A Moroccan interlude

...courtesy of Foreign Policy - apparently the PJD is trying to score political points dissing Elton John? Morocco can't feel the love tonight - Passport blog

To his credit, my Moroccan teacher did use "mithli" when telling dirty jokes in class...

Postscript

A sad follow-up to the old Morocco blogging: the Journal Hebdo, a plucky newsweekly Scarlett made me start reading, has closed, finally losing a defamation case against the king to the tune of being bankrupted by the government. Funny how bad things happen to investigative journalism in some parts of the world...

If you value free speech...

...then check this out and then pass on the news. Facebook-impersonation shouldn't be a crime.

Also, Le Journal Hebdo has its website blocked again and is facing more fines for something they published about Western Sahara. I don't have details, but Scarlett's been in touch with them and I'll link to details if she posts any.

Patterns

A friend mentioned she was looking for quilting ideas from islamic art, and I don't have server space for full-res pictures anywhere else, so everyone checking in gets subjected to more Morocco pictures. Click to enlarge to full size. Enjoy, or ignore, at your pleasure :)

Monitoring Morocco

I might have left Morocco, but still it resonates in my regular thoughts, an experience not yet entirely digested and translated into memory in the way of Provence or Madrid. A wool blanket on my bed, a green-felt jellabah in the closet, leather tasseled slippers on the floor, & fourcontinents itself all remind me of stories left untold and impressions that remain fluid and uncertain. Loading today's New York Times recalled the political ambivalence I feel yet months after the democracy dialogue. Andrea Elliott writes about Tetouan and its ties to the Madrid bombings and fighters in Iraq.

Her point about the social pressures is a good one, but how oh how do you even begin to sway opinion at such a local level? Where can change occur such that the neighborhood soccer squad serves as a force against terrorism instead of a recruitment zone? A lot of this is still poverty & hopelessness, but development alone isn't going to solve everything. These men are from a relatively liberal Muslim society and still get caught up in the campaign - it makes it hard to hope for change anywhere. Thoughts?

Update

So it's still six weeks until my return to Morocco, but as at least a few of my American friends still check in here periodically, I thought I'd at least link to others' coverage of relevant news. Recently a newsweekly in Arabic published a supposedly critical editorial and had all copies seized and destroyed, while the editor and op-ed writer were hauled into court and threatened. Actual translation of said article available here: eatbees.com

So yeah, I usually try to play up the good things about my adoptive home - it is a place I love most of the time - you still can't ignore that things like this do indeed happen. Censorship is still an issue. The monarchy might be modern, but it is absolute. This is why I have a hard time with some of the pie-in-the-sky democracy stuff...which I swear I'll get back to soon enough.

Further commentary on the Nichane incident available here: Long Way Home

24 hours in Fes

I fly out tomorrow - first to Paris, then on to DC. I'd be panicking except that I genuinely believe I'll be back and soon - if not this fall than in the next couple of years.

I still have a travel piece on Tangier and a few more things to say about local politics and even sexual harassment, but for the next few days I'm going to be in limbo and then in culture shock. Still, check back in - I might be leaving Morocco but I'm not quite ready to leave it alone yet...


The Coca-Cola donkey

Le Tour de Fès

Okay, a break from democracy stuff, which will return after my weekend Tangier trip. For now, a photographic tour of Fez:


This, believe it or not, is the McDonald's. Yes, the ceiling is painted. McDo is kind of an upscale, cool place to hang out in Fez. No, I don't get it either.



Moroccan families also take their kids' pictures with Ronald.



A graffiti ad near my house



The minaret to the Tijani mosque in the medina. The founder of a sufi order born in Algeria who converted many in West Africa, al-Tijani is buried in Fez. The Tijanis were all in town last week, which was interesting to watch.



A light at Dar Tazi/Le Palais de Fes, a favorite restaurant near Place R'cif



The mural and altar in the Église St. François, my local church

And now, off to Tangier!

