MAPS

LAST WORDS

When Morocco wants you out, she kicks you out. With the heel of the boot.
Somehow I got tricked into spending my five hour layover entirely within airport walls, instead of wandering the streets for some last minute kicks.

She finally gave me most of my voice back, but kept my luggage in exchange.

But it feels appropriate. This is how I pictured my last moments in the Maghreb.
This is basically the way I arrived, eating the lettuce out of a frozen sandwich from the airport.

CHRISTMAS CARD FROM THE MED.

The wheat shimmers in the bread. Long pieces of it.
Consider the view from behind my glasses compared with the view outside the lens. Juxtaposed, two confused versions of the same thing.

I started announcing my departure- my favorite response is when someone hangs their head and sighs.
The manager at Cafe Paris is going to give me his sister-in-america's address so I can go visit.

Mohamed’s baby was born and is named Hamza. I wonder about the family name. If it can be linked to drug-lords from Al Hoceima, like everyone says is probably the case.

Absalom got married. I wasn’t invited.
He came into the cinema with his new bride. I asked why he didn't tell me earlier, and he looked at me and responded in a mix of Arabic and English, something along the lines of “I was completely enamored with my new wife that I forgot to invite you.” Of all the things he could have said, this was probably the least disappointing response. Still, I would have loved a chance to redeem myself from the Bir Shifa incident.

In the spirit of having my fill of the Mediterranean before I am banished to the Atlantic, I went to Greece.
Everyone thought I was Greek.
Everyone looked like my mother.
One of these women was at the seminar I was flown in for. She was wearing a hot pink shoulderless t-shirt under a black spandex dress. She suggested instead of “dialogue” or “unity” as the theme for next year’s call for proposals, we use “bread.”
“Because everyone love bread,” she said.
That also reminded me of something my mother might do.

All over were posters of a man who was an exact 50/50 cross between my mother and father. My Greek brother? His name written in Greek looked like mountains colliding into parts of a wheelbarrow.

We drove to the Temple of Poseidon for sunset. The sea was moving in jerky slow motion like the leathery skin under the fin of a dolphin. The open mouth of the temple made everything around it more possible. Aesthetically, vaguely closer to perfection than any other given thing, sitting up on a hill with arms crossed above a full belly like it was pleased with itself.
We watched the sunset there then ate fish, the same fish we have over here and I wondered how the cultures of the coast affects their personalities. They tasted like they maybe had less of a backbone than moroccan fish. More willingness to cooperate.

My last night I spent at Hotel Zorbas and was greeted by some Spaniards in the shared dormintory in the thick of the night. I had fallen asleep to a Spanish music station looping Jennifer Lopez, George Michael and Britney Spears, which, I found upon waking, had at some point transformed into hardcore porn (or softcore at a climax). The girl was very polite in asking if she could turn off the television, or if I was still watching.
I snuck out like a thief in the night at 4am to catch my free ride to the airport from a different hotel, hiking through the streets of Athens, hoping it was as crime-free as the website insisted. It’s amazing what a girl will do for a free taxi. Legitimately, it would have cost one fourth of my monthly Moroccan salary to order my own. But getting away reminded me how lucky I am to have access to fresh bread and chicken and fish and figs for $1 a kilo this week. And how I have exactly two weeks left to enjoy these things.

Days: Numbered

Two stray cats are copulating on the sidewalk of Rue de la Liberte, I laughed out of embarrassment and they both looked at me for a minute then kept at it. No one watched them or tried to move them, only moved around them.

The death of the discman has brought me to a strange place, post IPOD death and IPOD II disappearance, this most recent blow has relegated me to punishment of silence, and the discovery that I understand 70% of conversations going on around me. Luckily,
the best way to learn Arabic is to listen to old people. Half the conversation is comprised of noises and they often repeat themselves, or repeat what the other person said, to confirm they heard right.

Eating a cold pancake out of a plastic bag, watching the fountain and the gardener of the traffic circle: the old man to my left is desperately trying to suck something out of his teeth, or maybe that is how he tastes food. The blind man arrives a few minutes later with someone resembling him, maybe only because they both have white hair. They cozy up between a man sleeping peacefully in his booth, and a heartwarmingly plump Spanish woman with a coffee and a cigarette and her head resting on the hand with the cigarette, like she is sitting at her kitchen table waiting for the mail.

I’m back to my daily routine now that my days are officially numbered, cakes for breakfast, H&M&M&M for lunch (even though Mohamed keeps telling me I got fat and inflating his cheeks to demonstrate), and the continued mission to try every fish in the market. Except the ones that are sold only half-dead, squirming around in the bag as you carry them home to their impending fate / doom, then erode their spirits into the walls of the qasbah.

