Numbness

For the staff of the open women’s ward much of July was spent in frustration over a young woman by the name of Maria.

Maria suffered from a sizeable list of vague physical pains and symptoms. She spent her days inexhaustibly in pursuit of any doctor she could find, beseeching him or her to order her some medical tests. Every fifteen minutes, she’d knock on the door of the doctor’s office with another question. At first the denials were friendly, accompanied by a well-intentioned explanation. But as her persistence grew, doctors’ responses became curt, revealing a mounting vexation. At our regular Thursday morning get-togethers, Maria would raise her hand every time another woman had finished her story – and every time, the psychiatrist would pre-emptively cut her off:

“Do you want to contribute to the subject under discussion, or do you want to talk about yourself?”

“I want to talk about myself,” Maria would respond in a feeble voice, visibly shrinking away from what she knew would be the reaction – and the doctor would politely but curtly tell her to wait her turn.

Maria had been hospitalized for the treatment of depression, but after a few weeks of this behavior, her treating psychiatrist had concluded that she must be suffering from some kind of delusion.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” he sighed one day, after having nicely but firmly sent Maria out of his office for the tenth time that morning.

“The medical tests come back negative every time, but she’s never satisfied. She’ll simply find a new symptom to complain about.”

One of Maria’s most persistent symptoms was her sense that she lacked a stomach. There was no place in her abdomen for food to go, she complained; consequently, she felt neither hunger nor thirst. She expressed a haunting sense of numbness that no doctor seemed able to help her with. Every mealtime became a torturous ordeal; every day was spent in the fruitless pursuit of some kind of feeling – some reminder, perhaps, that she was still alive.

Maria was discharged at the end of the month, without any real improvement in her condition; there simply was nothing more the doctors could do for her.

***

One morning, three weeks later, Maria was back on the ward for a consultation with her doctor. It was the third day of Ramadan. She saw me sitting on a bench in the courtyard, and came over. When I asked her how she was, she sighed.

“I’m still not hungry,” she reported, the tears she was holding back clearly audible in the quiver of her voice. All I could think of to respond was that I was sorry to hear she was not feeling any better. Then, wanting to add at least something of a thoughtful nature, I wished her a “Ramadan moubarak.” Once again she sighed.

“Kansawm,” she said – I’m fasting. “wa lakin kayderrni.” It hurts me.

“Why does it hurt?” I asked, wondering as much about why she was fasting as about why fasting would hurt someone who feels no hunger.

“Ana mrida,” she explained, her tone betraying a sense of urgency. I’m sick.

“Do you have to fast, even if you’re sick?”

She shrugged. “My husband says I have to.”

As she said this, she wandered away; she had spotted her doctor and was off to catch him before he had a chance to leave the ward. She left me sitting on that bench, both confused and intrigued about the seeming paradox between the two things she had just shared with me. If she felt no hunger, why would fasting be difficult for her?

By the end of that day I began to realize that Maria herself had already provided the answer in her explanation: she’s sick.

The Qur’an states that a person suffering from illness is not obligated to participate in the yearly month-long fast.* And indeed, not a single patient on this ward refrained from eating or drinking.** The meal cart came and went at its normal non-Ramadan hours, and the women walked around the ward with cigarettes, coffee, and water bottles as though it was any ordinary day of the year.

Before the start of the month, doctors had explained, with a smile, that Ramadan would divide the women on the ward into two categories. There would be patients who’d beg to go home; who would assure their doctor they were well enough to participate in the full experience of Ramadan with their families. On the other hand, there would be patients – the côté hystérique – who would emphasize their illness and their right to exemption from fasting, as yet another way to claim a kind of special treatment.

However, the women I talked to on the ward expressed both sentiments at once. They expressed frustration over the fact that their hospitalization prevented them from sharing in the experience of Ramadan. This holy month carries incredible cultural significance in Morocco; participation is often as much a religious obligation as it is a way of reaffirming (and showing) your membership of the community. These patients missed their families, the traditions, the general spirit of the month.

On the other hand, however, the women also seemed to understand their isolation as a kind of refuge. Not participating in the fast became, in some ways, a way of underlining their special status, and thus their rights to special treatment. For these patients, in other words, the Qur’anic exemption mentioned above translated into the idea that one’s behavior during Ramadan becomes a visible marker of one’s identity as either healthy or sick. Not fasting constitutes a new way of asserting one’s status as being truly ill – and by extension, not being obligated to fast means that one’s sick role is accepted by the environment, and thus declared legitimate.

Conversely, being obligated to fast thus automatically implies that your illness is denied; that your suffering is not legitimate.

A lot of the patients on the ward suffer from this sense of denial. They feel misunderstood; they complain about their family’s inconsideration for their illness. Of course it isn’t always possible to ascertain whether a patient’s family really is as inconsiderate as she claims, but I do have the sense that mental illness can be a difficult thing for the average Moroccan woman to talk about with her loved ones. Some of these patients come from an environment that does not allow women to talk much about personal feelings, nor to complain about hardship. Some of them are stuck in loveless marriages, and some of them bear sole responsibility for the survival of a large number of family members, without any hope of assistance from anyone else.

I think it might be this sense of denial that makes fasting so painful for Maria – and I think it might be this denial that underlies her sense of numbness in the first place. Whether or not the numbness is ‘delusional’, I think it could be possible that this is her way of expressing a fundamental sense of isolation and disconnect from the world. Maria has no role to play in the public sphere: she is a housewife whose responsibility lies in the home. But there, too, she lives her life unnoticed. Her husband and family members are far-off figures from whom she does not seem to receive much at all in the way of affection. During her four weeks at the Clinic, not once did they come to see her.

Maria is not seen, and not heard, by those around her. Perhaps she has internalized this sense of isolation; and now it is she who can no longer feel. Her husband’s insistence that she fast is another manifestation of his denial, and thus a further deprivation of sensation. It is this that is painful to her. What she seeks, with her pleas to the doctors, is simply a sense of reconnection. A sense of understanding, a listening ear – a sign that she is perceived by the world, which might in turn reignite her own capacity for perception.

We all deserve to be seen. Without it, we might all wither in numbness like Maria. Perhaps that medication might help Maria with her delusion. But mostly, I hope she succeeds in finding a listening ear.

* And in some ways, fasting is a logical impossibility: taking medication already means that your body is ingesting something. Even if you were to stay away from food or drink, a pill taken on its own already breaks the fast. Nevertheless, I was told before the start of the month that for some patients, it might be possible to adjust the dosage of their medication in such a way that they would be able to refrain from ingesting anything during the hours of fasting, thus enabling them to participate.

** I was told, however, that a fair number of male patients at the hospital were, in fact, participating.

In Need of a Listening Ear

“Charlotte,” she calls out. “Charlotte, shoufi,” look at me.

I turn towards her and she stands there in the middle of the room, a seductive smile on her face as she dances to the sound of Egyptian pop. She’s feeling the rhythm with eyes half closed.

“Like this, see?” she says and puts her hands on her hips for emphasis, swaying back and forth to the beat. She motions for me to join her. “Come here, try it. Leave your jacket.”

I get up off the couch, and join her in movement. She regards me critically as I attempt to imitate her movements, then laughs. “Hey, come and see!” She calls out to people walking by outside. “Charlotte’s belly dancing!”

***

I first talk to Rachida one Wednesday morning, two days after her hospitalization. On the day of her admission she’d been wearing a black Saudi-style abaya* with matching headscarf; twenty-four hours later, the Islamic clothing has been replaced by a leopard-print track suit. Diamond studs across the chest spell out “Chanel.” She has joined the other patients’ regular grooming activities, and now walks around with her hair blown out into large curls, her lips painted a deep pink, and her eyes accented with heavy lines of kohl.

