Interrupted Sleep: A Reflective Piece of My Time in Morocco As It Relates To Ragad
The other day I spent twenty five dirham on a coffee. It wasn’t anything special. The ingredients like beans, milk, and sugar were probably all locally sourced. The taste was the same as that of other coffees I’d had here for under eight dirham. Instad of buying it from the Rabat Medina, or even one of the coffee shops around Aribat Center, this expensive coffee I bought from Hay Riad. That name drop is likely to have made anyone who knows Rabat say ‘ahhh.’ The Hay Riad is Rabat’s expensive quarter. It is the region of the city in which many of the high-end shops, wine stores, and 4.5 and above rated restaurants end up. Suffice to say that if you go there then its expected you will pay much more than you would in other areas of the city.
The movie Ragad showcases a very stark contrast to these images described above. Where the Hay Riad has sweeping buildings of reflective blue crystal, well-rated young pop-up restaurants, and streets wide enough for two cars to pass abreast with room to spare, the village in Ragad is its antithesis. Instead of buildings there are stone huts, instead of restaurants there is fresh-baked bread, and instead of streets there are paths.
The poverty you’d see in places like the Hay Riad is manifest in the form of beggars, a form of urban poverty. In the film however, rural poverty is manifest during one of the wedding scenes at the beginning of the movie. As a group of men gather around to share some tea, one of them discovers that there is no sugar, something that, if you’ve ever had tea with a local, is anathema to Moroccans. There must always be an almost exorbitant amount of sugar in your tea, for this indicates great hospitality, wealth, and propserity. That there was no sugar available at a wedding no less in Ragad speaks volumes of the poverty present in their town.
It was notable to me that while a whole village was shown to not be able to provide sugar for a wedding, there is a whole section of Rabat that prices things over three times as high as other parts of the city would. The kinds of poverty in Rabat may be different than the kind shown in Ragad but the fact that it is there in both goes to show the rampant poverty that besets a large number of people in Morocco. So terribly that, in the case of Ragad, and I’m sure in real life as well, men are forced to leave their homes in order to emigrate to Europe in order to find a better life. It is something that sounds very much like what poor Hondurans back home try to do whenever they try to fulfill their American Dream. Unfortunately for me, it tends to be just that. A dream and sooner or later, you always have to wake up.
Religious Encounters: A Reflective Piece of My Time in Morocco As It Relates To Islam
Last night as I was walking through Avenue Al Abtal I encountered a man reciting the Qur’an. His little Qur’an in the form of a book on a tiny lectern facing him, he didn’t seem to be begging for money. He wasn’t waving a hat around nor did he have a sign in hand. All he did was sit there and sing. I couldn’t tell whether it was all by memory or if he simply read quickly but the only time he would look down would be to turn the page, which was clearly marked with Arabic script. I passed him twice with a thirty-minute interval in between. There were many more pages left in the book and he didn’t seem close to stopping.
Michael Sells in his text Approaching the Qur’an, talks about, among other introductory ideas around the Qur’an, about how a Qur’anic recitation conveys meaning not only through text, context, and word usage but also by tone and intonation. Previously, my only Qur’anic experience had been with the prerecorded Adhan and with an English translation of a small snippet I’d read when trying to look into what it is Islam espouses. I don’t think Sells would count this as a complete experience of what the Qur’an is. As such, I am treating this as my first live experience with a Qur’anic recitation.
What surprised me most about this was not, as some would expect, the intonation and singing of these Qur’anic verses. It was an– and in hindsight, this is painfully clear now –intrinsic similarity with Torah readings I’d heard before. It seems to me as if both have the same mutability that different singers can lend to the same song. Where some can sing it short, loud and clipped, in the same way as I’ve heard Torah readings done here in Rabat, others can sing it rhythmically, and melodically as it is done in the synagogue back home. If these thoughts of mine are correct, then I believe they add support to an interesting idea that surged out of my reading of Sells.
In his text, Sells mentions that there are famous Qur’anic reciters whose casettes and tapes are sold around major Islamic cities. I wondered if perhaps, had Judaism ever grown to be as large as Islam, would people sell cassetes of recitations in Hebrew as well? To be honest, I doubt it. I know of no such lyricism, music and poetry attributed to the Old Testament. Perhaps if an entire people whose very culture had been based around, was interwoven with and added supporting material to the Torah had survived long enough to reach this Modern Age then something like it would exist. Perhaps it is idillyc, wasteful thinking on my part but I think its cool to wonder and to wander. Who knows? I definitely don’t.
Class Divide: A Reflective Piece of My Time in Morocco As It Relates To Sur La Planche
Sur La Planche is a movie that I feel specifically portrays the Moroccan class divide. By focusing on a small group of women with low monetary means whose only legal job is the, as the film itself calls it, disgusting job of shrimp peeling, Sur La Planche showcases a three-fold class disparity: gender, monetary, and opportunity inequality.
