I
was prodded awake by an airport security boot.
I rolled over and glared blearily at the owner of the boot, punched my
suitcase into a better pillow shape and straightened the bed of clothes I was
sleeping on, trying to get some cushioning on the cold metal shelf.
“Salaam alaikum,” I said.
“Wa alaikum salaam,” he said. One thing I love about ritual greetings is
that they’re so engrained that you respond automatically, no matter the
situation – even when the person you’re greeting is a vagrant who’s sleeping in
a restricted area.
“All is well?” I continued.
“All is well.”
“How is it with you, brother?”
“It is fine, brother.”
“Alhamdu lilah.”
“Alhamdu lilah.”
The security guard paused. It’s hard to yell at someone for vagrancy
when you’ve just finished praising Allah together.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“I am sleeping.”
“Why are you sleeping here?”
It was a good question. I was on the bottom of a rack of steel
shelves set into the wall of the baggage handlers’ area in the Casablanca
airport. It had gotten colder during the
night, and the cold of the metal had reached through my makeshift bedding and
set me shivering. Not comfy, but a lot
cheaper than a taxi ride and a hotel.
The airline had cancelled my flight without telling me, and my flight
was the next day, so it seemed easiest just to stay at the airport.
“It’s clean here, and no one will
kill me in my sleep.”
“You cannot sleep here.”
“My friend, be kind. I came from Fez last night to fly to Egypt,
but my plane was not here. I have
another plane today, but I can’t afford a hotel. I just want to sleep a little.”
He fingered the shirt cuffs of his
spiffy new uniform nervously; I don’t think his training manual covered this.
“You cannot sleep here. But if you need to sleep, you can go to my
family’s house. My mother will cook
breakfast.”
I blinked. No matter how long I’m in this country,
intense and sudden displays of generosity always catch me by surprise. He meant it, too.
“That isn’t necessary. But thank you very much. It is time to get up anyway.”
The security guard helped me gather
my things and stuff them into my suitcase.
“I’ll see you, brother,” he said.
“I’ll see you, inshallah.”
“Ma salaama.”
“Ma salaama.”
I was in a good mood as I staggered
over to the airport café, considering the fact I’d just spent the night in a
luggage shelf. It was partly because of
the short but beautiful human connection I’d just shared, and partly because
the entire conversation had been in Arabic.
That would have seemed impossible
even a month and a half ago. Arabic, in
case I’ve failed to mention it before, is hard.
The conjugations, the pronunciation, the persnickety grammar – it’s a
bitch, and what makes it harder is that that no one actually speaks the type of
Arabic I know. I’d pretty much given up
on the idea of having any kind of real conversation in it and was just biding
my time until I could take a break from Classical to learn a local
dialect. This was frustrating, since it
meant that I wasn’t going to be able to have any close relationships with
locals in Morocco.
A mentor appeared in the unlikely
form of Ozzie, a nineteen-year-old American student at my school who
shared a house with me for a few months.
Ozzie would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the world’s greatest
student – his attendance was spotty, homework was a vague suggestion, and he
had a habit of taking long trips overseas in the middle of the school term. But put this kid on the street, and he was
like a goddamn local. He reeled off
slang words and local greetings, switching from Classical to dialect
seamlessly. Walking with Ozzie through
the old medina was always an exercise in patience, because he’d have to stop
every ten feet to talk to a friend – not just say hi, but do the full
handshake, ritual greeting, pull in for the kiss on either cheek. Most of the Arabic he used every day he’d
never learned in class, just picked it up during the hours every day he spent
at the local shops, sipping mint tea and bullshitting with his friends.
Once I realized Ozzie wasn’t putting
on a show, that he actually did enjoy this stuff, my first thought wasn’t very
charitable: I’m supposed to be the fucking Peace Corps. He was picking up an entire language (two
languages, really) just from osmosis and practice, the way human beings are
supposed to. Peace Corps had taught me
that was the best way to understand a culture and a tongue, but somehow a year
and a half in the States had made me forget it.