Within ten minutes of meeting her, Rachida has filled me in on the pertinent parts of her biography. She lives in a southern Moroccan town with her husband and three children, and she is a housewife. With regard to that last fact, there are three things I need to know. First of all, that she is highly intelligent – she could have pursued a higher education, had she been given the opportunity. Secondly, that she is a great cook (which prompts her to describe, in elaborate detail, the particular dishes she’s mastered). And thirdly, that she hasn’t lifted a finger in the house ever since she fell ill, now three years ago. “Je fais rien – du – tout,” she summarizes for emphasis.

She doesn’t know how or why she got sick. It simply happened one day, mysteriously and suddenly. For three long years she was incapacitated – but she’s definitely feeling better now, she lets me know. She tells me she’s “farhana,” happy, on the ward: everyone is nice, there’s always someone to talk to, and everything is taken care of (though the food doesn’t compare to what she whips up at home, of course).

She’s invited me to her room, and we sit on her bed as she shows me pictures of her family, describing each of her loved ones in the most positive of terms. I casually remark that her husband bears a striking resemblance to her late father: both were military men who seem to fulfill all the requirements of ideal Moroccan masculinity. She’s spoken of both with tenderness in her voice. But here I seem to have overstepped some boundary. “Not at all!” she exclaims with a vehemence that makes me fear I might have sullied someone’s image. Her father was a great man, she assures me; a truly great man. Her husband, on the other hand, is revealed to be a jealous grouch. Like all men from the south, he is conservative and traditional; it’s because of him that she stays at home, wears a headscarf, and keeps her distance from unknown men.

And suddenly she suggests that this stifling home environment is the actual cause of her malaise. She isn’t happy in her southern town, she explains; she feels quite literally like a fish on dry, desert-like land. She would much prefer to live in a place like Rabat, where women have jobs, and go to the beach whenever they like. She’s glad to be far away from her husband for the time being. He’s not allowed to visit her (doctor’s orders), but she doesn’t mind one bit. This way, she says with a smile, she can truly relax and get better.

Rachida’s eagerness to talk compels me to recruit her as a research participant. And she is indeed happy to be interviewed – yet the conversations that ensue are not nearly as rich or productive as I had hoped. The thing is that Rachida’s stories are a bit like a pre-recorded message; no matter what questions I ask, she tells me this same basic narrative over and over again. Behind this story is a mental wall that I simply cannot manage to break through. She repeatedly tells me that she is entrusting me and my recorder with her deepest secrets, but I get none of the subjective detail or emotional depth that I had expected to find.

It takes me a while (and quite a bit of self-doubt about my qualities as an interviewer) to realize that this is the very source of Rachida’s problem. It seems that she may have been right on the money when she blamed her environment for her illness. Rachida has lived her life in a time and place that discouraged women’s freedom to express their personal feelings and desires. She is hermetic about what goes on in her mind not because she does not want to share, but because she quite simply never learned how to do so.

Nevertheless, everyone needs an outlet – everyone needs to vent. And so in the absence of words, Rachida communicates with her body. Her malaise manifests itself to her as fatigue, depression, or a momentary lapse in consciousness that she explains as a neurological anomaly. She is a hypochondriac, and her medical file contains three inches worth of lab reports, x-rays, and MRI scans that all come to the same conclusion: her problem is mental, not physical.

Her inability to communicate verbally also explains her need for attention and tendency to seduce. Stuck in an impossible position, between a lack of words and the uncontrollable need to finally be heard, Rachida craves human interaction and a bit of understanding. But unable to ask for it directly, she’s learned to attract it by using the physical power of her femininity.

Rachida is, in a word, hystérique. The days of Freud are long gone, and the term “hysteria” no longer appears in the international diagnostic manuals currently in use – but it is alive and well in Morocco. The women’s ward always houses a few patients with hysteria; women just like Rachida, who have no other way to speak than through their bodies.

The doctors are stern with Rachida. She is taking anti-depressants, but the dominant aspect of her treatment involves a kind of behavioral therapy. Rachida must learn to be more emotionally independent, and she must learn to talk about her feelings. The doctor meets with her every day, and patiently yet persistently attempts to break through her mental wall. But women like Rachida are never allowed to stay at the hospital too long. This so as not to indulge in the ‘secondary benefits’ of hospitalization. Being a patient means being confirmed as being ‘sick’ – and that label entitles one to all kinds of special care and attention. Most patients cannot wait to be cured and discharged. But les hystériques? They couldn’t be happier, right here on the ward, being taken care of by everyone else. In order to ensure that such women still retain some motivation to get better, the staff tries to make hospitalization slightly less attractive – by cutting off certain privileges. This is why Rachida isn’t allowed to have visitors. She’s also not allowed to keep her cell phone with her, and although the staff encourages her to talk, they make sure not to be too available to her.

Luckily I am not a member of the staff, and I can be as available to Rachida as I want. Perhaps I can be a listening ear that doesn’t probe for uncomfortable details, I decide. And so I give up on diving into the depths of her mind, settling instead for easy interaction. Aside from our interviews I hang out with her on the ward’s courtyard, relaxing in the sun. As we sit side by side, she’ll turn to me, put on her nicest smile, and ask, “Comment tu me trouves?” What do you think of me?

I’ll turn, and look at her. And before I get a chance to answer, she’ll hint at the particular kind of compliment she’s looking for that day.

On this particular afternoon, she runs her fingers through her hair and poses a rhetorical question.

“I have nice hair, right?”

I express my agreement, and she continues. It’s perfectly curly, she explains. And no matter what she does with it, it always looks great. It’s just too bad she’ll have to cover it back up with a headscarf as soon as she leaves the hospital…

And off she goes; she has launched herself into another rendition of her biography. I lean back in the sun, put a smile on my face, and simply listen.

* basically, a long, formless black dress

Ethnography of a Psychiatric Ward: The Meaning of Psychosis

“What’s the point?” she asks. She looks fragile as she sits in that chair, her shoulders drooping and her face nearly hidden by the pink hoodie she’s pulled over her hair. She looks at the doctor with a bit of frustration in her eyes, her hands digging themselves deeper into her hoodie’s pockets.

“It’s gone, and I feel good. Isn’t that all that matters?”

Doctor Mourad leans back, and lets out a subtle sigh. Then he responds:

“But it’s important that we talk about this, you and me, so that I can help you.”

The consultation is suddenly interrupted when the door swings open and another resident walks in. She shares this consultation room with Dr. Mourad, and she’s here to pick up her bag. As the two physicians exchange a few pleasantries, I notice the patient’s head sinking lower and lower, until it is cradled by her hands. Rhythmic tremors running through her shoulders betray that she is crying.

But she has not given in. After the female resident leaves, Dr. Mourad tries again, to no avail. He is hoping to convince his patient to talk about her experience of possession by what she calls a diable, a devil (or, in Arabic, a shaitan*). I cannot help but think that he’s doing so in part for my benefit; ever since the doctors on this ward have learned about my research interests, they are constantly calling me in to observe their interaction with patients who claim to have been possessed or cursed – an experience the doctors categorically define as a particular kind of hallucination. None have been as unwilling to discuss the subject as this young woman, and I am struck by her defensiveness.

Her next argument calls on notions of expertise and authority, as she hopes to excuse herself from the responsibility of having to explain what happened to her:

“You shouldn’t ask me,” she says. “I don’t know anything about jnoun, diables or shaitans. All I know is what it says in the Qur’an. If you want any explanations, don’t ask me. You need to talk to an expert, some kind of scholar.”

