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.

Weekend in Ouarzazate

This weekend, I found myself on a tour of the Moroccan film studios in Ouarzazate.* Leading us around the replica of ancient Jerusalem that was built to film Kingdom of Heaven, our tour guide animatedly informed us that everything we saw and touched around us is pure façade. “Come, come here,” he said, guiding us toward a wall as though he was about to reveal a deep, dark secret. “Knock,” he added, nodding in encouragement. Upon the hollow sound our fists produced, he broke into a sly smile. “See,” he then revealed, “all of this is made of plaster.” To add to the sensation – to this wonder of disillusionment – he led us to a boulder that lay abandoned next to a giant slingshot, and gestured toward Farid to try and pick it up. The latter, good sport as he is, put on a pained face as real as the stone itself was heavy, and lifted the thing triumphantly over his head.

We walked around the set for about an hour, never ceasing to wonder at the wooden and metal constructions we discovered behind every seemingly ancient wall. All this thick stone, this ancient wood, all this air of history – nothing more than some very clever plaster!

This wonder of disillusionment colored most of my holiday weekend in Ouarzazate: the fantastic magic of plaster extends beyond the walls of these film studios. Most of Ouarzazate and the surrounding regions are, themselves, little more than a façade of Moroccan desert-exoticism created by and for a foreign audience looking for an escape from the drudge of reality.

When I say that, I do not mean that this region lay bare and abandoned before the advent of tourists from Europe. It has a long and honorable history as the dwelling grounds of Amazigh nomads, and boasts a few ancient hubs of trans-Saharan trade. But the infrastructure one sees these days – the overwhelming wealth of auberges, maison d’hôtes, hotels, restaurants, 4-wheel drive rental agencies – has been created especially for tourists. Ouarzazate itself is situated at a location that – as the point of confluence for the Atlas, Draâ, and Dades valleys – has always been strategically important, but as a town it was nearly non-existent until the French made it into a southern headquarters. These days it is a string of hotels, restaurants and rental car agencies held together by a few streets that lead directly out into the surrounding regions. One sees more tourists than locals, and the only place I’ve seen more foreign license plates is at the port of Tangier.

It is for two main genres of tourists that this façade has been built, as we learned over the course of observation and through conversations with the lifters we picked up in our rental car on our scenic drives through the region. There is, first of all, the kind that emerges from the many tour buses one will see in and around Ouarzazate. This is the package tour traveler: the often elderly individual who has booked an entirely arranged vacation, including plane ticket, in-country bus travel, hotels, meals, and a tour guide. All of these items are European in origin. That is, the tour guide is not a local but an experienced European traveler, and the hotels and restaurants where they spend their leisure time are owned by foreign investors. These tourists do not interact with the local population. They are not interested in Moroccan reality. No: what they are looking for are the images of exoticism found in many a travel guide, or those Picador books about Moroccan gardens, architecture, and interiors. They seek an escape, not an encounter. We saw these tourists briefly, as they hopped in and out of their buses, and as they were herded quickly into fancy-looking eateries along the road. They were completely absent from the streets we wandered, the market squares where we struck up conversations with the locals, and the casual restaurants where we looked (in vain…) for a bowl of harira.**

Where these tourists are absent, the other kind is too omnipresent. These are the modern hippies: the often young and often dreadlocked wanderers seeking an escape from the establishment of their native society. We saw these individuals everywhere, wandering the roads in their hiking shoes, burdened with a big trekking backpack. We experienced this genre of traveler in person when we picked up two Polish hitch hikers. As dusk fell and we drove them back from Skoura to Ouarzazate, I asked them how they were enjoying their trip so far. In competent English, Pawel shared with me how taken they were with Morocco. He had fallen in love with what he called its “inshallah-culture.” Such a relaxed society, he told me, and so friendly. He saw Morocco as a place where anything goes and nothing is expected; as a place where plans might at any minute be broken, because one never knows when one may be invited to the house of a random Moroccan one meets along the way, for a meal or a warm bed for the night. I smiled, expressed my contentment at his taken-ness with this country, and debated with myself to what extent I should burst his bubble.

