MARRAKECH VERSUS
Laura Jo Hess The King’s English, Summer 2006
Out of every corner of my eye at any time of day, there is
someone pressing his forehead to the ground, praying for
forgiveness or hope. So why not tap him on the shoulder, smeh he
li, Sidi, and ask, Have you ever loved a place as much as you love
it here or have you ever been so disappointed or are you even
happy: to my sister in the kitchen. Every day: shwia, a little bit.
So why not write about it, about contradiction in people's
faces, in the land, the inherent disappointment you feel as you
walk past a wall lined with beggars, their children strewn across
their chests in blankets older than your parents. This is Marrakech
and there is a world in every brick in the street, a history to every
drum circle. I couldn't do anything but write about being here,
about being in-between in a land that is constantly in limbo. So
what does it mean to stay or to leave; to be in the village or the
city; to employ language as silence or vice versa; to be a man or a
woman? There is an edge of the world here, in this city, where you
can dangle your feet and memorize the people who will pass you
by, the number of steps from the park to the mosque and what
people look like before they pray. There is such a place in this city
and I couldn't feasibly leave the country without becoming part of
it, recording it, needing it. This city is a drug. You wake up and
you're enveloped by the scents of the fires in the food stalls or the
number of times you feel loved just by the woman in the hijab who
holds your hand to cross the street. You learn to need this city, this
world where you've never been and never will be again, since you
can order in Arabic and become a fragment better than the next
tourist who couldn't possibly know the meaning of hamdullah,
thanking Allah for breath sixteen times a day. So I came to
Marrakech and watched my feet move over gravel and I found
people who wanted to sit on buckets with me and tell me stories
about their lives, their succession. Or they didn't, so I created
them, because I am allowing life to a person who may never know
such happiness or pain. Does it hurt? Maybe, but maybe not.
It is getting colder in Marrakech and people change with the
weather. If it is raining, there will be a man holding an umbrella for
"Marrakech Versus" first appeared in different form online at Toasted Cheese (toasted-
cheese.com) and its first print appearance in Abroad View, the global education magazine
for students (abroadviewmagazine.com).
Marrakech Versus ▪► Laura Jo Hess ▪► 2
you all the way down the street. Or if it's beautiful, there is orange
juice and music. Chantal says it's safe to say Morocco is the place
she grew up, Morocco with single cigarettes and balconies where
you can sit for hours watching palm trees in the winter. Something
happened here, she says as she walks in colors to the local café.
Something changed don't you see, all said in one breath.
Sometimes I smile and nod and sometimes not. Sometimes we
order in French but usually Arabic. Sometimes we get bread with
our harira, Moroccan soup, and sometimes the tea is three dirham
more than the previous day. Sometimes Romby kisses our heads
as we enter and sometimes he just sits with us silently, listening to
our foreign speech.
So what about creating a love life for the woman in the
park? Is it unethical to use the real names of the ordinary people I
meet on the curb while eating yogurt? No, because they will never
see it and if they do they will not understand and if they do they
will only feel beautiful and important because they are important
and maybe they've never felt so before.
But oh my God I think I may be drowning here in Morocco
and becoming infatuated with things like cobblestones and crooked
trees or women in hijabs on mopeds or the SIDA festival in the
park where the posters are of a woman's henna-covered hands
holding a condom and then some Arabic writing explaining it. I
stand there amidst fountains and police officers and hip-hop music
from speakers and I attempt to read the words, sounding out the
letters. There are boys on the corner rapping to 50 Cent and girls
in dance contests thrusting their bodies forward, as if to say, Look
here I'm so much stronger than you. Why yes, I never doubted it.
You're beautiful and probably brilliant and yet you'll probably never
leave the country. But do you really want to? Yes? Well then why,
let me ask you why.
1.
Here in Morocco, you can either stay and choose to breathe
with your entire body, or you can leave, abandoning everything
and the only thing you understand:
To stay is to sit with your feet crossed under your thighs
and whistle music through a tin cylinder, propelling snakes to rise
from authentic urns sitting at your toes. The tourists think you are
beautiful: you in your mustard yellow jilaba and fez cap. You must
not understand why they stare. It's because the sharp music hurts
their ears and the smoke their eyes. But they are nonetheless
amazed. To be here is to thrust your leg onto the lap of a boy and
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ask him to heal your pain, the prolonged pain in your knee. Or to
hear Allah’s name coming from the loudspeaker, the muezzin
praying then coughing five times a day. Marrakech is beautiful in
the daytime—the square shaped by orange stands and umbrellas:
people who understand suffering. To stand behind arcs of dark-
haired men and tourists with cameras wrapped over their chests,
to watch children dance for small change. The boy in the middle
just walks around shaking his shoulders, but he is so beautiful that
it works.