The doctor tries to explain that he’s not interested in theory; he just wants to know what happened to her. But it’s no use, and a few minutes later we escort the patient back to her room. She’s staying in the closed women’s ward: a dreary concrete courtyard where about twenty five very sick women spend their days doing little more than wandering around. Paint flakes off the walls and ceilings, there is little more than a few rusty old hospital beds to sit on in the recreational room, and a stale smell of abandonment hangs in the air. It is a far cry from the state of the art facilities where I spent my first week at the Clinic. Having moved on to a third ward at the time of writing, I’ve learned that this closed ward is by no means representative of the rest of this hospital. Nevertheless, it struck me in its sadness, and I think the difference in environment between this and other wards is worth exploring.

The dreariness of this ward is matched by a complete lack of stimulation or activity for the patients. Doctors tell me that a hair dresser comes to the ward to do the patients’ hair once in a while, and nurses will sometimes hang out with the women, listening to music or dancing a little. But there is no exercise equipment like there was on the addiction ward, nor are there musical instruments, books, or a television. Nothing is allowed on the ward; in their psychosis or suicidality, a fair amount of these women cannot be trusted not to do something harmful. On the one hand, I wonder how these women make it through the day, with nothing to do. On the other, even I can see that the majority of these patients are too sick to be able to participate in any kind of activity.

Most of the patients on this ward suffer from a psychotic disorder. They are heavily medicated: each morning, the nurses enter the ward with a tray full of Haldol, Largactil,** and other anti-psychotics and tranquilizers. The medication is often administered by injection – pills can be refused, I guess. There is no privacy; each room accommodates five to six women. Without curtains or doors to hide behind anywhere, patients are injected right there on the courtyard, en plein public.

Despite this medication, the women seem truly sick. Many of them spend their days walking around the courtyard, talking animatedly to the voices in their head. They slur their speech when they talk, and jump from one subject to the next. They crowd around the locked glass door that separates the ward from the nurses’ area, and sing famous Sherine songs.*** When they notice me, sitting there with the staff, they blow me kisses, and call out that I’m trop belle. A few of them even begin to recite the Fatiha, the first verses of the Qur’an. I’m struck by this ‘strange’ lack of inhibition, and take it as a sign that these women are really sick. Nevertheless, when that glass door opens and they all come in to greet me, they are friendly, and normal, and simply curious. They just want to know my name, where I’m from, how I’m doing. The next day, I see genuine recognition in their eyes as they greet me again.

A lot of the patients, the doctors tell me, believe they have been possessed, or cursed. One of the residents tells me, almost self-consciously, that for a psychiatrist, this is a hallucination. An anthropologist might feel differently, she adds, but for her, it is part of a psychotic symptomatology. I don’t have time to respond – she’s in consultation with a patient at the moment, and simply turns to me once in a while to ‘translate’ what the patient is saying into psychiatric terms. But it makes me realize that I need to come up with a ready answer for questions such as these. I am so often asked these days if I believe in possession, or in the effectiveness of countercurses. Regardless of how I might feel about these issues, I think I’ll say “I don’t know.” True objectivity is an illusion, I know that, but I think it’s a better idea not to weigh in on these questions with the people who are participating in my research, and try to maintain some kind of neutrality.

A central question in my research, however, is what happens when two different theories about mental illness meet. What does it do to a person’s experience of being sick, when his or her belief about possession is explained (dismissed?) by a psychiatrist as a ‘hallucination’? I cannot help but wonder if this has anything to do with that young woman’s unwillingness to tell Dr. Mourad about her experience. As we talked about her reticence, Dr. Mourad explained that she might worry that her diable will come back if she talks about it. Alternatively, she might be afraid that talking about devils will lead doctors to conclude that she warrants longer hospitalization. Dr. Mourad, however, feels that she will not truly be well enough to leave until she is able to talk openly about her experience. I can see his point; I tend to believe in the idea that talking – externalizing – provides a necessary kind of catharsis. Nevertheless, I wonder what it’s like for a patient like this young woman; to be asked to open up about a very traumatic experience to someone who might not agree about what that experience meant, and who has no more than twenty minutes a day to speak with you.

All of it makes me wonder about the nature or definition of ‘pathology’. Who has the right to define what’s normal and what’s not, and who gets to decide what it all means, or what should be done about it? I’m thinking here not just about the meaning of possession. Aside from these beliefs, another problem most of the patients had in common was a history of prostitution. Nearly every patient I met on the ward had, according to the doctors, engaged in some kind of prostitution at some moment in time. This behavior was often seen as a symptom of illness: a sign of mania, or psychosis. Some patients talked openly about it all, while others denied ever having sold their bodies – a sign, for the psychiatrist, of that patient’s impaired judgment. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether it might not be at least a little understandable that a woman might deny having engaged in something considered to be so shameful?

In addition, I wonder how much cultural beliefs and social expectations have weighed in on the high occurrence of ‘prostitution’-as-pathology among these patients. Morocco is a modernizing country, but extramarital sex is still, and will probably long remain, highly unacceptable for a woman. Does that mean, I wonder, that the definition of ‘prostitution’ here in Morocco is broader than ours? Once, when discussing an alcoholic male patient’s extramarital affairs with girls, a resident insisted that he must have slept with prostitutes. Anything else was simply not possible, she said; any girl who has extramarital sex is by definition a prostitute. Perhaps some of these female patients had engaged in behavior that, by Western standards, would not necessarily be termed prostitution? And in the same way, I wonder if the particular unacceptability of extramarital sex might mean that doctors here are more likely than elsewhere to label promiscuous behavior as ‘pathological’? Excessive promiscuity is often included on lists of the kind of reckless behavior that the DSM-IV lists as a possible symptom of mania, or various personality disorders. Nevertheless, I wonder if cultural mores weigh in here to create this particular tendency to label people with deviant sexual behavior.

I spent a lot of my time on this ward in a chair in the nurses’ lounge, observing the women on the ward through that glass door. And as they crowded up against that door to wave or sing to me, I began to wonder: what really is the difference between me and them? Aren’t we both curiously and unabashedly observing the other? I am as interested in them as they are in me. As a foreigner I, too, don’t always behave according to the social rules. Aren’t I, then, as abnormal as they are? When the nurse pulls a screen in front of the door, I am not sure whose gaze she is trying to avert – theirs, or mine.

I had hoped to do my research on this ward, but the level of pathology might pose a problem. I can interview only those who are capable of understanding the goals of my research, and of providing informed consent for participation. I did not meet a single patient who would have met those criteria – an observation later corroborated by most of the residents. I haven’t yet visited the open women’s ward, but hope this may be a better fit. Part of me is relieved, not to have to spend a few months on that dreary, tragic ward. But the other part of me continues to think about the women I’ve met there, wondering how they’re doing now, half a week since I last saw them, wondering also where they might end up, once they leave the Clinic.


* though curiously, this woman argued that a diable is not the same thing as a shaitan. It was one of the few things she was willing to explain – though she couldn’t tell us what exactly the difference was. I continue to be intrigued by the way in which Moroccans mix French and Arabic - and her distinction between these two concepts interestingly contradicts the idea that the two languages are conceptually interchangeable...
** Largactil is known as thorazine in the US, I believe.
*** Sherine is a famous middle eastern singer. Egyptian, most likely.

Dreaming in Morocco

In lieu of a written post, I'm going to present you with a visual today. This was sent to me by Hatim, my good friend from Fes. I'm grateful to him for sharing it with me, and will now pass it along to you.

This is a short film entitled "Dreaming in Morocco." It was made in 2007 by Pamela Nice, an independent filmmaker from Minnesota. Hoping to dispel the stereotypes (and perhaps ignorance) that we in the West often hold about Arab youth, Nice interviews a set of young adults in Morocco about their dreams and aspirations. The individuals featured in this film come from all walks of life, and thus showcase some of the incredible diversity that renders Morocco such an intriguing country. The film does not delve into the societal and political issues that confront these youth as they pursue their dreams, and as such does little more than scratch the surface of the true complexity of life in Morocco - but it's an interesting, well-made, and thought provoking film nonetheless. Enjoy!