Democracy again: Talking about Reform

The leaving-Fes update: one week and counting...eek! As regards my imminent departure, I'm past denial and into bargaining - pray, knock on wood, cross your fingers or do whatever you do on Monday for me as I MIGHT have found a way to come back. For now, it's back to democracy and security.

Part Two: The First Dialogue
Saturday morning we broke into small groups (about 16 people each) for discussion sessions. The first hour and a half was devoted to "democratic reform in Morocco," a chance to define democratic ideals and look at how such a government might work here, as well as the US role in promoting democracy.

My notes:
-Power in the hands of popularly elected leaders
-Talk of a constitution - but what about the fact that kings have ruled for centuries (need for GRADUAL change)
-Introduction of checks and balances? Increase accountability
-Reform Parliament FIRST
-Opening of media

The idea that any change will happen very slowly was immediately evident. The king is not universally loved (see nickname "sa ma-jet-ski"), but the Parliament doesn't exactly have anyone's trust either. Mohammed VI has reformed things (women's rights, for example) and is sometimes seen as less self-interested than elected representatives. In addition to holding all political power, he's also a direct descendent of the Prophet and is the leader of the faithful in Morocco. Almost no one wants to depose him, and very few want to relegate him to entirely ceremonial status. The most common proposal looks like a modified American system in which the king would be the executive, with real power but also checks and accountability (no Bush jokes, please).

This devolved into a complaints session about the uselessness of the current elected officials, particularly the PJD. They aren't islamist because explicitly religious parties banned, but they still campaign to a conservative religious base and is more locally active than other parties, particularly in rural areas. One participant described it, "They go into the villages and give a big donation to the mosque at Eid and that's why people vote for them, because they don't read the platforms and don't know better." My notes at this point, "well, so do Republicans."

The educated urban Moroccans are definitely afraid of this success and their response is generally to point to the PJD and the 40+% illiteracy rate as evidence that real democracy won't work until the population as a whole is better educated and able to vote on real issues rather than responding to simple pandering. I kept wanting to point out that in the US we have an educated populace and we still tend to elect the taller candidate - and that "elections on issues alone" is utopian pie-in-the-sky dreaming - if you wait for the perfect democracy you'll never get one at all. Don't worry, I mostly kept my jaded sarcasm to myself, or at least my notes.

The main buzzwords we kept returning to were inclusiveness and accountability. Part of why the PJD is popular in rural areas is that many other parties don't bother to campaign there. Youth involvement is distressingly low (sound familiar?), while women's outreach sections tend to be more show than substance. Government business is often conducted in French, which half the country doesn't speak, or Arabic, which still isn't universal (a significant percentage, particularly in rural areas, speak Tamazigh). Elected representatives don't have the will or the money to return to their constituencies regularly, or they win the seat and its salary but never even bother to show up in Rabat. Because the king often steps in and takes the rein on controversial questions, there's little incentive for compromise between the parties, who fight until Mohammed VI picks a side and resolves the conflict.

A moderator reminded us that we couldn't just list problems and obstacles, that we were supposed to propose solutions, and we began brainstorming. Our suggestions (with my added commentary) were:

The Moroccan government should promote the creation of local, organic news media (such as community radio programming) in local languages. (Maybe if the people know what's happening in Rabat, they'll be more inclined to respond).

Morocco should relax press restrictions so as to allow for greater dissent (censorship is still a problem if you want to criticize the king, for example)

The Moroccan Parliament should stress accountability through a program tracking members voting records, a written code of legislator conduct and the creation of contracts between individual representatives and their constituencies. It should also tie salary to attendance and consider the creation of an accountability committee to propose further reforms.

US democracy-promotion efforts should cooperate with international partners and create clear objectives for local organizations and individual participation in order to encourage accountability, track actual progress, and create a self-sustaning system.

