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.”

L-eid Again

            Since I last posted the Muslim world celebrated the major holiday of Leid al Adha.  I talked about the holiday last year in this post, so I won’t repeat myself describing it.  I’ll instead tell you a few stories and observations from the last few weeks, since nothing too exciting has happened otherwise—I’ve pretty much devoted my time to working on graduate school applications and trying to get stuff started.

            On the holiday itself I again celebrated the sacrifice with my mudir’s family.  As they were preparing organ kebabs wrapped in fat, one of his daughters (aged eight) asked me if we ate meat this way in America.  I explained we have kebabs, but usually not organ wrapped in fat.  The father said that she should note that Americans were just like Moroccans then, though the daughter seemed skeptical.

            A week later I was excited to see her not skeptical when she skipped into the Dar Chabab and started to tell her father and me all about the science class she’d had that day.  I couldn’t catch everything she was saying, but the words “birds,” “shapes,” “years of study,” “Darwin,” and “Galapagos,” came up over and over again.  Since I’ve met some adults here who do not like the idea of evolution it was nice to see that the topic is still approached in a way that gets kids excited.

            My town went through a transformation that I didn’t notice during the holiday last year.  Since it is the biggest holiday of the Muslim year tons of people come home from their work and school in other parts of the country.  In my town that means a huge upswing in the number of people who can speak English well.  From two or three to several dozen (notably, all but one of the regulars left town for the holiday).  It was an exciting reminder that the kids who acquire English and other skills have enough opportunities out of town that they don’t often come back.  One guy is even studying in the States.

            There are two new English teachers in town, and unlike the people they’re replacing they seem much more interested in working with me directly.  One of them especially has helped me meet teachers of other subjects who I hadn’t met yet, some of whom speak quite good English.  The other day I had a very informative conversation with them.  When I first came to Morocco, I read in my guidebook that the name of the capitol, Rabat, is the Tamazight word for fortress.  In the desert I’d even heard some Imazighin (Amizight people) calling a fortress-like building a rabat, so I thought I’d had this confirmed.  However, according to these teachers rabat is actually originally an Arabic word which means “armed camp,” and was later adopted into Tamazight.  They say it got associated with permanent fortresses because overtime people used for any place warhorses were gathered and cared for.  An interesting derivation for a semi-correct guidebook fact!

            In another interesting discovery, I’ve gotten both the heaviest praise and heaviest criticism of my Arabic accent recently.  Some kids from my town said they thought that while my vocabulary isn’t as extensive as the last Youth Development volunteer’s (a guy universally praised for the quality of his Arabic), my accent is much more authentic.  My new, English-speaking teacher friends, on the other hand, think I pronounce a bunch of things wrong.  One example the teachers gave me was that my pronunciation of one of the glottal letters (kh, خ) sounded like it was actually a failed attempt at another glottal letter (gh, غ).  What’s interesting is that when I first learned the word for bread in Tamazight I couldn’t tell if people were saying it with a خ or a غ.  When I asked, people said either would work, saying the sound was kind of between the two Arabic letters.  Between the local kids praise and the teachers explanation of what is wrong in my pronunciation I’m fairly certain my attempt to adopt a rustic accent and grammar worked.

            So yeah, not too much exciting these last few days.  I’m excited to get back to work, though it looks like that won’t start for another couple of weeks because, after this coming week, there is another week long school holiday, this time for some secular national holidays.  That means that since the beginning of the school year kids had three weeks on, then a week off, now two weeks on and another holiday.  Although the Dar Chabab is open during the holidays not many kids come in, especially my most regular English students, many of whom live in a dormitory and go home to outlying towns for the holidays.  Still trying to get stuff started next week, but I don’t expect much work until the middle of November, which is right in line with last year.  Some things you cannot change.

God Helps Those Who Help Each Other

            The other day I was chatting with a bunch of boys about a little bit of everything.  I want to report bits and pieces of the conversation because I think it will tell you a lot about how some Moroccans perceive the world.  To set the stage, these are four boys who I know very well, two of them are in their last year of high school while the other two are about to start their second year of university.  The two university students are both studying history.  None of the four has much English, but they are patient and willing to explain things in simple Arabic when we hit a roadblock.  One has quite good French, which helps with cognates.  All four are hard working, ambitious, and smart.  None has ever left the country, or, for that matter, travelled all that extensively in the country.

            I can’t remember quite how the conversation began, but it started getting interesting when we began to talk about democracy.  Their initial definition of democracy was a little off; they defined it as “being able to do whatever you want.”  I explained that while everyone should have a voice and a vote (two words which, in Arabic, are almost the same, sot and sout respectively) in a democracy oftentimes many people don’t get to do what they want because the vote is against them.  I then tried to further explain that in many democracies there are also failsafe laws to try to keep a majority group from subjugating a minority group.  In this way even majorities don’t always get to “do whatever they want” in democracies.  I made a tacit attempt to segue into Egypt from here (because I think its important that young people here understand why there was so much anger at the Muslim Brotherhood, anger that has now allowed a much more actively repressive regime to step in), but as I’ve talked about in previous posts there is a staunch refusal here to acknowledge that Morsi ever did anything wrong.

