Issue #1 Article#14
Holding the Centre In
Morocco by Pietro Abela
Travel in
Morocco is not for the weak or faint-hearted. To be too heartfelt will be to be
taken advantage of. To be co-dependent will lose you a lot of money in the
markets and soukes. Morocco asks you to be both strong of heart and strong in
intention. This is what the Moroccan admires most. You quickly learn the Berber
way is to hold your center. Thus Melanie and I learned to survive and revel
in Morocco’s poverty and spiritual
wealth. Yes, we were buffeted and sometimes bruised, but every day we were
there we lived life to its fullest.
Ali
When the
well-dressed man in the checked blazer and grey pants asked to borrow my Lonely
Planet guidebook for Morocco I was extremely suspicious. In all my travels no
native of any country I had ever visited had ever asked to see my guidebook.
Morocco is a police state. At the border you are given a visitor’s number.
Every hotel demands you fill in a card that asks for your visitor number, plus
details that includes personal information and the town or city you have just
visited and what your next destination is. It usually takes fifteen minutes of
your time to fill out one of these. After ten days into my trip I was convinced
some policeman somewhere was watching my every movement from an office in
Rabat. Morocco had a reputation for confiscating books it did not politically
approve of. So I watch this man combing through the pages. I am on full alert.
I radar on his body movements. I screen every physical, emotional and energetic
nuance, looking for clues as to his motive.
After twenty minutes he approaches our table
and introduces himself. It turns out Ali is a chef who is searching the hotels
for work. Our guidebook gives him clues as to the whereabouts of some of the
more tourist-laden hotels. I disguise my relief as I welcome him to our table.
We drink mint tea together in the customary celebration of greeting. We discover that in his spare time Ali likes
to write one-line reflections on life. “Life is like a river seeking the
ocean,” Ali proclaims to us in his passionate French/Arabic accent. For the
rest of the afternoon we become lost in time as we help him translate his
spiritual sayings from French into English. In our immersion we fail
to see the
advancing darkness and the crowds of Moroccans who, each evening in all communities
in the country, emerge en masse into the streets to walk, converse, laugh with
friends and family.
In the evening twilight Ali invites us to his home for cous-cous. We enthusiastically accept, knowing that to be invited into a Moroccan’s home for dinner is our ultimate dream, and the dream of most travelers, to enter intimately into the culture you visit.
During that evening we have the pleasure of
meeting and being entertained by Ali’s family and the family next door. With
all of the children, the grandfather and the teenager next door, fourteen of us
share cous-cous with chicken out of the same large plate in the traditional
Moroccan way using our hands in place of cutlery. Melanie braids the
childrens’s hair, we dance together to Berber drumming from the black and white
TV in the living room, Fatima the teenager tattoos our hands with patterns of
henna that stay with us as reminders of our time together for the next two
weeks.
Later in the
evening Ali tells us he wants to travel with us as he has to go in the same
direction. He needs to look at some hotels for work as there is nothing in the
town of Midelt where he lives. We accept, and side by side we gain, through
Ali, an insight inside Morocco that travelers rarely see. We stay overnight in
another Morrocan’s home, we visit a hidden valley of roses and we are stranded
in a remote village. We have to hire a mule to reach the nearest town before
darkness, witness breathtaking gorges and mud-built villages. Even traveling
part way with a group of mule-riding Berbers from a distant village. We relish
knowing that we are with a Moroccan who seems to be with us purely for our
friendship and not for our money, and we deeply appreciate this about Ali.
Appropriately, like our meeting, our parting is
at a tea cafe. As we say our goodbyes and state our commitments to stay in
touch, Ali drops a bombshell. He asks for money. I am temporarily uncertain as
to what to do. I quickly recover and hand him 100 Dirham (or $12 U.S.), the
equivalent of four days pay for a Moroccan. We part bewildered and confused.
For the next two days Melanie and I debate whether Ali associated himself with
us from the start as a potential
investment, in the hope of financial gain from the “rich” Canadians. We pass through a period of
temporary distrust of Moroccans, suspicious that money is behind all motives.
