Jonah Newman • Morocco
Last Saturday was my last day in Morocco.
Thanks to a misunderstanding about whether December 11th was the last full day of the program or the day we were supposed to leave (I thought it was the former, but it turned out to be the latter), basically all of my friends left before me, so I spent my last 24 hours mostly on my own.
I spent the day doing some last minute shopping in the souk (i.e. beefing up my growing collection of pirated DVDs) and hitting up some of my favorite Rabat spots, most of which are not at all Moroccan (like the crepe place that I started writing this post from). Mostly, I just wondered the streets of the Medina, trying to remember what it was like the first time I walked through them more than three months ago, and thinking about how comfortable I’ve become here.
Before studying abroad, you hear a lot about “culture shock”, the often-difficult process of adapting to life in a place that is vastly different from what you’re used to. But I’m much more concerned about what the study abroad experts usually refer to as “re-entry”—dealing with the adjustment back to my own culture after three months living at the once-strange but now all-too-familiar pace of Moroccan life.
It’s not that I’m not ready to leave Morocco; I am. The past few months have really been a great learning experience, one which I’m sure I’ll come to appreciate even more as I grow more distant from it. But I’m ready. I’m exhausted by the energy that it often takes just to get simple tasks done here—some of which is a product of language barriers, but some of which is simply life in Morocco. I’m excited for a hot shower that stays hot, for food that isn’t slow-cooked until the flavors are indistinguishable, and for the ability to get in a car without feeling like my life is in danger.
But many of these seem trivial in comparison to the things that I’ll miss. Most of all, Moroccans are some of the nicest, most hospitable, friendly, and outgoing—almost too much sometimes—that I’ve ever met. Sure, there are obnoxious Moroccans, and I’ve run into many of them too. But if I’ve learned anything this semester it’s the value of hospitality that really permeates this culture.
Here’s one story that I’ll never forget: I was traveling with my mom and step-mom a couple weeks ago, and our plan was to head from Tangier to Chefchouen, a beautiful blue-washed city in the Rif mountains, on our way to Fes. But it was pouring rain, and the road was washed out, so the man at the bus station told us that no buses were going to Chefchaouen. We made a split-second decision to get on the bus to Fes, which was leaving imminently, and reluctantly made peace with the fact that we weren’t going to see the little town of Chefchaouen.
But about halfway through the bus ride, our knight in shining armor showed up, in the form of a 51 year-old named Mohammed. Mohammed had overheard us in the bus station looking for tickets to Chaouen (as the locals call it) and, himself a resident of the town, was trying to get there as well. He’s a bus driver, but had a break to be with his family for a few days, so he “knew a guy who knew a guy”, and when he called to find out that the road to Chaouen was open again, he showed us where to get off the bus to get to the old medina. But it didn’t end there.
In the pouring rain, Mohammed found us a taxi, helped us drag our bags through the hilly, winding streets of the Chaouen medina to the hotel we were going to stay at, and then told us about a better hotel that he took me to see and—once I decided that it was, in fact, better—helped us bring our bags to that hotel as well. Then he showed us a rug store, the “best restaurant in Chefchaouen” (which really was delicious), and brought me to an ATM to take out cash. And he didn’t do any of this for money. He grudgingly accepted some dirhams when I offered them to him at the hotel—after he had already done far too much to help us—but refused to let us pay for the coffee that he shared with us while we ate lunch. He was simply being helpful out of the goodness of his heart. He was just being Moroccan.
In some ways, the reverse culture shock of re-entering American society will really be an “identity shock.” In Morocco I was an outsider, to be sure, but after living there for 3 ½ months, I came to take on a certain Moroccan identity. On my first night in their house, my host family re-named me Samir, and I like to think that Samir encapsulates those pieces of Moroccan culture that I wish to retain: the hospitality, above all. And while I’m going back to being Jonah when I get back to the U.S., I’ll always carry a bit of Samir with me.
I’m now in Copenhagen with my girlfriend, who spent the semester studying here, and luckily, we have another sure-to-be-wonderful week traveling in Europe to help us both make the transition back home. Prague and Budapest, here we come!
Note: This post can also be read at my blog on northwestern.newvoices.org. Also, the content of this post might not be suitable for the weak of stomach.
The whole thing happened very quickly and casually. Without any warning, a man and his son dragged the sheep from the kitchen into the middle of the courtyard and tied up its legs. There was no prayer or ceremony and no one was dressed in traditional costume. It was about a quarter to nine on Wednesday morning and most of the family was still in their pajamas. A minute later, the man took a large knife and, with a few quick cuts, ended the sheep’s short life. My 40-year-old host brother, Muhammed, was on squeegee patrol, constantly pushing the blood toward the drain in the corner of the courtyard. For about half a minute, the sheep continued to move, writhing as if trying to stand up. And then, it stopped.
