s just that the rules that count are not the ones you can see, hear, and read. If you can read between the lines, you may discover that there is a real system at work here – and I think that a comprehension of its intricacies may be the key to a successful (and perhaps even efficient) relationship with the Moroccan authorities.

Evert van der Zweerde, a Dutch philosopher who visited the NIMAR for two weeks in May, mentioned an idea once that might just provide a clue into the basic workings of this system. I asked him to remind me of this theory in an email. I cite (and translate) his response here:

‘Basically, there is a correlation between individualism and trust in a ‘system’. The Dutch, for instance, can afford to be individualists because, or to the extent to which, they have reason to trust the government and its civil servants. That is, a civil servant who does not give me the treatment he gives to other citizens has a problem. The problem is not mine, but his or hers. The contrary is true of Morocco: there, one is dependent on a civil servant’s graciousness (read: on one’s connections or ability to pay bribes), and so one cannot rely upon his or her help. This makes it hard to be individualist, because you must be able to fall back on your network of friends and family to get anything done. You might also say that both traditional (family) ties and bureaucratic structures figure as a kind of communicating frameworks that offer a measure of security, that you can count on. If it’s the second (the bureaucratic structures) that you can rely on, you can ‘safely’ be individualist.’

In other words, the wheels of Moroccan bureaucracy turn on the basis of a premise of citizenship that is defined by relationships and connections, rather than by a notion of individualism. The rights of citizenship (including bureaucratic assistance, the granting of paperwork requested) are conferred upon you if you prove yourself to deserve them, in Morocco as in Europe. The only difference is that here, this involves proving that you have the requisite connections, that you are a considerable enough point of gravity within the social matrix. My frustration stemmed from the fact that, as someone raised in Europe and thus trained to be an individual, my fundamental beliefs were utterly shaken by the realization I could not rely on the bureaucratic mill to turn for me as it would for anyone else. If I had come to the headquarters without the support of the NIMAR, there may have been a wealth of additional hurdles to jump in the pursuit of this extension. And according to the same logic, if I had been a personal friend of the police chief’s, the entire process may have played itself out (with successful results, of course) in no more than a few days.

Yet I’m stuck with one question. I think Evert is right, and many social scientific analyses of Moroccan organization testify to the importance of social connections. But how exactly does my network or lack thereof motivate a civil servant to do her job? If she is not a part of this social network, why does she care what kind of connections I have? How does it affect her, and her motivation? Shouldn’t she be motivated to do her job simply because she gets paid to do it – that is, because she receives a reward from her own social network?

Maybe the answer lies in my assumption that she is not part of my network. Maybe this is an erroneous assumption that stems from my having been raised in an individualist society and thus having a somewhat limited definition of ‘social network’ (that is, the fact that I see this as a purely ‘social’ network, not as a matrix of connections on which I depend for my survival). I am venturing into a little guesswork here, making a few other assumptions that may not be accurate (and if I am wrong, I invite whatever Morocco-experts who are gracious enough to take the time to read this blog to correct me and further my understanding of this system), but maybe the civil servant and I become part of the same network as soon as I enter her office with a particular request.

Perhaps the civil servant can rely on the system no more than I can. Perhaps her reward (a sufficient salary, promotion, and so on), and thus her motivation to help, comes not from the simple fact that she is a civil servant who stamps forms and gives people the help they need. Perhaps what counts is helping the right people – the people important to her superiors, or the people who can reward her directly. And so when I stand there in front of her with a request, I am no more a neutral cog in the system of individualistic citizenship than she is a neutral cog in a system of neutral bureaucracy. When I give her a request, we establish a relationship. My connections, my gravity within the social matrix, has the potential to directly affect her position. If I were a person of social or financial means, she might be rewarded for helping me with some kind of gain in her own status (and I would of course be motivated to reward her because I know her willingness to help stems from my willingness to provide a reward) – while if I were a person of no gravity whatsoever, she would gain nothing from helping me. Yes, as a civil servant she has a job security that those in the private sector can only dream of. It’s the mean reason so many turn down private sector jobs in the hopes of securing a government position. But other than job security and the potential of being rewarded for helping the right people, what other sources of motivation does a government job really provide? For all the government’s purported fighting against corruption, I do not think the average civil servant is rewarded with a salary sizeable enough to permit a comfortable standard of living without the supplementary income of an occasional bribe.