Running in the park

Last night, I was to have arrived back in Casablanca. I would have de-boarded the plane around nine thirty (had the Air Arabia flight from Brussels not experienced any delays, of course), and I would have tried to catch the ten PM train to Rabat – entering the country would have gone smoothly, because I wouldn’t have checked any luggage.

But in reality, I cancelled both this flight and the one that would have taken me from Chicago to Brussels, and now remain, for the time being, at my parents’ house in Hyde Park. The short version of the story is that, as a Legal Permanent Resident of the United States, one cannot just go and spend two years in a foreign country without keeping the authorities abreast of your intentions and activities. Which is what I am now doing, by means of an application for what is called a re-entry permit.

Hopefully this will be no more than a few weeks’ delay – I told the Clinic that I’d like to start my research around November first, and I hope I can hold myself to that promise. But for now, I’m enjoying the changes of fall (after three years in San Diego, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen leaves change color) and keeping myself busy with episodes of Dexter, movies from Netflix, and new recipes from the Top Chef cookbook. And this morning, I went running along the trail that spans the better part of Chicago’s lakefront. It didn’t go too well – I hadn’t expected otherwise, considering that my last run dates back to the weekend before the start of Ramadan. But whether I’m running, walking, or gasping for air, it’s always a pleasure to be out on that trail and see the Chicago skyline emerging on the waterfront, right as the road curves west around 52nd street.

Ramadan was neither the first, nor the longest break I’ve ever taken from running. In fact, running has only recently become a permanent part of my life in Morocco. Until this past May, being in Morocco always entailed a dire lack of opportunity to exercise – something I tried to make up for by walking everywhere I went (to the great frustration of many a host family, who would rather see me traveling in the safe confines of a taxi).

During my first three-month stay in Morocco – it was Fes, and it was the spring of 2005 – I was advised that exercising was not really something women did. The inescapable (and highly verbalized) male gaze on the street was enough to make any woman think twice about going for a jog – and thus attract even more attention to herself by traversing the public sphere in a run, wearing exercise clothing, and sporting an iPod). Gyms, like cafés, were a man’s domain – and anyway, I was told, I wouldn’t find much there, other than some scant, outdated exercise equipment, eighties-era photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude van Damme, and Moroccan men high on testosterone.

It simply didn’t seem as though there was much more to do than some at-home yoga. I resigned myself to this situation and concluded that exercise must be yet another ‘thing’ that separated the world of Moroccan women so inherently from that of Moroccan men. And I wondered, did the lack of exercise opportunity mean that Moroccan society entertained standards of female health and beauty that didn’t involve thinness and fitness? Or did it entail that women’s bodies will simply always be one step behind men’s in attaining those ideals?*

In any case, I didn’t pack my running shoes the next time I went to Morocco, nor did I bring them the time after that. This was never a decision I regretted, until recently. Stories from people I’d met through the NIMAR led me to discover that, where exercising is concerned, Rabat is no Fes. In my neighborhood alone, there are at least four or five gyms that offer a busy schedule of aerobics and ‘danse orientale’ classes – and every week, that schedule includes a few classes reserved exclusively for those women who wish to exercise in single-sex company.** I’ve even heard reports of actual yoga studios in Agdal – something I will definitely check out personally, if I can afford the rather hefty tuition fees.

But most importantly, there is a certain well-known park in the city’s southern quarters whose name, to most Rbatis, is virtually synonymous with ‘jogging’.

The Hilton park in Rabat is no lakefront trail, but it’s a close second. Located in Souissi, the park spans about a square kilometer of green forest situated right next to the hotel from which it takes its name.*** The park features picnic tables and soccer fields on which families spend their weekend afternoons, but mostly, this park is used by joggers: it features a 3500 meter track that runs along the perimeter and supports consistently heavy traffic, even at my preferred running time of 8 am on Saturday morning.

I encounter people of all shapes and sizes on that trail. Some of them run, and some of them walk. Some are alone, while others exercise in groups. Some listen to music while they run, and others like to chat. I certainly see more men than women, but the women are there – and they are there in all varieties. There are women in full jellaba and headscarf (sometimes topped by a baseball hat to shield against the sun), and women in running outfits like mine. Some wear tracksuits bought from a stall in the medina, and some sport gear from Nike, Zara, or Guess. There are middle-aged mothers, and there are young university students. I run past coiffed and primped groups of friends who chat, laugh, and check their phones for text messages as they stroll around the track – and I am passed by sole women who time their heartbeat as they run and monitor the speed at which they sprint around the track.

I love every minute of my weekly runs at the Hilton park. I love watching this great variety of people out on that trail, and I love the fact that this kind of thing is possible here in Morocco – not just for me as a foreigner, but for all women. And I wonder, what explains the fact that this park is here, now, in Rabat, when there was nothing like it in Fes? Is this a difference between cities – is the culture or population of Fes truly that different from Rabat? Does it perhaps reflect a change in standards of acceptable or ideal behavior that took only four years to take effect? Or is it me – did I simply not see (or take advantage of) the opportunities that existed back then in Fes?

If I have any female Moroccan readers (anyone?), what is your experience or impression of opportunities for exercising in your city, and how is the situation now in comparison to the (recent) past?

***

I always have some trouble finding inspiration for this blog when I’m not in Morocco. I’ll try to keep writing in the next few weeks as I wait for my paperwork, but I’m afraid my posts will not be all that exciting… please bear with me; I hope I’ll be back to my regular blogging schedule soon enough…


* Islamic theology shares in the very common worldwide belief that women’s bodies are impure during menstruation. According to Scripture, Muslim women cannot pray, cannot touch or read the Qur’an, and cannot fast when they are on their period. I don’t think this necessarily means that Scripture considers women to be inherently inferior to men, but I can’t help but think that this kind of thinking contributes to such a viewpoint, and it’s always made me uncomfortable. And so I wonder, could the lack of opportunity for women to exercise contribute to a general sense that women’s bodies are further away from the healthy or pure ‘ideal’ than men’s?
** For those of you who read Dutch, a friend of mine wrote a fabulous blog post about her local Rbati gym last year.
*** The ‘Hilton park’ is an unofficial moniker. I don’t actually know what the park’s actual name is, but as with many other well-known locations in Rabat, it is the moniker rather than the official name that seems to have stuck to the place.

Ramadan and Solidarity

“wash kat‘ajebek lkousina lmaghribia?” Lalla Ghita asked me as we stood over a steaming pot of what would, in a few hours, become harira. ‘Do you like Moroccan cuisine?’

I nodded wholeheartedly, taking in the warm smell of cilantro emanating from the pot.

“I love it,” I responded.

“mmm,” she mumbled, and nodded in agreement.

“It’s great food,” she then added, “but it’s a lot of work.”

She was right. As we stood there waiting for the harira to come to a boil, we were no more than ninety minutes into what would become a five-hour marathon of preparations for that evening’s ftour.

I had joined lalla Ghita in her kitchen that afternoon in order to learn how to make harira. After an unsuccessful attempt of my own at making this soup, which resulted in a tasty stew that nevertheless tasted nothing like the intended goal, I decided it was time to get advice from a seasoned expert. Armed with pen and paper, I followed lalla Ghita around the kitchen as she explained her process from start to finish, and meticulously documented every step.

As I had expected (based on my experiences asking my former host family about their cooking), the recipes in lalla Ghita’s mind were not written in the language of measured quantities and numbered units of weight or volume. I attempted to use my own, admittedly limited, skills at eyeball-estimations as she showed and explained to me that harira calls for “chwiya dial l-hommous” (some chick peas), “chwiya dial l-qousbour” (a little cilantro), and “chwiya dial l-basla” (a little onion). But despite the vagueness of these instructions, I gradually began to discover a method to the seeming randomness. The secret lay in her inflections: as more ingredients were added to the big pot of soup, I realized that the number of i's in her “chwiya” were directly proportional to the quantity required.

