Taza, pt. 1

Yes, yes, it’s Saturday. Saturday at 5 a.m., in my defense, so I’m not that far off the mark. Friday ended up being much, much longer than I’d thought it would be. You see, things don’t work as smoothly here as they do in America. Those of my readers who have been doing it for a while now will point out that living in America is not as easy as we make it look, and they’re right – but life in Morocco has an extra level of difficulty layered on top to make it especially hard to digest, like a fried egg on a hamburger.

But just like that delicious piece of heart-attack bait, the experience is usually worth it. I spent all of today (Yesterday? I haven’t slept, so it all blends together) in a fight with the landlords of the property I’m moving out of, a beautiful ancient riad in the heart of the old city of Fez. A riad is a sort of multi-level house/apartment, with a big central courtyard, sitting rooms, and a rooftop terrace. Ours was beautiful – one of the most incredible houses I’ve seen, with intricate tilework and calligraphy racing up the walls, a nearly 360 degree view from the terrace that took in the entire city and mountains beyond, and, fulfilling just about every dream I’ve had since childhood, a spiral staircase in my room leading up to my loft bed. The place has been a living dream, and it’s a shame to end it on such a rude awakening.

I won’t get into all the details of the fight – it’s essentially a point of view conflict, with my idea of what a landlord should do conflicting with his idea of what a tenant should pay for. We’ve all had arguments like that, except in this one I was reduced to stammering out mangled sentences in Arabic to try to beat back the torrent of abuse that flowed over me for hours. Dear god, no one can talk non-stop like an angry Arab. I felt battered by words, punch-drunk and dazed.

It’s all part of the Morocco tax. Life here, for the most part, is wonderful. Prices are cheap, the food is delicious, the experiences come thick, and the only acceptable form of coffee is espresso. Those who brave the expatriate life here find many rewards, but they always pay the Morocco tax – that extra bit of difficulty that lives in the gap between cultures.

Case in point – transportation. It’s fairly easy to get across the country, due to a stable bus industry, a nice set of railroads, and a fleet of long-distance taxis. Moving a short distance is usually much harder. A few weeks ago some friends and I decided to explore the mountains near Taza, a nearby town that’s supposed to have some of the best hiking in the country. In particular, we wanted to see the Friouato Caves, the deepest cave system in North Africa. The caves were just a few kilometers from the town, while the town was over a hundred kilometers away, but the trip from the town to the caves would cost over ten times as much as that to the city.

So we decided to rent a car, figuring we’d enjoy the extra freedom that we’d get having our own set of wheels. There are car rental places everywhere in the new part of Fez, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to bop in and grab one for the day. Because I’m stupid.

My first and biggest mistake was trying to rent this car on a Friday, after lunch. Friday’s the prayer day in Islam, and it’s a lot like Christian Sunday in that most people use the time after worship to eat, relax with their families, and visit friends. You see a lot of Friday picnics. So no one’s in any particular mood to rent out cars, if the businesses are open at all. I spent a lovely five hours trucking from agency to agency, haggling with shop owners and making all sorts of ridiculous demands, like working breaks and a lack of smoke gushing from the hood.

I finally got a decent car for a decent price and took it to the parking lot near my house, where I noticed for the first time, again because I’m stupid, that there were no seatbelts in the back seat. Moroccans have a deep hatred for seatbelts. More than once I’ve gotten into the front seat of a taxi and reached for my seatbelt, only to be physically restrained by the driver. I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe I’m insulting their driving skills, or they think the things are dangerous, or – and I’m playing with a little fire here – there’s a fatalism that comes from some types of religious perspectives that makes you less likely to watch out for your safety. It’s up to God whether you get in a car crash, and putting on a seatbelt is interfering with his plan. (This isn’t conjecture, by the way – several people have told me exactly that.)

Whatever the reason, the rental company had decided to put the seatbelts behind the back seat, then bolt the seat into the frame of the car. This went far beyond what the manufacturers had done – they actually attached the seats to a thick frame of plywood and iron, then spot-weld the damn thing to the car, to make it just about impossible to pull the back seat up and get the seatbelts out. It took two hours, with the help of half a dozen guys who were hanging out in the parking lot after dark, to undo the bolts with my Leatherman and yank the damn seat out of the car. Not just the cushions, the entire back seat, top and bottom. Got the seatbelts out, then put the whole damn thing back in. At this point I was ready to just say screw the trip and set the whole fucking car on fire.