This is why the youth here are suffering: walking back and
forth over the same sidewalks and slapping hands with the same
boys, drinking the same coffee or tea, dreaming of away,
anywhere they could make love, drink, not pray so much and still
be Muslim. A boy weeps: Before I knew America, I was going to be
a sports teacher, spend days teaching kids how to place the ball on
their toes. But now, now I'm dreaming of the States, flat land, and
opportunities. Take me with you. You watch him watch you tell him
it's impossible. He sighs. You touch his shoulder, soon, one day.
Or—you tell him, You could always leave. Begging your way
to Tangier, to stand on the port with your hands crossed in front of
your body, imagining what the mountains of Spain would feel like
under your feet. But do you think you can handle Spain after this,
after years of being in a place where women cover their heads and
Allah holds your hand as you cross the street? There is no second
here, after Allah, but in Spain, there might be. But leaving
promises more freedom and the chance to feel alone. Leaving
means no winter coats in fall, abandoning the dying voice over the
intercom. It won't feel as holy there, but maybe that's what you're
going for.
But even the Spanish enclaves are not safe. You are not
away yet. The Polisario Front takes over the desert. They've found
you, crouching there among the dunes. But you've managed to slip
a photographer your phone number; he clutches it in his hands,
watching the bus leave with you aboard. You've got no water, no
food: We are going to die. But at least the news groups can track
your movement, make it into a cover story. My God, Morocco
doesn't want you.
They are trying to send you home, but you've swallowed
your papers, erased your identity, and sent your children into
hiding. Spain won't let go of the land. Blame it on nationalism,
pride, but people are dying, crying, suffering. You've tried for
months to exit this land, taken the dirt between your toes. Now:
you've given up. You'll board the plane with the hundreds of other
migrants back to Mali, back to Algeria. You'll tap on your door with
the back of your fingernail, your wife will answer, and she'll know
you've failed. You say nothing. She holds you.
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But tourists are confused because they hear the French built
up the medina in Marrakech, they created the cloth rooftops and
the disappearing food markets, but this is Morocco and those are
Moroccans. This is Marrakech and that is a man sitting on
cardboard reading palms and he's never even met someone from
another country. This is a land where Tangier tastes like Spain to
some, and others, it's the heart of the country. Like Paul Bowles
and the Beats making it their land, learning the correct way to walk
and writing at single desks in dim hotel rooms. Tangier was the
creative center and now, now, now they say it's a land of hustlers,
a place only for people to hide.
2.
The city is poison. I am telling you this because I must.
Sufjan emerges from the barn dressed in camouflage pants
and a flannel shirt. He is barefoot and doused in cologne. He's
running after bubbles, crying when they pop, and spinning in
circles to Arabic music. I hand him a lollipop and he beams, hiding
it in his pocket for later. They'll never teach him to refuse candy
from strangers; there is no reason for fear. But I do not pity them
for liking it here: with their wheelbarrow and chickens bleeding at
the neck, with knit leggings and children entertained only with a
plastic bag and a wooden stick on wheels. In the village, they
wouldn't understand depression, mostly because it doesn't have
reason to exist.
My mother says the eighth-graders are cutting themselves
this year. They are so sad, she mumbles across the phone line. In
a windowless office in a brick building, she listens to a girl complain
about how her boyfriend didn't say hi to her in the hallway or how
she isn't invited to the birthday party this weekend. My mother,
motionless, thinking Is this really suffering? She remembers about
Amina, how I told her she would be a regular kid in the States,
crouching in alleyways holding cigarettes between her fingers. She
would be cursing at her mother and demanding new clothes and
notebooks, complaining when the cable goes out. But here, she's
wearing the same sweater set to school for a week, and holding
her brother's hand to help him walk. She kisses you every time you
leave the room and each time you enter. She'll take your hand and
draw henna shapes she's learned from the side of the box or show
you how to milk the cow and pick tea leaves from the ground. I've
never been somewhere like this, you whisper, wiping your face
with the backside of your hand, grinning.
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Time passes with you melting against a concrete wall with a
pillow behind your shoulders while Amina watches you from the
doorway, imagining what reading a book would feel like, knowing
she'll always feed the chickens instead. In a few years she'll be
chosen for marriage: standing with her head down and her hands
crossed over her chest. A woman will point at her, hold her face,
study her body and the shape of her eyebrows. Yes, this one. And
she'll walk to the arms of a thirty-year-old man. All this while she
contemplates how many times she's tried to leave: on the way to
school, What if I didn't come back? Herding the sheep, I could
disappear.