“Chwiya dial l-matesha,” she explained as she cut up six big tomatoes, puréed them in a blender and poured the mixture into the pot.

She followed with “chwiiiya dial l-‘ades,” as she added about a handful of lentils to the soup.

And finally, she told me, it was optional to include “chwiiiiiiiiiiya dial l-safran” – and she sprinkled in a small pinch of saffron, for a nice yellow glow.

With the harira comfortably settled to stew on low heat, I observed and helped as lalla Ghita turned to other preparations. We made the filling for briouat – fried triangles of filo dough filled with meat and/or vegetables – and gutted and cleaned a chicken (“for tomorrow,” lalla Ghita explained; “it needs to soften up for a night first”). We made the dough for rghaif (flaky, square pancakes), and did multiple rounds of dishes. We cut thin sheets of filo dough into long strips, and folded the briouat filling into their characteristic triangle-shaped packages. We baked the rghaif, and boiled some eggs. We did more dishes, made coffee and mint tea, heated up milk, and fried the briouat. All the while, we chatted – about the NIMAR (for whose students lalla Ghita’s family occasionally provides lodging), about my purpose in Morocco, about lalla Ghita’s family, and (inevitably, perhaps) about food. I told her about my various attempts at Moroccan cooking, and she in turn explained to me what’s customarily eaten at Ramadan meals. In a show and tell of sorts, she extracted each item – tmar (dates), chebakia, sfouf, zoumita*– from refrigerator and cupboards, provided me with a rich description of its ingredients, and gave me various serving suggestions. A modest but well-deserved sense of pride spoke from her eyes as she told me this was the first year she herself had made some of these items from scratch.

Lalla Ghita occasionally sent her husband and son out on errands: she’d ask them to bring her some fresh mint, some cheese, or a loaf of bread. But other than these brief trips, lalla Ghita’s family mostly spent the afternoon reclining on the sdader (Moroccan sofas) in front of the television – watching Prison Break on MBC Action, or a Mexican soap opera dubbed in Darija on 2M – waiting for the hours to slip away. With the curtains drawn and their half-open eyes fixed passively on the television, they whiled away their afternoon in a state of utter torpor. I couldn’t help but wonder whose fast was easier: that of this slumbering family, who expended as little energy as possible, or that of their hardworking mother, for whom time must have passed by much more quickly.

Solidarity is an important concept during Ramadan – and many people I’ve talked with include this notion in their explanation of what Ramadan means. Apart from a way to turn back to God, Ramadan is also a way to boost a sense of community togetherness, a sense of shared experience and compassion for those around you. One thing this experience of fasting has taught me, is that this sense of solidarity is real and acute (more on that below). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder how that sense of solidarity and shared experience correlates with this division of labor that had lalla Ghita single-handedly preparing several laborious dishes in a single afternoon, while her family slept on the couch. Is this division of labor seen as too much of a natural given to be the object of efforts at greater solidarity? Is the focus on solidarity more mental than anything else – is it less about action than it is about awareness? Did lalla Ghita’s husband perhaps consider his occasional errands to be an act of solidarity?

By seven PM, the table had been set, a platter of rghaif had been delivered as a gift to the neighbors, and we’d taken our seats around the knee-height table. A few minutes later, we turned down the sound of the television to listen for the cannon shot indicating sunset – our sign that we could gratefully grab that first glass of water. Lalla Ghita, the orchestrator of the meal, served everyone a bowl of harira and was herself last to sit down and break her fast.

And so the day ended with a rich and above all very satisfying ftour. A day of fasting seems to shrink my stomach, but exponentially increases my mental appetite. This leads to a bit of nightly frustration as my stomach protests at my eyes’ desire to keep feasting on the wealth of food. This evening was no different. One overly stuffed belly later, I said my goodbyes, promised to make lalla Ghita’s family a pot of harira in return for their hospitality, and headed home, utterly satisfied.

I think that what I enjoyed most about this experience wasn’t just the fact that the harira-mystery had finally been unveiled. Mostly, it felt deeply good to spend the afternoon inside a Moroccan household. I love having my own apartment, but sometimes I miss a sense of connectedness to ‘real’, daily Moroccan life – sometimes it feels as though I have permanently positioned myself on the outside of that actual lived reality, as though I’ve confined myself to expat life. I hope that this will change once my research gets under way and I interact with Moroccans again on a more regular basis, but that sense of disconnection saddens me sometimes.

And so I was grateful for this brief afternoon, in which I felt as though I had been let inside, and had been allowed to participate in the intimacy of Moroccan lived reality – allowed to share in the practice and concrete meaning of Ramadan customs. I have a feeling that my status as a participant in the fast may have helped to facilitate this inclusion. Because I, too, was sayma (fasting), the solidarity conferred by the shared experience of Ramadan seemed automatically to have been extended to me. For the first time in months, I did not feel like an inherent outsider. I felt as though I was recognized as being a part of something, even if just potentially – as though I had been let in. That afternoon, I felt as though those boundaries between me and Morocco – the ones that seem so insurmountable sometimes – might actually be crossable.

And for that alone, I’m happy I decided to participate in this experience. I had been told about the significance of solidarity during Ramadan – but I doubt I would have truly sensed its presence if I myself had not shared in the experience of fasting. Not only does my choice to fast entail that I have become a recipient of solidarity – that I have been allowed to experience what it is like to be part of an ‘inner circle’ in Morocco; it also entails that I’ve experienced first-hand what it is like to feel that sense of solidarity extend from myself to others. I’ve realized that it’s more than just an ideal that people express to me, the outsider, to teach me what Ramadan should be about. Fasting turns that sense of solidarity into a visceral and almost primal experience that cannot help but permeate your mind. The emptiness of my stomach is an inescapable and constant reminder of the fact that I am voluntarily sharing in a particular experience – and with every person I encounter during the day, I cannot help but think: does this person’s stomach feel the same way mine does?

Of course, not everyone feels the same amount of solidarity as others, and some more than others translate that visceral experience into action. But the sense of togetherness is there, much more acutely than I would have ever guessed, and being part of that has been an unforgettable experience.


* sfouf and zoumita are mixtures of ground nuts, spices, and various other ingredients; whereas sfouf is courser and stickier, zoumita is much more powdery. Both have a distinct taste of cinnamon, and remind me very much of pumpkin spices. Whereas sfouf is often pressed together into a mound and served as such, lalla Ghita mixed the zoumita with a combination of melted butter and honey. She rolled the resulting paste into small truffles, dipped them in sesame seeds, and arranged them on a plate.

The Moudawana, Five Years Later

The New York Times published an article today about the status of women in Morocco, five years after the radical reforms of the Moudawana (the Family Code of Law) came into effect. This article is the latest in a small collection of others published about the same issue, and largely presents the same conclusion: while great headway has been made toward elevating the status of women in Morocco, much remains to be desired.

The articles’ authors note a discrepancy between imposed law and applied reality, and mention that the legal changes made are not far-reaching enough: women still inherit only half of what men do, for instance, and single mothers still have no legal rights. More reforms are needed, they therefore argue.

As much as it is true that the new body of Family laws leaves certain issues unchanged, I agree with those who think that the disparity between the law and its real-life application is a more pressing issue that needs to be dealt with, before we start talking about further reforms. Five years after the new laws came into effect, issues continue to plague their mise en pratique. Because the new code of law was not accompanied by sufficient efforts to re-train Morocco’s legislative body, judges and courts were mostly left to figure out how to apply the new procedures on their own. Divorce procedures, marriage contracts, applications for citizenship, and custody battles therefore continue to be plagued by legal inconsistency and uncertainty.*

Likewise, efforts to educate the public remained insufficient. Of course, the means to create awareness are limited, among a public with a high rate of illiteracy. But the result is that many – both men and women – have little sense of what the new laws really entail. And in that sense, the failure of the Moudawana to unambiguously live up to its promise of radical change points to deeper issues that plague Moroccan society.