So that’s that, then. I doubt that I have here discovered the secret to the Moroccan ‘system’. But perhaps I’m a little closer to getting why it works the way it works – and perhaps I’ll be less likely to succumb to frustration next time I interact with it…

Siham and the Fata Morgana of Europe

Siham is a young woman in her early twenties who lives in a Southeastern Moroccan city. She is the only daughter in a warm and friendly family that consists of her two parents and four brothers – some younger, some older. Siham is beautiful and kind; the first thing you will notice about her is her wide smile and luminous eyes. She is open and inviting, and her laughter and genuine interest in others are incredibly endearing.

In the few hours that I spent with her, I came to know Siham as a girl full of ambition. She talked of pursuing degrees and diploma’s, and of a brilliant career in business. Siham wants a future of freedom, opportunity, wealth, and love. But she has decided that the only means to such a future is migration to Europe – and she has decided that the only means to realize this plan is marriage to a European man.

She has undertaken action to pursue this goal: she is active in online chatting networks and makes clear in her profiles that she is looking for a husband. She seems to have success: she has gotten engaged to a resident of a Northwestern European country whom she has met online, has brought him to Morocco for an engagement ceremony, has studied the language spoken in this part of the world, and has applied for a visa in his country of residence. It seems, however, that he is not a strong enough candidate to figure as guarantor for another person’s residence permit,* and so the possibility of obtaining a visa through him seems to have become somewhat uncertain. She is thus continuing her online search, and is now engaged in conversations with other men who woo her with expressions of devotion, love, and promises – which she reciprocates.

I do not think Siham is an opportunist, and I do not think she should be condemned as an immoral and heartless individual. Siham is simply doing her best to secure a future for herself in the only way she thinks is possible. The real issue at hand – the real question – is why a girl like this sees no other way than this risky endeavor to secure a future for herself. How is it that she believes her prospects in Morocco to be so slim, or dim, that she is willing to literally put her life in the hands of men she hardly knows (because we all know how easy it is to be creative in your online self-presentation, and how dangerous it therefore can be to trust what you are told by people you meet in the virtual world. Her fiancé, for that matter, does not seem to have the best record of trustworthiness and respect for women) – to stake her future on a promise (on an image), the reliability of which she will not be able to verify until it is too late?

I think there are two issues behind this question. First of all, there is Siham’s unrealistic image of Europe. In this dream she has, Europe is a kind of promised land where everything she considers herself deprived of in Morocco is taken for granted as a regular part of daily life. Siham expects absolute freedom and opportunity. She realizes that the road to obtaining a visa is rife with obstacles, but once that hurdle has been crossed she pictures an open road and open arms ahead of her. From where did this dream emerge? I know that European Moroccans who return home for the summer with their cars and material goods often paint a somewhat one-sided picture of their new lives in the North. But aren’t there just as many stories about their hardships to match those images – stories about discrimination, poverty, and limits to freedom? And so I wonder – what are Siham’s sources? On what basis has she constructed her image of Europe? What has she read, and to whom has she talked? Her image is that of a dream-world. It is an ideal, a utopia – and it is bound to set her up for disappointment. She is staking her life not only on what is really no more than the idealized image of a man, but also on the idealized image of a place. It is such a gamble to choose these images over reality and to turn one’s back on the possibilities that the here and now may still hold – a gamble in which the stakes are too high, I think, to take the risk.

That brings me to the second issue: the perceived lack of opportunities in Morocco. I know that there are girls in this country who truly have very few options. There is great poverty in many parts of Morocco, and it is often women who bear the brunt of it. It can be difficult for men to build up a self-sustaining life, and even more so for women. So many people – and again, women more than men – have no voice in Morocco. They are politically disenfranchised, never heard and are powerless to change their circumstances. Marriage certainly still is the primary acceptable way for a girl to increase her social standing and ensure a better future for herself (though certain groups are pushing for this to change) – and yes, given the conditions in many dimensions of Moroccan society (see this, for instance) it seems more advantageous to marry a European than a Moroccan.

But for how many girls is it truly the case that there is no possibility for a good future in Morocco? Or better said, for how many girls is a future in Morocco so dim that it is worth staking their lives on no more than a tenuous promise for something better in Europe? And more concretely, is this truly the case for Siham? She comes from a middle class family that seems to be wanting in nothing. Her father has a stable job, and so does her older brother. Their house is of a good size, and the food on the table was rich and elaborate. Yes, as the only daughter it fell to her to set and clear the table at which we ate, but this is clearly a warm and good-natured family that loves its daughter and wants nothing but the best for her. She is surrounded by other individuals who seem successful: she talks frequently (and wistfully) of friends who have left her behind, who have moved to the coast to pursue a higher education in the big cities. Why did she not go with them to do the same? Why is it that she sees no opportunities for a future in Morocco? How is it that she sees only limits to her dreams, chains to keep her down on earth?