Democracy in Morocco: the Rabat Panels

Even before the now-finally-blogged trip to Marrakech, I attended a "Moroccan-American Youth Dialogue on Democracy and Security" in Rabat. The conference made both Al-Jazeera and the BBC, and a comment of mine even made it into the final BBC Radio edit (yes, a Katy in international news - I could get used to this...) However, I didn't write about it at first because I wanted concrete ideas on the topic first. Then I didn't write about it because there was a shiny music festival in town and stalking rock stars was more fun anyway. Last weekend, a second conference brought some of those same discussions back to Fes and I still didn't write about it because the whole topic depresses me.

Democracy in Morocco is a pesky, messy question and American democracy promotion a more complicated issue still. And truth be told, I'm not sure that very many people involved in Moroccan or American politics really care if Morocco ever democratizes. Still, it's an interesting case study in American foreign relations and Middle Eastern politics both domestic and international, so here goes...

Part One: the Players

Day One of the conference involved a series of discussion panels representing many of the interested parties. Ali Amar, publisher of the government-critical magazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire, skipped out at the last minute, but Yassir Mezouari represented the Youth section of the USFP (socialist) party, while Lahcen Haddad spoke for the Mouvement Populaire party. Mezouari went on about the need for greater youth involvement in politics and lamented his generation's disinterest (sound familiar?) Haddad described a society in need of greater education and economic stability in order for democracy to flourish, worrying that the present population, impoverished and half-illiterate, is too susceptible to manipulation.

A second panel included Julia Demichelis of USAID and Eric Duhaime of the National Democratic Institute, who discussed the how of American democracy promotion in places like Morocco. Ms. Demichelis was my favorite of the participants, describing parliamentarian education courses in proper legislative etiquette and the creation of a governmental documents library to store and catalog the activities of the legislature. Mr. Duhaime added that the NDI works with a number of local and national organizations, including offering GOTV training to Moroccan political parties (I want THAT job!)

The final group of speakers went off the record because Craig Karp, the political affairs counselor to the US Ambassador to Morocco, did not want his remarks broadcast on Al-Jazeera. I was nonetheless disappointed when he followed his "off the record" request with a presentation carefully crafted and absolutely correct - if you're going to go off the record you might as well enjoy the opportunity to be frank! Mohammed Ben Hammou followed him with insightful remarks I've since forgotten, which is a shame.

We ended the discussion panels with dinner and a free evening to mull over all we'd heard in preparation for the next day's discussions.

مراكش

(Murrakush, or more commonly, Marrakech)

I'm medina-wandering a lot nowadays, trying to anticipate and memorize memorize those sights and sounds I will most miss. Today I think I will test whether Principessa's built-in microphone and GarageBand are able to adequately record the call to prayer from a hotel terrace over the medina...wish me luck. If you have any souvenir requests, by all means, make them - but otherwise I will try NOT to wallow in leaving-Fes too much. Besides, I'm behind on other stories, like the fact that I went to Marrakech over a month ago and never wrote about it, even though Marrakech is the one Moroccan city all the tourists, likely tourists and armchair tourists want to hear about.



Having adopted Fes as my home base, I expected to dismiss touristy Marrakech as a Disney-fied sellout, check it off my "been there, done that" list and return to my (obviously superior) town. Thankfully, the reality was more fun than that - Marrakech has made its concessions to the visitors but it's still very Moroccan also, and I enjoyed spending two days lost in its medina - and could have stayed longer.



First, the Jemma al-Fnaa, supposedly the largest public square on the African continent. Farrin and I arrived there after dark and so first discovered its nocturnal incarnation as a place of picnic-table eateries, a heaven of 3-dirham harira and overpriced tagines that bustled with life even at 10 pm. I asked directions to the hostel from the man at orange juice stand number 12 and made a mental note to return when next I needed a 3-dirham glass of fresh-squeezed.

Making dinner plans with Laura, I chose juice stand 12 as a meeting point and set out to find him once again. Approaching the row of juice carts and CD vendors, one man called out to me and I began to walk in his direction until I realized that his was juice stand number 13 and turned instead to my friend at 12. As I ordered a glass of grapefruit juice, the purveyor of stand 13 left his cart and came down to berate me for buying from a competitor, a tirade that ended in "fuck you! fuck you! fuck you!" Laura arrived just in time to witness my welcome to Marrakech, and we quietly rejoiced in returning to stand 12 as often as possible during our stay, partly for delicious fresh juice and partly to watch the man in stand 13 throw evil eyes our way.