I’m glad I didn’t, though, because it turned out to be one of the best experiences I’ve had in this country. The full description, though, will have to wait until tonight or tomorrow, because I’ve just run out of time. Got a ferry to catch to Spain. Sorry to leave you hanging again, but this story shall be told! Tune in… soon. No promises this time. There will be caves! And mud! And great deeds of derring do!

Hungry

The funny thing about living in a fairy-tale city, one that delivers fresh exoticisms daily to your door, is that familiarity still ends up breeding contempt. Contempt is too strong – I’m still besotted with this city and drunk on its secrets. Maybe restless is a better word. There isn’t much difference between a weekday and a weekend in Fes, except that I don’t have to go to class, which makes it easy to just cozy up in a café with a book and let the day spend itself. To keep active and to avoid squandering this gift of five months in Morocco, I try to get out of town every other weekend or so.

You’ve heard already about the trip to the Sahara, where I discussed etymology with Achmed, my Berber camel guide and the first actual person I’d met with that name. I felt like I was back in New Mexico, soaking up the sun and the sand and the big big blue sky (and there’s really nothing like a sunset over a sand dune. It blazes a kind of screaming orange just before touching the horizon and for a second colors the sands between you to match, like a light on a wavy mirror.)

One thing I didn’t mention was the abandoned village we visited. It was on the other side of the big dunes from the town, about two hours’ camel ride, and I could tell walking through that it used to be a prosperous enough town, long ago. It had about two dozen houses, with wells and goat pens and cleared spaces for gardens. The houses were ruins, most of the mud walls were partially collapsed and the roofs had caved in. The largest of the houses was once a mansion – eight rooms, a stable, a banquet hall and an outer wall. Achmed coaxed me up onto the roof and we peered down into what must have been the Playboy Mansion of the Sahara.

“A very rich family lived here,” he told me. “They traded with merchants passing through from Algeria and owned a mine in the mountains.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It all dried up. This area used to have grass most of the year. People grew dates and olives, kept cattle.”

“What did they mine?”

“Fossils, for the tourists.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, the Germans especially, they loved the fossils.”

“Germans? Wait, when was this town abandoned?”

He counted in his head, searching for the English numbers. “I think in, two thousand and six, maybe.”

“You’re saying people lived here,” I waved, taking in the barren sands, the decaying ruins, the absolute lack of any goddamn thing, “less than six years ago?”

Achmed nodded. “My cousins lived here. They sold spices and olive oil. But then the grass dried, and everyone who could afford it moved away, to the big cities. If they had no money, they came to live in my town. Their relatives made space for them a place to live in their own houses, and food and water. But living that way, on charity, it’s not good for a man and a family."

There was actually one family still living there, and they made us lunch as we rested from the sun in one of the more intact ruins. God knows what they lived on, other than selling lunch to camel-jockey tourists.

I try not to get political in this blog, but this hit me hard, and I have to talk about it for a second. Climate change is screwing these people. They bear none of the responsibility but most of the burden.

This town was thriving less than a decade ago, now it has dried up and withered away, as have countless other tiny settlements along the Sahara. The desert is gobbling up more land every year, consuming lives and communities with a bland and patient hunger. You can dismiss doomsday prophecies about the seas rising, but you can’t dismiss the empty shells that used to be people’s homes. This is happening; this is now.

Another thing that hit me from this trip is how much I’d missed travelling on my own. I love travelling with my friends, of course, and some of the best times in my life have been two-man road trips or excursions with Peace Corps buddies. But there’s a lot to be said for striking out alone, just buying a bus ticket and seeing where it takes you. With no one to answer to but yourself there’s no deliberating or coaxing. You’re free to follow your every whim and explore whatever you want, earning great XP and picking up stories that no one will believe. Without someone to speak English and make Big Lebowski references with, there’s no buffer between you and the culture you’re wading through. It’s just you versus the world.

That said, I had another amazing trip with a group of good friends a few weeks ago, when we rented a car, crawled through miles of dank caverns, saved some German backpackers, broke into a hotel to forage for food and ended up getting a five-course meal. I’m reaching the end of your attention span, though, so I’m going to save it for next time.