Perhaps she is stuck in a vicious cycle. Perhaps an initial set-back in her ambitions turned her gaze toward a future elsewhere, which in turn encouraged her to turn her back on any possibilities for enrichment in Morocco. With her lack of investment in the here and now, perhaps these possibilities come to seem ever dimmer and slimmer, fading into the background until they are no more than a mirage, even less tangible than that dream in which she invests so much of her energy. Perhaps this is how her dream comes to seem more real than her reality.

There is so much I want to say to Siham and so much I want to ask about her life, but I do not know what words to use. I felt uncomfortable as she spoke to me about all this, and was unsure how to react. I went back and forth – and even now as I write this I feel this alternation of feelings: between thinking on the one hand that someone must help her realize the risks of what she’s doing and encourage her to invest in her reality; and wondering on the other hand who I am to think that I’m a better judge of her dreams than she is – who am I to think I know better than she does about the possibilities that Morocco may still have in store for her? There is so much that I do not know about her life. Who am I to judge? Is Siham the problem, or is she simply a symptom of a malaise much greater? Does the cause of the problem lie with her, or with her society?

It’s a little of both, perhaps. But wherever the cause should be sought, it is important that girls like Siham be encouraged to see opportunities for themselves in Morocco. They must be given, and be encouraged to exercise, a sense of agency within their society. By this I do not mean an unlimited freedom to choose and act – that unlimited freedom exists nowhere and for no one, no matter what Siham may think about Europe. What I mean by agency is the perception of ‘meaning’ – a perception of belonging, of being a part of and thus having a stake in one’s environment, and of having a voice, of being a recognized and respected member of the social order. If a woman has such a sense of agency – if she feels that she has a stake in her surroundings and that she is a respected part of it, she will be encouraged to invest in it. I think this sense of agency can be encouraged (in part) by creating opportunities – for education, for a career, for political participation. It’s about the creation of ‘space’ or ‘room’ for individuals within the social order. If one is invited to take up ‘space’ in the social order, one is encouraged and inclined to invest in it?

Or is that itself a utopian thought?

* in many European countries, simply marrying a non-European foreigner does not guarantee that person a residence permit – it is not as ‘easy’ as obtaining a green card by marrying an American, for instance. In order to obtain a European residence permit, not only the immigrant but also the European spouse must meet a number of requirements. The spouse, for instance, may need to earn above a certain minimum salary, have a long-term employment contract, and be in good standing with the law.

Hamdulillah

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been meaning to write something about a particular leg of our road trip through the south. The longer I wait to do so, however, the more I wonder what it was, exactly, that I wanted to say about this piece of the trip, and why I wanted to say it.

The leg of the trip in question was the road from Foum Zguid to Zagora on a Saturday morning. Whereas we had expected about 60 kilometers of the same kind of road that we’d traversed from Tata to Foum Zguid before our coffee break that morning, we encountered instead a 130 kilometer piste, an unpaved road. But not only was it unpaved; it was a road really only meant for (and accessible to) a land rover or other vehicle with a four-wheel drive. We didn’t have such a vehicle, and so drove through riverbeds, over large boulders, pools of soft sand, and other obstacles in our little black four-door Chevy. Not expecting 130 kilometers, we hadn’t filled up our half-empty tank of gas – and not expecting to need five hours for this trajectory, we hadn’t brought any extra food or water.

Looking back, and even at the time, this trip was an adventure. A beautiful adventure, at that: how often do you get to travel through absolutely desolate desert landscape, surrounded by nothing but wild nature, and truly be in the middle of that vastness and feel that sense of solitude? In those five hours, we saw no more than two human beings. I have never been further into the middle of nowhere than during that trip, and have never quite thought about the beauty and power of the natural world (and the smallness of us as humans) as acutely as I did on that road.

Looking back, it was also a huge risk to take, of course. Not only was our car not built to deal with this kind of hardship; more fundamentally, we embarked on that trajectory without having prepared, and not knowing what to expect – a dangerous combination. We neither knew how much better or worse the road was going to get, nor how much longer it was going to be. There was no cell-phone reception, and neither human beings nor dwellings were anywhere in sight. What if we hit an insurmountable obstacle, 100 kilometers in? What if the car broke down, or what if we ran out of gas before we ran out of road? There would be no one to help us, no one to call, and nowhere to go.

