Café Culture

         As per usual, the hardest part of a post is starting it.  My last couple of weeks has been very interesting and informative, but there isn’t much of a coherent story to them.  Rather, they were a series of observations and conversations about Morocco with a few notable events thrown in along the way.  Since my last post there has been a major change in my English teaching work.  The bacc test was last week (three days of test, English was the first day).  Since then I’ve seen some bacc students I worked with around town, but I haven’t had a bacc class since they want a break.  There is some interest in starting a conversation class at their level, but the grammar heavy review session I was running is done.  I’m not upset about that; while it was a good first run at teaching a class and I learned a lot, the format of that class needs some tweaking.  I probably will not reuse those lesson plans, or at the very most I will raid them for some exercises.  My favorite part of the class, the song discussion, will become more prominent.  I want to make the class entirely student centered.  It’s not a teaching style the kids are used to, but I think they’ll become better students and thinkers for it.

            Although I’ve lost one class, I’ve picked up another.  Two weeks ago I started a beginners English class that meets twice a week, and I will actually be starting a second session at the artisanal cooperative this week.  In some ways beginners are easier than advanced students, in other they are much harder.  Since all they know is what I’ve taught them they don’t have the vocabulary to make listening to a song effective, and of course they can’t discuss in English, but I still play English music in the break so they can get used to the sounds of the language.  We focus a lot on dialogues.  It is useful for helping their pronunciation, but it encourages rote learning.  I’m trying to combat this by teaching different possible responses to questions and encouraging them to use variations when I talk with them outside of class.  It’s somewhat successful.  After the dialogue I have a mini grammar or vocab lesson about some topic from the dialogue.  After I start them on vocab I try to have them supply me with words in Arabic (sometimes leading to charades as I try to figure out what they mean) so there is at least some student produced content.  I was happy after our last class, the third.  At the end of the class I had them write some three-word sentences with “to be,” and almost all of them could.  For kids coming from a language where “to be” isn’t used in the present tense much it was pretty impressive for so early on.  I’m looking forward to starting the second session.

            Other than class work I’ve been focusing on community integration.  A couple of days after my last post I found and moved into a house (pictures forthcoming) and have been trying to get to know my way around the people and places of my new neighborhood.  The day after I decided on this apartment I took a walk around the area.  One of the hanut (general store) owners called me over and gave me a snack from his shop, just to be friendly.  A few days later, once I’d moved in, I went back to his shop to pick up some supplies for the house.  He wasn’t there, but his little daughter was holding down the fort.  She found the American misspeaking Darija so funny that she called him out of their house next door so he could see the strange thing.  He remembered me and had me in for eggs.  Needless to say, this quickly became my go-to hanut, though I still use some others.

            That story illustrates an important point, the importance of offering food (and tea) in the social life here.  After class a couple of times some students have invited me to their house for kaskrot, couscous, or le aesha (dinner).  I make a point of accepting any invitation nearly anyone makes to me.  It has turned out very well so far.  The first students to invite me over are a brother and sister from my bacc class.  The food was delicious, largely cooked by the sister.  From the times I’ve been there, once for kaskrot and then lunch the next day, the best couscous I’ve ever had, it seems that there is house is the hang-out spot for a bunch of students, though that may have been because the American teacher was there.  Since my language is so much better than it was in Fes I really relished the opportunity to talk with all the students about their lives and interests.  One girl wants to be an engineer, unless she can somehow become an actress.  Another doesn’t care what she becomes, providing it gets her to America.  Two of the boys want to be teachers, one of physics, the other of French. 

I have some music recommendations from the students.  If you liked the North African pop I recommended in one of my Fes posts check out Nabilaman’s song “Marraliya Omarralik.”  If you are more interested in hearing some traditional Amizigh music (and you should be), look at Mohammed Rouicha.  Rouicha just died recently, so his most famous song, “I nas i nas” has been all over the Moroccan radio.  It’s a great song.  Make sure you find his version rather than his son’s memorial cover.  Both are good, but his is better.  Another Amizigh musician to listen to is Housa.  There is another style of music here too, called gnawa.  In the 17^th and18^th centuries Morocco was a major hub in the slave trade, so there are plenty of people here from sub-Saharan Africa.  Gnawa was their traditional music; a fusion of sub-Saharan music with Amizigh and Arab music.  Therefore it shares some roots with American blues, jazz, and rock.  It became especially important in the sufi (mystical) strain of Islam.  Modern gnawa musicians play music similar to, but not quite the same as, American jazz, blues, and rock.  I recommend Rais Tijani, some of whose music borders on funk, and Hamid Bushnak, whose song “Bombara” is frustratingly catchy.