This type of traveler cannot be accused of avoiding encounters. But what is true of the package tour tourist is ultimately true of these hippies as well. They encounter and dive in head first, but they nevertheless avoid Moroccan reality. They are not interested in discovering the ‘real’ Morocco; they, too, pursue a dream of exoticism. They do not see the social rules of propriety that lie behind this seeming laissez-faire attitude that Moroccans portray toward their tourists. They do not think about the fact that the very hospitable people who offer them meals and beds often have very little to spare, and they do not think to offer these people a little something in return – reveling only in the inviting nature of Moroccans and the economy of traveling in this part of the world.

Both kinds of tourists seek an escape, a dream of exoticism. All of this makes the infrastructure a plaster façade without history: it’s all of recent creation, and caters to a public that doesn’t want a reality. They revel in the façade, and neither think nor desire to turn the corner to examine the woodwork and iron scaffolding that holds it all up.

It is also a plaster façade without roots. That is, none of this infrastructure has any roots in Morocco itself. These rental car agencies, restaurants, and hotels are run not only for, but also by Europeans – clever Frenchmen, Brits, or Belgians who saw the opportunity to make some money in this Orientalist yearning for the Arab exotic.

There is, then, no financial exchange between tourists and locals. The encountering tourists don’t think to pay their gracious hosts, and the package tour people deal only with other foreigners. This means that locals do not profit from tourism. The beautiful oases are run by foreigners, while the locals are left with nothing but desert. We encountered men in qsars and Kasbahs, hoping to make a few Dirhams by moonlighting as a tour guide for the occasional tourist who does open him or herself up to the local reality, and who spoke to us of the dim prospects for an uneducated individual from this region. And what of the nomad whom we picked up on the road, who had nothing but the tent we saw lying just 100 meters away from his tent, and flock of sheep to sustain him. The reality of the region – its history and roots, its people and its resources for survival – have been pushed back into the arid nothingness, the abject spaces that surround the gorges, oases, and auberges where tourists spend their Euro, pound, or dollar.

It is a beautiful region, Ouarzazate, but it is a sad region – a region that sets out the inequalities that plague this country in stark colors. And it bothers me that it is precisely this kind of area where one will find these flocks of tourists who render themselves oblivious – whether deliberately or not – to these realities.

This post was written after a long series of discussions with Farid, my travel partner. He is thus due at least half of the credit for these observations and interpretations.


*Ouarzazate (pronounced "war-za-zaht") is basically an unexciting garrison town about two hours southeast of Marrakech, but boasts a film studio popular among epic movie makers, and is thus lovingly called the “Hollywood of Morocco” by many a western guidebook.
** harira is a delicious Moroccan soup with tomatoes, chick peas, and many many other ingredients.

El Clasico in Rabat

Last night, Farid and I watched a soccer game at a café on boulevard Mohammed V. Liverpool was playing Real Madrid – Farid’s team – in the first knockout round of the Champion’s League.*

In every Moroccan café, or “qahwa” (literally, ‘coffee’) one will spot one or two televisions hanging in a corner. Day and night, these televisions provide background images (though nearly never background sound) with the latest music video clips from an Arab music channel, or Al Jazeera’s latest news stories. Men will spend hours sitting quietly over their cups of qahwa, smoking a cigarette and absentmindedly glancing at these screens – or reading the newspaper that someone else left on the table. But on soccer nights, the televisions are tuned in to Aljazeera sport, the sound is turned up to maximum, and the cafés fill up to capacity with animated men, eager to cheer on their favorite team. These men come in early to get a good seat, all lining up their chairs in rows – a table interspersed here and there on which to place one’s coffee, soda, juice, and ashtrays – in order to have an optimal view of the TV screen. We arrived at a café twenty minutes before kick-off, and found no empty spaces left. It took two more fruitless attempts before we found a coffee with a few empty seats, upstairs in what is normally the ‘women’s’ – or more private – section of the place.