These thoughts briefly got to me somewhere at what must have been the middle of our trip. We were driving over a patch of particularly large boulders at 2 kilometers per hour, when a wave of panic hit me. I am always a pessimist, in the sense that I always (and sometimes unnecessarily) prepare myself for the worst-case scenario. But in doing so, I always devise a B plan, an algorithm or two of solutions and ways to deal. I am used to calming myself by discovering that there is a way to solve any problem – but this was the first time I truly didn’t see a solution to the worst-case scenario. It halted my breath and made the world close in on me for a minute as I thought I was realizing there was no way out for us.

It didn’t last, and my spirits quickly lifted in a mood of pragmatism. A stony haze washed over me as we kept going, and the manual labor of pulling the car out of patches of sand that we encountered after those boulders helped keep my mind off panic. But it was the reminder of that brief moment of absolute desperation that caused me such incredible relief when we finally reached the paved road on the outskirts of Zagora. Its famous sign, “Tombouctou 52 jours” took on new meaning.


After arrival in Zagora, I expected the combination of the adventure’s majesty, the awareness of the immensity of the risk we had taken, and the relief of having safely arrived to result in an unprecedented and euphoric feeling of relief. I think it’s mostly this expectation of big emotions that made me want to write this post. I expected a new take on life, a sense of having been given a new chance to rededicate myself, to be reminded of what’s important and what is not worth worrying about.

But the truth is that those feelings didn’t really wash over me in the way I had expected or perhaps hoped. I did feel immense relief after arrival, but not the euphoric invincible sense of weightlessness that I always imagined one might feel at moments like these. Instead, I found myself almost a little hung over, haunted by the thought of the risk we’d taken – uncomfortably looking over my shoulder as though I’d narrowly escaped something that was now lurking in the shadows behind me. I slept restlessly that night, constantly waking up from vague and instantly forgotten dreams.

And soon enough, all those mundane worries of a day-to-day life came back, and my expectation of re-dedication seemed lost forever. Two weeks later, the experience seems so small, my panic so ridiculous, that I’m even wondering why I wanted to write about this in the first place. I think I’m a little disappointed at the lack of emotional weight that this event proved to carry, in the end – or disappointed in myself, for not having been as touched by this as I felt was appropriate. When in fact, of course, I should be grateful that our situation was not so dangerous as to leave a permanent emotional imprint.

But maybe – just maybe – it did leave a trace. I notice that I’ve been more grateful for things lately, and often hear myself whispering “hamdulillah” under my breath. I’m more optimistic than I know myself to be, and I seem to be more content with the way things are. I am more inclined these days to remind myself of how much I have to be thankful for (and it is a lot) – and this seems to alleviate my worries about an uncertain future.

Reflection on the South

During this road trip, and even now afterwards, I keep wondering what it is that makes the south so mesmerizing to me. Part of this has to do with the region’s obvious beauty, of course. It is the combination of colors – those shades of brown, interspersed by patches of intense green, traversed by sparkling rivers that send reflections of sunlight in all directions like winding prisms.

There is also the beauty of its difference: the difference of its pace of life, the daily concerns of its people, its architecture, its climate. This region is exposed to such different elements of nature than what I am accustomed to. I am used to dealing with rain and snow (I will not claim to be accustomed to the fear of earthquakes and wildfires after three years in southern California); this region is ruled by draught, wind, and heat. Instead of umbrellas, the people here don scarves to shield themselves from sand blown all around by strong desert winds. And instead of floods, these people worry that a lack of rain will ruin the year’s harvest and make for a difficult summer.

It is also simply the majesty of this natural environment. Being a city dweller I take it for granted that civilization trumps nature – but these regions prove the contrary. I am struck by these places where civilization has learned to work around the forces of nature, where people bow their heads to its power and know that any ground they’ve gained could be reclaimed at any moment. I am awed by these regions where natural cycles of rain and draught, light and dark dictate the pace of life and lifestyles prove that humans can be happy with much, much less than the things we we in cities depend on and take for granted.

These dimensions of difference give this region such an air of remoteness. It has such a quality of otherworldliness that this cannot but be a very faraway place. And in a sense, it is. Not in the number of kilometers between here and there, perhaps, but most definitely in its lack of accessibility. These small towns are truly hard to reach. Some villages are connected to the rest of the world by no more than a single, one-lane winding mountain road that leads but to a slightly larger town from which one might catch a bus to a regional hub, from where transport to one of Morocco’s large cities may then be arranged. Often one can pick up no more than a single radio station in these regions; in Tata, the only radio emissions we could find were Polisario’s.* There are internet cafés in these towns, these days, but the connection is slow and the computers are old.

How is it then, I wonder, that the people of these regions relate to the rest of Morocco? What are their daily concerns, and are they aware, in any way, of their situatedness within (and membership of) a larger union whose identity is, at least in the cities, a great public preoccupation? How connected do they really feel to the politics of Rabat, and the economics of Casablanca?

