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.