Harmonies, Discords, and Realizations

            After many false starts and delays my schedule of classes for the second year has gotten off the ground, and, thus far, is going rather well. Having learned a lot from last year’s mistakes I’m looking forward to a very fulfilling year. I want to tell you a few anecdotes, but to start I’ll lay out my schedule so you have a framework for these stories.

            My one big disappointment this year is that I have not yet gotten morning work off the ground; I often feel like a bump on a log until work starts around 4PM. I go every morning to a café in order to have breakfast and check my e-mails. On some days my teacher friends get off work early and we chat, but other days their schedules don’t have any openings in the morning. When the English teacher gets off we talk about how the students are doing, what topics he is working on (so I can provide follow up to our mutual students), and trade ideas about how we can approach these topics. I usually follow this breakfast time with a stroll through the surrounding mountains, or stopping to say hi at the artisanal cooperative where I taught last year.

            After lunch I finish preparing lessons and materials and head off to the Dar Chabab. Theoretically, my first real job of the day is a young kids’ English class, but we’ve changed this into a singing club since they are more interested in music than English. After that I either teach one class at the Dar Chabab and then move to the Dar Taliba (female students’ dormitory) for a second, or teach two at the Dar Taliba. Originally, I’d planned on making the Dar Chabab classes a place where I would direct all the misbehaving students and direct all the behaving ones to the Dar Taliba, but most of the misbehaving boys seem to have gotten bored with disrupting classes, so instead I offer a general basic course at the Dar Chabab for first time learners and older students who need review and grade specific classes at the Dar Taliba. I finish up around 9 PM, at which point my town is a ghost town. I do this Monday through Saturday, though on Monday the Dar Chabab is closed and on Saturday the Dar Taliba is. Sunday I have off, though we’re talking about starting a morning sports club.

            Speaking about clubs, a few members of the C.L.I.M.B. program have decided they want to try and run a version of it! “Graduates” of last year’s program will now lead their own hiking and environmental club, and though they won’t have outside funding to allow for a big trip like Toubkal they still hope to do some longer day treks by splitting transportation costs. I’m helping them design lessons and will come to their first few meetings to lend them authority as student leaders, but the goal is to make this a sustainable project without the need for a Peace Corps Volunteer.

            Now on to the anecdotes: I’ve discovered that teaching music to young Moroccan children is very difficult. So far in our music club I’ve been teaching them songs we learn as kids in America like “The Ants Go Marching,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?”. Surprisingly, the biggest challenge hasn’t been with the pronunciation of English words but rather with the concept of pitch in general. Since students haven’t been exposed to learning music before they don’t really get the idea of singing together on one pitch to sound nice, or, in some extreme cases, the difference between singing on pitch and yelling rhythmically. One big surprise was the first time I taught them a melody they tried to sing in my register rather than up the octave as I’d assumed they’d naturally do, though honestly I don’t know if this would be a natural reaction as my music teachers up through my voice changing were all women. After a lot of repetition the students did get pretty good at “Brother John,” so I tried to introduce the round. They looked at me like I was crazy, and the resulting train wreck only confirmed their suspicions. Going to have to go back to the drawing board on teaching singing, but at least I’m getting to teach some music!

            On the opposite musical extreme, I had some students get really excited over the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” the other day in class. I’d given them lyrics with all the verbs and verb contractions omitted as listening practice, and they got so excited by the song that they insisted we listen to it again multiple times after the class was done, with them singing and air guitaring along.

            In my highest-level class I learned something about English grammar myself the other day. My students explained that they understood how and when to use the Present Perfect tense in a complicated sentence with multiple verbs, but wanted to know how to know when to use it as opposed to the simple past in a simple sentence with just one verb. It wasn’t until they asked that I discovered I had no idea how to answer it. By thinking of examples I quickly realized what the rule I’ve unwittingly followed all my life is, but it was a pretty humbling moment.

            Which brings me to another realization I had about language the other day while talking with some teachers in the café. They were defending the Moroccan practices of writing all books in standard Arabic as opposed to the local dialect, and to teaching math and science at the university levels in French rather than Arabic. They explained that those students who wanted to reach the very highest rungs of modern mathematical and scientific study would need French (and, they added, English too), to follow modern research at the highest level, it is best they be forced to grapple with it at the undergraduate level to prepare them for the future.

I’d never really thought about the fortune of having my native language be the language from which higher-level academia is usually translated. At the highest levels of academia even a major world language like Arabic is limited. As Americans, I think we tend to think of foreign languages as a very useful luxury; even in fields where they’re necessary we only use them as a tool to access information, not as the language in which we must conduct all our work. To most of the rest of the world foreign languages, particularly my native language, are necessary tools to learning, and the expectation that students be able to learn in another language, rather than from it, is not so far-fetched as I’d first supposed.