That said, how connected are they to the goings on in the northwest? The remoteness of these regions is maintained to no small extent by a lack of interest in its involvement on the part of the powers that be in Rabat and Casa. Citizens in the large cities complain of a lack of connection between politics and the people – let alone the voicelessness of individuals in these marginal areas.

This seeming lack of centralization (for how centralized is a country whose different regions communicate so poorly with one another) rests on a long historical legacy. Morocco has always known a distinction between bled el-makhzen (the center) and bled as-siba (the margins): between the regions that various dynasties were able to submit under centralized rule, and those where Berber tribes agreed to respect a sultan’s religious power, but refused to succumb to his political rule. The only difference between then and now seems to be that in those times, such regions were permitted to remain largely self-sufficient. Now, however, centralization has been pushed through to such an extent that self-sufficiency is no longer an option – yet not far enough that the margins have equal access to the facilities and services they are no longer able to provide on their own.

It makes me wonder why. Why has centralization been pushed through in such a partial and insufficient way? Is it a sense of disregard on the part of the power in Rabat, an underestimation of the value and power of these margins? Or is it rather a fear of that power – a fear of their threat to national unity, and a sense that if involved too much, if given too much access, people in the margins could perhaps pose a threat to established power, or to unity?

Whichever is the motivation, one has to wonder what kind of national unity could ever exist with such a lack of connection between parts of the country, and such a lack of involvement among such a sizeable proportion of the population. True change and development are impossible, I think, if two-thirds of the country is systematically left behind. One sees it in things as simple as the statistics of healthcare: the lack of access to care suffered by these remote populations is enough to drive up mortality rates to third world levels – no matter how many private clinics in Rabat and Casa may boast the latest in medical technology.

Strangely enough it might just be tourism that will connect these regions more permanently to the central regions of Morocco, that will force a more permanent channel of access to and from these remote places. I say strange, because tourists are outsiders to all these issues of national unity and development; it is precisely the type of tourist that remains blind to these inequalities and disenfranchisements whose money may ultimately force a change.

It is only tourist interest in the exoticism and natural beauty of this region (and the consequent influx of foreign money) that may give rise to any national interest in the development of an infrastructure of more accessible roads, and more reliable channels of communication.**

This gives tourists a strange kind of power. Tourists not only have a hand in the direction of development (by way of their money, as well as by way of their wishes, catered to by others with money); their continued interest in the region also sustains much of the local population, who make a living from the tourist industry. Keeping travelers happy (giving them what they come here to seek) helps keep the region alive. And so tourists become holders of power whose decisions affect the region in deeper ways than these travelers themselves may be aware of.

I think it’s this kind of power that Yelins alerted me to after we went to inquire after prices for a trek into the desert at an agency in Amezrou. Did I notice, he asked me, that although the blue man-agent directed his detailed explanation of options and routes mostly to Yelins, he clearly regarded me as the ultimate decision maker, exemplified by the fact that as soon as he mentioned concrete prices and options, he switched from Arabic into English and looked at me?

Tourists, then, become powerful decision-makers whose will ripples through the society and livelihood of the regions they visit. This power seems to be respected – and local industries cater to the images of exotic fantasy sought by these foreigners, but is this a real kind of power? How much control do tourists really exercise? Respecting the power of foreign money, I get the sense that local populations help create a particular, fantastical Moroccan ‘reality’ to cater to Western visitors’ wishes. Yet I also get the sense that foreigners will always be regarded as outsiders whose fantasies are humored, but never taken seriously. That the hegemony of their outlook is very partial – that a local man may cater to it in the sense that he puts on a blue gandoura and leads a camel to a ‘Berber’ camp in the desert, but that all this will not come to consume his view of reality – that it will, for him, always be a performance.

Then again, regardless of how ‘real’ the western view of Morocco is considered to be by locals, it seems to be powerful enough at times to push out any alternative realities. As I’ve noted about Ouarzazate and Marrakech, façades created by Western hands sometimes have the power to squash Moroccan realities, or force them to the margins. In that sense, can local peoples afford not to take these western fantasies seriously, not to see them as ‘real’ in their own, powerful way? Real in their power over whatever reality Moroccans live in, in any case?

Whatever the nature of this power, it’s something I’m uncomfortable with, as I always am uncomfortable in positions of power. I am always taken aback by the realization that I am expected to (somehow) determine or dictate the behavior of others. Especially in Morocco, this attribution of power creates discomfort – because I feel so incredibly powerless myself, most of the time. Though I feel that I am making headway, I still feel ignorant, unaccustomed, and childlike when it comes to the customs and norms that reign daily life. It is strange to then be treated as the decision-maker. As much as I hate to be the passive bystander, I am also constantly afraid of making the wrong decision.