First of all, the insufficient efforts at public education reveal (and probably reinforce) another dimension of the big divide between center and margin in Morocco. The new law was passed by the parliament in Rabat. Its written form, as well as those publications that discuss it, are accessible to and read by the educated citizens of Morocco’s larger cities. Francophone women’s magazines make an effort to answer readers’ questions about what has legally changed. But very little of it all penetrates the margins – by which I mean both those geographical areas far removed from the epicenter of government, as well as those communities far removed from any sense of power, through lack of money and lack of education. The result? Those women who stand to gain the most from these new laws – impoverished, uneducated, illiterate women in rural regions – are the least aware of their new rights, and continue their lives much as they used to. And how can you effect real, applied, change, when it impacts only a small proportion of the population? There is very little point in enforcing change from the top, if it is not accompanied by an effort to reach down toward the public, to help it understand the new legislation and facilitate its real-life implementation.


(This cartoon appeared in TelQuel, the francophone Moroccan version of Time or Newsweek. The dialogue translates into "Informing myself about the Moudawana reform? That's a bad idea, I might no longer be against it!")

In a more general sense, I think that the lack of education and awareness also makes that the general public (urban as well as rural) does not know what to make or think of the reformed Moudawana. With only a vague sense of what the new laws really stipulate, many see the new code mostly as a dangerous threat to traditional values and social order.** Originally pushed for by feminist movements and other liberal progressive groups, the new laws are seen as representing the victory of modernizing and secularizing tendencies in Morocco. The entire issue of Family Code reform thereby remains stuck in (and representative of) the deadlocked debate-turned-struggle between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and inspires fear and hostility in those who perceive it as a threat to their conservatism.

The new Moudawana is both cause and result of a shift in the foundations of Moroccan society. Government efforts at socio-economic development, modernization, and globalization have occasioned an intensive and sometimes highly emotional debate about the relative value of tradition and modernity. Within that debate, these two concepts, or better said, ideologies, are often starkly opposed to one another. Each has its adherents, and each of these two camps is so worried about the dire impact of the other’s dominance, that neither is prepared to make any compromises on its ideals. The result is a deadlocked debate in which ‘tradition’ is portrayed as the polar opposite of ‘modernity’, and open communication seems to get a bit lost. As much as the King attempted to involve representatives of all ideologies and sympathies in the drafting of a new law, the reforms of the Moudawana are mostly seen as the triumph of modernity and secularism – and many conservatives and Islamists felt (and feel) disenfranchised, overruled, or ignored.

As much as, again, I agree that additional changes must be made, I also think that radical reform simply may not always be the most effective way to push for change. Not if it creates hostility and thus throws up barriers that hinder effective communication and collaboration. People don’t like change, even if it’s inevitable. Sometimes, it is much more efficient to be patient, take it slow, make an effort not to completely do away with the past, and ease into a new status quo. It makes those resistant to change feel validated in their concerns. Pushing too hard, too fast, only incites greater conflict and protest.

Yes, there is a ways yet to go toward equalizing women’s status. But right now, I think that what is holding it back has less to do with legal rights than it does with public opinion. Radical legal reform is not necessarily effective if it gets too far ahead of the public mind.*** There is no point in adding new laws to ensure women’s equal share of inheritance, if women in rural areas have not even become able to claim their right to divorce. This does not mean that we should give up on change. But it does mean a greater openness to conservatives’ sentiments, individuals’ fears, a greater effort to find a middle ground between different ideological desires, attempts to ease into change at a pace that is comfortable for everyone – and a willingness to make other social changes that make the implementation of new family laws a bit easier (combating illiteracy and corruption, perhaps?). An effort, simply, not to make a large proportion of society feel disenfranchised and brushed aside. Do this, and perhaps you’ll find much more goodwill and openness to real, meaningful dialogue about the future of society and the place of women in it.

In order for this dialogue to take place, greater openness is needed, as well as a greater and more systemic effort at public education about what these new laws really imply: how they relate to Islam (how they may coexist peacefully with religious values), what their impact will be on the structure of the family, and how it affects the status of men. Fears and concerns must be openly and respectfully addressed. Only then can the population begin to process the changes that have been made – and only once that has been done, is it going to be useful to begin discussing additional reforms.



* add to that the persistent and widespread problem of corruption…
** Yes, of course, the new Moudawana does make a lot of changes to the traditional status quo. But I think that there may be more room for a continuation of traditional values within the new legal situation than many people assume.
*** I do not think this is always true, in every situation. There are times and places when radical reform is necessary. But within the context of a deadlocked societal debate between two camps with equal power, it simply doesn’t serve anyone to make half the population feel disenfranchised. No matter how wrong you may think that other half is.

"Number One"

Last fall, a new Moroccan movie was released that, according to Femmes du Maroc at least, had everyone talking. The magazine itself devoted a lengthy article to this new film, “Number One” (this is not a translation; I’d transcribe its Arabic title as ‘Namber Ouane’), most of it a rave review.

As a movie about the consequences of the new Moudawana (the new Family Code of Law*) for the relationship between men and women, my interest was piqued. I waited and waited for the movie to come to theaters in Rabat – but I was out of luck. Time passed, and the day of my departure to the United States finally arrived before the movie did. Back at home, I crossed my fingers for six weeks in the hopes that Number One would still be showing at the Rbati theaters when I returned. Of course, as luck would have it, by the time I arrived back in Morocco, the movie had come and gone, and I had missed my opportunity…

Then, last weekend, a wonderful turn of luck handed me a DVD copy of the film, and I finally saw for myself what Femmes du Maroc had raved about. And it was everything I was expecting.

“Number One” is a propaganda film, first and foremost. Its message lies right on the surface, conveniently etched out in stark colors and so concrete that you’ll be sure to get the idea even if you sleep through most of the movie. It is a neon-advertisement-version of Moroccan reality, the before-and-after of an infomercial.

The movie tells the story of a middle-aged, middle-class man stuck in the middle of a power hierarchy. Feeling put down psychologically by his wealthy boss, he is a despot to the people he considers below him on the scale: his wife and his employees – seamstresses at the clothing factory where he is a manager. The story takes off when, literally overnight, he changes his ways. He becomes friendly, gentle, and respectful – and finds that not only the women around him, but also he himself is much happier this way.

“Number One” is funny, it made me laugh – but it is mostly the way in which this story is told that makes this movie endlessly fascinating to me. First of all, there is the fact that although the movie clearly tells the story of the changing relationship between men and women, it suggests that the societal confusion surrounding the moudawana has led to a bouleversement (I love that word), or complete upheaval, of hierarchies in general. The film is full of references to and illustrations of other power inequalities. The main character, Aziz, is a tyrant not only to his female employees, but also to the male parking guard who works for him, or the young man selling nuts on the street. Moreover, it seems that Aziz acts the way he does out of a frustration that stems from the fact that he himself is stuck at the low end of yet another hierarchical relationship – that with his boss, who spends his days barking orders over the phone at a suddenly very humble Aziz.

Aziz’ overnight change comes with a radical upheaval of the power relationships in which he is involved. We see that he becomes more friendly to his wife and more understanding to his employees, but at no point does this shift in hierarchies become more clear than at the moment that Aziz, in a first attempt to reverse this new situation, visits a fqih.