But: in the city you are bred to fail. You cook pasta in
Missouri, but it was grown on a hillside in Italy, or if you are tired,
you drive to a restaurant and sit for hours being fed by strangers.
My father on Tuesday nights at the Italian restaurant: What a
country! That you can enter hungry and leave full. But in the
village, you must wake at dawn to knead the bread; the chicken is
from the pen and the vegetables from the garden. The oranges are
grown in the backyard and the only store is a hanout with laundry
detergent and apricot jam. I feel queasy at the sight of a bleeding
carcass, and they laugh, asking, How else would we eat?
Let's tell the women about gay marriage and eating
disorders. Let's tell them about our suffering, cured by medicine
swallowed once a day. If you are sad, just take this pill and you
should feel better. But the translator knows this world better than
we do. He says the women would feel uncomfortable, and imagine
what his father would say. H'shuma, shame on you.
And the drum circles in Marrakech, can we talk about the
drum circles? Yes, there are men in drag who think they can
imitate the beauty of a woman dancing, but have you ever seen a
mother put a tape in a cassette player and take the scarf from her
head and tie it around her waist? This is in the village, where Zhor
is dancing and grinning while Sufjan runs around her, pantless.
This is Zhor who is beaten by her husband, who sleeps with her
children on either side of her because she doesn't want to touch
her husband unless she has to. In the drum circle a man dresses
as a woman and hurls his body back and forth; this is
entertainment, seeing a faux woman dancing in public, it isn't
done. But in the club there is a woman scantily dressed in a pink
halter top and she moves like a flamingo. She dances like a bird.
But her stomach is showing and it reminds the bartender of the
porn he's been looking at online since he was sixteen. And in the
village, please don't tell the women about this. Please god no.
Please let that birth control pamphlet floating around be something
they found in the trash, something that blew out the window of a
Marrakech Versus ▪► Laura Jo Hess ▪► 6
passing car, something that got carried here. Don't tell them about
it. It isn't worth it.
If this is the village, then what is the city? On the front page
of the International Herald Tribune today, Malawi is suffering.
Unees Malay, 17, has two children by a seventy-year-old man. Her
father sold her in exchange for a cow. I didn't know it was abuse,
he tells the reporter, I just needed food, some money. But Unees
seems far away from here, from the men with tambourines dressed
in bright colors or the women at the souks, saying Hello, in a nasal
voice as you walk by, Henna? A Moroccan teenager tells you how
her cousin is abroad in Africa: Africa! Then she goes off in her tight
jeans and tennis shoes and you stand there, almost motionless,
thinking, But this is Africa.
If the city is poison, what is the village? Africa?
3.
In Morocco you learn to pour tea with delicacy, holding the
pot between your fingers, raising it from the surface as the liquid
rolls out. This is unique to Morocco and yet it has nothing to do
with language. But everything else does, everything revolves
around it or the lack of it or the connection between it and silence.
Have you ever listened to the sound of a broom against gravel or
the voice of a woman who is dying, begging? Well, start listening.
Then there is silence like the village: holding your hands to
your head like ears and muttering solopan to ask if you can ride
the donkey to the well in the afternoon. Or your village mother
pointing to your stomach and lacing her hands together in front of
hers, protruding them forward, and lifting her shirt to show you her
stomach, zwina. There's the silence at the café when you hear
change jingling in the palm of a shoe shiner, but you can't locate
him. It doesn't matter because you know what he looks like and
that he's holding a wooden block beneath his arm, trying to catch
the eye of the man at the table to his right, hoping he'll notice his
need for shiny shoes.
Then language: the café owner shuffles over to your table
holding a piece of paper. Pulls the chair out from under the table,
sits down next to you. He asks you to spell “panoramic” in French.
Mershi Francais, he says. Failure translated into English, so you can
understand.
My God to the tourists who think they can digest this in two
weeks, a month. My God to myself—only four months. But there's
a man dressed up in a costume with bells on his feet asking if
you'd like a photograph and it takes all the strength you have not
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to twist your mouth into a small diamond and say, Don't you see
I'm not like them? Except you are, just more interested.
Here, there is language and there is silence. Language like
the cab driver who speaks slow Arabic so you can understand, so
thrilled that you're even trying. Or the Danes at breakfast who
pass you the butter and say, Go for it, a phrase they probably
learned last night over dinner. Or the American boy, pulled from
school to accompany his mother on her Fulbright, dragged from his
home for a year, thrown into a place where the woman at the front
desk doesn't understand what a coat hanger is and people stare
because he is so frightened and it shows.