At these students’ house I had my first chance to play a loutar.  The loutar is the Amizigh cousin of the oud.  It is Rouicha’s instrument.  It is rougher than the oud, but I think it has an even more striking sound.  Unfortunately, my student isn’t a loutar player; she plays the violin (in the Amizigh style, closer to Scots-Irish fiddle than the classical violin) and is looking to pick up the instrument, just like I am.  She is also having trouble finding a teacher.  Despite that it was still fun to play around with.  It has four strings, with a few different traditional tunings.  I don’t know the exact notes this one was tuned to, though the intervals between strings were disorienting and different: an augmented fourth between the lowest two, a perfect fourth between the next two, and a perfect fifth between the top two.  It is a fretless instrument, so you have to focus a lot on where exactly your fingers go.  After a few minutes of testing I was able to find that same scale I learned in Fes on the guitar with quartertones.  It sounds even more dramatic on the loutar.  The neck of the loutar is rounded, fingering more than a double stop is almost impossible.  Since Amizigh music focuses more on melody than chords this isn’t an issue.  It is also very hard to bend the string.  Again, this is not a sound used often in this style.  On a chance fingering I was able to figure out the introduction to Porcupine Tree’s “Fear of a Blank Planet” on the loutar, which impressed the kids to no end even though they did not recognize the song.

While these kids and their family reminded me a lot of my host family from Fes, a liberal, modernizing family, others have been very different.  One of the students whose family I ate with is the son of one of his father’s two wives.  I met his mother, but only briefly, as with a lot of more conservative families she did not eat her delicious dinner with us but had her own portion in the other room.  I’ve heard this is fairly common among rural families, but although I’d seen segregation of the sexes at parties before this was the first time I’d seen it in a small gathering.  I may have only seen her it all because I’m American, and therefore allowed to break some rules.

These invitations to meals come frequently (I could probably survive the next two years without a kitchen if I timed it right), but they are nothing compared with the invitations to tea.  Most days while I walk around in the morning I’ll be invited to join two or three different groups of people drinking tea.  Since my goal is to meet and get to know people I always accept.  First I’m asked the obligatory information gathering questions: who are you?  Where are you from?  Do you speak French?  Why are you here?  Are you sure you don’t speak French?  Are you a Muslim?  Will you repeat this after me?  Where did you learn that you say that to convert?  Where do you go after you die?  You positive about that French?  Do you have any siblings?  How long have you been here?  How long will you stay?  Are you married?  Do you have a girlfriend in America?  In Morocco?  Well, do you want to marry a Moroccan?  I have a cousin… Inshahallah.  You must speak some French!  The questions pretty much always come in this order, or fairly close to it.  I now consider myself essentially fluent at answering them.  After them topics can range all over.  I’ve talked about everything from the different pronunciations of Darija in Fes and in my region, to the nature of Tamizigh as a language (more on that later), to diversity in America, to NAFTA (I don’t know why, but NAFTA fascinates all the kids), to why Fusa (Modern Standard Arabic) has so many words for the same thing (all the words incorporated from conquered languages), to Obama’s reelection chances, to what people do for fun around here, to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity (I’ve figured out an explanation of how the Trinity works in Darija!), to why I like my town.  Often times these topics will follow one right after the other, in no logical order.  Between each they will be sure to ask if I speak French, if I like my town/Morocco, and how I’m doing.  I make a goal of learning at least five new words a day from these walks, though often I get more (and other times less because I still have too many to memorize from the day before).  Usually the words are in Darija, but I’ve started to pick up a word or two of Tamizigh and throw them into my speech, which is how people here speak Darija.  Occasionally they think it’s better if I learn the French word instead.

Actually, the French thing has gone down pretty dramatically of late, as has being addressed in French.  At the same time, more and more people are addressing me by name.  I’m starting to get known around town, they know I don’t speak French but can sputter out passable Darija.  Sometimes this backfires; younger kids especially don’t seem to understand that knowing a few words of Darija does not translate to fluent and able to understand their every fast spoken word.  I’ve met a lot of people whose names I’ve forgotten, and I’m sure there are people I’ve never met who know about the American named Youniss.  I feel kind of like a rock star.