Of all the privileges I never realized I had growing up in America this might be the most important.

Ashura

            Finishing the full week of Moroccan holidays, this weekend we celebrated Ashura, the tenth day of the first month of the Muslim year. Ashura is a very important day; in Islam it is the day the world was made, the day Adam was made, the day the world will end, and—according to the friend who explained it to me—a whole bunch of other important events he couldn’t remember the specifics of.

            Despite being such a significant day, Ashura celebrations in my town are quite simple. I was coming home from the Dar Chabab on Saturday, thoroughly surprised by the evening since a few students had shown up, when I encountered a rag tag group of little boys and girls walking up and down my street beating drums. I had my guitar with me—I’d brought it to the Dar Chabab as a defense against boredom/teaching tool if the one kid with a keyboard showed up and wanted to learn more about reading music—and because it was a holiday I ignored my better knowledge about the behavior of some of these little boys and took it out when they requested I play with them. It went about as well as expected.

At first, one of the little girls would start playing a beat, I would join in playing my approximation of Tamazight music, then a little boy would stop the girl’s playing either by grabbing the drum from her hand or playing and shouting a different beat loudly over her. I would stop, try and explain that to play we need to all play together, and tell the girl to start again. Rinse, wash, repeat, which obviously exasperated the little girl. Bored that there was no music, some of the boys whose behavior worried me started to shout that they should play the guitar, and being of the body of boys who enjoy breaking things they proceeded to punch the guitar and try to snap its strings. I put the guitar away and told the bad boys that I was leaving because of their bad behavior, then turned and apologized to the good boys and girls. Sadly, I’ve found this is the most effective way of dealing with behavior problems, I won’t hit the kids, I won’t tell their parents (because I’ve found that’s just delegating my hitting), they won’t respond to other punishments, so I do the least unhealthy effective thing, and turn them into pariahs. In my defense, it has changed a couple of kids’ behaviors in the past, not wanting everyone to hate them, but I don’t like it as a method.

I went up into my house, dropped off my guitar, and went on an evening stroll to see the celebration, now unencumbered of my guitar-loadstone for bad boys. Through most of the town’s main streets nothing was going on, so I went home, convinced I wasn’t a fan of Ashura, when at the corner of my street I encountered another group of boys, this one a little older. It included my host brothers, a couple of C.L.I.M.B. boys, and a few other boys I know and like, so I accepted their invitation to clap and dance and drum with them, to the great amusement of them, the surrounding adults, and little children. After some spirited ahedus (traditional Moroccan dancing, at which I have become in no way adept), the boys dispersed, but by the then the young girls from the first group had returned, having left the young boys to go off and be terrible somewhere else, so I joined their parents and older siblings and watched them dance and drum for a little bit.

The next day was a slow and sleepy Sunday, without much of note, except for when one of the little girls in my neighborhood asked how we celebrate Ashura in America and was very confused to learn that we don’t. In the evening I had plans to meet some friends for tea, but I left a little early knowing I would get shanghaied by the group of mothers and daughters drumming on drums and metal dishes outside my house. I clapped along with them for a bit, deciding that I really enjoy Ashura, when suddenly they stopped and requested that, since they’d been showing me so much Moroccan music, I should show them a traditional American song. The time of year being what it is I had to reject the first bunch of songs that came to mind, since singing about the birth of Jesus on a Muslim holiday seemed offensive, and I desperately grabbed onto the first secular song that came to mind. Inexplicably, this was “Home on the Range.” They thanked me for the song and we went back to Moroccan tunes, though I had to leave shortly thereafter to get to the café.

There you go, a little slice of Moroccan life. Along with “Home on the Range.”

P.S. For those of you who didn’t see my Facebook post and enjoy images of life not making sense, yesterday I saw four men wrestle two live goats into the trunk of a small sized sedan. The goats didn’t seem happy with the arrangement, and protested. In the face of goatly protest the men didn’t seem happy with the arrangement either.

Drop by Drop the River Floods

            This has been a full week of Moroccan holidays.  Early on in the week was the anniversary of the Green March, which commemorates Morocco’s occupation of the formerly Spanish controlled mandates which in America we call the Western Sahara.  Normally I don’t shy away from touchy topics, but our relative positions on the legitimacy of this are one of the few disagreements I let lie with Moroccans, though as with many things I have heard a few people in the younger generation question the legitimacy of this past action.  The other holiday was the Muslim New Year.  Happy 1435.

            On the night of the New Year—like Jewish holidays, Muslim ones generally start at sundown, so calling it New Year’s Eve would be a misnomer—I was invited to a party at a local acquaintance’s house.  I met this guy once when we both had to take early morning buses and sat together at the station waiting for our late transportation in opposite directions.  He is the president of the local veterans’ association, and many of the people at the party were former military men, along with a couple of young men my age.  There was also a women’s party, though as usual that happened in another room so I have no idea what the make-up of it was.