On these match nights, there is no such thing as a women’s section. Watching a game at a café is clearly a male activity: I was the only woman there. A bit nervously, Farid leaned over to me and asked, ‘are you comfortable?’ I smiled and nodded. Strangely enough, I was. I’m not sure if it was the comfort of being there with the protective shield of a male friend, or the comfort of being such an obvious outsider that it doesn’t always matter when I transgress certain unspoken gender barriers.

However, I’m not sure if there really is a gender barrier to speak of, here. Despite the fact that I didn’t feel uncomfortable, I was aware of my minority status in the café, but this might be no more than a kind of general feeling of otherness when one is aware of being the odd one out. When I asked him about it later, Farid surmised that there is no hard and fast rule that says women are not expected to join in on a public soccer viewing. Nevertheless, I doubt that it is entirely acceptable for a woman alone to surround herself with agitated men at a coffee. As much as any man may say it’s ok, I have a feeling that if asked, those Fassi boys with whom I discussed ‘women between tradition and modernity’, back in November, would classify that kind of behavior as evidence that women “have lost their value” – I doubt they’d want to see their sisters engage in such “untraditional” behavior. I have a feeling that a sole woman watching soccer with men falls into that vast gray zone that lies in between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’: it’s most definitely a non-traditional kind of behavior that is not inherently wrong – but that nevertheless comes across as not-quite-appropriate among those who are still inclined to judge others on the basis of observation.

But whatever boundaries I may or may not have crossed, I had a good time. I enjoyed watching a good soccer match again (the last one had been this past summer, with the European Cup), even if I am nowhere near as big, or as passionate, a fan as the men at this café. The men around me all sat at the edge of their seat, yelling “sir, sir!” (this is pronounced ‘seer’ and means ‘Go! Go!’) at the screen whenever a Real player approached the Liverpool goal. It wasn’t until Liverpool scored the first (and only) goal in the 82nd minute, that I realized there were fans for the other side in the room, too: a few men here and there jumped up in excitement, punching the air above them with their fist while they shouted out in jubilation.

Farid later explained to me that these were no Liverpool fans. To the contrary: English soccer means nothing to them. No: they are FC Barcelona fans, which automatically means that they hate Real Madrid enough to cheer on any team that plays against them.

I come from a family with Barça sympathies, but my preference does not make me a sworn enemy of Real. This is not the case for most Moroccan men who – overwhelmingly – obsess over Spanish soccer. This passion for Spanish football among Moroccan men means, by association, that they are also caught up in the legendary rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid (This rivalry is so notorious it now even has a name: El Clasico. Look this up on Google and you’ll find a wealth of information about the history of this enmity). This rivalry seems to have existed ever since the two teams came into existence, back in the 1890s, and constitutes a poignant illustration of the political undertones that soccer can never quite shake off. Madrid and Barcelona are the capital cities of what are seen as two rival regions of Spain – Castilia and Catalunya, respectively. The enmity became even more pronounced under general Franco’s dictatorial rule. When Franco militantly suppressed all languages other than Castiliano, Barcelona – and thus its soccer team – became symbolic of progressivism and subversion, while Madrid – the team favored by Franco – became associated with the establishment. ‘El Clasico’ has never since abated.

Domestic soccer competitions are important to Moroccan men as well, but there is a certain passion that Spanish soccer evokes in them that I find very interesting. In the north, this passion is instilled almost as though by automatic osmosis – the north picks up Spanish radio and TV channels better than Moroccan ones, and so most casual coffee shop television watchers have no choice but to watch the Spanish Liga. I wonder if there’s also an element of ideal identity involved – a wish to belong to that part of the world that seems so close yet simultaneously so far – and to grasp for any link or connection that allows them to (virtually) cross the strait of Gibraltar. Further south, the Spanish football fever has clearly caught on as well – whether it be through diffusion by migrants from the north, or the fact that Al Jazeera has started broadcasting their matches, Real and Barça are followed no less passionately than in the Rif.