And before you roll your eyes and assume that’ll be another three weeks – Lauren – I’m making a personal pledge that I will post the next entry this Friday, just two days away. Look at all the Yahya you get in just one week!

Rulez is rulez

Arabic is a wonderfully insane language. It reminds me of Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes. The only rule of Calvinball is that you can make up the rules on the spot, and you never play with the same rules twice. If you score a goal, the other team might have secretly switched the goals, so they get a point – unless it’s backwards day, of course, when the goals switch back. Every rule has exceptions, and those exceptions have exceptions. Finishing a game is just about impossible.

Arabic is similar, except all the rules were invented centuries ago by overly-intellectual scholars who apparently had nothing better to do than come up with ever-more obscure rules to complicate their language.

First you have the letters, which are written differently depending on whether they’re at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Then you have case endings, which change the endings of some (but not all) words depending on the role of the word in the sentence. There are twelve pronouns, each with its own set of conjugations. Then you’ve got plurals, which are much more than just adding an “s” to the end of a noun – you change the word completely, sometimes based on a regular pattern but usually not, so that every for every single noun you have to memorize two distinct words, the singular and the plural. There’s also a special form you use for a group of two.

Numbers in general have their own special neuroses. You use the singular form for one, the dual for two, the plural for between three and ten, then for anything larger you go back to the singular, adding a few letters at the end just to make sure it doesn’t get too easy. Nouns and adjectives agree on gender, just like French and Spanish, except for numbers, which reverse agree – but only between three and ten. Also, any group of non-human nouns, like “books” or “chameleons”, gets treated like a single feminine noun. If the sentence starts with a verb, though, there’s no number agreement at all. If the moon is waxing, all verbs are in the masculine form until sundown, unless there’s a menstruating cat within a hundred steps of your house.

And I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m studying Fus’ha, also known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is the language of business and the media. It’s based on Classical Arabic, the language of ancient poetry and scripture, which is so complicated that Muslim scholars spend their entire lives untangling its grammar.

I imagine a group of crotchety old men sitting around a mosque fifteen hundred years ago, striving to outdo each other to invent the craziest rule.

“All right, all right, I’ve got one. We’ll make them conjugate a verb differently if it’s used in a request instead of a command.”

“Yeah! And if it comes after a pronoun instead of a noun!”

“I like it. Hard to remember, easy to screw up – you’ve got style. How about we get rid of the vowels?”

“What, all of them?”

“Most of them.”

“Don’t we need vowels?”

“Not for reading. Don’t write them down, just let people guess”

“But so many of our words are almost identical! How will people know what they’re reading if they’re not already familiar with the language?”

“Exactly.”

“Ooh. I just got shivers.”

Here’s the thing, though – there’s a method to the madness. Arabic is a constructed language, logically and lovingly fashioned according to a specific plan. Each word is based on a root of just three letters, with a template to specify the meaning.

Example: the word “kitaab” means “book”, and “maktaba” means library. “Darassa” is lesson, and “madrassa” is school. To create a word meaning the place for something, you take the root letters and stick them into the “ma_a_a” template. You can use this to make any word. If I know “play” is “la’ib”, I can make “playing field” just by throwing the template on to make “mala’iba”.

Isn’t that cool? It’s an incredible tool for prose – you can invent a new word on the fly, and anyone coming across it will immediately know what it means even if they’ve never seen it before. It allows Arabic to be a truly living language, growing and evolving as old tools are used to create new ideas. The system makes so much sense you wonder why every language wasn’t built this way.

This same devotion to logic can be seen in Arabic artwork, too, particularly the tilework. Wander into an older, upscale building and you’ll see beautiful, convoluted tile patterns festooning every wall. They’re not just for show – each color has a meaning, and the layout of the tiles is strictly determined according to a geometrical progression. If the center holds a twelve-pointed star, then there will always be six sections radiating out from it, and within those sections will be six-pointed stars, six-sided shapes, and infinite variations on that theme. You’d think such a rigid structure would repress creativity, but it’s like a haiku or a sonnet - art is enhanced by discipline.