            Quite naturally from this failed segue we segued again into the news and how much you can trust the media.  I believe I’ve mentioned before that many Moroccans don’t trust any news source.  Given how used they are to state run and state censored news this isn’t surprising.  Unfortunately it leads to a tendency to believe in some pretty wild conspiracy theories (which media outlets are a part of).  These boys, like a lot of Moroccans I’ve talked to, would feel at home at a 9/11 Truthers conference, and this is where they steered the conversation next.  I have no patience for this theory, either at home or abroad, so I told the kids we were going to look closely at the possible motives both the U.S. Government and Al Qaeda might have had for attacking the towers, and the risks they would take on doing so.  Anyone who has ever debated a Truther back home knows how lopsided this list becomes, and I can now proudly say that two of the kids now believe Al Qaeda did it, the other two went from staunch believers in a government conspiracy to unsure.  I ended this part of the discussion by saying that while a healthy skepticism in what you read and hear in the media isn’t a bad thing, but a good skeptic doesn’t always write off what they read and hear, they analyze it, compare it to other sources, and use their brain to figure out what makes the most sense.  The boys seemed to like that idea.

            9/11 talk quickly and easily moved to Afghanistan and Iraq, which then moved to us talking about Syria and the recent threat of force and even more recent redaction of the threat.  These boys are pure cynics about United States involvement in Middle Eastern wars.  Interestingly, they don’t question that America ought to act as the world policeman.  I’d always thought it was only a small group of Americans who thought that was America’s duty.  These kids though think it is America’s duty, as the superpower, to keep order.  Whatever ought to be, though, they also think that America is bungling this duty.  In the case of Syria their anger is that we didn’t strike.  While I can’t speak for all of them, from other conversations I know at least one of these boys does not discriminate against Shia Muslims (Assad’s sect is a subgroup of the Shia), so for at least one of them the Sunni-Shia divide was not coloring this call for action.  We talked for awhile then about reasons for the U.S. not attacking, and past U.S. interventions and invasions (specifically, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, which they knew a surprising amount about).  This got us talking about self-serving and altruistic national urges and how sometimes both of these can be present in an international action.

            This led to talking about the purpose of the Peace Corps itself.  I told them both about the more “self-serving” element (a way to peacefully swing countries out of Soviet influence, now a way to better America’s image in the world) and the altruistic elements of Peace Corps three stated goals: to pass on technical skills to people in the developing world who want them, to better other people’s understanding of Americans and American culture, to better American’s understanding of other peoples and other peoples’ cultures.  They liked that I mentioned both sides of the coin.  Then they asked what my opinion of the youth in their town is after having lived here almost a year and a half.

            I started by saying it is of course very hard to generalize, but if I had to I could divide the boys into two roughly equal groups: the group that works hard and the lazy bums.  I could do the same with the girls, I said, only then the groups aren’t equal, the vast majority of girls fall into the hard working group.  I told them I think this is because girls have so much of a more challenging life here, so they push harder against those challenges.  Three of the boys indignantly said girls lives were no harder thank you very much, but the fourth scoffed as they said so and joined me listing off the many ways girls have it harder here (less opportunity for work, more likely to be pulled out of school, less able to travel, less able to go outside at all, harassment, the list went on).  We convinced the other three rather quickly.

            Seeing an opportunity, I asked the boys what they thought we could do, as men, to help girls and women here in their struggle for equality, but they shot back that it’s impossible to improve the world since God makes its order.  I replied that God helps those who help themselves, then quickly added “and each other,” which to me seems like it would be truer.  This launched us into a discussion of whether this was a “Christian idea” or one that could apply in Islam too.  When I tried to join in they asked what I knew about Islam, so I laid down my credentials and told them about the college course I took and the books I read.  One boy said that American college courses on Islam must be about how bad the religion is.  I told them not at all, and explained that I’d had Muslim professors, Muslim TAs, Muslim friends in these classes, and even the ones taught by non-Muslims focused on Islam as a beautiful and great faith.  They seemed pretty shocked.  This makes me worry about how Christianity is approached in their classes, of the three Islamic Studies teachers at the high school I know one really dislikes America—he has twice shown up at my events and gone on anti-America rants and to him America and Christianity are synonyms—but the other two both seem like they would give a fairer appraisal, one is even a good friend who once delivered a counter rant to the first guy.  It didn’t seem like the time to ask, since they had to go and I wanted to end on a good note.  All in all it was quite the conversation!

P.S. Just so people don’t get concerned about the anti-American teacher, although he very much dislikes the States he seems to have no beef with me personally, and except for when he shows up at my events and says that America created AIDS (at the AIDS awareness event) or that America polluted the world (at my CLIMB kids Environmental Education Conference) he and I are quite civil to each other.  I do wonder, since he never seems all that interested in having longer conversations, if he knows my Arabic is good enough to follow his rants.