* for the American not-in-the-know, the Champion’s League is the yearly championship of European club soccer in which qualifying teams from cities all over Europe compete for the Champion’s League trophy. This year’s final is on May 27th. All Dutch clubs have, unfortunately, already been eliminated.

In/Outside

I now live with Fatima, the other Nimar intern. We get along well, and it’s been incredibly interesting to learn more about her perspective on Morocco. For as it happens, she has a completely different relationship with this country than I do. She’s been here much more often, but for much shorter periods of time: every summer, with her family, who are of Moroccan descent.

As we talk, sharing our respective experiences of this culture and society, I get the sense that Fatima seems to position herself at once as an outsider, and as an insider. She displays an extensive knowledge of Moroccan language, tradition, and mentality. Hers is a knowledge that clearly comes from the inside out, so to speak; it is something that comes from a long gestation of lived experience rather than from a book or other third-person account. In her interaction with others, I can tell that life here (the rhythm of it, the logic of it) makes sense to her on a much more instinctive level than the way in which things are beginning to make sense to me. But at the same time, she often seems to position herself as an outsider. As she describes her interaction with Moroccans, tells stories about experiences she’s had, sometimes I can see her literally drawing up a wall and separating herself from Moroccanness – describing customs, habits, or traditions as the somewhat curious habits of an other people, in the same way that the average European or American would.

Matching this dual perspective is also a dual perception of her on the part of other Moroccans – and perhaps this lies at the source of her own ambiguity. She obviously blends in easily, as a Moroccan-looking girl who speaks fluent Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic), but she often mentions being perceived as an outsider – and I pick up on this, too. I see it in the smiles she gets from shopkeepers who comment about her accent, and the attention she and I both get in the medina: she is often not seen as a Moroccan. Not as a ‘real’ Moroccan, anyway. As she herself says, it is as though Moroccans have a sixth sense for this; it’s like they can smell that she did not grow up here.

I wonder what this must be like – and I wonder if it’s anything like the feelings I have about the Netherlands, the way I am perceived there by my friends and family. Whether it is at all similar to the sense I have of being both insider and outsider, in the Netherlands as well as the United States. I mean that sense of being considered part-of-yet-not-quite, in either country. I probably take up that same kind of dual stance when I talk about the Netherlands and – these days much more common – when I talk about the US.* I catch myself doing it sometimes; I will hear myself talking about “Americans,” and realize that I sound as though I am no more than the observing anthropologist – as though ‘Americanness’, like ‘Dutchness’, is not a part of me.

I have the lucky situation, though, that I can blend in – in either country – until I myself choose to unveil my otherness. It is not until I reveal to a shopkeeper in the Netherlands that I am not familiar with Euro coins that I get a strange and almost disapproving stare, and it is not until I reveal to my American friends that I’ve never seen “the Goonies” that they send a barrage of questions my way. This is not the case for Moroccans in the Netherlands who, in Holland, are instantly identified by merit of their looks as non-indigenous. It does not matter what your passport says, how well (and accentless) you speak the language, or where you and your parents were born. Darker skin and an Arabic name means that you are inherently an allochtoon, a foreigner.

But if Fatima is right about this sixth sense that Moroccans have, the same instant recognition of something ‘other’ exists here in Morocco, as well.

We tend to forget (or simply fail to realize) that migrants are perceived as outsiders not only in their country of new residence, but often also in their country of origin. Dutch social science and popular press has picked up on this a bit as it pertains to Dutch youth of Moroccan descent. Dutch society perceives them as ‘Moroccan’ – but every summer, when they drive their hard-earned cars down to Morocco and spend their summer nights promenading along the Mediterranean coast, they are perceived as foreigners – as Europeans. I remember media stories from a few years past, in which a number of teenagers were interviewed during these holidays in their (parents’) country of origin. They expressed a sense of alienation and uprootedness that I was struck by – because it seemed so hopeless. That feeling of belonging nowhere creates an emptiness that I needed time to get used to – and I think my alienation is much less acute than that of these young adults.