Perhaps it is for this reason that I hate the thought of being labeled as a tourist – because I do not know what to do with the power that is then attributed to me. But I hate it also for the assumptions on which this attribution of power rests. The assumption that I am an outsider, that I am not interested in the ‘real’ Morocco, that I have money, that I do not speak the language. It’s because of all these thoughts – this unwillingness to be associated with the groups of travelers that shape the future of these regions – that I get frustrated when addressed in English, and that I felt so self-conscious atop that camel, literally taking the place of the tourists I had seen the day before. In a strange and childish sense of vanity, I want to be recognized for the not-quite-outsider I hope that I am. I want to be appreciated for my efforts, lauded perhaps even for my budding skills in darija – not pegged as the eternal foreigner.

* Polisario is the separatist movement in the Western Sahara, engaged in ongoing conflict with the Moroccan government.
** But then again, as Farid and I noted in Ouarzazate, until now most efforts at developing this southern region seem to come directly from Europe itself and cater to its own audience of travelers, rather than to any sustainable development for the local population.

Description of a Pilgrimage

Ever since Farid and I first set foot on the road from Ouarzazate to Zagora, we were hooked – mesmerized by the beauty of the south, taken in by its exoticism and remoteness. We never made it further than Agdz that day, but that evening, as we reminisced about our conversation with a group of local men in a dilapidated kasbah, we began to talk about coming back – and following the road all the way to its endpoint at M’Hamid, that remote little dot we saw on the map surrounded by all that desert, only 45 kilometers from the closed Algerian border.

Last week, we made true on that promise. A sequence of Dutch holidays (Queen’s day on the 30th, Memorial day on May 4th, and Liberation day on the 5th) closed the NIMAR’s doors for six days, and gave us our chance to undertake a mini-odyssey to M’Hamid.

On the eve of Queen’s Day, our caravan (Farid, me, our colleague and friend Yelins, and a rented black Chevy) set out for Marrakech, which was to be the starting point of our voyage. We enjoyed a late dinner on the Jemaa el Fna with a college friend of mine who had vacationed in Agadir, and then retired to our Kasbah-style hotel on the edge of town for an early night. We did not dwell in the pink city: early the next morning we hit the road and traversed the haut atlas on our way to Taroudant (with a brief stop in Imi-n-Tanoute for the most delicious tajine I have ever eaten).

Taroudant is a city less impressive than I had anticipated. Constructed in the same hues of terracotta as Marrakech (in fact, this color dominates much of the architecture in the south), it seems to be a smaller and less wealthy version of that city, left mostly untouched by European money and dreams of Orientalism. It has no great monuments to attract the foreign visitor, it is (thus?) lacking in high-class accommodation and haute cuisine restaurants – and thus seems to pull very modest amounts of tourism into its gates. Yet in its own way, it was precisely this that made the city more interesting to us – without the dominance of a tourist industry, the city had a quality of authenticity that I often miss in Marrakech. We certainly did see the occasional tourist traversing the city, but spent the evening at the hotel bar surrounded by local men, ate breakfast at a café where servers seemed completely un-jaded by the appearance of a blonde woman (and persistently and a bit confusedly kept speaking English despite my responses in Arabic), and witnessed a very lively May 1st protest march – the kind of thing no Moroccan hopeful of painting a flattering portrait of his country would want a tourist to see. In an interesting contrast with Marrakech, this town seemed, at last on Labor day, to be less interested in appearances than it is in social justice.

This May 1st activity resonated with Taroudant’s general identity as a rebellious little town. After figuring as Saadian capital* and thus base for resistance against Portuguese invasion during the 16th century, Taroudant supported a rebellion against sultan Moulay Ismail** in the 17th century (for which Moulay Ismail, after crushing this rebellion, made the city pay by slaughtering its population). Finally, Taroudant put up resistance against French colonizers during the early 20th century by harboring the son of a Saharan sheikh, Ahmed el-Hiba, who protested the creation of the Protectorate by proclaiming his own sultanate in Tiznit.

After an evening and morning in Taroudant, we hopped back in the car and drove to Tafraoute along a winding mountain road through small towns with names like Souq-tleta (“Tuesday market”) or Ait-Abdellah (“the tribe of Abdellah”) – names that bear witness to the way in which towns come into being. Admittedly the decision to visit Tafraoute led us on a de-tour away from the intended destination of our trip, but it was well worth the extra hours: this town lies in a valley surrounded by impressive rock formations and beautiful fields of almond trees.



