The first thing I noticed when I landed in Morocco was how it felt, or how I felt in it. Seventy degrees, sunny and dry, the sun present in and on everything, the sky electric blue as though turned on by a light switch. After Nashville’s humidity and fickleness, I felt like I was in paradise, turning my face to the sun and skyline and architecture like the gawking tourist I am. Travel guides, textbooks, photos, films, they only go so far; at a certain point you just have to be there. I read that Barbara Cooney, one of my favorite illustrators, experienced a shift in her work when she began traveling extensively in her forties. It was then she finally learned to capture ‘the sense of place, the spirit of place’ in her art. It’s something I forget about, something so obvious I don’t factor in until I arrive somewhere and it smacks me in the face. But it makes sense too. Otherwise why should we travel?
A poem by Elizabeth Bishop is tacked to my wall here in my
new room. It’s written in the handwriting of the artist whose studio it is, the
studio I’m living in for the year. The poem is called ‘Questions of Travel’ and
the middle part goes:
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
In this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
In our bodies, we are determined to rush
To see the sun the other way around?
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By day the past two and half weeks have consisted of Darija
classes and lengthy lectures. We traveled a few places too: Fes, Casablanca, dreamy
Assila for a much needed weekend. By night we were staying with host families
in the Medina.
Saturday morning my fellow ETAs left for their respective
host cities. I’m staying in Rabat but I moved from my host family's in the Medina
to a place in Agdal with my friend, Acacia. The orientation, while important, felt a bit like limbo.
All of us were itching to get on with our placement and city and teaching and
life here. We had waited so long to get here and then we had to wait some more.
After dinner on Friday the group
turned to each other to say goodbye in front of the restaurant. But it’s like
we couldn’t figure out how to say it exactly. A group goodbye turned into an
extended series of hugs and walking and individual goodbyes and repeated group
goodbyes and then decisions to walk some more. It went from, “okay, I guess
this is it” to “Or I guess I could walk with you there.” And finally, “How bout
we all just walk there? We’ll all just walk there together?” At last we disentangled ourselves and peeled off one by one until finally it was just me.
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Medina life isn’t for everyone. And in a different host
family I could imagine myself being overwhelmed by it. It can be hectic and confusing.
But with the family I was placed in, I couldn’t get enough of it. After sitting
all day for lectures, bending my mind to retain the alphabet soup that is the Darija
dialect, I’d come home and sink into the medina life and family environment
like a hot bath.
The director who placed us in host families told us before
we met them, ‘Every family is a culture in itself.’ That is to say, don't chalk an entire culture up to one experience with one family. But I still call them my
host family though I’m no longer living with them partly because I still spend
a good amount of time with them and partly because theirs is a culture I don’t
wish to unwrap myself from. My host father told me on my first day there,
‘We’re like fingers of a hand now. A family.’ And they do what any good family does: they make you feel at home, even when you're the furthest thing from it.
There are four girls between the ages of ten and twenty and one
baby boy, who they dote on mercilessly. By their side through the medina, I
feel as though I’m each of their ages all over again. I'm ten and
thirteen and fifteen and twenty. In many ways the girls and I are kindred
spirits. All four of them sleep in one room. One told me that even if they got a
bigger place, they wouldn’t have separate rooms; they couldn’t leave each
other. It made me think of my earliest memories sleeping in the same room as
Kate and Rachel. And how once we moved into a bigger house and separate rooms,
my parents say I cried - for months I cried - to be separated from them, my
original roommates.
The family is very playful, parents included: lots of hand
games and magic tricks, songs and pranks, singing, dancing. They’re big into
jokes and laughing (my kind of people). When I came back from Assila, I walked
in the living room and they all exclaimed: “Red! You’re so red!”
Their early encounter with a sunburn was what I considered to be a gentle tan.
Meanwhile, Imane went in the kitchen and brought out a tomato. She held it up
and said, “Look, Lindsey! It’s your sister!”
In other ways, their childhoods are so different from my
own. I marvel at ten year old Lamiae who takes my hand as she weaves deftly
through the markets and alleys, knowing where to turn and where not to, knowing
who to engage with and who to ignore. The girls are tough and smart. But what’s
so striking about them is their sweetness. They laugh and laugh and yell at
each other and dote on each other and argue and make up and pour each other tea.
Sitting in their living room it feels as though there are no
walls between their home and the medina, as well as between their family’s life
and that of their neighbors’. Neighbors come and go out of their house like
they’re simply walking into the next room. Over the course of two weeks, the
nine month old baby began crawling with a vengeance. The door would be open to
neighbors and Sulaimon would wriggle out to the alley until a random child in a
school uniform would carry him back in.
One night Kawtar, Aya, the baby Sulaimon and I walked down a
darkened alley lined quietly with figures. I felt a little ill at ease to have two teenagers and a baby stroller under my supervision though I
knew nothing about my surroundings or the languages to use in them. At the end
of the alley, Kowtar commented on how she knew or knew of everyone we passed. She
said that if you walked up to anyone of them and told them the name of her
family, they could have led you to her house. That’s how tightknit the
community is. That’s what life in the medina is like, she says.
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The other night, I went along with them to buy a sheep for
Eid. We walked down a medina alley to a door that looked like any other, arched and decorous; it could have easily led to someone’s living room.
Instead it was totally dark. Once my eyes adjusted I could see that I was
surrounded by sheep and above me was, not a ceiling or rafters as I expected,
but entirely open to the stars. People were sitting on bales of hay and bags of
feed. My host father examined a few sheep with the flashlight on his
smartphone.
In the dark, surrounded by sheep’s breath, looking up at the stars, a
gas lamp on one side of me, an iPhone on the other. The collision of the
old and the new; to be both inside and outside. It was a place I couldn’t have
imagined or dreamed. For the baby at my side and the ten year old at my hand, it was the
most normal thing in the world.
"Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have
stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