I’m told that Islam itself carries a similar zeal for logic. It certainly has a thing for numbers – five prayers a day, five pillars, the mathematics of the calendar, the 99 names of Allah. During Ramadan in the Gambia, when people fast all day and eat after sundown, the official fast-breaking time was precisely one minute later every day (which was funny, because it was the only time I ever saw a Gambian care about the exact time). My Muslim friends say that logical thought is one of the cornerstones of their faith, and one even claimed to be able to logically prove the truth of his religion.

I love the idea of a language, a culture and a faith built on logic, and I can’t help feeling some regret when I think about it. It’s hard to look around and make the honest case that the modern Arab world has kept its ancestor’s devotion to logic. None of the dialects that are actually spoken on the street have the root and template pattern of Fus’ha – no more inventing words. Artists either copy the works of their forebears or work in new styles that are more free and open, without any connection to mathematics or geometry. And while you could call modern Arabic society many things – evolving, passionate, complicated – logical isn’t the first word that springs to mind.

I say all this with a deep respect and affection for the culture (I’m living here, after all), and I say it knowing that many Arabic intellectuals agree with me. My professor, a brilliant and intimidating bullet of a man named Abdelhafid, spends a good fifteen minutes out of every lecture bemoaning the loss of Fus’ha in everyday speech and the loss of logic in everyday thought. The civilization that invented algebra, chess, and inoculation is struggling to catch up to a world that leapfrogged it long ago.

In the 9^th century, Mulim scholars not only knew the world was round, but calculated its circumference to within less than 200km. Now that the world is flat, competitive, and looking more every day like one big game of Calvinball, it’s time to remember how to make new words.

God in the Machine

It has been pointed out to me by certain parties that my blog posts have been neither short nor frequent, as I had promised. So rather than subject you to another series of epic encounters, I want to talk a little bit today about words. Words are interesting, and they ways they make up a language create much more than just a vehicle for communication - their forms and habits shape culture.

I’ve got a copy of Rosetta Stone for Arabic that I’ve been using to supplement my classes. I’ve had it for a while now, actually, and back in the Gambia I got through a couple hours’ worth of instruction before giving up in frustration. The program relies on a type of audiovisual learning that’s supposed to mimic the way a child learns its first language, by presenting images and their associated words then connecting them in more elaborate sentences. The problem is that Arabic grammar is so complex that it’s just about impossible to pick up from examples alone. Not only do the verbs conjugate, but so do the nouns, depending on gender, number, possession, position in the sentence, and a few other things. Every rule has a counter-rule, and most seem to be made up just to piss off foreigners. It's linguistic Calvinball.

Now that I’m getting some more formal training, though, the program’s been pretty useful for giving me some practice and a little extra vocab. My host family loves it, too, mostly because the program breaks down words by syllable to teach pronunciation, and it’s apparently hilarious to watch me lean over my laptop screaming, “Beh. Beh! BEH! It’s Beh, you piece of crap! I'm gonna smash you with a hammer!” My microphone isn’t very good. The youngest brother’s favorite trick is to sneak up while I’m trying to pronounce a complicated phrase and whisper Arabic curses to the computer. Sometimes it registers him as correct.

I noticed something strange, though. The word the software gives for hello is “Marhaben”, which really means “Welcome”. The standard Arabic greeting is “As-Salamu Alaykum”, meaning “Peace be upon you”, as anyone who’s spent five minutes in an Arabic country could tell you. It’s a religious expression, and as I plowed through Rosetta Stone the pattern continued – the program didn’t have a single reference to Allah. It’s bizarre, but understandable; they wanted to simply teach a language, without getting involved in religious or political issues.

But trying to teach Arabic without mentioning God is insane. It’s like teaching conversational English without using slang, not so much as “okay” or “hi”. Islam and the Arabic language are so thoroughly intertwined that to separate one from the other is impossible. You invoke God when you meet someone, before you eat, when you sneeze, when you say goodbye, when you begin something, when you end something, and a thousand other times in daily life. This isn’t just Muslims, I’ve heard plenty of Arabic-speaking Christians do the same thing. God is a constant, palpable presence in their lives, and it’s reflected in the words they speak as much as the calls to prayer they hear echoing across the rooftops fives times a day.

The phrase I have the most complicated relationship with is “Inshallah”, meaning “If God wills.” In the Gambia, I hated this expression, because there the real meaning was “Not a chance in hell.”

