January 2002
"I feel as though I would need twenty arms and forty-eight hours a day in order to do a reasonable job and capture it all...At present, I am like a man in a dream who sees things he fears he will lose." – Delacroix, Morocco, January 25, 1832
It is January 26, 2002 and I feel the same way.
Actually, my trip felt like a re-discovery of Delacroix, of Matisse and of my grandfather. I knew that my grandfather had traveled to Tangiers in 1913 but I didn't realize how much he must have brought back from that trip. Again and again, I would recognize a pitcher, a scarf, or a plate and realize with surprise that I had grown up with an object that I didn't know was Moroccan. Like Delacroix and Matisse, I found Morocco to be an overwhelming visual experience. I took 13 rolls of film as I traveled from the old medina of Fez to the sand dunes of Merzouga over the Atlas Mountains to Marrakesh and along to the Atlantic seaside towns of Essouira and Rabat.
Sitting here back from my trip, in the sun on my balcony eating camembert brought with me from Paris, I'm enjoying the gentleness of Egypt. Perhaps it is easier to live in these countries than to travel. While I reveled in being able to communicate (In Morocco everyone spoke French) I found we had to be always on our guard. There seemed to be a scam everywhere, from "the Berber woman's festival which turned out to be a rug shop, to the two blue clad Moroccans coming over the sand dune at 5:00 a.m. to sell us fossils while we watched the sun rise, to the man on the train to Fez who happened to appear on both my train trips into the city. "No, you don't recognize me. Moroccans all look alike," he said before he quickly excused himself perhaps remembering that he made no headway with me the first time when he tried to get us to come to his house for a meal.
But visually Morocco is incredibly stimulating. Pattern upon patterns in tile, painted wood and stucco. Green plants and fruit trees in abundance. Tiled courtyards with gardens. Perhaps my favorite place was the town of Fez. The dark winding streets of the Fez medina are a maze. I went in there four times and still have no clue how to find my way around. It is a haunting place alive with the bustle of the inhabitants- children in school chanting the Koran, neighbors bringing dough to the local oven to be baked, donkeys overlade with everything imaginable making us duck into doorways as their owners shouted for us to make room for them to pass. Unlike the medinas in Cairo and Istanbul, this medina is full of daily life- it has not become simply a place for tourists. One moves from residential area, to fruit market, to camel meat preserved in large quantities of fat, to nuts, to television and electronics, to clothes – all this scattered throughout with workshops of men sewing, woodworking, wool dyeing, baking, and crafting in tile, wood and brass.
And then of course there were the famous tanneries which are as visually impressive as their well known pictures – abstractions of colored circles amidst white and constant movement of men standing in the dyes working the skins. The stench is strong, but I sat there anyway drawing for two hours while our guide took my friends on one of the walks through the medina which I had already done. Before he left he told me that if I finished drawing I was not to leave the shop where I sat perched on a balcony above the vats. And my friends said he also told every single person in the shop as he went out, not to let me leave. I recognized it as another example of Arab male protection; I guess he didn't want to lose a tourist and for the first time in my drawing experience no one dared come near me or say a word to me. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be an Arab daughter.
Morocco is such a mixture of French, and Berber and Arab. In the south, the Berbers usually corrected my Arabic by teaching me the Berber equivalent. Boys go to school and learn French so I could communicate in French with most men, but often the women in the south did not know anything except Berber. But Moroccans are not friendly like Egyptians. We often took service taxis (which are cars that do regular routes between towns and wait until six people show up, before they leave – it is best to pay for two places rather than one to insure a comfortable space-) but our taxi driver never chatted with his passengers the way the Egyptian drivers do. Where the mixture of cultures worked best was in the food. We found croissants as good as the ones in France, and delicious tagines of lamb and figs or minced pigeon pie filled with almonds, cinnamon and rice.
Three weeks in Morocco was exhausting because of all the traveling but it just gave me a sense of the places I want to go back to. The next trip I take there I want to spend more time in the mountain towns. They sit amidst amazing colors of red, green and purple rock landscape melting with the color of the earth, often their fortresses in ruins high above on a cliff with snow peaks in the background. We climbed to one town straight up the mountain following our guide who moved nimbly like a goat as we huffed and puffed behind. As we neared our goal of the town above, we found such a strong wind I thought it would push me over the edge. Finally sheltered in a cement house, we were served fresh bread and the most delicious olive oil I had ever tasted while a chicken kept trying to enter the little room where we sat and the five year old girl kept shooing him out into the wind. While this place seemed remote, we noticed two hard backed suitcases piled on a top shelf so someone must travel from here. I remembered the local bus ride from Fez to Erfoud where the bus would stop along the road in the middle of nowhere picking up a person, their faces reminding me of walnuts and the women's hands and feet covered with henna. I wondered where these people appeared from. Obviously they had walked a long way to get to the road.
Finally at the airport in Rabat, the man at Passport Control spoke to me in French. "Where was your passport issued?" "I got it through the mail," I replied truthfully forgetting that this sounded fishy. "Well where do you live in the States?" he asked. "In Vermont," I replied, "But actually I live in Cairo". "In Cairo?" he asked. "Yes, Egypt" was my reply in French. No wonder I confuse them. The man next to him overheard the conversation and he said in Arabic, "So you speak Arabic?" and when I replied in Arabic " a little" first with my Egyptian accent, and second with the Moroccan accent, they broke into wide grins and continued in Arabic. I heard them say the word for painter and in surprise, I said, "Aiwa, rasm" and in English "How did you know?" forgetting that the form in front of him had my profession written on it. In any case a French speaking blonde American saying Arabic words with an Egyptian accent cracks them up and they passed me on through without further discussion.
So good to hear from you all.
Take care,
Marrin