I thought I could pick it up from lectures and textbooks, which is
absurd. Language isn’t about the
classroom, it’s about the world, and if you don’t want to speak to locals, why
are you learning it in the first place?
Of course, it’s a lot easier to say
that than to live it. It’s tough for an
ADD boy from the world of hash tags and streaming video to sit down in a shop
for an hour and struggle to just talk.
For every idea successfully communicated there’s five minutes where you
just smile and nod, not understanding what the hell they’re talking about and
not feeling it’s worth it to find out.
You tend to have the same couple conversations over and over.
But once I started making the
commitment, it really paid off. My
speaking and comprehension shot up, making more progress in a few weeks than in
the three months before. I made friends
in the medina, real friends, not just guys that I saw sometimes and said hi
to. I ate at their houses, met their
families. Yesterday I made a final
circuit of my neighborhood to make my goodbyes.
I thought it would take about half an hour, instead it took three. I hadn’t realized just how many friends I’d
made here or how attached I’d become.
There are two guys in particular
I’ll miss. Saiid runs a teleboutique, a small
shop with public phones that also sells well as candies and sodas and
whatnot. Every time I walked in his face
would light up and he’d clear a place for me to sit behind the counter. Once I told him that I needed a pair of
running pants, but I didn’t want to get ripped off. Right in the middle of the day, he closed up
his shop, walked me over to a friend of his on the other side of the medina,
and got me a cheaper price than I’d seen anywhere else.
At one point we were having a conversation about why Western
women feel so uncomfortable in Morocco, with the constant harassment on the
streets. Saiid told me that most of the
young men here are decent guys, but many were dogs, sniffing and barking after
every skirt they see. He acted it out,
getting down on all fours and pretending to chase after an American girl, and I
laughed so hard I think I peed a little.
After that, every time we were in his shop and we saw a young guy
harassing women in the street we’d bark and howl at him.
Another man, Aziz, owned a general
store near our old house. He’s the kind
of guy you want to get to know, with connections throughout the city – it’s
weird the number of times I’ve been in a completely different part of Fez, I’ll
mention the neighborhood where I live, and they’ll say, “Do you know
Aziz?” His shop is just a hole in the
wall – no seating, you can’t even go inside – but it’s one of the major
community hubs, with people stopping by at all hours to pick up something for
the house or just hang out for a while.
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time hanging out by that shop, one arm
on the counter, chatting with the endless flow of neighborhood denizens that is
always streaming by.
One time I went out with Aziz to a bar, actually a fairly
classy joint, which is unusual for Fez. We met some Lithuanian tourists and went back
to their riad for drinks. I hadn’t seen
Aziz drink that much, but apparently he’d been knocking them back without me
noticing, because at about one in the morning the riad manager quietly told me
that I needed to clean up my friend and get him home. I found him bent over the Moroccan toilet
(which is just a hole in the floor), looking like absolute hell. Together we trekked through the medina,
stopping every fifty yards or so for him to be sick. It was an interesting evening, worth a little
XP if nothing else.
All this means that I finally lived in Fez. I loved the city as soon as I set foot in it,
but I loved it as an outsider, exploring the winding alleys and watching the
bustle of life. Once I made some
relationships, I was actually a part of that life.
I would say I’m sorry to leave, but
that wouldn’t be true. Not that I’m
eager to get away from Fez, far from it, but my next step is just so goddamn
cool that I don’t have much regret. For
those of you unaware, I’m heading to Cairo.
I’m planning to study the Egyptian dialect, which is the most widely
spoken of the dialects thanks Egypt’s prolific media industries. Just about everyone in the Middle East can at
least understand Egyptian, since they’ve been listening to it their entire
lives.
More
than that, though, I get to watch history happen. Egypt is in many ways a new country, with all
the birthing pains and uncertainty that entails. The signs aren’t all positive; it’s going to
be a long and difficult road – and I’m lucky enough to see it take the first
steps.