But I have to say that in terms of that insider-outsider stance, I feel completely at home at the Nimar, where I think we might share some of this feeling. We are all transnational: those of us who are Dutch are – obviously – all expats here in Africa, and those of us who are Moroccan have spent time in Europe. Both Morocco and the Netherlands are treated simultaneously as home front and as foreign territory. It creates an interesting sense of mobile rootedness. The US remains far away, but other than that, I feel fairly grounded here…


* For these days my perceived identity has been switched around: it is now the American connection that people do not see until I alert them to it. After spending eight years of having to explain my Dutch side, this is an interesting change. Nevertheless, it is striking to me how little has changed about my personal experience – though the poles have reversed, the ambiguous insider-outsider feeling remains completely unchanged. I’m still the seeming member of the club – until it becomes clear that there is some element of common cultural knowledge that I am not privy to.

Amours Voilées

I saw my first Moroccan movie tonight, on my second visit to a Moroccan movie theater. This cinema is not the best one in town, Farid later told me, and – without having seen Rabat’s other cinema from the inside – I am eager to believe him. The Royale was full of people, hustle and bustle, but it had an air of abandonment about it. Everything – the walls, the carpets, the brass finishes on the staircases and ticket booth – looked as though for years it had borne heavy loads of traffic, but had since then been covered in a layer of unstirred dust. The once-bright colors on the wall had long faded, and the carpets bore the worn signs of a million footprints.

The film, “Hijab l-houb,” or “amours voilées”* told the story of a young female doctor who, as TelQuel describes, “est complètement perdue entre son amour pour Dieu et son amour pour [un homme].” Batoul, the protagonist, is portrayed as a woman who allows herself to enjoy life, but also actively upholds her religious obligations.** Then, she falls in love with a very wrong, much older man who clearly is not looking for marriage. She allows herself to be pulled along by the current of this affair, yet is clearly conflicted about what she does. Perhaps it is this sense of conflict – this discrepancy between moral expectations and actual behavior – that compels her to don a hijab, a veil.

It is ultimately this conflict – between religion and sordidness, between moral expectations and personal desires – that drives the story to its climax. Caught with her lover at a party one evening by her brother (who is there himself with a girlfriend, but the movie dwells on this fact for no more than a second), a high-speed chase ensues when she and her lover flee the scene, and a sudden stop, the inability to stop the car, kills Batoul’s brother. This death sends an acute and searing message both to Batoul and to the audience that her kind of behavior leads to nothing but dire consequences.

But surprisingly, the movie does not stop here. Though we see Batoul in a state of deep religious repentance (while her lover moves on to other women), it becomes clear that the conflict has not yet been resolved: she returns to him. The audience is then treated to a second shocking climax: after Batoul learns she is pregnant, a complete nervous breakdown on the road lands her in the hospital, where the story is then suddenly and a bit unsatisfyingly terminated.

This ending alone made this movie incredibly interesting to me. I was surprised not only that the obvious message inherent in the brother’s death was not intended to be the take home message; I was also surprised that the movie passed no explicit judgment on Batoul’s pregnancy. Yes, the movie made clear, this is a difficult situation that is not without stigma. But no judgment was made. She was not denounced, neither explicitly nor implicitly. Ilyas – my movie partner for the evening – suggested that Batoul was able to get away with her transgressions because of her status in life. As a doctor, he said, she enjoyed the respect of her family, and had enough money to buy herself a certain level of freedom.

But there’s a larger message here, I think. I don’t think the movie is in the business of denouncing immoral behavior. I think, rather, that this movie actually laments the unfair burden placed on women’s shoulders to uphold the moral fiber of society, and the constraining boundaries that this burden imposes on them. It is a story that highlights the unfairness of these boundaries, and the immense difficulty women thereby face in their efforts to pursue some kind of happiness within these constraints.