            In the men’s room, topics ranged from the Arab Spring to the new highway that apparently was recently announced to connect Beni Mellal and Fes.  This highway would completely change life in this part of the country, though the men disagreed as to how.  Some believe that towns like ours, which essentially lies on the Route 66 that this highway would replace, will lose much of their raison d’etre as entry points for farmers to the main road and suffer.  They believe the new highway will destroy the countryside lifestyle.  Others believe the highway, which would have three exits all within 30 kilometers of the town, will provide new economic opportunities for the region.

            Regarding the Arab Spring, they talked at length about the political situations in Libya and Syria, which led to rebellion, and the situation here, which led to reform.  For me, it was interesting to listen to older, former soldiers perspectives on this issue, because usually I only hear from youth, whose take on the reforms the king made in the wake of the Arab Spring in Morocco—called the February 20^th Movement, for its start date—is quite different from the older take.  While many young people say they don’t think the reforms went far enough, the older men think the new Constitution is very good, though they still acknowledge the reforms were necessary for the entrenched powers to stay entrenched.

            From talking about the political situation the conversation soon shifted to talk about Morocco in general, and they wanted to know my opinion as a foreigner.  I gave my usual answer about things I like in the country, but since they obviously wanted a fuller answer I also talked about the gender disparity which frequent readers know I believe to be one of Morocco’s biggest challenges.  As I was talking about developing cultural attitudes towards women’s equality one of the party’s few young men asked me why it is always non-Western countries that have to change their culture.  In short I was accused of being a cultural imperialist.

I’ve thought a lot about culture, both American and Moroccan, the last 19 months I’ve lived here.  When I first arrived I was something of a cultural relativist, and though I didn’t buy completely into the idea that cultures can only be judged by their own rubrics I certainly tended that way.  Over time I shed this view entirely and started to think in more absolutist terms that, while I didn’t like thinking those thoughts, I couldn’t shake.  Although America was far from perfect in this new view on culture of mine it is only in Morocco that I’ve ever seriously felt proud to be an American.  Even before this October shook that pride, my thoughts had already shifted again.  Central to my erstwhile American jingoism was the belief that what made American culture great was its diversity and fluidity.  Around a shared set of central tenets, there are uncountable different ways of being an American.  What I came to realize, and what I realize now was always my problem with cultural relativism, is that this is true of all cultures.  Cultural relativistic ideas, at least as I’d been exposed to them, always seem to function on the assumption that cultures aren’t themselves changing and transforming over time.  Cultural Relativists are right in that Cultural Imperialists have no right to dictate how another culture acts or develops, but treating culture statically doesn’t allow for the natural growth that will happen in all cultures.  Just as a society of individuals inspires humane tendencies in individuals so the world’s society of cultures ought to inspire the growth of human liberty, equality, and dignity in all cultures, each in their own manner.  Which I guess is probably a pretty common belief, and certainly what I believed coming in, but I had no idea how to articulate it even in my own language.

Now, my Arabic has gotten pretty good, but it is in no way good enough to explain that monster of a paragraph in a way that wouldn’t raise a whole bunch of confused eyebrows around the tagine, so instead I replied with a more metaphorical version.  I said first that American culture does change; we talk about our cultures of the 60s, 70s, and 80s as different both from each other and from now.  Culture, I said, is not a stone, but a river, and drop by drop the river floods.  The last phrase is a bit of Moroccan folk wisdom, and I don’t know whether it was the metaphor, the appropriation, or the idea itself, but the older men nodded in agreement after.  We then talked for a little bit about how attitudes towards women and women’s freedoms have changed in their lifetimes, and how they think the trend will continue with time.

Since I haven’t told a Joha joke in awhile here are two:

One day Joha was sitting by a lake watching several ducks swimming nearby.  He decided that he could catch one of the ducks and have a fine dinner.  He quietly went into the water and swam up behind the ducks, but just as he approached the ducks flew away.

Back on shore, and now feeling very hungry, Joha took out a piece of bread and dipped it in the water.  A fisherman saw him do this and asked what he was doing.  “I’m eating duck soup,” replied Joha.

There was a new barber in town, but he was not very experienced.  Joha decided to give him some business, so he to went to have his head shaved.  The barber’s razor was not sharp, and he was very careless.  Several times he cut Joha, who was losing patience.

Suddenly there was a loud scream from the shop next door.  “What was that?” cried Joha.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the barber, “There’s a blacksmith next door and he was just nailing new shoes on a horse.”

“Oh, I see,” said Joha, “I thought they were giving it a shave.”