Though I believe that the films portray true interpretations of Moroccan culture, I cannot say for certain that I have experienced or witnessed them all. Of the inequalities mentioned above, I will relate my experiences to what has been shown in the film.
Gender inequality is something I’ve witnessed several times during this trip to Morocco. The only personal experience I’ve had as it relates to this subject have been ones in which I’ve benefited. Be it by a lack of sexist comments, absent perhaps by my own inability to notice them, or physical attention such as touching and staring, the gender inequality in Morocco has been solely beneficial to me. That is not to say that I haven’t noticed it establish its existence on some of my friends. I’ve heard of, and been a personal witness to, several instances in which members of the female sex (this is an attempt at political correctness, don’t hate me) have been grabbed by the arm, oggled, or otherwise inappropriately spoken to by males. Sur La Planche showcases these in scenes such as the nightclub scene (in which our female main characters dance for a sitting group of men), and a scene at the beginning in which a man literally attempts to look at the contents of our main character’s purse. Most importantly though, it is present in the shrimp peeling factory, in which most, if not all of the workers are female. Unfortunately none of these things are unfamiliar. Back home, any textile or menial jobs dealing with the preparation of pre acquired goods is done by women. Roles that are seen as unsavory that do not involve force of arms are relegated to women. I would not be surprised if, for example, Honduras’ shrimp processing facilities were also fully staffed by women.
The monetary inequality is not hard to find. Sharing a street with one of Rabat’s largest malls, that is staffed with big name stores such as Virgin, and Celio, and still finding beggars right around the corner is one of the sharpest contrasts that I have to date found since coming to Morocco. Walking down the street from my dorm, just before reaching the skewer shop, is an old man. Every day, almost like clockwork, he’ll be sitting there from nine onwards making coffee for passersby and selling it at three dirham a cup. Any time I think of this monetary division in Morocco I think of him, for in front of him is a parking lot in which it is common to see BMW’s. This divide was also clear and almost ironic to me when watching Sur La Planche, where the women deemed stealing dozens of iPhones worth the risk of incarceration. There we were, a group of international students, studying in a country where we didn’t belong, holding versions of those phones far more advanced and likely worth more than the ones shown in the movie. It was somewhat humbling.
When we traveled around the easternmost reaches of Morocco the opportunity inequality became apparent. As international students (especially me given the twofold nature of my internationality) it was hard not to spot the contrast between us and the people there. Travelers thousands of miles away from home meeting people who had been born had lived, and would die in their own towns, smaller even than ones you encounter in Honduras, made for a very black and white picture. It was odd, having these present and vivid reminders of peope who may not ever be able to travel like we are, to study what we are, or to be what they want to be is quite eye-opening. While Sur La Planche doesn´t exactly deal with the opportunity difference that can be seen in tourists it definitely showcases the opportunity inequality when it demonstrates the lengths that people are willing to go through to rise above the lot that life has given them.
Fires Within: A Reflective Piece on My Second Week in Morocco
I’m honestly trying to come up with some metaphoric intro that is dramatic enough to accompany the title of this blog post but I’m only coming up with these pseudo-metacommentary sentences. I write this while simultaneously doubting whether it is an acceptable way to begin a weekly reflection about my weekend in Fes but I’m operating on the freedom the syllabus has given me so let’s go for it.
My weekend in Fes was a good one. Though I still struggle with feelings of deracination that beset me the first week, their effect has been lessened. It helped that Fes has a lot of those metaphorical jewels that make cities sparkle with the brilliance of their culture and commerce.
The most wondrous of these was a hammam’s furnace. Though it is something that had been referred to regularly in the past by students in the IQP group and Rebecca (my professor), I had never seen anything quite like this. As if pulled from the Lord of the Rings’ Erebor (home of mountain dwelling dwarves), we discovered a dim cave filled end to end with sacs of kindling and sawdust. A few feet below ground, reachable by way of ladder, lay a large kiln bearing a bright, hungry flame; the only light source to be found within. After walking through the dazzling hues, muddy roads, and twisting corridors of the Medina, this was an incredible find. Though I’d originally imagined a system of gas pipes, exchanging heat into the hammam, it was terribly logical that such an ancient idea as communal bath houses set in a place as aged as Fes’ medina would rely on past engineer’s first and most primal friend: fire.
Though I’d originally been enamoured with the culture, it was an academic interest that now gripped me. When travelling to places so suffused with age and history, it has always been fascinating to see the mixtures of old technologies out of place in this modern world. Seeing the winding electrical cables, using my phone to navigate around, wearing clothes made of the best plastics the world now has, it was a wondrous thing to see.
Unfortunately at this point Mohammed, Me, and the few other people I was with were now lost. Given that we were travelling with a larger group, we could not be separated for long and decided to run around the rest of the Medina until we found our way back to our people. Though the whole encounter lasted less than five minutes, the childlike wonder that had suffused me stayed with me for the rest of the day into Sunday.
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Liam's Travelogue (C20) 