This was my first experience of Eid al-Adha, the festival of the sacrifice.
Eid al-Adha commemorates the story from the Qur’an of Ibrahim almost sacrificing Ishamel. To Jews and Christians, it will sound very similar to the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac. God asked Ibrahim to sacrifice his only son, and then stopped Ibrahim at the last minute, instead providing a sheep to be killed in Ishmael’s place. To commemorate this event, Muslims buy and sacrifice a sheep (in some places, a camel, goat, or cow will do) to proclaim their faith in God.
Just a day earlier, I had been in an upper class neighborhood of Casablanca, interviewing Jewish students for my independent study project. Tuesday night I came back to my host family in Rabat, where two sheep were living in our kitchen (actually, one was in the shower), awaiting their role in the largest Muslim holiday of the year. It felt like a world away.
After the first sheep was killed, Raful, the man who had been hired to help with the sacrifice, and his son began the arduous process of skinning it. Hanging the sheep from the rafters by its hind legs, they used a combination of knives and their hands to slowly peel the skin away from the sheep’s body. It took more than half an hour. Throughout, Muhammed or Raful’s son would continue to clean the floors, which were still dripping with blood. Afterward, they gutted the animal. That’s when the women joined the process; my host mother and her granddaughter began separating out the various intestines to be cooked and eaten later in the day. Honestly, that was the grossest part.
Just as quickly and unexpectedly as they had brought out the first sheep, the men dragged the second sheep out of the shower and began the process all over again. And by noon, various innards (I didn’t ask what parts, exactly, they were—truthfully, I didn’t want to know) were already on skewers and in pots being prepared for the festive meal. We had kebabs for lunch and a kind of stew for dinner, filled with sheep parts whose taste and consistency did not do anything for me.
I woke up Thursday morning to the sounds and smells of a butcher shop. The sheep carcasses, which had been hanging since the morning before, now smelled even more strongly of…well, sheep carcass. One of the sheep had been taken down, and my host father was now dutifully chopping it into pieces with a giant knife. “Today is kebab day!” my mom declared when I went downstairs for breakfast. “Mezian!” I replied. “Excellent!” It turned out also to be head day—but my family correctly assumed that the other host student and I were not interested in eating the sheep’s head, and allowed us to stick to the kebabs.
It took my host dad from 9:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon to finishing chopping the two sheep and sorting the pieces of meat into bags. He worked straight through lunch, taking intermittent bites of his grilled kebabs while cutting up more potential kebabs. Despite the stench of meat all around, the kebabs were almost certainly the best I’ve ever had—fresh, tender, and absolutely delicious.
As much as I had been looking forward to this holiday for the past two months, I was, truthfully, also very concerned that it would turn me into a vegetarian. In the end, I was surprised by how normal the whole thing felt. It was a very tangible expression of the power that human beings have over nature, of the food chain in pure form. The transformation of the sheep from living being to meat was rapid; once the sheep were hanging and skinned they barely resembled the animal that had lived for a few days in our shower. And even when I was eating kebabs and thought to myself “I saw this sheep alive one day ago,” the thought somehow didn’t bother me. I’ve eaten meat many times before, and undoubtedly I’ll eat it in the future. As some people say, you shouldn’t be able to eat meat unless you can stand to see how it gets to your table. I guess I’ve passed that test.
Eid Mubarak Said! A happy and blessed holiday!
A couple of my fellow contributors on The 195 wrote a couple weeks ago about discovering that the place they’re living abroad has started to feel like home (see here and here). In a lot of ways, Rabat has really come to feel like home for me too. The narrow streets of the old medina that were so confusing at first are now second nature. The rhythm of life here—busy in the mornings, slow during the time between the two afternoon prayers, picking up again around 6pm and basically shutting down by 10—has become my normal. Eating dinner at 9:30 is part of my routine (although that doesn’t stop my speedy metabolism from craving food at 5 or 6). Life in this city is now familiar.
But while Rabat has become comfortable for me—particularly the old medina, where I’ve lived for the last two months—I’ve also found myself feeling ‘sick’ of it. I reluctantly spent the past two weekends here and I’m itching to get out of the small radius that includes my house, my school, and the cafes on the main avenue that my friends and I frequent. You come abroad because you want to expand your world, but perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, my world here is very small. Rabat is a big city, and yet I confine myself to the little corner of it that I’ve carved out for myself and labeled my ‘home’. In some ways, I think, this is the other side of the coin: feeling comfortable in a place, feeling at home, often comes at the expense of feeling too comfortable and forgetting that there are parts of everyone’s home that they’ve never chosen to explore.