We rest in the assessment that in Ali there was, on one hand, a true desire for
friendship, and in the other a hope for monetary gain. He stood between
the two. We embraced only the one hand, the friendship.
Sad’din
Sad’din made a
surprise offer. As we passed his stall in the market in Marakesh he tells us
all of his hand-sewn leather shoes are on sale for 20 dirham ($2.20 U.S.) I ask
him to repeat this. He confirms his offer. He leaves us alone to peruse the
shelves of multi-colored leather. I am in colored shoe heaven, and try on pair
after pair of the loudest. After a time I choose the yellow ones. I show them
to Sad’dim and hand him the twenty dirhams. He looks at the money then at me as
if I am an idiot. “No, “ he says, I meant twenty euro, not twenty dirham.” I am
enraged and tell him he’s a liar. I storm out of the store.
Outside, I
want nothing more than to go back to my hotel. Melanie has other ideas. She
encourages me to confront my “abuser.” I come around and agree and head back
inside the souke. I stand before Sad’dam and pronounce that I will be informing
the tourist police about this. Sad’dam is conciliatory. He tells me he is
impressed that I have come back and admires me for that. He asks me to sit with
him and have a cup of mint tea – the traditional ceremony of friendship. I
agree. He talks in Spiritual ways, tells me there is nothing to be upset about.
“Nothing in this life matters, “ he tells me. “Our purpose in being here is to
embrace and accept our life challenges.” I am lulled by his words. He tells me
I misheard him, that it is inconceivable he would make such an offer. I
apologize to him, I tell him I am sorry I heard wrong. I sense the gnawing of a
part of me that is beginning to tell me how stupid I was. I feel an anger
towards myself arise from familiar depths within.
Then Sad’dam
says something unexpected. “You do realize, “he said, “that in Morocco we do this
all of the time, we tell the customer the goods are 20 dirham just to get them
into the store.”
I snap out of my trance. I realize like
times past I was believing my abuser (again), that I was in the “I am wrong and
their behaviour is justified” mode. I remember that historically the abused are
easily seduced, convinced,
influenced. I feel clear-headed, with no trace of anger. I look deeply
into Sad’dam’s eyes and say to him:
“In my country
you would be put in prison for doing that.”
He replied,
“But we are in my country, and our ways are not your ways.”
I say,
“Sad’dan, whether in Morocco or Canada I prefer honesty. This is important.”
He did not
reply.
I say, “From
this I have learned that should a Moroccan tell me everything in his store is
20 dirham I would walk away. You are teaching me to trust Moroccans less.”
Melanie
returned and it was time to leave. Sad’dan insists I take the shoes I chose for
free. I insist otherwise telling him I will pay something. It is customary in
Morocco for the giver to offer the gift three times, and for the receiver to
turn it down twice, though I am genuine in my desires to pay. After the third
offering, I accept the shoes. We part knowing that each of us has learned what
we needed to learn in our encounter and that we have both grown from it.
Mohammed and Youseff
Mohammed worked as a
waiter, cook and maid at the small desert hotel we were staying. On our first
day he took us into the desert. He told us he was a desert nomad as a child,
that his home is the desert, and when he is in the city the desert misses him.
I am enchanted by this 19 year-old whose talk bounces between explanations of
the practicalities of desert life - the irrigation system giving the residents
a vegetable garden in the oasis of the Sahara, the barriers constructed to
protect the town from sand-storms - and the spirituality behind all of desert
life. “There is no time in the desert,” he says. “In the desert life challenges
us, we accept its challenge, we surrender. In the desert we learn to surrender
to God, to the desert.”
Mohammed is a clown. Between the spiritual
meandering he laughs and giggles, telling me I have “cous-cous in the mind” for
being time conscious. He is almost on the ground laughing when we tell him
Melanie cannot hear well. And the whirring sound of the camera zoom sends him
into a terror that backs him into a corner.
