Salty McNabb

I just finished a book by Tahar ben Jelloun called To Leave (Partir), translated into Hebrew from French.  (Here’s a review of the book in Hebrew and here’s an interview with the author.)  I don’t know if I was allowed to read a book by such a controversial author in Morocco.  Either way, if the authorities read this post, I just wanted to say to my defence that I didn’t know anything about this author and apologize in advance if I‘ve read a book by someone whose works are banned in his own country. 

The book tells a few interwoven stories of young Moroccans from Tangier, who dream about leaving their countries and starting anew in Spain, France, anywhere in Europe, where they will have a future.  The story is written in a very vivid and direct language.  It also addresses many taboos in the Moroccan culture, such as sex before marriage and, on centre stage in this book, homosexuality in general and specifically a gay relationship a straight Moroccan guy forges with an older Spanish man so the latter can help him obtain a work visa to live in Spain.  I highly recommend this book and plan on reading other books by the same author.

The Moroccan professor in linguistics I’m working with here told me that emigration from Morocco is an ongoing problem.  Many young people get the false impression that life in Europe or North America is easier and that one can live an easy life without working hard there.  Most of the people who immigrate illegally are from poor families and have little education, so the jobs they find abroad are menial or mindless jobs.  They work very hard, make little money, and don’t live the carefree life they hoped for.  When they come back to visit their families—and many times they do so on the ferry from Spain—they rent flashy cars so their family and friends think they’ve made it big abroad. 

This is not new to many of my friends back in the US or elsewhere.  Every industrialized country faces this sort of situation and in many cases the economies there depend on this cheap labour they can’t get from their native population.  At the same time, Europe executes its own infiltration into their immigrants’ countries.  The Moroccan professor told me that Marrakech no longer belongs to Moroccans.  They all live in the city suburbs because the European’s real-estate shopping spree has led to such a hike in housing costs in the city that Moroccan can’t live there anymore.  There’s one street in the medina that has recently gone entirely European.  When the last Moroccans on the street have sold their home, the European owners had a block party.  The houses, usually old and spacious riads with a garden and a fountain in their centre, are being bought for ridiculous prices because some Moroccans don’t understand what gems they are.  And so, Europe is full of Moroccan enclaves and Morocco is full of European enclaves.  I guess this time colonization is working both ways, albeit not equally in terms of extent of exploitation.

It’s very easy to spot tourists.  It’s not only the different skin tone but also what the visitors wear to cover their pale or sun-scorched skin.  We all know those people with shorts.  Hell, we are them when we just can’t bear the heat.  But when travelling in places like the Middle East, if we looked around we’d see that only kids and cool-wannabes wear them. 

The other day I was walking through the medina from a walk along the beaches and cliffs (could be beautiful, but the trash and sewage tarnish the beauty somewhat).  Among the natives and tourists, a homely pair of people stood out.  Both of them were European but I couldn’t tell where from because they weren’t talking.  The ham-like pink colour suggested that they were exhausted from a long, hard day of self-frying.  But that’s not what made them unattractively conspicuous.  He was shirtless—and no one is shirtless this far from the beach, and I mean no one.  The woman walking with him, his mother most likely, was wearing a spandex top that probably served as her swimsuit top and that revealed where her bosom started (somewhere around her diaphragm) where it ended (close enough to her knees so they can support it).  Now, I don’t have a problem with this woman’s physic.  No one’s perfect.  But you should have seen the head-covered Moroccan girls taken aback by the sight of this charred, beached whale barely managing to crawl up the packed medina, wishing she had taken a taxi.  But I think walking up the medina was a good call for her to have made.  In fact, she should do it every day for the rest of her life.  What she should have done was drape herself.  And her son too.

Later that day I spotted a backpacker.  He could have blended in if it hadn’t been for his squalid sharwal (or shalwar, depending where he bought it, God knows how many moons ago) and black toenails. David Sedaris talks in one of his stories about a clueless Texan couple on the Paris metro, who mistook him for a Frenchman.  The American couple could be anything else than an American couple, dressed in their Sunday’s best: beige shorts and matching sneakers.  Their tasteless attire makes him flesh out a reasonable travel etiquette that goes as follows.  When you’re traveling somewhere, don’t dress as if you’re going to mow the natives’ lawns.  May I add that you shouldn’t dress as though you’re going to raid their trash bins and ask them for change.  Ya Allah!  

So far, I’ve met only friendly Moroccans in this visit.  They are nice to me even when I alarm them with my atrocious French or offend their linguistic sensibilities when I speak a confusingly incoherent jumble of FusHa (Standard Arabic) and Moroccan Arabic.  But whenever one visits at any famous tourist attraction, one can’t avoid the faux guides.  They can be anywhere between 5 and 65 years old and will relentlessly solicit their guiding services into the medina(old city) or kasbah, from which no white tourists without a guide will ever be able to find their way back.  This claim is, of course, proper nonsense, but I can see how convincing they can be.  After they’ve shown you around the medina or kasbah and “subtly” though incessantly mentioned a certain coffee/rug/brass shop that is worth stopping by, they ask you for money.  Now, I sound curmudgeonly, but the truth is that it’s a fun game if you know the rules and the outcome. 