This feeling drew me jump in a taxi on Friday afternoon and to ask the driver to take me to Yacoub el Mansour, a neighborhood by the ocean side that I thought I remembered hearing interesting things about. It turns out it’s also one of the poorest neighborhoods in Rabat.
When we got close, the taxi driver asked me where I wanted to go. I didn’t really have any idea. Seeing a market, and figuring that would also mean people, I told him to stop there. I wandered around a bit, walking through the market, which led down the street and toward the ocean. I stopped for a few minutes to watch some guys playing soccer in the middle of the street—they had set up two rocks at either end as goals and when the occasional car or motorcycle would drive by they kind of just kept playing and let the car swerve around them. I debated whether to take my camera out to capture it, but decided against it. I looked out of place enough as it was.
I walked to the water, and snapped a few shots of the fisherman standing in the tide and the men sitting on the bluffs above. I turned around and tried to capture the graffiti on a broken fence and the towering minaret of a mosque that I could see in the distance. That’s when I met Rashid.
He turned the corner as I was taking pictures, and, in Darija that I didn’t fully understand, asked me what was I doing. I told him I was a student and a journalist from America. A 39-year-old with deep brown skin, uneven, blackened teeth, and a prickly 5 o’clock shadow, Rashid immediately stuck out his hand. He told me to keep taking pictures, but feeling suddenly self-conscious of my expensive DSLR, I put away my camera. After politely asking his name and then briskly ending with “B’Salamma”, we parted ways. It was only then that I actually noticed what was behind the fence. Beyond the empty field that I had first seen were the characteristic scrap tin roofs and garbage-covered dirt paths of a slum.
I walked back toward the street-ball game, trying to decide what to do next. I was way outside the medina and certainly outside my comfort zone. Suddenly, Rashid was back. Again he spoke in Darija, which he quickly discovered I only partially understood. He pointed toward the slums and asked me if I wanted to see them. Hesitating for a second, I followed him.
Rashid was an enthusiastic tour guide, stopping at every second to ask if I wanted to take a picture. He seemed to know everyone we passed, and as uncomfortable as I felt intruding on these people’s lives, walking with Rashid put me a little bit at ease. At his constant insistence, I took pictures of many of the people we encountered.
Only a large brick wall and a narrow two-lane road separated the ramshackle houses, made of a combination of concrete, tin siding, and sheets from the ocean. In most places in the world this would be million-dollar property. But here were people living in nearly destitute poverty.
The slum town continues for about 3 city blocks, and Rashid talked the whole time; I understood very little. But I did get that he grew up in these slums from when he was a little boy. As we kept walking in the direction of his house it became clear that he no longer lives there. Instead, we left the slums and entered an apartment building a couple blocks away. We walked up the stairs, which were littered with cigarette butts, to apartment 9, where I met Rashid’s wife and baby daughter, along with both of their aged mothers. They served me tea, and tried talking to me in Darija. I did a lot of smiling and nodding. Rashid took me to the roof, from which you could just barely see the ocean in the narrow space between two new apartment buildings, clearly recently built. On the other side, the slums were still visible, stretching down the coastline.
After Rashid and I parted, I began to walk back toward the medina along the other side of the slums. Men sat in the shells of old houses playing backgammon and eating. Across the street, the tall minaret of the neighborhood mosque blared the call to prayer as the sun started to set over the ocean behind me. People walked back and forth along the street, barely noticing the sharp contrasts between the banks and shops on one side and the crumbling houses of the slums on the other.
I don’t want to pretend that this little excursion last week changed me, or even gave me a really accurate picture of what life must be like in this slum town. I can’t say that I really know how it feels to grow up with a scrap tin roof, knowing that just a few kilometers away live people like my host family with large houses and beautiful courtyards.
But it did remind me that no matter how long you’ve lived in a place, no matter how much it feels like home and even how ‘boring’ it might seem, there are always parts of it that you haven’t seen. Often they’re just a short taxi ride away.
If it sounds at all like I was more a passive observer than an active participant in part one of the Moroccan wedding, that’s because I was. I found myself in a room full of easily 200 people, all but one of whom shared no common language with me. And I was taking part in a ritual that was completely unfamiliar to me but which everyone else there seemed to know very well. All things considered, I think it’s pretty fair that I spent most of the time watching everyone else and taking lots of pictures (although that doesn’t mean I didn’t get up and dance for a few minutes along the way—much to the delight of the Moroccans in my host family).