We stayed in town only for a relaxing couscous lunch (it was Friday, after all – the day for ‘kseksou’) and brief stop at an internet café (where I received the happy news that I have finally been granted IRB approval!) – then drove back part of the way we came to get to Tata, our destination for the night. The sun set before we reached Tata, but not before our brief stop in Tagmoute, where we fell right into a local moussem, or festival. The theme of this moussem was unclear to me, but its epicenter was a series of tents where women sold herbs and oils. Groups of women sat on the ground around these tens, while other groups walked around, listening to the music that emanated from large loud speakers.*** The women wore a peculiar costume of simply constructed dresses in hues of blue or black, scarves in the same color worn on top of them; a few walked around in patterned fabrics. Each color was worn by a collection of women, which made me wonder if there is a meaning or categorization behind this choice of costume. I attempted some furtive picture-taking, but with the diminishing daylight, my moving around resulted in an unfocused mess.



Night began to fall as groups of girls walked away into the palm groves, and we got back in the car for the last stretch to Tata. We could not see much in the dark, but it was clear that the landscape was becoming flatter here. Early the next morning, as we got a head start on the next leg of our trip, Tata revealed itself as a desert outpost that reminded me strongly of small towns in Nevada – in the sense that Tata, too, is a desert town that stands tall on a flat plain of sand where the wind reigns supreme, and little other civilization beyond its edges helps to shield Tata from the elements.

That Saturday we drove from Tata to Zagora along a road that led us right through the desert. As sand swept across the tarmac and shrouded the road ahead in a mysterious mist, we delighted in seeing wild camels grazing in the distance (or not so far in the distance) by oases of palm trees, and small rivers running through this arid landscape – such a seeming contradiction of natural terms.



I will describe this particular leg of our trip in more detail in another post, but suffice it to say that we arrived in Zagora after a 300 km trip that took us about eight hours, exhausted and relieved, excited finally to have arrived in this town we were unable to reach on our last trip.

Zagora itself is uninteresting, but we spent the afternoon exploring the beautiful ‘palmeraie’ in nearby Amezrou, and retired early to gear up for our trip to the real desert, scheduled for the following day.



Zagora marks the beginning of the world of the blue men – men dressed in the deep-blue gandouras the south is famous for, heads wrapped in black scarves to protect against the sun. They are everywhere – they are the proprietors of souvenir shops selling similar garments for tourists, the men standing on corners waiting to show tourists the way, the individuals leading camels bearing tourists into the nearby sand dunes and back. We saw them in Tamegroute (site of a mesmerizing library of 13th century books of all varieties – Qur’ans, treatises on the medicinal uses of plants, dictionaries, scriptural exegesis), Tinfou, Tagounite, and finally in M’Hamid, where we approached them for a trek into the desert.

After being aggressively courted by a trekking company that called itself ‘le Petit Prince’ (and who initially enchanted us with its quote from one of that book’s last pages on its outer wall), we made arrangements with another operator (Cherg expéditions) that seemed less eager to get us on board of their caravan. We enjoyed a lunch of tajine with camel meat on Cherg’s premises, relaxed on their sdari (Moroccan couches) and checked our email one more time at ‘desert net’ before packing ourselves into Cherg’s land rover and heading to the dunes.

Just outside of town, we traded the land rover for three camels. Bouncing along with the camel’s lazy tread, we were led by three blue men through small villages, past old abandoned qsour [plural of qsar, a palace/fortress typical for the south] to a permanent camp surrounded by a few dunes of sand. Incidentally this camp, too, had chosen ‘Le Petit Prince’ for its name – Antoine de St. Exupéry’s story of the small prince encountered in the North African desert is a popular source of inspiration for these tour operators, it seems (perhaps it is thought that this cultural reference will resonate with and thus attract European tourists?).



I felt a bit self-conscious atop my camel. Having watched caravans of camels bearing middle-aged, under-dressed and overly tanned tourists on their backs pass through Amezrou the day before, I had been struck by the sadness of that image. By the seeming disconnect between these tourists high atop these animals, and the blue men on the ground leading them by a rope. How aware are these tourists, I thought, of the reality of this world they have entered? Do they see beyond the blue costumes and the dunes of sand to the hardship and poverty of this region? And in turn, how much do these blue men really know about the world these tourists come from? Both sides see the other’s world in hues of stereotypes and images, and take comfort in the barrier of language that makes real communication impossible.

