Three Nights in Morocco
archived post - 2019
Over the past few months I’ve started writing blog post after blog post, and for whatever reason I have never been able to finish one; the initial thought always fizzled. As I opened my laptop this morning though, sitting at my desk in Madrid with wet hair from a hot western shower and nails scrubbed free of the dirt that had been there for days, I found myself fairly confident that I would actually be able to write this blog post in full.
Three nights in a foreign country is, as one would imagine, not nearly enough time to scratch the surface of what that country and culture is all about. It makes sense then, that when our group of USA-to-Madrid study abroad students first stepped out of the plane at the Rabat-Sale airport, our collective first thought was “wow, guys, we’re in Africa,” and other than that sort of amazement that we were standing on completely foreign soil, most of us didn’t know what else to feel; speaking for myself, I had no idea what to expect.
Throughout this entire study abroad thing so far, we’ve heard a lot about culture shock; we were warned of it before we came to Spain, we’ve expected it since we arrived in Spain, we have even, to an extent, experienced it at varying levels in Spain. It’s sort of funny though, thinking now about this ‘culture shock’ that we come to know when moving from one western world to another…in comparison to what we found in Morocco, that particular kind of culture shock became fairly negligible.
Everything in Morocco was different.
The Medina where several families hosted us in their homes looked like it was out of a movie; it had white walls and dusty roads and generally that look about it which implied that despite the years that had gone by, time hadn’t passed in ages. Upon entering the homes, we found ourselves surprised by their delicate floral-tile-covered walls and velvety couches and open air interiors, protected from the elements by metal roofs or plastic sheets. Shoes were not to be worn on carpet, water and electricity were to be used sparsely, food was served on one large dish in the center of the table and eaten with our hands or maybe a spoon, calls to prayer played through the streets five times a day, English speakers were few and far between, toilets were a “luxury” that were relatively uncommon (but I have luxury in quotes because Moroccans were perfectly content with a hole in the ground and a faucet to wash everything down). This list of differences goes on.
And that felt strange to me, going into a place and initially being able to see so many differences. But then it was also strange that, after just a few short days, we found that all the important things were essentially the same.
A few weeks ago I was in Córdoba, and I was having a conversation with one of my classmates as we walked around the mezquita, you know the big architectural marvel with overwhelming cultural significance to Spainish and Christian and Islamic identity, that gigantic mosque with a cathedral dropped in the middle of it. We were talking about how the sense of awe I felt in the cathedral was tainted by this unfathomable fact that so many years ago, Catholic Spain had taken this grand mosque and made it a cathedral during the Reconquista, just because they wanted to and had enough power to do so. After backtracking through history, thinking about the Moorish invasion of Spain, this classmate said to me of the Moors, well “they sort of did the same thing then, didn’t they?” when they built their mosques on top of the Visigoth basilicas. And then the Visigoths had built their basilicas on top of Roman temples. And while the fact that ‘others did it before’ can’t be used as an excuse to do it again, we can trace this and so many other patterns back and back, actions taken again and again, through history until the beginning of time. That’s when I responded to my classmate, “yeah, I guess people are people.”
People are people; a notion confirmed by my visit to Morocco
I think at this point I’ve made it fairly clear that I love humanity. I mean I’m a portrait photographer writing about people in my free time. And I couldn’t tell you exactly what has made me this way, but I’ve always found humanity, in all its raw complexity, incredibly moving. I’d be lying though, if I told you I was entirely ready to embrace the humans of Morocco as soon as I got there.
I grew up in a western world, one laced with biases and relatively unfounded fear of the unknown. I went to small private schools, which helped me grow immensely, but – as it is with all types education – not fully. The range of human experience I had seen was wide, but it was predominately western. The humanity that I had come to love was indeed raw and complex, but that love was rooted in what I had seen, which was again, predominately western. And I am not trying to say here that the east and west are two separate worlds entirely; in fact that is quite the opposite of what I am trying to say. They are however two separate identities, and the eastern identity was one I didn’t know. In the interest of being completely honest, I’ll admit that before my visit to Morocco, I didn’t really care to know it, and that’s not because I thought our western identity was superior or that their identity wasn’t worth knowing. It was because that unknown made me uncomfortable, and that discomfort, while it wasn’t fear, did vaguely resemble it.