Night two of the wedding was somewhat different. I was still mostly an observer, but this time I felt more at home. For one thing, it actually took place in my host home; the open courtyard in the middle of the house was transformed on Saturday afternoon into a beautiful venue for a wedding reception, complete with white cloth-covered chairs, elegantly set tables, and even a place for the band. With that in mind, it was obviously also a much smaller affair than the first night: only members of the bride and groom’s families were in attendance. Although I didn’t know any of them, aside from my immediate host family, before the wedding weekend (I didn’t even know the groom, my host brother, until a few days before, since he lives in Belgium), by the time Saturday night rolled around, I felt like I was almost a part of the family. If you’ll remember, we spent the better part of 6 hours together on Friday night, in addition to lunch and general hanging out on both Friday and Saturday afternoons. Although I still couldn’t communicate much with any of them, the younger cousins made an effort to talk to me and ask me questions, and even to explain things along the way. And just being in a room with faces that I mostly recognized made a big difference.
Part two of the wedding also had a more laid-back feel to it. Everyone was dressed up, but it was a little bit more casual, with the women in colorful djellabas instead of the fancier caftans of the previous night. The band was much smaller, and the main singer was Hicham, my host brother, giving me the impression that it might just have been a group of his friends who had been asked to provide the music. The dancing in the middle of the night was more spirited; it felt like people could let loose a little more when it was just the family.
But there was still quite a bit of ritual and tradition. When the bride arrived with her entourage of family around 10:30, the women of our family greeted her with milk and stuffed dates, and she and her female relatives were showed to the traditionally decorated reception room of the house, a room which until the wedding hadn’t been used in the two months I’ve been here. In the meantime, the men from Muna’s family were seated in the courtyard, with the men from our family. Everyone was served milk and stuffed dates, and then Khalid and Muna sat in the reception room while the women sang and danced around them.
Like part one, it was a long evening. The band played all through the night, but the dancing didn’t really get going until after midnight. And we didn’t eat dinner until at least 1:30 a.m. Like Friday night, there was an outrageous amount of food. It started with the dates and milk, and included cakes and cookies, both chicken and lamb, and lots and lots of tea. There wasn’t enough space at the tables, so the bride’s family ate first, after which the servers cleared all the tables and reset them for our family to eat. It was a small gesture, but to be considered part of the family felt meaningful to me, especially since I’ve been feeling for most of the quarter like a guest in my host home rather than a part of it.
The night ended close to 3 o’clock, and I was again happy to feel my head against my pillow. I spent the better part of the next 36 hours in my bed with a fever—maybe it was just a coincidence, but I have a feeling that two straight nights of a big fat Moroccan wedding had left its mark on me.
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I knew I was in for a long night when we walked into the ballroom a few minutes after 9 o’clock last Friday to find that only a handful of the two-dozen or so tables had been filled. For the next hour, guests trickled into the room, each person greeting the members of the bride and groom’s families who were loitering near the door. The men all wore suits; the women were dressed in beautiful, brightly colored kaftans.
I had arrived with Jethro, the Dutch student who is also being hosted by my family, and Muhammed, Salah, and Khalid—three of my host brothers, all in their late 30s or 40s and all married and divorced. Khalid, who lives in Belgium, was the groom. After we arrived he disappeared and I didn’t see him again until 10:15 or 10:30 when he entered the room with his new wife, Muna, who was wearing a beautiful white wedding dress and a tiara and was seated atop a gold and silver litter (one of those cushion-y things with a canopy that Kings used to ride in) and carried by four men in long white djellabas. Family members pulled out their cameras, cell phones, camcorders—basically anything that could record the event—and the professional videographer captured the entire thing, which was simultaneously broadcast on two TV’s set up near the back of the room for those who weren’t close enough to the action. That’s when the party really got started.
I like to think of the evening in stages, which corresponded both to the food that was served and to the actions and dress of the bride and groom. The first stage was the hour or so before the bride and groom made their entrance, when the 12-man band—complete in djellabas and fez hats—played music while the guests arrived and we were served tea and noshed on the nuts that were set out on the tables.
Stage two included more music from the band, as well as a performance from one of Khalid’s older cousins, who did a combination of what seemed like a comedy routine (at least everyone who understood it was laughing) and a musical solo. The song included a lot of call-and-response, and everyone seemed to know the words. The bride and groom watched the performance while perched on a white couch at the front of the room, from which they observed most of the night unfold. In this stage, the servers brought us cakes, which were scarfed down quickly, and more tea. At around 11:30, the bride and groom left to another room, and the bride made her first outfit change of the evening. It would not be her last.
Stage three began around midnight, when the bride and groom entered the ballroom again. This time the bride was wearing a long silvery kaftan with a large gem-studded belt. Stage three included the first bit of dancing, which in Morocco meant women (and some of the male cousins) standing in the middle of the room, shimmying and moving their hips slightly. It kind of reminded me of a mom at a bar mitzvah trying to dance to Jay-Z. In other words: awkward.