The next morning Farrin and I set out to get lost in the medina - an easy task considering I had not brought my guidebook along and therefore had no map. The streets were generally wider than the alleyways of Fes, and they all had names and markers, a very un-Moroccan level of organization indeed. The salesmen on the main streets had all learned just enough English to shout "Fish and chips!" at us as we walked by, which both confused and amused me greatly. We soon wandered aimlessly away from the main streets and past the mosques, schools and shops - including one restored museum-madrassa - of the central city before reaching another gate and hailing a taxi back to meet Laura for lunch.



For the afternoon we meandered through the Palais al-Bahia and took advantage of its cool, shadowed gardens during the heat of the afternoon. I took photos of the tilework, plaster carvings and painted wood. My comparison of a floral design on one shutter to Norwegian rosemaling earned me the nickname Wikipedia for knowing one obscure trivium too many, apparently. After taking our pictures of arches, windows and walls, we returned to the Jmaa al-Fnaa and watched the sunset from a café terrace before descending to the square for more orange juice and harira.



For day two, I negotiated myself a shirt-length caftan for half the original price and navigated my way to a small riadh-cum-art studio to see a photography exhibit and drink spiced coffee. After one last bowl of addictive harira and a stop at the juice stand to get a liter-bottle filled for the road, Farrin and I caught the evening train back home and found myself once more in Morocco's soul and my own little house early the next morning.

Etc.

List additions... To "Things I will miss": Fayrouz soda, especially in mango. To "Things I'm looking forward to at home": Access to Livejournal and Google Earth (both blocked in Morocco); a washing machine (though I might miss my clothesline).

Attempting Balance

Okay, so there are definitely more things that I will miss about Morocco than things I'll be happy to leave, but I am trying to find an upside in my imminent departure as well. For example, things I WON'T miss:

Long sleeves on hot days (even though I choose to wear them)
Boys who say lewd things when I walk by
Haggling
Bugs in the house
Communication issues, not understanding what people say
The guilt that comes from walking past the beggars and turning the street kids away from my door

And even a few things I'm looking forward to at home:
Broccoli
Air conditioning
Bookstores
Family and friends

Still Alive

...and not coming home. I leave Morocco in 16 days and the initial anxiety attacks have set in. I hate the goodbye process part of this routine, and this particular return is harder than after previous studies abroad, when my friends were also leaving and I had plans waiting for me once I got back home. Here, I'm leaving behind a number of friends both local and expat, and I'm returning to a lot of unknowns. I'm trying to convince myself that it's a good time to leave, but I've also promised myself that I'll return. Tomorrow I'll come up with a list of the things I won't miss about this place, but for now, the things I will:

The turtle in my yard
Boys who compliment me as I walk by
Almond milkshakes from the café with the crazy old man near the Moulay Idriss II shrine
Egyptian music videos
Cherries, olives, preserved lemons (and produce in general)
Never needing a watch
Taxi drivers, having life flash before my eyes on a daily basis
Women with Berber tattoos
Feeling fabulously wealthy
Tea, friday couscous, and food as a communal tradition
Camel heads at the butcher's shop and chicken death row
Beachgoers in hijab
Le Coin Berbère
The ever-present hope of my own riad in the medina
The Coca-Cola donkey
Sufi chant and ganaoua music
Saffron (see "feeling rich")
Wearing pjs to class - under a jellabah
The call to prayer
Train travel, and fellow passengers
Getting lost in the medina
Palm trees

Siin, Sahd, and Dirty Jokes

Arabic has two letters best transliterated as "s," one called siin and the other called sahd. The main audible difference between them is actually in the successive vowel, since siin comes from the front of the mouth and sahd from the back of the throat. In any case, it's sometimes hard to know which is which when hearing a word and guessing its spelling. One of my classmates will often ask which to use when taking notes, but today her question made the professor stop for a moment.

