Moroccan Rhythms

           I’ve tried again and again, but I can’t find any way to start off this post, so I guess this’ll do.  In the week since I wrote the last post so much has happened that I could easily divide this into two stories, or even three.  The thing is, this week couldn’t have been better made for a continuous narrative if it were fiction.  This week was a story; it is bound by themes and motifs and pulling apart the individual episodes into separate posts would ruin the overall effect, just as if you tried to analyze each tile of the tile work in my new host family’s foyer.  Each tile is stunning on its own, but it’s the overall effect that really matters.  Yes, I’m with my host family now, but that’s not for until the end of the story, and there’s a lot of tale to tell until then.

            Our day off this week was Sunday the 24^th, so on Saturday night the staff hosted a “Peace Corps Morocco Party” where they said we would dance to Moroccan and American pop music, watch/learn some Amizigh (Berber) dances and have a giant jam session cum sing-a-long with any staffers and trainees who cared to join.  As you might expect I wasn’t particularly fond of the American Pop part of the dance party, but the Moroccan pop was interesting.  Although it is as heavily auto-tuned as American pop music, it is much more rhythmically nuanced than our pop.  I don’t want to make this blog in any way the snooty music criticism of an under-qualified listener, so I’ll stop myself and just say I liked it! 

The Amizigh dances did not start off well.  Six of the LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators, our teachers’ formal title) performed a dance, but I think it had been awhile since they had last done the dance because they had three or four false starts and stopped to fix several flubs throughout.  Of course, we probably wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t stopped and pointed out the mistakes.  Part of the problem was that the dance demanded that the men drum, dance and sing a call while the women sang a response and performed a more complicated step, but the only LCF who really knew how to play the Amizigh hand drum (correct name pending some research) was one of the female LCFs.  She took up the drum after the first dance and started to play a very complicated, finessed rhythm.  She could draw a huge range of tones simply by changing how much pressure she exerted on the drumhead with her left hand, and the beat she kept seemed to change time signature constantly but stayed infectious throughout.  I wished I’d brought my recorder up, but although I’d meant to grab it after the “dance party” changed to traditional dance the first dance had discouraged me from bothering.  Soon the other LCFs jumped into what looked like a wild dance, though we quickly realized it was not traditional when one of them started doing the funky chicken.

The next morning some of the trainees woke up earlier than we otherwise might have on our day off so that we could see a bunch of sites.  At first we thought it would just be seven of us, but at the last moment one of the LCF’s decided he’d join us for at least part of the sightseeing.  We were very glad that he did; only a few minutes walk out of our hotel we started seeing people carrying signs with the Dome of the Rock on them walking towards the medina, just like us.  Before I say anymore I do have to say that this is not the place to discuss politics, so I won’t.  I will only report on what we saw and heard.  As we approached the medina we also approached larger and larger crowds, some holding Palestinian flags, others with placards, still more with the Dome of the Rock sign.  Without the LCF we probably would have tried to find another route to our first site since we wouldn’t have been able to read the crowd or know what they were saying, and if any of it started to focus on us.  As it was we learned a lot.  The protest was, obviously, for a free Palestine, but also had an element calling for solidarity with the Syrian people.  There was a lot of singing and chanting throughout the crowd, but the words the LCF made out most translate to “God is Great.  Muhammad is his Prophet.  We die by these words, we live by these words.”  The center of the rally was on Avenue Hassan II just after it passes through the old walls just south of the Bab al Had gate (the gate behind me in my blogger profile picture).  The breach in the wall that Avenue Hassan II makes marked where the protest was segregated.  Outside the old city walls were where the male protesters lined up, inside was the women’s part of the protest for a few blocks until the very front of the rally, which again was exclusively male, at least among participants.  This was a convenient place for the front; we got to see the largest flags and most informative placards right before we had to turn to continue sightseeing.

After a walk down the beautiful, palm-tree lined Avenue Mohammad V, past the Sunna Mosque, the well-guarded gates that eventually lead to the royal palace, and through the southernmost gates of the old city we reached Chellah, our first real stop of the day.  Chellah is a ruined 14^th century mosque, medersa, and tomb complex built next to and on top of the old, even more ruined Roman town of Sala Colonia.  The entire complex is now overrun with storks.  Its pretty surreal.  And beautiful.  The Roman site is heavily decayed.  It takes a lot of imagination to see the old buildings, though its cool to be able to get right up near the slowly crumbing ruins in a way you never can in Europe.  The only guardrails in all of Chellah were on a viewing platform and around the tomb of its builder, the sultan Abou al-Hassan Ali.  The Islamic part is in better shape and houses most of the storks.  Two different pairs have even set up nests on the Mosque’s old minaret.  If I can get a stronger Internet signal this time posting I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

From Chellah we took a long walk along the outskirts of the city where we got to see beautiful views of the surrounding country, complete with cows, cattlemen, and the omnipresent storks.  Once we made our way back into the town we stopped for our first outside the hotel Moroccan meal.  We ate at one of the ubiquitous small restaurants that call themselves snack shops.  The name is deceiving.  The portions are both huge and delicious.  Most serve a wide selection of paninis (here usually a single meat with melted cheese and some sauce), sandwiches, tagines, and rotisserie chickens.  I had some of my favorite drink, the asir banan from the last post and a kefte tagine.  The lamb meatballs were tiny, just about thumbnail size, and perfectly spiced.  The sauce they cooked in was tomato based, heavily spiced with a Moroccan blend, and mixed with scrambled egg.  I’m sure it sounds good.  It tasted better.