Stage three also (finally) included the main meal, which was served around 12:30. It began with bastilla, a thin, sweet, chicken-filled pastry, topped with powdered sugar and served like a pie. Before we could even finish ours—although we did put quite a dent in it—the servers whisked it away, and returned shortly with the largest, most tender side of lamb you’ve ever seen. A little while later, that too was taken away, and desert was served: chocolate cake and plentiful fruit. To say I was full would be an atrocious understatement.
Shortly after dinner the bride and groom departed again, and they returned around 1:30 a.m. This time they were both in the air, carried atop golden beds, which looked kind of like large crowns. They were transported around the room and then danced in circles around each other. It was like a fancier version of lifting the bride and groom in chairs, like we do at Jewish weddings. This time both of them had changed outfits. Khalid was dressed in a classy off-white djellaba and Muna was in her third dress of the night, a beautiful dark green and gold kaftan.
This grand entrance marked the beginning of stage four, which consisted of more music and lots of pictures. In couples or small groups, many of the guests ascended to the white couch and had their picture taken with the bride and groom. This went on for quite some time, during which many of the guests—myself included—took the opportunity to get a breath of fresh air outside. But don’t forget this stage’s food: the servers carried around plates literally piled to the top with little cookies and pastries. And more tea. I opted instead for a cup of espresso—I needed something to keep me in the game. There was also much more dancing in this stage, and a solo from Hicham, another of my host brothers.
After another outfit change around 3:00am, the bride and groom returned—him in a black suit and a striking red tie and her in a different long, white wedding dress. Stage five, dress number four. The servers, who were looking pretty tired at this point, brought forward the seven-layer wedding cake, and Khalid and Muna cut a slice into each layer before feeding each other their first piece. Again, this in front of dozens of eager family members with cameras. The cake was delicious—absurdly sweet almond-flavored cake, with a sugary frosting that had the consistency of the outside of a meringue.
Stage five didn’t last long. Around 3:30, the bride and groom were whisked away in a car decorated with ribbons (and driven by the same cousin who performed earlier in the night) and the guests began to leave. But not before grabbing a quick bowl of harira, the thick Moroccan stew that we ate every night of Ramadan. Harira?! At 3:30 in the morning?! That was one step too far, even for me.
I returned home with Muhammed and Hicham and slept for more than 10 hours. Rested up, I was ready for part two of the wedding celebration to begin the following night.
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It took a couple of days, but Hanaan, my 15-year-old rural host sister, finally warmed up to me. She’s a happy and playful girl, who seems quite content with her life. She showed off her bread-baking skills to me one morning. “Is it hard?” I asked, as she worked in a fast-paced kneading motion. “No,” she answered quickly and with a smile.
That same smile came over her face when, at dinner, I asked if the bread we were eating was the same bread that she made this morning. “Yes,” she replied, with an encore performance of the smile. Behind it, I sensed pride and gratitude that I had recognized her work, easy though it may be.
But her life is certainly not easy. She does much of the work in the house—cooking, feeding the animals, sweeping the dust from the ground outside the house, fetching water from the well, serving, cleaning up after meals, collecting firewood…and certainly many tasks that I haven’t seen her perform yet. But she does it with the excitement and pride of a little girl who is eager to help her mother. In the evening, when her 11-year-old cousin came home from school and her mom asked Hanaan (told, more exactly) to go feed the sheep, she did it with the gait of someone with an important responsibility.
And today, when she separated the raw wool for her mom to spin, the two of them sitting side by side, there was a bond that seemed to bind them. They chatted playfully—I couldn’t understand about what—and reprimanded the younger girls with equal authority. It’s as if, with the responsibility of so many household chores, she had also earned a certain respect, a place as an adult woman in the house. My liberal education is telling me that this is wrong. She should be at school. It is knowledge that should earn her the respect of her family. But my experience here is challenging that. She can do things that I’ll never be able to do, that no amount of time in a classroom could teach me. But they are skills all the same, and they are the skills that she needs to live successfully, get married, and support a family in this community. At 15, Hanaan is already a strong woman in what I can only assume must be a long line of strong women. Maybe I should know better, but I’m starting to respect it, rather than judge or pity her.
—
Another scene from a Moroccan village:
One afternoon we met with some men from the village to ask them questions about their life and perspectives, in the same manner that we had done with a group of women the day before. The first question from our group was about their thoughts on the family law reform, passed in 2004, which, among other things, gave women more rights in the realm of marriage and divorce.
The general consensus among the men seemed to be negative.
“The Qur’an says that I can have four wives,” yelled Muhammed, the caretaker of the school, as he adamantly waved four fingers at Lahcen, our academic director who was doing the translating. “But the new law makes this almost impossible.” The law requires a man to get his first wife’s written consent if he wishes to take another wife.