"That reminds me of a joke," he remarked, then paused.
"Tell it!" Amanda requested
"It's a very dirty joke." Silence.
"If we were boys you would tell it," she retorted.
"Yes." Awkward laughter and more silence.

At least he's honest about it...and perhaps less biased than many. Amanda did bully him into telling the joke, the punchline of which involves a girl's confusion of the two terms "to touch" and "to suck," caused by the fact that the only difference is that one is spelled with siin and the other with sahd. Some days I really wonder about my classes...

Ferrane

When I was setting out for Morocco, my dear old New York Times didn't offer a lot by way of travel advice. Now, it feels as though they've stalked me here. A profile on Fes, a close-up on my rug guys, and now an article on food and cooking! Though Joan Nathan writes today about ferrane, communal ovens in Assilah, I get the feeling she found a slightly different Morocco than the one I call home. For example:

"People eat seasonally, shop at the outdoor markets, buy live chickens to have slaughtered on the spot, feathers flying helter-skelter. (In the big cities, where health inspectors and supermarkets are taking over, this is a dying custom.)"
Dying? I'm in the third-largest city in Morocco and I watched a chicken die on Saturday because I happened to be walking by a butcher's stall in the medina just as a customer made her purchase - he picked up a bird, held it around the neck, and slit its throat with an already-bloody knife. I go to school three blocks from a storefront in the ville nouvelle nicknamed "chicken death row" for the cages of birds squawking and stinking just off a main street. I don't buy my poultry that fresh because I'm too lazy to deal with feathers, but to call it a dying tradition? Not yet it isn't.

"Today many people have gas stoves or propane cooktops at home, and the communal ovens are disappearing...In Assilah, as in other Moroccan towns, the ovens are in transition, still in use even though many people have their own stoves."
I lived with a solidly middle-class host family and they did have their own oven and baked bread at home, but even they considered this a luxury, even in the new city where families are more isolated and independent. In the medina, houses are compact and crowded and the ovens are still very much alive and necessary. In Marrakech, I watched a little boy carrying his family's bread home get in a fight with another boy. He set his tray down ever-so-carefully in the road before proceeding to kick his opponent in the groin. This was a kid who knew that coming home with dusty bread or no bread at all would be a big problem, and who took his job as oven-runner seriously. If a six-year-old takes it that seriously, you know it's important to Mom, too.

"Ms. Sella insisted that the couscous be steamed three times, something that cooks rarely do in the United States."
It's also something many Moroccans cheat on, apparently, considering that my own teacher only insisted on twice :) Still, her couscous recipe looks like a traditional royale (rather than the standard vegetable mix - a classic couscous nonetheless). Note that even the NYTimes foodies don't try bastilla, which I'll admit I'm both eager and terrified to attempt...but it tastes so good there's no way I can't at least make an effort to bring it home with me.

Lost in Translation

One of my teachers this term is an animated, slightly crazy man prone to unexpected tangents. Through his many wandering stories I had learned such unusual Arabic as pornography (al muwaaqa ila baahia) and homosexual (mithli, an adjective stemming from the comparative particle "like"). But today he reached into English for a colloquial expression and ended up creating something else entirely. Speaking about multiplying problems, I offer you the new saying:

"Out of the oven and into the frying sauce."

I love non-native speakers of my mother tongue...

Fences and neighbors: update

So the boys finally left yesterday - and took the outer half of the doorknob on the gate with them. Now getting into my own yard is a bit of a Houdini act even with the key, as turning a small square axle is a lot harder than you'd think.

Joy.