Luckily, my time in the cafés has not been entirely limited to speaking in a language that I am nowhere near mastering.  I have two close Moroccan friends in town who are both fluent in English (I also have an older site mate, but he works in Small Business Development and is working all the time to finish up his projects before he leaves in a few months so I don’t really see him to often.  He’s a great resource when I need to speak some English or have a translator and is a very friendly guy).  They like to practice their English with me, and after a long day of communicating in Darija and trying to teach my own language as a foreign language I am more than happy to oblige.  Since their English is spectacular and they are both young, highly intellectual Moroccans our conversations range all over.  One of the two is Amizigh, and he tells me all about the language and culture and lets me double-check what I think people have told me during the day.  He told me that a long time ago, well before the Roman colonization, some Amizigh (which, in their language, means free people) lived for some time in Iberia before moving back to North Africa, and even though their language is Semitic they have some cultural and genetic connection to the Celts who lived there.  That’s why, on occasion, you see redheaded Amizigh (there are a few in town, it can be disorienting).  He also hears a similarity between the rhythms of Amizigh and Celtic music.  I think I hear what he’s talking about, though there are many more differences than similarities, though one the violin is the melody instrument it is very clear.  There are three main Amizigh languages in Morocco, each of which are divided into several sub-dialects (our valley speaks a slightly different version of Shillha than the next one).  He says the common convention for naming the languages in English is wrong.  Terrefit is spoken in the north, but his language is not called Tamizigh and the language in the south is not Tesshelhit.  He doesn’t like it when I call his language Tamizigh, which he says is the name for all Amizigh languages.  He speaks Shillha, Tesshelhit.  In the south they actually speak Susa, Tesselsous.  He says that the mistake in the naming convention comes from an old misunderstanding, people confusing a tribe name for a language name.

We talk a lot about language and culture, American, Amizigh, Arab, and Moroccan (the fusion of the latter two), and of course that means we talk a lot about Islam.  They are both Muslims, but one of the two’s worldview is much more shaped by Islam then the other.  It’s fascinating to see them talk, one is religious, but fundamentally a secularist whose views are shaped by his culture, the other is a liberal Muslim.  It means they agree on a lot of things but come to their conclusions in different ways.  They both believe that it is important to be educated about the outside world and be exposed to different viewpoints.  The secularist thinks this is important because it is the best way to learn and develop and find out what you really think and also because it helps define your culture for yourself.  The more religiously defined one says that acceptance of people is in the Koran.  You need to meet other people so that you can be exposed to other views, some of which agree with the Koran, and some of which don’t.  This helps define what the Koran is and isn’t, and also shows you alternate paths, which, if you are a true Muslim, you can now see are wrong.  This is how he explains inconsistencies in the Koran towards accepting various groups.  Their path is wrong for a Muslim, hence the more negative quotations, but Muslims must accept and incorporate them into the culture, and maybe then they will see the error of their ways.  Inshahallah.  I’ve never heard this explanation before, but I think it is an interesting one.

They are a good pair to talk to when discussing projects to work on with the youth (they have both said they are interested in helping out once some of the projects I’m planning get off the ground, probably in the Fall when school is back in session).  Like me they think that a big problem in the Moroccan education system is the focus on rote learning and the lack of reading.  They think that this leads to a dearth of critical thinking and an excess of TV (Ok, they didn’t use the word dearth, but if they did I’d be out of the job).  One of them thinks that the biggest problem with TV in Morocco is that a lot of times it shows an inaccurate reflection of other people’s culture (especially American, Turkish, and Indian, whose cultures are the most seen on television here).  This misconception becomes so deeply seated people don’t believe that’s not how things are in the other culture.  This leads to misguided imitations (sometimes people try to justify very taboo actions because it’s “how people in America/Turkey/India act”), and complete misunderstanding.  Even when someone comes from that other culture and explains how they have misunderstood they don’t accept it (I’ve seen some of this.  Seriously, we don’t all love Wrestlemania and yes, we do know it’s fake).  After he explained this I pointed out that it was like a modern version of the Allegory of the Cave.  He’d never heard of it, or of Plato for that matter, but he was excited to hear that a really smart old Greek man agreed with him thousands of years before he was even born.  They don’t study Plato, but students know all about NAFTA.  I’m still trying to work out how this education system works.

Don’t worry, not all (or even most) of our conversations are quite so heavy and pretentious.  A lot of times we do literally talk about the weather (it is getting hot here, I understand why nothing gets done during the mid-day lunch/naptime).  Other times we talk about Internet dating.  As an American I must be an expert.  What was that you were saying about cultural misconceptions?

Sorry about the rambling post, here are some pretty pictures of my house to make up for it!

P.S. I have an address now, if anyone feels like the might want to send me some snail mail just let me know and I’ll give it to you.