He is a
contrast of pure emotion and spiritual class. My heart opens to him. I ask him
if he sees deep into people. He tells me his mother showed him how to see
deeply into people’s eyes, and to know their truth – whether they are people to
be trusted or not. He says he can see people’s futures by looking into their
eyes, though he has to stay with it overnight to gain a complete picture. Melanie
and I both are fascinated. We plague him with questions on how this is done. He
has no response. He has no idea what we are remotely talking about. The closest
answer he can give is that it is “who I am and what I do.” There is no reason,
no explanation, no need to know.
In the nights
ahead I discover Mohammed is a musical genius. He plays Berber drums with his
restaurant colleague Youseff. Mohammed flays around the drums, syncopating
rhythms above Youseff’s off-beats that so characterize Berber drumming. He
produces sounds I hitherto did not realize drums were capable of. His hands fly
everywhere, he invents outbursts that are startling, surprising and satisfying
all at once. Whatever your musical ability, interest or taste, you know that
you are watching and hearing a master.
The day of our
leaving is sad. We have grown close to our friends Mohammed and Youseff in the
week we have been there. The evening before Mohammed told us he has never
before felt so comfortable with any guest as with us. That each day he wanted
to just sit with us, and he feels our hearts. As well I feel a huge paternal
instinct towards these two boys. I want to help them in some way, support them
in a better life somehow.
I ask Youseff
a question I am surprised I have not asked earlier in our time there,
“Do you like
Morocco?” I ask
Youseff
replies in a way that shocks me, “I hate Morocco. I hate the desert. I want to
leave and to live in Europe.” I am surprised by this emotional outburst.
Youseff is quiet, calm, seemingly indifferent and uncaring. Unlike Mohammed who
speaks seven languages Youseff speaks only French. He is handsome, shy with a
mysterious Arabian air. You know that if he were to reach France or Spain the
girls would flock his way as soon as he lands.
The reality is
that it is very difficult for a Moroccan to leave his country. Passports are
almost impossible to acquire and almost every western country will only grant a
travel visa if a Moroccan has a written invitation from a westerner. The
quantity of Moroccan refugees escaping to Europe is apparently very high.
However I see
a loophole. I suggest to both boys that they make a video tape of themselves
playing their drums - any tourist could do that for them – and send it to me. I
tell them about the folk festivals held in North America, that some will pay
for their flight and living expenses, that I still have contacts from my
professional music years who I know would respect my recommendations. It was
like sending light into a black hole. There was no excitement, acknowledgement
or even disbelief at my offer. There was only despondency. Despondency in silent words telling me, “I
refuse to risk believing you because it will never happen.”
I repeat my offer
and ask Mohammed for some response, “Inch’Allah,” he says, if God is willing.
And despondency once again descends like a desert cloud. “We must surrender to
life,” was Mohammed’s only comment.
And then I
realize, while Moroccans are masters of surrender, and in that they have much
to teach westerners, if surrender is not balanced with its polar opposite of
motivation, surrender becomes a coping mechanism. The boys and I had hit a
cultural impasse. In my time in Morocco I had come across other talents and
dreams, a teenager who wanted to become a judge one day, a father of three who
had a degree and a passion for organic agriculture but who was forced to be a
guide for tourists because his country was largely devoid of opportunities.
Surrender, in most cases, was the only available option they have.
As I pay my
bill I whisper to the hotel owner, a French lady called Isabel what I had
suggested to the boys. She confirms they refuse to hope because it is not in
their experience that opportunities are ever there. They refuse to take the
risk of hoping. They have no other option but to surrender and put their dreams
aside. But she wants to encourage them to make the video too.
I leave valuing more than ever the self-motivation I had within me that
had pushed me through my childhood challenges, into a completely new country,
into my path as a healer and teacher. I hold this in one hand. In the other, I
accept with surrender maybe how life is now is how it needs to be and will be
for them. Maybe if life presents an opening in the way I envisage they will not
choose it. And as such, Inch’Allah, if God is willing.