A few weeks in

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?"