“I’ll be there at noon, inshallah.” He shows up at five-thirty.

“It will be done by next week, inshallah.” Try a month.

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow, inshallah.” You will never see this man again.

After a while they realized I was catching on to their sophisticated code and tried to sneak it into conversations: “We will meet this evening *cough*inshallah*cough*.” Sneaky bastards.

The phrase made me wary whenever I heard it, instantly disbelieving whatever had just been said. After the first day of class here in Morocco, my professor said “See you tomorrow, inshallah”, and a part of me was surprised when I actually did see him the next day.

My fundamental problem with the term was the philosophy it reflected, a type of fatalism that made a convenient excuse for apathy. If everything happens as God wills, why try to change your life? It's folly to fight against whatever fate He's laid out for you. I've noticed a negative correlation between religion and traffic safety: when people hold to a more deterministic faith, one where every decision is made by a higher power, they tend not to wear their seat belts. This is anecdotal, of course, but still.

Morocco is not Gambia, though, and anyone who thinks that the Arab people are content to have their fates decided for them has been in a cave for the last year. "Inshallah" means something different here.

I just got back from a trip to Merzouga, a tiny town on the southeast border of Morocco, huddled precariously on edge of the Sahara desert. It’s the last real outpost of civilization before trackless miles of sand and hardpack dirt. The town’s 200 residents survive almost entirely on tourism, which has been hit hard in recent years. The European crisis and the spread of the Sahara from climate change have hit the town hard. I splurged and went for the two-day package, wanting to see as much of the desert as I could in a weekend. My guide, Achmed, was a hell of a guy, both tour guide and linguistic philosopher, and he taught me many interesting things about the language – including the fact that my name here, Yahya, means “live,” like an imperative command. It’s apparently something you can shout at someone if you feel they aren’t living life to the fullest.

Yahya!

As we were walking through the sands I pointed at a gigantic dune towering over the town. According to legend a rich family had refused to give any money to a poor old woman, so God buried them under a sand dune. I like that sort of old-school wrath story, although I suspect that it might have been propagated by the old beggar women you find in every town – “You don’t want to give me a dirham? That’s fine. You know, there was a family here once that didn’t give someone a dirham, and BAM, God hit them with a mountain. Just saying.”

Anyway, I asked Achmed if we could climb the dune later, and he said “Yes, inshallah.”

I said, “No, seriously. I want to climb the dune.”

He said, “Okay! Inshallah.”

“Why not? Is it too far?”

“No, it’s fine. We’ll climb it in the afternoon, inshallah.”

“Why don’t you want to climb the damned dune?”

“We will,” he said, practically shouting. We were each getting a little frustrated. “We will climb the dune. It will happen.”

“Okay,” I said.

“All right.” Pause. “Inshallah.”

“Aaagh!”

After some discussion, I found that he really did intend to climb the dune. But he couldn’t promise it. Who knew what might happen? The camel could break a leg, one of us could get sick, a sandstorm could whip up and drive us to shelter. There was no way he could absolutely guarantee anything.

The biggest lie we Americans like to tell ourselves is that we’re in control. We make these plans, draw up these schedules, set firm dates. But there’s only one sure way to make God laugh. How often have your plans been wildly derailed by something completely out of your control, something wholly unexpected and unprepared for? Maybe it was God’s will, maybe not, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours.

For Achmed, “inshallah” is just a way of acknowledging the untameability of life. The future cannot be corralled, it won’t go where you point or march at your pace. We can control our actions (to a point), and we can influence the actions of others (to a lesser point), and for the rest, we’re swept where the future takes us.

We did end up climbing that dune, and the sunset was glorious. I think I managed to catch in my eye the very last photon of the sun as it sank behind the distant sands. As we sat Achmed told me his plans to start his own touring company, letting out rooms in a small hotel he’d built next to his house. His eyes flashed as he explained his business plan, how he’d compete with other companies by offering more extreme treks, by bike or foot, for tourists who want to battle the desert.

For those who were disappointed by the lack of zany hyginks in this post, I’ve got plenty stored up, from my forays into the Fez medina and my trips to Asila and Chef Chauen, the blue city. I’ll put them up in another post soon - this time without a two-week gap.

Inshallah.