Technically, originally, or officially, a fqih is simply a man learned in the Qur’an who can guide others in matters of theology and religious practice. In practice, there are many fqihs who have become much more than that; they have added an expertise in magic to their repertoire, and may more aptly be considered a kind of ‘sorcerer’. Fqihs are always men, and it is important to know that these sorcerer-fqihs are usually quite marginal figures. Sorcery lies very much beyond all that is considered Islamically orthodox, and it is thus not something that is commonly accepted in Morocco. Those who choose to devote themselves to this practice thus often find themselves on the social, economic, and political outskirts of society.

The fqih in this movie is no different. He resides in a shack in the “bidonville des voleurs,” the slum of thieves. Aziz enters the neighborhood in his nice suit and briefcase; an appearance that inspires fear in his employees, but scorn and mocking among the slum’s residents. To make matters worse, he must admit to a shady figure on the street that he, the important factory manager, is seeking help from the fqih, a resident of this slum (and from the shady figure himself, because Aziz is quite unable to find the fqih on his own). “Ma kathshemsh,” the figure breezily tells Aziz as he leads him down a winding alley, ‘don’t be ashamed’: members of parliament, governors, even ministers come to consult the mighty fqih.

Ultimately, though, even this almighty fqih (who himself spares no words in expressing his unprecedented and unsurpassed power) admits to be completely powerless in the face of the force that has brought about this change in Aziz’ comportment. And that brings me to two other fascinating elements of this story: the allusion that there is a mighty female power that can ultimately overrule even the most tyrannical man, and the form this power takes – a chouafa.

A chouafa (pronounced shoe-waah-fah) is a kind of medium. She is always female, and in many ways the counterpart of the sorcerer-fqih. As someone who communicates with spirits and other supernatural forces, a chouafa can be consulted to divine what has caused the problems in your life, and will offer solutions that range from magic spells and curses to herbal concoctions and ritual sacrifices. Much like the supernatural figure of Aicha Qandisha, a chouafa represents the danger and mystery of female power. Chouafat are thus often considered a threat to the normal social order and, like the sorcerer-fqihs, find themselves on the margins of society.

Nevertheless, this marginality prevents neither Aziz’ wife from seeking a chouafa’s help in enchanting her husband, nor Aziz himself in seeking a fqih’s supernatural remedy. It illustrates the ambiguity of power that affects the Moroccan social order (and all other social orders alike, probably) – our dependence on great power, and our simultaneous fear of its destructive force.** This is an ambiguity that the movie tries to provide a new solution to, I think. Aziz’ story is meant to suggest that rather than fear such power we’d be better off to accept it – in the end, we’re all subject to female power, whether or not we respect women – but also that this power is much easier to exercise and maintain when it is accompanied by some respect for those at whom it is directed.

The last element that fascinated me about this movie is the fact that Aziz immediately interpreted his change of behavior as an illness or affliction. Of course, in the movie, it was – an affliction directly caused by a chouafa’s herbal concoction, mixed into Aziz’ evening meal. But the point is that Aziz, not knowing how he’d contracted the problem, immediately sought the help first of a fqih, and then of a psychiatrist. He immediately pathologized his anomalous behavior, his deviance from the social norm. More specifically, he pathologized what he seemed to consider a loss of masculinity: nervously, he faced the doctor and uttered his fear: “have I become a homosexual?” The doctor laughs and shakes his head, to Aziz’ great relief. They settle on another, less noxious diagnosis: “syndrome de la moudawana.”

What really struck me was the movie plot’s similarity to what Vincent Crapanzano argued, years ago, in his “ethnopsychiatric” ethnography of a mystical brotherhood in Meknes (The Hamadsha, 1973). When you are truly possessed by a jinn, Crapanzano explains, complete exorcism is no longer a possibility. The jinn is with you for life, and so the best you can do is to establish a symbiotic relationship with it, thus reaping the benefits of a connection with the supernatural. Though marginalized by mainstream society because of the erratic behavior the jinn causes you to exhibit, the therapeutic process of communicating with the jinn – facilitated by this brotherhood of men who have themselves been possessed – is simultaneously an induction into a new community, of those with a certain kind of supernatural power.

The exact same thing happens to Aziz. He is ‘possessed’ by respect for women (literally – the chouafa’s magic has taken possession of him by ingestion), and learns from the fqih and psychiatrist that there is no way he can be completely exorcised. He ultimately finds that he can reclaim a sense of power and status not by ridding himself of his new behavior, but by embracing his new reality. He may have lost the respect of a few friends, but he has gained that of a new social group.

Modernity, tradition; power, danger; male, female; healthy, pathological – if there’s anything this movie shows, it’s that these binary sets are inextricably related, and a shift in one balance tips that of the others…


* the family code is a body of law that governs all relationships and acts that pertain to the family – such as marriage, divorce, and heritage. Previously based on Islamic law, the moudawana was radically reformed in 2003, and is now based on civil law. Most of the changes to the family code come down to an unprecedented increase in women’s rights.
** It never stops to intrigue me that our preoccupation with power – something that is probably very primal in our nature – is so often projected onto our experiences of the relationship between genders. Though most likely, this is also perfectly natural, given the fact that that relationship is one of the most central and important in our collective lives as human beings.

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.

Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus

Most mornings at the NIMAR start slowly. We officially open at eight, but we usually spend the first hour of the day circled around a table, chatting over tea and breakfast. We discuss our weekends, comment on what’s playing on the television in the background, and allow for the occasional preliminary discussion of work-related goings-on. It’s a pleasant way to ease into the day, and a good use of an hour at which there is little else to do. We open this early to stay on track with the Dutch institutional world, which lives an hour ahead of us. In Morocco, however, no self-respecting employee, or NIMAR student, is ready for business until at least 9 am.

This past Monday, as we did a post-game evaluation of my birthday party (which had taken place on the preceding Saturday), the conversation touched on the risks of making a late-night solo drive back home – and from there devolved quickly into thorny territory: the harassment of women on Moroccan streets.

Cynthia and Chaima opened, claiming a lonely street in the dark of night is no place for a woman alone – what with rapists, thieves, and other figures of the underworld.

“Well, what about men?” Farid retorted. “Men are the ones who get robbed, conned, and deceived. People are actually nice to women – you get your bags carried for you, a seat given away to you on the bus, and there’s always a hand ready to help you change your tire.”

Chaima dismissively shook her head. “Oh, Farid,” she chuckled, “you have no idea what it’s like for women.”

Cynthia bristled in agreement. “What?” She demanded of Farid. “How can you say that? Women are constantly treated with disrespect on the street!” Confronted by a skeptical expression on Farid’s face, she then launched into a description of the verbal and tactile varieties of unwanted attention that women suffer daily when out and about, trying to mind their own business. To add dramatic force to her illustrations, she got up from her chair and turned courtyard into stage, enlisting Chaima as co-star in her performance. The two put on their best macho faces, their eyes expressing an exaggerated form of the demeaning lust they attribute to the men they were imitating, and swaggered daringly past each other, Chaima grazing Cynthia’s posterior while the latter stage-whispered disrespectful gibberish into the former’s ear.

“Nine out of ten men,” Cynthia emphasized, shooting meaningful glances in Farid’s direction. “And by the time the tenth guy walks by, I’m about ready to punch him in the face.”

His skeptical expression unchanged, Farid shrugged and lit up a cigarette. “It’s all in your head,” he muttered.

This set off a trigger with the lot of us. Say what? Claiming that we’ve somehow conjured up this constant stream of verbal harassment in our collective mind is like saying that there is no glass ceiling for women, or that men are just naturally better at math.

We icily asked him to elaborate, our swords hanging in the sky, ready to fall with a vengeance when he gave us what could only be the wrong answer. Farid argued first that we’d be lost without the attention. He cited a survey that he personally conducted among his female students: “Nine out of ten said they’d feel depressed if they were ignored on the street,” he reported in subtle reference to Cynthia’s earlier statistic.