“The law gives women more rights than men,” another guy said, citing a story of a man who moved to Spain and tried to divorce his wife after he discovered that she got a driver’s license without getting his approval first. (Imagine that—a women whose husband moves away wants a means of transportation! How terrible!) The judge wouldn’t let him.
“Men have no rights anymore,” he lamented.
Our group, 39 out of 45 of them women, were taken aback, to say the least. But the girls and women from the village who were there didn’t seem too surprised.
After about 5 more minutes, during which the questioning from our group took on a tone that felt more like lecturing the men on Western ideas of women’s rights, I decided to raise my hand and change the subject. “Ask the kids here if they want to stay in the village when they grow up,” I asked Lahcen. A show of hands told us that all of the dozen or so kids there wanted to stay in the village. Except one girl.
“Why not?” Lahcen asked.
“I don’t want to live in a place where men think it’s ok for women to have fewer rights than they do,” she answered.
—
On our last day in the village, I walked to school with Hasna, the 11-year-old cousin who lives next door to us. The school is about a 15-minute walk, over a number of rocky hills. Hasna, who has a sweet, boyish look and wears jeans with patches of bright colors, wants to leave at 7, even though school doesn’t start until 8. We end up leaving at 7:15, and still arrive nearly half an hour early.
On the way, she tells me that the school in the village only goes until 6th grade. After that, kids have to go to the middle school/high school in the nearby town, which is where her 14-year-old brother goes.
“Are you going to go to that school too?” I ask.
She says she doesn’t know. She wants to, but it’s up to her father. Her older sister, she tells me, only went to school for 5 years before getting married and moving away from the village. She doesn’t tell me about her older brother, but I can only assume that he went to school for longer.
Still, Hasna has it better off than Hanaan, my host sister, who has never been to school. That evening, I finally get the chance to ask Hanaan why. She’s sitting in the kitchen, cutting vegetables without a cutting board, when I ask her if she goes to school. I already knew the answer, but figured that it was a good way to start to conversation.
“Did you ever go to school?” I ask.
“Me, no I never went to school. I always do this,” she says, gesturing toward the bowl of cut vegetables.
I don’t know the word for ‘Why’ in Darija, so I try to use other words to get around it. She mentions “Baba,” Dad, and so I ask, “Your dad doesn’t want you to go to school?” She nods. Earlier in the day, Hasna had given me the same answer: “Her dad doesn’t think that girls should go to school,” she had said.
“Do you want to go to school?” I ask Hanaan. She answers yes, before quickly changing the subject, returning to our usual game of pointing to objects and telling me the name in Arabic and asking me to give the name in English.
The interaction leaves me conflicted. It was easy to make sense of the patriarchal attitudes when they were coming from Muhammed, the man from the round-table discussion, who seemed to have a generally angry (and misogynistic) demeanor. But it was much harder to reconcile those beliefs with my host-father, also Muhammed, who I had experienced as being a wonderful father. The way he spoke with Salma, his 5-year-old daughter, the way he played with her and kissed her, was incredibly loving and tender. His interactions with Hanaan were rougher, although I have to imagine that there was a time when the same kisses fell on her head. Why would a father who loves his daughters so much keep them from the opportunity to go to school? Especially when Hanaan clearly wants to.
If earlier in the week I had almost glorified Hanaan’s role in the house, by the end of our time in the village I had a less rosy picture. She works hard; has no friends, as far as I could tell, other than her cousins; and seemed jealous when Abd al Hfidth, the 14-year-old boy cousin, wrote a note to me in Arabic, which she clearly couldn’t do. That she approaches her role in life with a positive attitude and maintains a happy demeanor says more about her strength of character than about the justness of her place in the family and the community.
Still, I have trouble imposing my views of women’s rights on a society that is so drastically different from my own. And I am left with more questions than answers: Who am I to place a value judgment on these men whose lifestyle I went to “experience” for a week but certainly couldn’t imagine adopting for good? I may not agree with their views on women, but does that make them wrong? Is there a middle ground between demeaning their beliefs and accepting them? And what is the right action for me to take to help girls like Hanaan without totally uprooting the culture behind villages such as this one?
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I spent last weekend with a group of friends in Assilah, a beautiful beach town less than an hour south of Tangier, on the Atlantic coast. We’ve got a beach here in Rabat, but the beach we went to in Assilah, about an hour and a half hike on the bluffs overlooking the ocean, lived up to it’s name: Paradise Beach. And the town itself – with its whitewashed old medina houses, beautiful blue trim, and colorful murals – had a certain magical feeling to it.
With these photos I hope to share some of that magic with you.
Note: This post can also be seen on the “What’s Your Story?” blog on the NU Hillel website.