Feels Like Patanka

Through the window at Café de Paris I get to see everyone on their way to work, scarves and belts and pot bellies still in place where they were strategically placed earlier that morning.
Most of us are still waking up, sneaking in yawns, and others are already knee deep in dealings by 8am.
Café Paris celebrates shady passport exchange, what seem like divorce proceedings, and -God help me- small children and their obnoxious noise pollution, as of late.

I have begun to mentally prepare for my departure, designing small handmade invitations for my Mughal-e-Azam going away bash. I will invite all of them, and only Absalom will come.

I’m not usually up this early. Tight times are forcing me to “take-jobs” that have nothing to do with me or mine including menial photography assignments- the latest having to do with the Tangier Renaissance- forces me to think about what that could actually mean.

Will these upscale elitist spaces eventually overtake the low-life gems that continue to differentiate Tangier from Marrakech despite the waterfront, despite the geraniums?
Are the Dar Noors and Serenity Spas of the city really the next wave of urban development for sleepy Tangier?

Sometimes the whole city is like one big yawn. The noise is transparently placed in efforts to wake us up. I can see through it and conveniently, also sleep through it.

From the café window I get to see all of my Souk Barra friends out of uniform and a lot of times I don’t recognize them, only that I know that I know them.

The waiters at Café de Paris wouldn’t let me take pictures this morning- some mumbling about the patron and pleading eyes convinced me to drop the subject and sheepishly tuck my camera back into its hiding place.

A man with a box tied to his neck with a bird sitting on it is in the window, I want to ask what he is selling but I’m losing my vocabulary and can’t pronounce verbs ending in ein. I usually say something like, what’s that you've got there? or Can I buy that from you?

I have become all around very strategic. Being a strategic person involves trusting yourself. Your ability to affect people. General faith in cause and effect.

In general, I don’t trust the words that end with an open mouth. F’gaa, qaraa, shifa’e.

I have two months to get through the 3 kilo textbook that has been making eyes at me from across the room all year. You know you want me come get me, he says. But I resist each time. When will this flirtation evolve into something real? Why can’t you commit? Was it something I did, something I said?

While pleading with my Arabic I lost track of the conversation in real-time. Apparently I had stained my banana-coat in some mysterious place between my waist and collarbone and right shoulder. I thanked the man for pointing it out and chased it like a dog for a minute before deciding it was a strand of my hair that he mistook for a streak of dirt.
I received a free treat from the Qawee on my way out, also like a dog.

What to do when no on takes you seriously? Opt out of the banana coat, perhaps? But Faddal makes brush strokes in the air each time he sees me in it, calls it my artist coat.

I know it’s not the coat-
it seems I’ve all around made myself too familiar.
Too available.

Is that the name of the game? I plead once more with my Arabic, it takes him a few seconds to mentally translate, then he slithers away as if to say, you’ll never learn.
In dialect. In idiom.
Something about my being fit for a pocket.
At least I understood the part about the pocket.

HOCEIMA

After finally exploring the gloomy remnants of cafes and low-budget sea-side resorts at Robinson Plage (empty pools, etc) I was especially eager to make the trek to Hoceima. A long time coming, I admittedly let myself build it up in anticipation, the long imagined home of Mohamed and Mohamed (and Mohamed and Mohamed).

The six hour approach managed to include a stack of misadventures including the creepily determined, possibly high, car-chasing hash-dealers they warn you about in guidebooks. They put on an impressive performance, luckily shy of running us off the road. The eventual disappearance of each obstacle was only an introduction to a new one on the one lane mountain road to Hoceima. At points we ventured off-course only to be met by potholes and gloom. The first glimpse of the Rif cuddling up to the sea coaxed some gasps, mostly on my part, a pretty constant gasper on the whole. But as we approached the city in our tiny white fiat, still pure and genuinely curious, there came an overwhelming sinking feeling, felt by all parties.
We spent two hours in Al Hoceima, inspecting the gloomy premises, before we decided to flee- or more appropriately- to escape-
no Talla Youssef, a taste of Cala Iris, a taste of the public beach.

Upon my return Uthman interrogated me on what I’d seen and why didn’t I tell him. Come with me next week, he pleaded. I casually blocked his hand from touching my knee and explained that I would never return to Hoceima.

