Neighbors

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

-                                                                                                                                                                 -       Ernest Hemingway

The other day my host sister and I were talking about our favorite songs. Her favorite: "What a Wonderful World." Her favorite part: "I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do." She joked that in Morocco, that's why they ask how you are so many times over the course of a conversation; they’re really saying I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

In greeting someone, you’ll get one kiss on one cheek and one on the other. After you see someone you've met before, you get one on one cheek and two on the other. As someone explained to me the other day, that second cheek on the second side is to say: Where have you been? Where did you go? You’ve been missing from me.

Now that I ride the train to and from Kenitra every day, I do a lot of people watching. I watch this daily exchange: the numerous questions, the kisses, the outburst of joy on people’s faces. I see this and I’m moved by it.

It’s no secret that the region is known for, prides itself on hospitality. But what sticks with me aren’t the grand gestures; it's the little, repeated acts that make up day-to-day life.

When I walk past my laundromat, Ahmed and Mohammed call out my name from the street. They ask me how my parents are. They ask me how work is going. They pour me coffee and show me a video of an American woman singing in Amazigh. I never leave within 30 minutes.

Maleka runs the hanut across the street from me. She teaches me Darija; I teach her English. We write lists of words we hear for the other to translate. We scribble drawings for each other on the edges of envelopes and make gestures to convey "garlic" or "cheating."

When I got back from Barcelona, Said ran across the street. Said is the security guard for the street that I live on. We had never talked apart from greeting each other each morning. “Is everything okay?" he asked. "I haven’t seen you in a while. I was worried!"

When my parents were visiting, I walked my mom through the neighborhood one evening and introduced her to everyone I knew, everyone I come across in my day to day life.

“I’ve never seen you so outgoing,” she said.

It's true that something in me has changed, but I think it's more than a personality trait. Living here has changed my idea of community.

Because language is culture (and culture is everything), learning another language gives you a different way to move through the world. Learning and using Darija in my day to day life has given me different grounds for relating to people. The words "loving concern" are an idea I spend my days circling. What do all these questions do"? What do answering them do? What does asking them do? 

I used to think of a community in terms of sharing something specific in common: an artist community, farming community, expat community. It was a rather foreign concept to me for a community of people to be bound to each other simply because they lived near one another, to look out for each other like brothers and sisters.

In the Williamsburg neighborhood I lived in as a child, I can remember one time that neighbors came out of their houses to interact. A tree had fallen during an ice storm, blocking the road leading out of the cult-de-sac so that no one could get to work. Other than that, people kept to themselves. To each his own.

In the here and now, I would describe my life as full. It's the kind of life I hoped for myself as a child, trying to fall asleep at night on that quiet cul-de-sac, wondering if anything would ever happen. The difference between fullness and busyness, I think, has to do with people. The makers and breakers of happiness, as Hemingway would say. The elevators of the mundane. The enrichers of routine.

Kif dayera? Labas? Bikher? Culshi mezyan? If the greetings and questions never went deeper than the surface, it could become tedious. But, what I’ve witnessed is that this gesture of care and emotion, over time, gives ways to genuine care and emotion. I feel invested in my neighbors lives; I feel as though they’re invested in mine. I know their children and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives. I genuinely care how they’re doing. The questions and cheek kisses have led to sharing our lives with each other.

When I arrive in the doorway of my old host family’s house, I’m greeted with a kiss on one side and about ten or fifteen on the other. This is repeated five to seven times over for each member of the family until I’m suspended in space and time. Of all the places to be in the world, it's one of my favorites.