As we traversed small oasis-towns and passed by little boys greeting us with ‘bonjour’, I worried about being a similar kind of disconnected tourist. This feeling was reinforced by my mostly passive behavior, on that overnight trek, of my presence at but non-participation in the Arabic conversations Farid and Yelins had with the men who had led us to this camp. I sat with them that evening, listening to the exchange and trying to understand as much as I could, frustrated by what I was sure was an appearance of ignorance and disinterest. I perceived myself as being cast in a role I did not want, but felt unable to change anything about this.

Involved in conversations about Berber identity and the nature of ‘language’ we missed the desert sunset, but had a pleasant evening under candle light and a semi-clear night of stars. The wind picked up somewhere over the course of the night and we awoke underneath a layer of sand. ‘Le petit prince’ actually had a brick building with running water, but it didn’t seem like the place for a warm shower (and besides, the second half of our desert trip was still before us, why wash off the sand if more was to come?) – and so we hopped in a land rover and drove back to Zagora.

We hadn’t been able to witness much of the change in landscape on our way south – the sun had set soon after we passed Casablanca. But driving north along the eastern route that runs through er-Rachidia, the change is impressive and sudden. It occurs somewhere around Midelt, a borderline of sorts in the middle of the Atlas – where, all of a sudden, the terracotta kasbas and brown earth of the south is replaced by whitewashed concrete and pine trees. A little further north, around Azrou, slanted roofs reminiscent of Swiss postcards dominate the scenery (this is because of the snow, I learned).

A little further west, this Alpine landscape gave way to the rolling hills of Morocco’s northern Atlantic coast, and suddenly we found ourselves back home, back in the everyday world that suddenly seemed so mundane, after that excursion to the exotic south.


* the Saadians were a dynasty that arose in the south (around Zagora, actually) and ruled Morocco in the 16th century. They claim descent from the Prophet Mohammed and thus have a fair amount in common with the current ruling dynasty, the Alaouites.
** Moulay Ismail, the second ruler of the current (Alaouite) dynasty, ruled during the late 17th century. He established his capital at Meknes and was known for his bloodthirstiness. It is under this ruler, incidentally, that Morocco was able to permanently defy an Ottoman invasion.
*** Men were fewer in number, and kept themselves at a greater distance from the festivities. Was this moussem a women’s affair? If so, why would that be? Did that depend on the particular theme of this moussem?

Grounding

Lately, life has been carrying me along too rapidly for me to take any time for reflection, it seems. I have been back in Morocco for more than two months, but it feels as though no more than two weeks have passed. I have utterly enjoyed every minute of these two months, but I have realized that without a bit of time for private reflection, I lose my sense of grounding. My sense of control, my sense of where I am in all this ‘world’ and ‘life’ around me, and my sense of what I am doing there.

It is not the first time that alone time has been hard to find here in Morocco. But despite the intensity of social interaction with my host family last fall, I was always ‘alone’ in my head, in a way – because none of those relationships were based on personal connections, I was able to maintain a kind of observer’s distance, which perhaps means that I was always in a reflective mode. This time around, the social interaction that dominates my days, evenings, and nights, is entirely personal. I am wholly involved in the relationships I have built up, and they have swept me up in a current of activity and interaction so deep I have a hard time reaching the ground with my toes.

Nevertheless, some changes have occurred lately in my situation here – some planned, some by surprise – that have created a greater sense of grounding, and I am hopeful for a greater sense of solidity and control.

First of all, I have moved out of the NIMAR apartment. I now live by myself in a studio on a busy street lined with cafes. I miss living with Fatima but love the space I now have to myself, the satellite TV I can watch in bed until late at night, and the bathroom I don’t have to share with anyone. I love waking up with the smell of croissants floating up from the cafés below, and I love playing host to Fatima, Farid, and other friends. I even love having responsibility for a household now – I love having to be organized enough to take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, pay electricity bills when they are due, replacing the tank of propane when I am out of gas.

And secondly, I have been awarded a grant! After three rejections, I finally, finally have a (conditional) award. I will receive this grant only on the condition that my research obtains human subjects approval, and quite a few questions remain to be answered before such approval will be granted, but still – it is such a relief, such an honor, to finally receive a positive response to my grant proposals. And such an exciting (but also a little scary) thought that I will actually be able to begin this research!

I feel lucky, and need to allow myself more often to realize how happy I am these days: I am living in a city I am in love with; I have a beautiful apartment in that city with everything I need; I have the opportunity to start the research project I have been dreaming about for so long, and I get to do it all while spending half of my week in the warm environment of the Dutch institute. And that sense of grounding – I’ll get there, too.

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.