The synagogue was tiny; you probably could fit it into the living room of the apartment I lived in last year. Maybe you would need the kitchen too, but only if you included the women’s section, which, separated by a white curtain, was only big enough for a single row of chairs. But it’s really not fair to include the women’s section. This was really a men’s domain.
It is located on the grounds of one of the two Jewish high schools in Casablanca and it seems almost like an afterthought. Two Moroccan policemen sat at the entrance, but they must be there mostly for the protection of the school. It’s hard to imagine such a small synagogue being a target for violence.
Inside, about 35 men of all ages—a surprising range actually, from boys of 11 or 12 to old men, certainly in their 80s—greeted each other with the tradition Moroccan greeting, a single kiss on each cheek. Chatter in French could be heard as people prepared to begin Kol Nidre, the evening service that begins Yom Kippur. Men took their seats—what I can only assume are the same seats they’ve been sitting in for decades—on stiff wooden benches, covered with thin red cushions, which surrounded the small sanctuary on all sides.
Being Ashkenazi, a Jew of Eastern European descent, I was a little uneasy about spending Yom Kippur in Morocco. Moroccans are Sephardi Jews, originally from Spain. And while the prayers—for the most part—are the same, the melodies and traditions and atmosphere of a Sephardi synagogue can be very different. And my expectations were correct. This was certainly unlike any Yom Kippur I’ve ever had. The services were foreign, at some points almost to the point of feeling like another religion altogether, and the atmosphere was entirely different from my synagogue at home. But it was also a Yom Kippur full of devotion and thoughtfulness, of community and prayer. And it was one of the most meaningful Jewish experiences I’ve had in a long time.
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But let’s back up. How did I get here?
I got the name of Jacquy Sebag from a friend who did the same program in Morocco a few years ago. All she gave me was his email address and the fact that she had spent part of Passover with him and his family. After deciding that I wanted to spend Yom Kippur in Casablanca, which is home to the vast majority of Morocco’s 3,500 or so Jews, I emailed Jacquy. He told me that he and his family would be happy to have me for meals before and after the fast.
Jacquy is a firm man, in his handshake, in his stature, in his beliefs. The phone number he had given me didn’t work when I tried calling, and by the time I found his house it was nearly sunset. When I arrived, he informed me that I had only two minutes to eat before the fast started. His brother, who told me only that they are “brothers, but very different” said I should take my time. I quickly recognized this as a debate with roots much too deep for me to get involved in. I snarfed down a croissant and a couple of potato knishes, trading bites with large gulps of water and orange juice. A few minutes later, I was back outside, following Jacquy to synagogue. “We’re already late,” he told me.
Kol Nidre, although it lasted nearly three hours, felt like a bit of a whirlwind. I recognized many of the prayers but none of the melodies. Near the beginning of the service I was caught somewhat by surprise when I heard the name Muhammed. Not the prophet Muhammed, but Muhammed VI (Muhammed HaShishi, in Hebrew), the current King of Morocco. It goes without saying that I’ve never heard a prayer for the king said in synagogue.
There seemed to be little choreography and even less organization. In most synagogues in the U.S. congregants stand and sit in relative unison, often at the direction of the Rabbi. Here, men stood and sat at their will, almost never at the same time, and moved constantly around the small room. Some of the older gentlemen, including the guy who spent much of the time asleep against the wall, sat the majority of services; one man stood the entire time, not only during Kol Nidre but also the whole following day.
I left services with Jacquy and his sons, who pointed me in the right direction back to my hotel and wished me a good night and a “g’mar chatimah tovah,” the traditional Yom Kippur greeting, wishing for a good verdict to be written in the Book of Life. I learned that services the next morning would begin at 8:00. I had absolutely no intention of getting there that early. Feeling exhausted from a day of travel and looking ahead to an entire day of fasting on a pitifully small dinner, I went to sleep that night feeling somewhat deflated and perhaps further from home than I had in three weeks in Morocco. I had not expected that even in synagogue, on Yom Kippur, surrounded by Jews, I would feel so distinctly out of place.
I awoke in the morning already feeling somewhat weak and lightheaded and (confession) chose to drink some water and eat a Nature Valley bar that I packed from home and had been saving for just such an occasion. I arrived at the synagogue at 9:15 to find that they had barely made a dent in the morning service. With the previous night’s experience still in my head and a long day in the synagogue ahead of me, I was understandably unenthusiastic.
But Yom Kippur is a repetitive service. And as the day moved on, I began to pick up on the melodies and the rhythm. I knew when to sit and when to stand. And I started to appreciate the differences that, in my opinion, actually made the service much more accessible. Rather than one cantor, a seemingly self-selected group of men alternated leading the prayers, almost all of which were read out loud. These leaders sat among the rest of the congregation and there were no restrictions on who could stand behind the amud, or podium, which is usually the spot for the Rabbi or cantor. Certain prayers were interrupted after almost every word with an enthusiastic “Amen!” from all directions, more like a Baptist church than any synagogue I had been to.