Fences and neighbors deux

The loquats have all been picked or rotted and the situation with my neighbor-boys seems to be doing the same. Two weeks ago, a friend staying with me let the usual group into the yard while I was in class. Farrin knew that I let them pick the fruit but didn't know that I hung out and supervised when they came by, so she wandered back into the house for a while. Later, she took the broom out and offered them 10dh to sweep the walkway, which they halfheartedly did. She went back inside and got distracted, only to find later that the boys used the broomstick to push a window open - she caught them trying to lift a shoe through the metal bars. They left, but after Sam got back from his short trip, he discovered that his laptop power cord, a blazer and two dress shirts had gone missing, vanished out that window.

Farrin paid for a replacement computer charger and we dismissed the incident, resolved simply not to let the boys back in the yard. Two days later, three of them rang the bell and asked for water. I glowered and yelled at them in a broken attempt at darija about the thefts but still took them a bottle filled from the tap because it was, after all, a hot day. They rang the bell again, demanding food and money. One started to come into the yard. I closed the gate on him, and after ringing the bell another ten times, they left.

Today they were back. They asked for food and I said no but went to fill a water bottle again. When I returned they had already gone, but an older woman was at the gate and accepted it with thanks. An hour later, I looked out my back window to see the ringleader standing in my back shed with a black plastic bag in hand. Yelling for Sam to join me, I stepped into the yard only to find him vanished. Standing at the clothesline, wondering where he had gone, I heard a noise and realized he was still hiding in one of the outbuildings. I poked my head in and he stood stock still behind the door, pretending I hadn't seen him. Finally Sam came out and half-dragged, half-pushed him out of the yard while I picked up the bag he'd left behind - one of my bedsheets, my blue jellabah, some of Sam's towels, all plucked from the clothesline moments before. He climbed up and sat on a low spot in our wall, jeering.

I need to call my landlords and start hanging my laundry indoors to dry. Thankfully all the windows to the house do latch firmly and we have bars on all of them...but now that the house has become a target I'm not really sure how best to stop the harassment.

Youm al-Juma'a

On Thursday, not only did I play the good student and go to class rather than to carnatic chant, I also stayed home that evening to do homework (gasp!) housework (what?!?) and cooking preparation (now that sounds more like the Katy you all know and love).

You see, in a moment of confidence and folly I had decided to invite my classmates over for Friday couscous, a near-sacred tradition. While every other day of the week is named for its number, from Sunday's first to Saturday's seventh, Friday is instead the day of gathering, coming together: Mosque day, the day of communal rather than individual prayer. After worshipping together, extended families gather while smaller families join friends and neighbors for lunch, which is invariably couscous.

I had loved this tradition when living with a family, and now that I had a kitchen of my own I decided once again to participate. I'd observed and assisted in couscous preparation, but had not tried it solo. Still, it's simply not a dish made in small portions, and so I invited the girls from my class to become guinea pigs and three cheerfully accepted.

Thursday afternoon I wandered through the market, buying zucchini, pumpkin, cabbage and carrots; saffron threads, extravagant even here, though far less so than at home; ripe tempting cherries and lemony green olives as accompaniment. Friday morning I rose early to cut vegetables and dissect the whole chicken before class, returning at noon ready to put the whole mixture on the stove.

A couscoussière is an oversized steamer - the chicken-and-vegetables mixture all goes in the bottom half while the couscous sits above it in a colander-like pot, making this a one-burner meal. The hard part isn't so much the cooking process but the couscous preparation. First it has to be dampened and hand-rolled until it unclumps, then put into the steam pot. After twenty minutes of cooking, you have to take it back out, add more water and oil and spices, unclump everything again without burning your hands, and transfer it back into the pot. I understand now why couscous hasn't really caught on back home - this stuff is considerably more work but also much better than its instant boxed cousin.

Amazingly enough, it turned out. Some chickpeas had to be sacrificed when we found the flies had gotten into them, I spilled couscous on the floor during one of the bowl-to-steamer transfers, and the whole finished product ended up on the slightly bland side - still, the company was good, the conversation fun, and the experience good enough to inspire another try in two weeks' time. Now I just have to figure out how to get my couscoussière home so I can bring a little more of Morocco back for family and friends.