Then: there is silence heavier than this. Like the woman
who tucks her hair under her scarf and puckers her lips in an
attempt to feel beautiful. But she might return home to a man who
will never love her, who doesn't understand what it means, who
follows foreigners on the street. It's normal, you're told over
dinner, to have your husband take a second wife. It's normal to
want to disappear, she says. It's not normal, you scream across
the table, there's so much more. The greetings are the worst.
Every day, Lebas B'chair Hamdullah, How are you Good Thanks be
to Allah. They don't even listen to the response, you could be dying
and no one would notice. But Marrakech doesn't hurt you anymore.
It doesn't know how.
Because:
Somewhere a Muslim boy is drinking on a roof terrace while
his mother washes the dishes and his sister sews a dress. If
disappointment had a taste, this is it, down his throat. In his
stomach. I am sorry for your pain.
Because:
In a park you smile at the woman cleaning benches and she
says she's Fatima and can you be friends. Tomorrow at three
o'clock, your life will change.
Because:
Your father doesn't love you. Or he does, too much.
Because:
A boy goes to the hammam by himself for the first time and
he sits among buckets and tiles that are as big as his body, but
he's been here before so he knows the hot water is on the left and
the cold the right and he isn't scared of the men with beards and
chest hair because why would he be?
Because:
Amina in the village herds the sheep and wears nail polish
but she's never felt beautiful a day in her whole life.
Because:
In Morocco, you do things like sit at cafes with tea you've
never tasted before and look people in the eyes and stop looking
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when the call of prayer comes on the speaker. You learn the land
and digest the air. You're healed and angry all at once.
Because:
In Jemaa al Fna you breathe deeply and sit in circles among
drums and men and there are no tourists here because they are all
on the hotel terrace drinking alcohol and mocking the call to
prayer. It is just you and the man with the mullet and his band.
Because:
It's ending and you've just arrived.
4.
It isn't just the men that want to shake your hand. On a
bench in a park a woman with a scarf on her head asks your name,
if you have a phone. She sits near to you and writes her name in
Arabic in your notebook. Her hair is tied up and you imagine she is
beautiful, out of her pale blue uniform and sneakers. Here, there
are men and there are women. The women look at you and smile
and they have henna on their hands and you emerge from the park
at the same time as they do and they hold your face and thank
God for your existence and that you talk in broken Arabic to the
little boy in front of them. But the men just ride on bikes and
whisper gazelle to you as you walk by. But at a park, on a Monday,
you meet the most wonderful woman and you want to take her to
coffee and ask her if she's ever met someone who didn't want
something from her. I don't want anything from you, you tell her.
You change her life just by showing up in a T-shirt and painted
feet. I lived in a village, you say. I've never been to a village, she
says; probably never will.
The man on the terrace is John. He is ordinary and not. He
is from England. He hates Morocco and loves it all at once. But
don't put words in his mouth. If I told you about my life, he
whispers in a voice that hurts, you would be horrified. Simply
horrified. But last night you dreamed of sweet tea and stage fright.
You dreamed of men who spin their heads and wait for money to
be laid at their feet. You dreamed of lovers in the park, holding
fingers, touching sides, wondering if they'll marry, or if they are
really in love. Last night you created a hotel bus boy who sits at a
table with some foreigners: English French Spanish Arabic Berber,
he says, this is what I speak. This is how it works in Morocco.
Brilliant people hold so much and then they are bus boys at a
hotel, guards at a garden. And the bus boy stumbles in later, with
a tray of cookies arranged neatly on a napkin. Then thirty minutes
after, smelling of beer, mumbling, I have no friends, and sitting
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with his feet on the floor, his eyes downward, ashamed. Or you
could meet Mohammed in the porcelain shop, who gives you free
tajine dishes if only you promise to return. Do you have a family,
you ask, a home? He shakes his head, I have a baccalaureate
degree. No family and glasses bigger than his face, but he is
educated, and happy posing in pictures in front of his pots.
Imagine Mohammed in the morning riding in through the streets
(there are no streets), on his bicycle (he owns no bicycle), trying to
teach his son (he has no son) to cross safely. Look left right up
down until your feet reach the curb. And pray, don't forget to pray,
son. And Mohammed as you leave, at the doorway, waving. These
are the men.
The women, the women are even lovelier. They learn to
walk so people will watch them. Cover their ears and pray for
sound. Or sit on a stool with a pack of cigarettes and wonder how
much they can sell them for and what they'll possibly buy with that
twenty dirham. Or Hind at the hotel, kissing your head each time
you emerge from the stairway and you are not the man who
demands three pillows or the vegetarian woman who simply cannot
survive on Moroccan food. You call from the room, Hind, hello, you
say into the receiver, Lebas? She is so happy to hear your voice.