And while all these things added to the foreignness, they also fostered an energy and communal atmosphere that I haven’t felt in any other synagogue I’ve ever been to. The commotion started to feel less like chaos and more like the purposeful actions of a tight-knit community. In order to decide who would receive the honor of opening the ark, a box was removed from a shelf and one of the younger boys would reach in to blindly pick out a note card with the name of a congregant. Even coming as I do from a synagogue where all the services are lead by lay members and where honors are regularly spread around the congregation, there was something about this gesture, simple as it was, that represented for me the strength of this community. In many synagogues in the U.S., Yom Kippur is the day when people who never show up for synagogue make an appearance, creating a congregation that feels somewhat disconnected and a service that can feel a bit like a show. I don’t know if the people in this synagogue in Casablanca are regulars or not, but I know that—at least from the outside—it felt like a community of people who knew each other, who were comfortable with each other, whose prayers were stronger because they were uttered together.
And though no one ever formally welcomed me or invited me in, as the day went on I felt that I became a part of this community too. I spent nearly 10 hours in that synagogue on Saturday, broken by a single hour-and-a-half break between the morning and afternoon services. (During the break, most of the men just took the cushions off the benches and found a spot in the shade just outside the synagogue to take a nap. I followed suit.) And there was something about it—maybe it was the long day, maybe it was the fasting, maybe even (and I’m sure my mothers will cringe at this) it was the fact that everyone was male—that made this service a decidedly communal experience, and allowed me to feel a part of this unfamiliar community.
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I didn’t come to Morocco looking for a Jewish community. All I really had hoped to find in Casablanca last week was a place to spend the holiday and people with whom to observe the ritual. But what I found instead was a powerful Jewish experience. As clichéd as it sounds, even as I write it, there really was a spirit—a ruach, in Hebrew—that filled that tiny room. As the sun set and Neilah, the final service on Yom Kippur, began, that ruach reached its pinnacle.
Neilah has always been a powerful service for me. Filled with imagery of the gates of prayer closing in the face of people struggling to have their repentance accepted, there is a desperation and urgency to Neilah that doesn’t appear in other Jewish liturgy. But the added emotion of the few dozen men in that synagogue, and my feeling, just then, that I finally belonged among them, made this Neilah—and this Yom Kippur—more meaningful than any I’ve experienced before.
I don’t speak French. I speak so little French that I had to look up on Google translator how to say “I don’t speak French” in French. The only French I know, which I guess comes in handy here, is Je ne sais pas, which, said in the right tone, roughly translates to, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”
And yet, everywhere I go people speak to me in French. In other countries my pasty white skin would immediately indicate to locals that I’m American and thus elicit English from taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and strangers on the street. But here, the language assumed of white people is French, not English.
There are a few explanations for this. For one, tourists here are much more likely to be French-speaking than English-speaking. As we learned in class the other day, Americans make up a small percentage of tourists in Morocco. In the past year, only about around 100,000 Americans visited Morocco out of close to 9 million tourists. Many, many more people come from Europe, especially France and Spain.
But I think this phenomenon also reflects a remnant of French colonial influence in Morocco. This is a country in which people of power, people of means, and people with light skin (often the same people) have long spoken French. When the French left in 1956, they left behind their language, especially in the upper echelons of Moroccan society. All of the Jews I met here at synagogue on Rosh HaShanah spoke French as their primary language. The younger generation also learned Arabic in school. But the lingua franca in the house was French. To know French in Morocco is to have access to the best schools and the best economic opportunities—many of which, it seems, can be found only in France.
The assumption that, as a white person, I know French is often accompanied with an exclamation of surprise when, instead of French, I respond in broken Arabic. “You speak Arabic?” I’ve been asked excitedly by a fair number of Moroccans. Their pleasant shock is quite telling. Their assumption, based pretty solidly in history, is that white people don’t take the time to learn Arabic. My guidebook told me that the way to a Moroccan’s heart is to speak to them in Arabic. I’m not sure if I’ve won over any hearts, but I do think I’ve provided some pleasant smiles.
Earlier today I joked with some of my friends who told me that they had been mistaken for Moroccans and asked for directions. I would kill to be mistaken for a Moroccan, I said. Thanks to my father’s genes, I don’t have much hope for that. But it does give me a bit more motivation to learn Moroccan Darija well and to increase my competency in standard Arabic. I want to be able to surprise people—not only in Morocco, but elsewhere in the Arab world—and to show them that there are white people who are interested not in exporting our language but in learning and understanding theirs.