We next visited the Tour Hassan and the Mausoleum of Mohammad V.  The Tour Hassan is the last standing vestige of a mosque built by Sultan Yacoub al-Mansour (the Victorious) in the 1100s.  If it had been completed it would have been the second largest mosque in the world at that time, but he died while it was under construction and the minaret, though tall enough it can be seen for miles, is about 16 meters shorter than intended.  However, all that remains standing is this massive minaret, the rest of the mosque was destroyed in an earthquake in 1755.  As with Chellah, the ruin is what gives the place its charm.  Around Tour Hassan are the remains of columns that used to support the mosque.  They are all different heights and make a fantastic tableau.  A lot of tourists (myself included, I’m only half-ashamed to say) play stylite for a couple minutes on top of the shorter ones.  The mausoleum, built sometime after Mohammad V’s death in 1961, uses the old ruin as a courtyard.  It houses both he and his son, Hassan II, the present king’s grandfather and father.  It is breathtakingly beautiful and opulent.  I think the strength, in part, comes from how the architect contrasts the ornate design inside the mausoleum with the simple ruined columns outside.  He somehow designed the building so that the complexity of the inside just melts as you go outside.  It contrasts without clashing and creates one contiguous structure out of two, built centuries apart.

Our day still far from over, we walked down the hill from the Tour Hassan into the medina (the rally by now had either ended or moved on).  Our goal was to get ourselves good and lost in the old cities labyrinthine twists and turns but eventually make our way out to the Kasbah on the coast, hopefully just in time for sunset.  We succeeded, though not the way we thought we would.  We entered at the mellah (the historically Jewish quarter in any Moroccan medina) and were almost immediately assaulted by the smell of roasting shawarma.  Soon after we came under another assault, a group of young schoolgirls greeting the foreign looking party in French.  We tried to reply in Arabic.  They laughed.  I guess our pronunciation still has a ways to go.  Further into the medina the smell from the spice shops hit us.  The cumin and coriander were overwhelming and amazing.  We passed an instrument shop, but they all looked poorly cared for and were out of tune, so all I knew was that this shop would not be where I eventually buy my oud.  We sifted through stalls selling brightly colored clothes and cloths, sometimes western and sometimes Moroccan.  We rushed by the shops that sold chintzy western culture inspired merchandise from China and the stores that provide pirated DVDs so we could ogle the ones next door that sold traditional handicrafts, still homemade.  Like everything else I’ve seen here the Rabat medina is a complicated knot with strands of the modern west enmeshed with strands of traditional Morocco.  In the midst of the confused bustling we stumbled into a shop.

From the outside it looked like nothing in particular.  It had some nice crafts displayed outside (I particularly liked the wooden camels), but none that stood out from the work at other shops that decorated that back alley.  It was larger than we expected, it had a courtyard inside and several rooms around, each displaying different types ceramics and woodwork.  I actually didn’t get to explore the shop too much, as the other five trainees (the LCF and one of the other trainees had left at this point) browsed I tried talking with one of the shopkeepers.  He didn’t laugh.  So much improvement in so little time.  Just as I was running out of things I could say and understand (it took less than two minutes) a few of the others came up and the process repeated itself.  Then the shopkeeper invited us to have mint tea with him.  Of course we said yes.  He took us into one of the rooms around the courtyard and had us set up chairs for him and ourselves while he went and brewed the tea.  At this point we still thought he wanted to sell us something, so we started to look around for inexpensive things we wouldn’t mind carrying around the rest of the day that we could buy after tea.  He came back and we shared his delicious tea.  With his very limited English, Spanish, and French (we had a couple of French speakers, and I speak Spanish passably when not worried about passing a class), our even more limited Darija, and a lot of hand gestures we were able to learn that we was originally from the Rif mountains in the North (Shemel) of the country and the names of several neighborhoods around the Hay Salaam neighborhood of Salé, which is the city across the river from Rabat.  We learned this because we mispronounced the words we’d learned for Peace Corps, Hay’at Salaam.  He assumed we were teaching English in the Hay Salaam neighborhood and was recommending places to visit, we thought he was telling us alternate names people called the Peace Corps.  So much for that language improvement.