We protested that this is no surprise in a society where women hardly ever receive positive reinforcement on other aspects of their being. Moroccan women are raised to be demure and modest; if street comments about their appearance are the only source of compliments they have, no wonder they’d miss them in their absence! But, we assured Farid, no self-respecting, confident woman would prefer unsolicited attention to the freedom of public anonymity. Unfazed, Farid pressed on, introducing his second argument. He reminded us that women receive a lot of preferential treatment in return for the occasional offensive comment. We scoffed, but he proceeded to his concluding argument: we bring this attention upon ourselves by not talking back.

I’d been relatively quiet before, observing the back and forth with curiosity as I tried to theorize what made the various participants in this discussion say the things they said and feel the way they felt. But I felt personally addressed by this last argument, and I stepped in.

“Talking back doesn’t work!” I exclaimed, a bit of this morning’s annoyance with the appreciative soldiers I encountered on my walk to work leaking out. “All it does is make them laugh! Hearing me speak Arabic does nothing but egg them on.”

“Or it makes them mad and makes the harassment even worse,” Chaima added. Cynthia and I nodded eagerly. “Yeah,” we contributed, “and when you react by yelling, they accuse you of crossing the boundaries of propriety!”

Farid stuck to his argument, though, insisting that an angry response is the key to solving this issue. “It’s a vicious cycle,” I offered, trying to be the mediator. A theory began to develop in my head, but I wasn’t ready to put it into words yet, and so I kept it at that. “Women allow this kind of attention to happen by remaining mute, which allows men to keep it up. In turn, the sense of endlessness with men’s attention makes women feel as though there’s no use in protesting.”
We got up, cleared the table and put our dirty teacups by the sink without having reached an agreement.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged by any woman (both foreign and native) who has spent a day on Moroccan streets, that one cannot venture outside without eliciting at least a comment from at least seventy percent of the men one passes by. You learn to drown it out (though the occasional butt-graze is impossible, ever, to ignore, and some days are certainly worse than others), but the principle of the matter is offensive. This primal need that men seem to feel, to comment on any and all female figures within their sight, implies a perception of women as not-quite-real, and as not-quite-human.* It is, in all honesty, a very frustrating kind of objectification. But not only that; it is offensive, on a deeper level, that men seem so completely unashamed of their behavior – that society seems to accept this kind of uncivilized comportment.

If we are all so bothered by the fact that we cannot anonymously walk alone outside – by the fact that we will never be able to sit down on a park bench to read a book in peace, to stop outside a shop window and ogle the shoes on sale, or to wait on a street corner for a friend without eliciting a whole lot of unwanted attention – what can we do to make it stop?

In order to answer that question, I think we first need to answer another one: what makes it happen in the first place? How did this become such a commonplace public form of male-female interaction, and what motivates men to address women in this way? I’ve been walking around with these questions ever since I first visited Morocco in the spring of 2005. Despite warnings from more seasoned travelers, I spent the first two days of my stay in a state of complete agoraphobia, holed up in my hotel room in Fes without a clue as to how to deal.

After this initial shock, I became intrigued. I began to observe the attention, examining it and experimenting a little with its limits. I’d change my clothing, varying the amount of bare skin I exposed to the public to see if this correlated at all with the frequency or intensity of the comments, stares and grazing hands that came my way. I even donned a headscarf once. The effect? None whatsoever. And so I came up with a theory. I think that this attention has nothing to do with us as women. It doesn’t matter what we wear, how we behave, or how pretty we are. We could walk around covered head to toe in clothing that hasn’t been washed in weeks, flash a smile of black teeth and exude a smell of sweat across a two-meter radius, and some man would still feel the need to whisper “very niiiiiicce” as we limped by. It has nothing to do with us – and everything to do with them, with the men. My theory is that men in Morocco have so few ways in which to exercise and display their masculinity, that anonymous women on the street become the unwitting target of their frustrated need to show the world they’re male.

I’ve devoted earlier posts to the problem of Moroccan masculinity. The Moroccan masculine ideal – defined by dominance, power, and independence – is difficult, if not impossible, for a man to live up to. In a patriarchal society with a developing economy and a high rate of unemployment, very many men are stuck in a position of relative dependence – whether it be on their father, an employer, or some other figure who exercises power.** The result is that they act out their frustrated need for dominance and power in a space where they do not risk offending someone to whom they are subordinate – in the no man’s land where social norms don’t really count: the street.

Furthermore, Moroccan social norms and the gender segregation they sanctify mean that men have very little permitted access to women. There are very few acceptable ways and places for innocent flirtation (flirtation that is not meant as direct prelude to marriage, that is) – in other words, there is no sanctioned way for a Moroccan boy to parade his masculinity around and attract the most appealing female without the risk of consequences. Another frustration they act out in the space beyond social norms – by aggressively flirting with anonymous women who are not a part of their social community. Strict rules within the social fold elicit acting-out behaviors in the abject areas beyond its boundaries.

These norms also ensure that male-female interaction is beset by tension. The politic of segregation teaches children and teenagers that the opposite sex is inherently and dangerously different. It teaches them that the other gender is there for marriage and sex, not for friendship and normal human-to-human relating. It nips any potential for mutual understanding and communication in the bud.

Of course all of this is evolving. Moroccan social norms have been subject to rather rapid change – a development Moroccans themselves conceive of as ‘modernization’ and regard with a fair amount of ambivalence. Men and women can be friends – and one thing I’ve been so struck by in Rabat is the seeming informality and comfort of contact between the genders. But day-to-day attitudes and public behavior always lag a step or two behind institutional social change.

Maybe the crux of the problem hides in our inability to span the gap of understanding between genders. The thing is that Farid can’t understand what it’s like. No non-female can understand this feeling of complete and entire objectification; this denial of your freedom to be anonymous, of your private space, and of your very fellow human-ness; the insistence always to see you as a woman, and never as a person. No non-female can understand how it feels when you are expected to remain demure and modest, yet somehow must acquire a basic sense of self-respect.***

But the thing is also that no female can understand the social pressure on Moroccan men. High demands and huge limitations on one’s ability to live up to them are an impossible combination. The thing is that men are essentially as objectified as women are. In a society where social connections are everything, men are constantly sized up according to their position in the matrix of power relationships and their relative status in relation to the one doing the sizing-up. If men don’t talk down to someone in an assertion of their dominance, they risk having such subordination imposed upon themselves. Who can blame them for acting out?****

So. To make a long story short, the issue comes down to this. Can you be a respectable woman without demurely allowing yourself to be objectified, and without accepting a man’s refusal to see you as a person? Can you be a confident woman without needing positive reinforcement from random lustful machos on the street? And can you be a real man without needing to assert your male dominance by objectifying women?

One anonymous woman on a busy downtown street had her own answer to these questions. As we hunted for cabs on Monday evening after a satisfying meal at Dar Naji, we heard her screaming to some unfortunate male offender.

“Are you a real man? I don’t think you’re a real man, I think you’re a fag! Go get yourself checked out, fag!”



* I’ve had men lean in and clap in my face to see if I’d react. It leads me to conclude they might be wondering if I’m even real. I get the same sense from their laughter at my Arabic requests to be left alone. They don’t hear what I say; they seem to see a doll talking and are surprised by its lifelike appearance.
** And in a society where social connections are everything, that dependence, that subordinate position, is something you are constantly reminded of.
*** Not to mention the recent addition of new, ‘modern’ expectations: women must remain modest, quiet, and submissive, but must now also become ambitious, successful, and financially self-sufficient.
**** Let me make a disclaimer here that I know I am generalizing. The dynamics of Moroccan society are much more complex and intricate than the rough sketch I am laying out here, and the actual currents carrying along the type of male-female interaction that I am discussing here are much more subtle and multi-pronged than I suggest. I’m just trying to theorize a little.