And so, after I walked out of Rabat’s medina and into its beautiful white and blue Kasbah des Oudaias, I was assigned a guide.  I don’t know why I didn’t dismiss the 12 year old kid—maybe I didn’t talk to anyone all day except for hotel staff, store owners, and waiters—but we commenced the tour given my silent approval of the deal.  And so, we walked through the narrow streets of the kasbah, and the kid recounted (rather accurately!) the history of the kasbah in a beautiful melange of Moroccan Arabic and French.  He also mentioned a few times, lest I forget, the Café Maure at the entrance to the kasbah, which I planned to go to anyway.

When we concluded the tour, I handed him 20 Dirham (about $3) and 2 Euro (about 20 Dirham as well), which is what I had in coins.  I thought it was a fair rate for a half hour.  (If I got this much for a half hour when I was 12 I would be ecstatic. But then again the faux guidemanager probably gets a cut from this.)  The kid was obviously not happy with this meagre compensation.  His outrage may have been genuine but is still part of the act.  Trust me, I’ve got the same disappointed look many times when I was in Morocco with Mark in 2004.  We went to the manager, who explained that they have a set tariff of 120 Dirham (roughly $17).  I gasped at the sound of the rate and said I regrettably had no more money.  (Which was a lie, but so is the story about the “set” tariff.)  They didn’t buy that, quite understandably, and I suggested that he would give me a business card and I’d contact him when I get to the hotel.  (The Moroccan government cracks down on these faux guides and requires that they all be licensed.)  He ignored my proposition and suggested that the kid would accompany me back to the hotel so I could give him the rest of the money.  It was my turn to ignore his idea, and we agreed to meet the next day at 10 a.m. so I pay him the rest of the money.  At the end he asked me if it’s my first time in Morocco, to which I reply with a No.  “Yes, I can tell you’ve been here before. You speak Arabic.”  It’s a good thing he didn’t say I’m a cheapskate.  (Though I must be because I really am on a tight budget here, and $120 is roughly what I spend on food for two days here.) 

I never got back there, but I do want to check out that café at the entrance to the Kasbah. There’s only one entrance to the kasbah, and the kid and his manager are bound to be there.  My plan is to either refuse to pay next time, saying this is roughly what I would be paid per hour for a professor assistantship at my university (almost true) or to make a deal with them:  I’ll pay them the rest of the money, and they in turn will participate in my study and help me recruit more people.  This might be the beginning of a beautiful business partnership.

On my second day in Israel, my father took me and my brother, Omri, to the fields of the Kibbutzim agricultural co-operative Tzabar Kama, the first place my father worked at in Israel.  My father was born in New Brunswick, Canada, and came to Israel in his mid 20s.  Like many westerners fascinated by the communal and socialist ethos and lifestyle of the Kibbutzim, he came to volunteer at Kibbutz Ma’ale Hachamisha (’The ascent of the Five’ in Hebrew, named after five Kibbutzniks who were murdered by people from the neighbouring Arab village of Katana while they were paving a road).  As a volunteer, he worked at the Falha (’field’ in Arabic).  To revisit these innocent days of hard menial labour, he took us to see how things have changed there.

We met with someone who back in the 1970s was my father’s fellow labourer but now runs the show there, katanchik (’little dude’ in Hebrew, though I’d have to say he’d gained some above the waist).  Katanchik drove us through fields of corn, cotton, watermelon, hummus (chickpeas), eggplant, squash, and groves of fig, olive, almond, and plum trees.  Yes, we’re talking here about thousands of dunams.  (Divide by about four for acres, and I think it would still be thousands of acres.)  Most of Katanchiks workers are Thai and Arabs.  It’s a really interesting pairing of origins, especially when you see an Arab guy wearing a Thai straw hat.  (Wasn’t fast enough to take a picture.)

At the end we stopped at an almond grove to see the harvest.  The almond harvest is very similar to that of olives.  You spread a burlap carpet underneath the tree, shake the tree (nowadays with a machine equipped with a sci-fi arm) while the workers hit the branches to ensure all of the almonds fell to the ground, and the burlap carpet is being rolled back and the almonds fall into the truck. Here’s a video showing the procedure.  (That’s Katanchik blabbering in the background with a typical Kibbutznik/Israeli “Let me tell how things should work” tone.)

The almond variety is called Umm el-Fahm, named after an Arab village near Haifa.  There were actually three varieties of almond in the grove because, according to Katanchik, they don’t pollinate their own variety. I don’t know how this works in terms of preserving the unique flavour and use of each variety, but I do know that the Umm el-Fahm is better than the Napa variety (named after the famed valley in California) or the third one, whose name consisted of numbers only.