Soon one of the other shopkeepers joined us.  He’d studied English in university and was fluent, even though he’d never left the country.  We were shocked; we’d assumed he must have spent some time in the States or England.  He was also from the Rif and explained the Hay’at Salaam confusion.  Then he gave us a mini Darija lesson.  Once the tea was done and the lesson over they sent us on our way with directions for the Kasbah.  We’d been there about an hour and a half, maybe more.  They didn’t seem to want us to buy anything.  Talking about it later my roommate and I agreed, it would have felt weird, wrong even, to have tried to buy anything after the tea.  The relationship had changed.  Their directions were spot on, we went a little ways back the way we’d come, took one turn and went straight for a few minutes and came out at the coast, the Kasbah immediately ahead.  The Kasbah is a wealthy neighborhood with incredible views of the river, Salé, and the Atlantic.  The houses are universally painted deep blue up until about elbow height and then white above.  We worked our way through to the ocean and watched the sunset sitting on top of a breakwater.  After a quick stop at a snack shop on the way home we ended our long day!

The next day we were back in class, able to show off some of our new Darija and improved pronunciation from the day before, but the real noteworthy event happened between the end of class and dinner.  Four of us (only my roommate and I were the same as the day before), tired from sitting all day in classes took a stroll out to the medina, mainly because one of the girls wanted to get postcards.  Since the two girls hadn’t been to the Kasbah yet we took them, using a different route then the day before (read: dumb luck).  While we were waiting to cross the street from the medina to the Kasbah a well-dressed older man called out to us.  With our usual patois of limited languages we explained the usual points, this time without any Salé based confusion.  He told us he was a technician who worked at the university.  There he’d met several students who came to Morocco to learn Arabic and teach English, with our limited Arabic this is more or less what we told him what we were doing, except with the Peace Corps.  He offered to take us to a house in the Kasbah, we thought where one of these students or their professors lived.  Now, I don’t think any one of us would have gone with him alone, but since there were four of us, he was taking us into one of the richest and most touristy parts of the city, and he just gave off such an honestly friendly vibe we felt safe.  As it turned out the only mistake we’d made was that he was taking us to his house, where he introduced his lovely wife, beautiful children, and newborn kittens (we’d just learned how to ask how old someone was in class that day, the kittens were 20 days old).  He showed us the beautiful view of Salé from his roof.  He also showed us the room where he and his wife put up two students studying Arabic at the university, though they were away.  Then he took us on a quick tour of the Kasbah.  We wished him good-bye at the edge of the medina and reached the hotel just at the start of dinner.  For the second day in a row we were treated to amazing Moroccan hospitality.  I’d read about this kind of thing happening in a few of the books I’d read about Morocco, but I’d assumed you’d have to be fluent in Arabic, like the authors.  I’ve been corrected, though I look forward to having more Arabic so I can learn more next time.

The next few days were unexciting, though I got a little sick (along with a whole bunch of other trainees).  I think of it as acclimating, though I’m glad its past.  Actually, I’m more glad that it was past before I reached my host family, I’d hate for their first impression of me to be a sick one.  To explain, for the next month and a half or so I’ll be living with a Moroccan family somewhere in the area of Fes (sorry, we’re told not to be more precise than that on a blog or social network) while I continue my language lessons and other elements of training.  Again, Moroccan hospitality.  My host family is huge; I have five host siblings!  A couple of them speak a little English, but for the most part we communicate with Arabic and hand signals.  Their place is beautiful (remember that tile work I was talking about).  We sleep on couches on the edges of the rooms.  They very nicely gave me my own room (right next to the mosque, but I’ve been sleeping through the morning call to prayer anyways), while four of the siblings sleep in the dining room and the mother and one of the daughters sleep in the living room.  The food is delicious.  My oldest host brother, who is sixteen, took me to the hammam today.  Its an odd experience; as advertised, you strip to your boxers, go into a sauna and wash yourself in public, and then douse yourself in cold water at the end.  You do feel especially clean afterwards.  The Moroccans go their with their good friends and actually clean each other, but my host brother and I are a long, long way from there.  We’ll probably never reach it.  I’ll definitely go again, though it won’t be anything like a weekly thing.  So this is life in Morocco.  It has a very different beat than life in the U.S.  It has a subtlety and complexity I’m only just beginning to even comprehend is there.  And just like that complex Amizigh drum pattern at the “Moroccan Party,” it has me entranced.

P.S. Amizigh is the Berber word for themselves.  It is their own languages it means “Good People.”  In recent years Berber has apparently stopped being an offensive term, or at least is less offensive.  Until about two days before learning that Berber had lost its offensive connotations I didn’t even know it was offensive.  Although Berber is now considered a (more or less) neutral term I’ll use Amizigh.  This is as much for politically correct reasons as because I think Amizigh is more poetic sounding.  And yes, I am using my Post Scripts as footnotes, I’ve been writing academically for too long and can’t break the habit of footnoting.