How it balances out

When my college roommate, Emma, came back from a study abroad trip to Guatemala, one of the first things she told me was how this girl on the trip spent the entire time singing the Patsy Cline song “Crazy” in an elongated, r-less drone. Emma was in a packed elevator of strangers when the voice of her friend, nowhere in sight, pierced the distance.

Cwaaaay-zy. I’m cwazy for feeeeeling this lonely.

I loved the story so much that I took it on as my own, quoting it as if I were there.

In fact, it's my favorite word in Darija: hmk. (pronounced huh-muk), meaning crazy. Wesh nta hmk? You'll hear people ask, are you crazy? It always warrants laughter when I try to use it. Maybe I'm saying it wrong. Or maybe just because it’s a fun word. Huh-muk. It sounds and feels like the situations it describes. You can spit it out like a curse word or a sneeze. And here, it’s a very useful; it comes in handy quite a bit.

 

In the US Culture class I teach, we often talk about the layers of culture. There are the things you see – behaviors and practices – like the tip of an iceberg and then everything else beneath the surface: interpretations, unspoken rules, core values. Down there, you have concepts of things: concepts of self, of beauty, sanity and – my personal favorite – insanity.

I have interactions sometimes where I wonder, very mildly, if I’m insane. Is this normal or am I being pranked? Am I too concerned with being respectful and polite to ask why something this bizarre is happening?

One day I was teaching a class when a student knocked on the door and asked to speak to me. I asked if he was in the class and he said, No, but could he borrow a chair? Yes, quickly, I said in front of my fifty students. The boy walks in and takes an empty chair. Then thirty other students walk in and take every other empty chair in the classroom, lifting them over the heads of my students who sat there with unblinking attention. Was this normal? No one seemed to think twice about it.

Is it normal, that a month into the semester I would have one of my classes taken away from me with no warning and, in its place, an entirely different class of different students at a different time and place, a month behind every other course? Or the fact that I would have a class of fifty students one week, a hundred the next and close to a hundred and fifty after that? I feel like bellowing Patsy Cline myself sometimes.

And yet. And yet.

Recently two Moroccan guys, friends of a friend, helped me find an apartment. I had been at a loss where to begin the process, which can be relentless, aggravating, expensive. But they did all of the heavy lifting. They made appointments. They negotiated for the best price. When I moved, they rented a vehicle and carried all of my stuff up the three flights of stairs. And in return they wouldn’t accept anything other than thanks. No money. Nothing.

The one guy, Outmane, said that helping people makes him happy. “It makes me feel like a real human being,” he said.

My old host sister recently gave me a bag of clothes she had bought for me, choosing things she thought I would like. Thank you, I said, but why? She shrugged. Because I love you.

Or how my host mother took away my right to say thank you. She shook her finger in my face, You are my daughter, she said, you are our family. There’s no more shukran for you, there’s no thank you for family.

They don’t owe me a thing and yet, again and again, I experience the kindness of strangers, of acquaintances, of people who let me in and choose to trust me. Again and again, I feel the warmth of Moroccan hospitality that has no equal, that's nothing less than crazy.