The coolest thing about the whole visit is realizing that all these acres of produce are watered by recycled water.  They are fed to a reservoir that has been recently declared a protected area due to the ducks and other birds living around it.

This is my first post about my actual trip to Morocco.  I intend to tell a few stories about my preceding visit in Israel in separate posts to confuse readers and reminisce.  

The flight to Casablanca from Rome followed an uneventful flight from Tel-Aviv to Rome.  The only notable thing about the flight from Tel Aviv was that it was the first time I was leaving Israel during the day.  In fact, because my previous flights from Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) Airport were at inhumane hours like 3 a.m., I was sure that airport opened up at sunset and closed at sunrise.

After sipping a divinely golden cup of Tazza D’oro espresso at the Rome Fiuminico airport, I left for Casablanca.  A French speaking couple sat next to me, and while I was debating whether they’re French but living in Morocco, French and just visiting Morocco, or Moroccan speaking French only, they were served boxes of Glatt Kosher meals. This hasn’t helped me enough with solving the puzzle but merely added a tangential piece of information to it.  You see, Moroccans switch between Moroccan Arabic and French mid-sentence—it’s called Code-Switching, in case you were dying to know—whether they’re Jewish or Muslim.  While being disgusted by the contents of their Kosher box, I was wondering if I should out myself as an Israeli, but then decide to hold off on that as I was fixing my meat and cheese sandwich.  (Yum!)  And besides, meeting French Jews is not all that novel, coming from Israel, where it seems Hebrew speaking Israelis are being outnumbered by French-speaking Jews.  Exasperated Israelis even have a pet name for them, Tsarfokayim, consisting of Tsarfat, the Hebrew word for France, and the last syllable and a half of Maroko, Morocco in Hebrew.  The source of this pet name is that many Jews who live in France emigrated from Morocco in the 1950s, probably finding the idea of immigrating to sunny, dusty, and culture-less Israel very unappealing at the time.  Now they buy condos in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv and vacation there, indirectly forcing many restaurants and cafés to go Kosher to cater to their dietary restrictions.  Sometimes, I guess, the forces of the free market don’t let one have a nice steak of the other white meat or enjoy a nice bowl of bouillabaisse.  Oh well.   

The couple was curious to know where I was from, because I was reading the The New Yorker but was also speaking in broken sentences in French sans an American accent.  (I think it was Paul Theroux who made the observation that not-native English speakers, when speaking English in a good accent, will always resort to their native accent when pronouncing a non-English word.)  When I fetched the Jewish (French?) lady her bag from the overhead cabin at the end of the flight, her husband said, “Il est un gentleman canadien.”, to which I replied, “Je suis Israélien aussi.”  Their eyes widened and the man said his name was Mordecai and that they lived in Tangier.  Then he called someone on the phone and spoke Moroccan. Aha! He’s a Tsarfokai!  Just before we started moving towards the exit, he grabbed a case of violin from the overhead cabin and said in Hebrew “Kanar al ha-gag.“, meaning “Fiddler on the roof”.  I guess some things are (J)universal.  

A couple of days ago I met with a Moroccan man to prepare some materials for my fieldwork in Morocco. I won’t say too much about him as to keep his identity concealed, but I’ll just say that he’s an Amazigh (a.k.a. Berber) from Beni-Mellal. I told him what I was going to do in Morocco and recorded him, and then the conversation drifted to more personal stuff. When I told him I was Israeli, he talked about the great ties that Arabs, Berbers, and Jews all had before the great Jewish immigration to young Israel at the end of the 1940s and during the 1950s. He said that Morocco suffered economically and culturally after most of the Jews left because they constituted the middle class of the country. 

Then he told me that his first love was a Jewess from his town. Their parents knew about their love but chose to overlook it. In high-school the man left for an exchange program for a year in the US, and when he came back to Morocco, his beloved had already gone to France to study medicine. I asked him if he’d ever seen her again, but he smile in resignation and said no. His eyes went glossy when he wondered out loud if they would have married had their lives not drifted apart. 

And I tried to imagine their not-so-secret, yet covert and restrained love affair. I wonder if their parents had conversations about it into the night, whispering as not to be heard by the children in the other room, the fathers thinking how to sever this tie by sending their children away, the mothers secretly touched by their child’s innocent love. I can see in my mind’s eye the smitten teenagers stealing glances on the street, meeting for a short, blissful minute at the store or the school’s courtyard. And the tearful farewells when the guy left for the US, the painfully long year away, and the realization that she’s gone forever when he got back to Morocco. 

These stories happen all the time, and some love stories do culminate in a life-long companionship against all odds. But the emotional effect that such stories have is always greater in societies where love is a contract, a transaction conducted by two families. If this story hasn’t made you sad enough, listen to Act One of This American Life’s episode Matchmakers (click on Full Episode to stream it).