Public Performance

It only took two weeks of frequenting the farran (public oven) daily to hit the red brick wall at the end of that path. The mool’l farran, a fresh replacement for my favorite old man ever (now fled to Placa Toro) has also been acting as my dealer for various gems from the neighborhood: peanut cookies, abandoned bread loaves, moroccan pizza / caliente (ironically always cold somehow), Abdullah’s mint tea, and lately the gargantuan black bookshelf donated to the oven from the mosque, to cut up and use as fuel for the fire. Men, boys, and children wandering the street with nothing better to do come by to chat or smoke, and this way I have secured a handful of neighbors willing to guide me through the process of preparing whichever mythical-looking fish I purchased that morning from the market uphill from the Socco. I am careful to follow these instructions exactly, since they will all see the finished product and probably by smell alone be able to tell if I failed in my endeavor. This is the trouble with public-cooking. Inevitably, you will be judged. As an American I am expected to be incompetent, but since taking the Ana Hindaweea route, I have a reputation to uphold.
Performance wise, I would say the mool’l’farran is probably a religious man- he never lets me take food with my left hand, often abandons CapRadio for Quranic recitation, and prays on a warm blanket behind a wood pile. I can understand that my visits and photographs might convey a certain sentiment, and so when he vaguely asked me to enter into a non-baked-good-related relationship, I tried to be as nice as possible in my refusal. Instead of the usual smug “why/why not?” he looked away in embarrassment and possible shame, a smeHlna, avoiding eye contact with the other men in the room. They all seemed shocked that I wasn’t interested, assuming that this is what I was after all along in the guise of cakes and cookies and disastrous fish tagines. I awkwardly handed him the dirhams I owed for the use of the fire and headed back across the street to my home.
I could retreat, seeking out the "old mool" in the maze of Place Toro streets, in my usual way, showing passers by his photo asking "have you seen this man? Which way did he go?" but I am tough like all American girls, as they say, and I refuse to let this deter me from spending the occasional rainy and windy Tangier afternoon in this warm and safe place, warm from the fire and safe because bread is baking just behind me, and there are trays of cookies to the right and left of me.
It seems that old Kashmiri logic is haunting me again.

APRIL SHOWERS

In rainy Tangier everyone is hiding behind those big plaid umbrellas. I refuse to carry them because they insist on making a mockery of me, turning tricks for everyone to see, insides outside and downsides upturned, basking in the wetness from above and the wet mess it makes of me.

There is some secret fun to be had- rain fashions are the most entertaining. Old women wrap themselves in yellow plastic ponchos as though they are about to cross the strait, boys and men are tucked into hoods like Eskimos or skaters (sk8rz), and the women manage to keep their spiky heels on with no issue. I enter the scene like some sort of sea creature, blinded by the steaming lenses of her glasses and lack of reason.

Even still, Suleiman insisted this morning, in English
“If I were already young, I swear, I would just sit next to you…all day. I would never get up.”
I wanted to ask,
“What if I get up?” but he whisked away with his tray of mint tea, a delightful compliment to the rainy season.

POCKET FACTORY

My lessons at the sewing school have been dwindling. I’m just not as passionate about pockets as I once thought. I agree there is a lot to be learned from the modern variations of pocket, but they are not so relevant to my life right now. Although I could always use a good hiding place.

A few weeks ago I scoured the city for a sewing machine in the hopes of making a go at the growing pile of clothing projects in the corner of the spare room (not so spare any more). I was delighted to find, at the foot of the stairs lining each side of our street, a tiny sewing school with seven machines crammed into a 10’ x 10’ room.

Although it is a training school preparing students for work at the local pocket factory, the m3allam insisted that I would follow my “own system” and “learn everything.” The first lesson seemed promising, I re-learned how to use the industrial machine that had years ago prompted me to drop out of fashion school. I mastered it this time around, and learned all of the Arabic names. It wasn’t until my second lesson that the m3allam ordered I follow the “common system” - “his system” -“the pocket system.” I have a lot of respect for pockets and the things they hide, and I am trying not to discriminate against them while I learn to discriminate between them, but I think it is time to move on to a less-limited system.

KING-FEST

The King graced Tangier last week. The Socco outside of the CdT was lined with metal barriers and hoards of men, women and children behind them, waiting for him to pass on his way to Friday prayer in Jama’Al Kabir. Bus loads of people from all over town steadily built a healthy crowd. Officers were posted every few feet to keep us off the streets and keep us from taking pictures of the square. In practice, most of them turned a blind eye, although they were especially adamant about every window in every building of the Socco remaining closed. Personally, if I were being cheered for, I would delight in the little window explosions of arms and heads and laundry. Maybe it is a security issue? It was so sad to see them all retreat into the darkness of their homes and offices.

We waited well past prayer time, in anticipation as the multiple prayer calls overlapped each other into one brilliant howling. I can only assume they delayed prayer until his arrival. It seems like something you might do for a King. Men in djellabas distributed miniature Moroccan flags and pictures of the King looking uncomfortable in his pink cushioned chair. The moment I held these free items in my hand I felt a surge of national pride run through me, and could hardly keep from waving them like a child.

His passing was announced by a handful of tiny black cars, speeding in circles as though the controlling of hand of a giant three year old was guiding them. The King sighting consisted of one arm, waving.