This is portrayed most poignantly not by Batoul, but by her friend Houyem – a mother of two who has been left, years ago, by a philandering husband. Bearing the responsibility for two young children, she especially is expected to play the role of demure housewife. Without the protection (control?) of a man, Houyem is consigned to a sober life inside the house. She plays this role, and does it with gusto. She also plays a different one, however. A very different role, marked by a different costume: disguised by a wig, Houyem likes to go out on the town at night to have some fun and meet the occasional man. Her disguise lends her a bit of anonymity, which in turn allows her to transgress certain boundaries without risk of repercussions. But when a friend in the know confronts her with the hypocrisy and immorality of her soirées, this is what Houyem says: how fair is it that she is made to pay for her husband’s flouting of his responsibilities? He was never held accountable for his transgressions, or for the fact that he left, while social norms now confine her to a life inside the house (in the same way that Batoul is punished for her affair with a dead brother and illegitimate baby, while her lover is free to move on to the next woman, without reprimand or accountability). Houyem simply does not want to wake up one day, she says, and discover that she is fifty and life has passed her by.

The movie, I think, very strikingly portrays the crisis of looking for happiness when you don’t truly have the right to define for yourself what that happiness is, nor how to seek it. This is the tragedy: these women seek approval in the eyes of society. They seek the ultimate measure of success (and even of freedom?) as defined by the moral norm: marriage, a husband, financial comfort. Some of Batoul’s friends pursue these imposed dreams so ardently that they simply do not allow themselves time to think about whether this would truly bring them happiness. Those who do give themselves that time and discover that happiness may lie elsewhere, open themselves up to scorn and moral rejection.

Batoul’s headscarf essentially serves the same purpose as Houyem’s wig. Religion, for the women in this movie, becomes more a kind of self-protection than it does an ideological conviction. Religion is not the boundary that confines them, it is not the force that keeps them in line. On the contrary: it is a safe ticket to transgress these boundaries. This is what Batoul’s flirtation with the veil is about. For both herself and her family, this veil provides a material and psychological ‘shield’ that makes them all feel more comfortable about the life she leads beyond the gates of her house.

Religion is also a shield for Batoul’s best friend, whose ultimate goal is to marry a “barbu” – a bearded, AKA religious, man (and it is in pursuit of this goal that she, too, begins to wear a headscarf). Her implicit thought process reasons that a religious man is more inclined to transgress the moral boundaries, thus taking some of the woman’s moral burden upon themselves and balancing that responsibility more evenly.

No wonder the Islamists in Morocco are upset with the movie. Without having seen the film, they have denounced its message and have called for it to be taken out of circulation. It paints a horrible picture of veiled women, they cry; religion may under no circumstances be associated with that kind of hypocrisy. Telquel has devoted a bit of attention to this in two separate issues, but I can almost hear the editors’ laughter at these protestations emerging from behind their printed words. It doesn’t seem like Islamist groups have any clout in this matter – and aside from Telquel few others seem to take these protestations seriously. And for now, Amours Voilées continues to enjoy a considerable (and perhaps a bit naughty) popularity here in Morocco.


*the translation for these two versions of the title are subtly different from one another: the Arabic means ‘veil of love’ while the French means ‘veiled love’.
** This role is played by a French-Algerian actress. Ilyas disapproved of the fact that she was not Moroccan. I had had the feeling that she wasn’t quite convincing in her role. Perhaps our impressions came down to the same idea: that this actress didn’t truly feel the weight of the conflict this character was involved in? In last week’s Telquel, the film maker was asked why he chose this particular actress, and he replied that it is actually quite difficult to find an actor or actress residing in Morocco who is willing to play daring and controversial roles such as this one. An actress residing à l’étranger, at a safe distance from Moroccan moral judgment, is more free to take on such roles.