This will be something unprecedented, a short post. I have a feeling I’ll have a lot to write
about after this weekend, so I’m taking advantage of this rare piece of free
time to write about the last few days.
This
weekend was nice and low key. It was
raining, so I spent it mainly inside with my host family. Since I spent so much time with them, and
especially with members of their extended family I haven’t seen in awhile, I
could appreciate how much my language has improved in the last few weeks. When a host aunt asked to talk with me we
could actually have a conversation, rather than a scramble to find mutually
intelligible phrases. It felt good and I
finally got to get my family to laugh on purpose through Darija (needless to
say, they’ve been laughing since day one at statements that weren’t meant to be funny). One of the neighbor’s daughters came in just
after I finished writing in my journal and asked me what I was doing. I responded, in what I hoped was an
internationally sarcastic tone, “Kan-gls,”
I sit. Not really all that funny, but
the combination of sarcasm and surprise at my ability to say something
correctly put the room in hysterics.
This is a major step forward; my attempts at sarcasm are no longer
wasted!
The other
fun part of the weekend was when various family members pulled out their photo
albums for me to look at. My host mother
is one of nine siblings. There is a huge
backlog of family photos. It was fun to
get a look at them all, especially to get a chance to see my host siblings
growing up and the fantastic shots of one of my host uncles playing goalie on
the Moroccan army soccer team. My
weekend largely involved sitting around, talking, eating bread, and looking at
photos. Not much to write about, but
actually one of the best weekends here.
I should describe the bread. It’s
called mulwi bsla (some Moroccans say
mulawie instead of mulwi, my host family is in mulwi camp, along with the local
bakers. It leads to confusion when talking
with people whose host families use the other term). Mulwi
itself is a simple bread, just flour, oil, and water fried together in a pan,
but when made as mulwi bsla it’s
cooked with onions and various spices to make a delicious kaskrot (tea time) snack. Up
until this weekend I’d only had it from the local bakery, but my host mother
and her sisters and sisters-in-law make an even better version. I’m trying to build up good will so I’ll be
let in the kitchen to watch next time. I
do this, conversely, by not helping
in the kitchen or doing my own laundry.
My family members get annoyed when I do “women’s” work like that. I’m coming to understand that, while very
different, this is not as offensive as it feels to a modern American. My host mother is a stay-at-home mom; when I
try to help out around the house I’m taking her job. She doesn’t want me to help because I’m
straying into her sphere and taking her work.
It’s really different from how we’re used to thinking as modern
Americans, where housework is largely in addition to our real jobs, and
therefore shared.
The other
event I want to write about happened Tuesday evening after class. I was hanging out at the local hipster café
with my Moroccan metal friends. I
realize I’ve misrepresented them. They
are in their first year of university, not late high school. They just all look really young. Moroccans in general, at least Moroccan
youth, tend to look a whole lot younger than they are. I would assume pretty much all my host
siblings are two or three years younger than they are based on how they look,
especially the nine year old. They study
a mix of subjects, though the boy I met first is an English major (why his
English is so good). It’s a very
different course of study here than in the States, obviously, since it’s a
foreign language. While it does include
a comprehensive study of English and American lit (we talked about Chaucer the
other day!) it is just as much a linguistics major here. My LCF was also an English major. He wrote his senior thesis, in English, on
Moroccans’ perception of their native languages, Darija and Amizgh. I hope he’ll let me read a copy; it sounds
fascinating.
Sorry, I
got off topic, but that was something I wanted to mention. In any case, we were hanging out at the café
when one of their friends, who I hadn’t met before, showed up with what they
called a Moroccan guitar. At first
glance it just looked like a nylon stringed classical guitar and I couldn’t tell
what made it Moroccan. Then I noticed
the extra frets. Between the 2nd
and 3rd fret, the 5th and 6th fret, and the 7th
and 8th fret there were small, wooden frets only for the 2nd
through 5th strings. These
frets allowed him to play notes not available on a regular guitar, quartertones
that aren’t in western scales. He showed
me his favorite scale used in Middle Eastern music. For those of you interested in theory, it was
basically the Phrygian mode but with both the minor and major thirds and
instead of a major or minor second it used the quartertone in between them. It was hauntingly beautiful. He showed me some chords to comp with it on
the other guitar (a regular steel stringed acoustic). They sounded like flamenco chords. He also let me play around with his
guitar. It was awesome, but very
difficult since sometimes I’d miss and play the quartertone rather than the
real note or vice versa. I actually
found it was a little easier for me to play the scale on the regular guitar
with a small string bend to raise the pitch of the minor second to the new
note, but that’s probably a matter of practice.
It was a really fun jam. I think
I’m just going to start bringing my recorder to the café and hope he shows up
again.
So that was
my last week. I think I’m starting to
get more attuned to the more subtle cultural differences between Morocco and
the States. Like the quartertones in the
Moroccan scale, these differences, though slight, are cause there to be a huge
difference in the overall the impression of the country. I think this is a big step in my quest to
integrate because it will help me understand why things are different. I
should hope it’s obvious why that’s so important.
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