Our guide for this trip, Nate, was this sort of American-turned-nomad who decided one day that he wanted to live in Morocco for a long time and that he wanted to live abroad forever. The first thing he said to our group on the bus into Rabat from the airport was about the many misconceptions on both sides between these two identities, namely, that said misconceptions were intensely present all the time. Maybe that means eastern students may share my discomfort (perhaps they would be wary of embracing the people of the west), but I suppose that’s not something I’ll ever know for sure.
One of the unique aspects of my visit to Morocco, was that I and a couple other students got to live with a host family for two days. Cookie (this is what she told us to call her) was seventeen, spoke English, and went to school. Her mother Fatima and her sister stayed at home, supported their daughter, took care of Fatima’s ill husband, and spoke as much English as we spoke Arabic (none, save words like hello, goodbye, and thank you). We never met the husband; we didn’t even know he was there until we saw Cookie take a tray of food upstairs and asked who it was for. Regardless, they were a family. And thus, my discomfort began to fade.
We all got to know Cookie very well, and we communicated with Fatima and her sister with lots of gesturing and laughing and nodding and laughing again. It’s only been a few days since we left Rabat for Chefchaouen, and I miss them. I am saddened that I will likely never see them again. They reminded me that family is family.
We spent the day with Moroccan university students: we walked around their city, through the markets, to the coast where they always surfed and swam, to a café where we sat and drank tea and smoothies and sang together and passed around a guitar. We made friends…students are students, young people are young people.
We went to the baths in Rabat and bathed using argan oil with local women. They sang and hit their buckets together and chanted and giggled, stripped of clothes which made us look different from each other…women are women.
We had lunch with a Moroccan farming family in the mountains. We heard their children scream and argue, then watched them chase each other and laugh. They ran up the hill behind the farm, leading us to their incredible view, picking flowers and kicking rocks and hiding in bushes along the way…kids are kids.
The wild thing about it all is that I still can’t claim to know anything. While Morocco was an eye-opening, healthy dose of perspective, it was also a reminder of how big the world is, how little we know about people, how much we should still strive to learn, even if we know we’ll never understand it all.
And I realize that all this may sound a little wishy-washy, that it may seem I’m ignorantly peering through a rose-tinted lens that only lets me see the good things in all these people. Perhaps I should explain that I’m neither blind to all the horrors of the world nor am I trying to argue that humans don’t do horrible things. There are indeed parts of the world right now that are so unbelievably screwed up, and I’m not going to pretend to have an explanation for that. The thought does cross my mind, however, that a small piece of the word’s pain may come from those misconceptions Nate told us to recognize at the beginning of our limited time in Morocco, from those differences we tend to put under a magnifying glass.
One of the more striking moments for me, the sort of “cherry on top” of all the little stumbled-upon reminders of our similarities, was when we asked the Moroccan farming family what they thought of Americans. We were expecting to hear about the American stereotype we knew we carried with us throughout the cities like Rabat and Chefchaoen, where global news was shared and tourism was present. But what we got was a wildly unexpected response from a rural family who perhaps only kept up with goings-on in America when they caught wind of them. They shrugged, as if it were a strange question for us to ask. “You’re just people,” they said, “same as us.”
I can only imagine what the world would be like if we all saw each other that way.
And with that, I feel the urge to leave you with an image, but I seem to have written a blog post about the beauty of people and returned from Morocco without any pictures of people to show it. I guess that’s what happens when it’s culturally inappropriate to photograph strangers. Nonetheless, I do have a portrait I hope you’ll try to see in your imagination, one a camera could never hope to capture, much less do justice.
I want you to see a portrait of the face of humanity. I want you to see a portrait of yourself. I want you to see a portrait of your best friend. I want you to see a portrait of that person you just can’t stand. I want you to see a portrait of eastern identity, of western identity, of every identity between each of them and every identity within each of them. And I want you to see all the differences that make each face and each soul its own, but I also want you to see what makes each face and each soul the same. And I want you to remember that portrait for the rest of your life. I want you to be reminded of it every time you look at another human being. I want it to constantly change, but I want it to always move you.
I can see it in my mind right now, and it’s the most moving portrait I’ve ever seen.