Stay another week, she says, you just must. The women are so
silent and so mysterious like one day you'll wake up and the entire
town will be unveiled. Like they are so delicate and walk with
babies on their backs and coconut cookies on a tray in front of
them extending their arm at the elbow to offer you some.
M'breetch. Ana Shbet, I don’t want it. I am full. And everything you
would say if only you spoke the same language.
At a café on a Saturday, you are sitting with your feet on a
chair during call to prayer. A man shuffles by with a plastic bag and
no nose. You write his childhood:
He was six, playing futbol in the street and it started raining
and he ran so fast he fell in a puddle and he wept and held his
knees, lying on his side, waiting for someone to pick him up. At
home there is a cat that stays outside the doorway and sometimes
we give him fish left over but sometimes papak says Ahmed don't
you give him fish. I don't work fifteen hours a day to feed the cat.
But sometimes I'd take my fish and lay it outside anyways because
I didn't like to think of the cat dying. What if the cat died, then
what? This was the first day he remembered.
His brother kissing a boy on the rooftop and him peering
from the staircase, eyes wide, his brother on his knees begging,
Please please don't tell mamak please no please. And him in the
doorway, paralyzed. I don't know I don't know what was that why
what? But Hicham sometimes he and Simo, they go on the roof but
always I thought it was hash and that's why they went on the roof
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but my God my God what now? This was the second day he
remembered.
Then in the Jemaa al Fna three years ago he was walking
with his cane and a girl came up to him squeezed his palm. She
was foreign, maybe twelve, but knew his eyes and handed him ten
dirhams. My shoes can be shiny now. These shoes, just as good as
that man I promise my shoes will be shiny too.
There is a day, a few years from now, when he'll wake up in
the alleyway and he’ll count the branches above his head and pray
no one will see him suffering like this and he'll sit up and this will
be his death and all he cares to remember.
His story is complete now.
Or, or it could be like this: You could sit down to talk to a
man with no teeth and a porcupine. You could sit down on a piece
of plastic and pet the animal, holding the spikes, grinning with this
man. You could ask him his name and if he is from here and listen
to his response and understand it even though it's in Arabic, even
though nearby there is a man who has long curly gray hair and
dark skin. He is shirtless, poised around a tea pot of scalding
water. Look at me, he says with his arms, his shoulders. Suddenly,
you realize: this is not a game, this is terror. The circus man is
preparing to pour boiling water over his body for the change in the
bottom of your pocket. Pain for money, that is how it works here.
And the child sitting at the edge of the crowd swaying back and
forth, starving and freezing, and the tourists ogling at him with
pity, him thinking, Didn't your mother ever teach you not to stare?
No, no one ever told them it is wrong to buy alcohol and sell it to
young Muslims whose parents would cry if they knew. Or
photograph the beautiful colorful spices in baskets and not pay the
man for his gorgeous dreadlocks and color. But in the medina they
get fed up with the persistent battering etcetera. But this is
Morocco and you are in it indefinitely.
It is getting colder here and now you use all three blankets
and wear close-toed shoes and even the interactions change. You
know, most people talk to tourists for money, says a boy in a plaid
flannel shirt with a dictionary in his back pocket, but not me. That's
not why I am talking to you. You smirk. Oh yeah? What are you
talking to me for? He pulls his lips together tightly, trying to figure
out what to say that means, You're foreign and I can't help it. Like
it's a disease.
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5.
It is late in December and you must retire now. Your shoes
are worn through to the soles and your clothes soiled with dirt. You
close your eyes and it's over. It's over, you say to yourself as you
board the train. It's over and you've changed. It's over and you've
learned about the color of hands and the width of roads in this
country. Remember when you were handed dates on the train
home and it was Ramadan and you knew what to do with them and
you read the Arabic aloud to the woman next to you and she
laughed like a little girl. Mezyan, she says, Good, and takes your
hand, B'chair Hamdullah, Good, thanks be to Allah, like she was
your grandma or something and she loved you more with each
blink and breath. You've got one foot on the train and your hand
on the bar and Marrakech in the background but not Marrakech,
just the train station. Marrakech is back there with the people with
the snakes and the monkeys. It's with the oranges and the man
selling teeth. Yes, for tourists, but my God, he’s selling teeth.
Marrakech is an anthem and you're leaving it and you're younger
and my God are you happy.
◄▪►
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Jo Hess is finally 21 and is not moving to
New York City when she graduates. She wears
shoes most of the time and likes polygons and
trivia. You can reach Laura Jo at
ljhes@conncoll.edu.