Location: train to Tangier
Today I leave Morocco. I’m sitting on the train to Tangier watching Rabat disappear behind me; only the green pyramid roof of the Mausoleum and the still-scaffold-covered Hassan II Tower still are visible.
I wanted to use this post to tie up a few loose ends, describe some parts of Moroccan culture, and talk about the “study” aspect of study abroad. Because, trust me, my program still worked us pretty hard in the academic department. I had three classes lasting from 9 until 4 from Monday through Thursday (hereusement we had Fridays off for traveling). My Sociology of Migration class, taught in French, was very very interesting and it helped to lay our all the complexities and intricacies involved in the concept of migration; it’s much much more complicated than just going from Point A to Point B. The class was taught by a very tall Belgian-Moroccan professor named Farid, who enjoyed asking us about how things are perceived in the United States and each of our personal heritage stories. It was interesting because even though two of us were children of a least one immigrant, the rest of the class was just as invested in the topic as he taught it. The next class was an Introduction to Darija, taught by Majid who took us around Meknes a few weeks ago. We all loved this class mostly because of Majid. He truly enjoyed explaining his language to us, and since he has gone back and forth teaching English and Arabic/Darija, he was very adapt at conveying the differences between the languages. He’s the one who gave us all Arabic names and brought in his childhood fine arts teacher to give us a class in Arabic Calligraphy. Darija was challenging for me because it was a spoken language, although it could be transliterated, a lot of the learning was auditory, and I as a visual learner found that very difficult. Some of my favourite words though are, swiya(a little), swin/a (pretty masc/fem), yel-lha(let’s go), bzeff(a lot), inshallah( God willing), and l’Humdullah(thanks be to God). I’m a little sad we didn’t get to learn any of the Arabic alphabet, and if I’d been a super great student and on top of my game I would have tried to learn while here, but homework from my third class, plus travelling and a general lack of time prevented that from happening. As I mentioned, the work in our third class, Politics of North Africa, was hard to keep up with. With long (50+ pages per night) readings in French, presentations, a large research paper, and two exams, it was a lot to fit into just 6 weeks of class. The class was loosely organised on a thematic basis, comparing Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia on a historical basis. There wasn’t a lot on the explicit politics today or political system. Instead we learned about the colonial history, modernisation, islamism, authoritarianism, and the Arab Spring, which were all very interesting, but confusing when presented in thematic order as opposed to chronological or geographic basis. Since I was still interested in the political system, I decided to do my research paper on the electoral system in Morocco. For its’ House of Representatives, Morocco actually has 90 seats set aside for candidates elected from a national list (as opposed to a local constituency), 60 of which are reserved for women, and 30 for men under 40.
Like usual I’d let myself get caught up in schoolwork and only during this past weekend did I really take stock of things I’d been noticing during the past few weeks. For example, I came to the worrying conclusion that even though I’d said before that I wasn’t experiencing as much male attention as expected, the reason I hadn’t been was because of Ramadan. In the few days after Ramadan ended, I experienced a significantly more amount of comments and advances from men when walking on the street. Nothing serious, but it was a little disillusioning to realise that what I thought was a drastic misconception may instead be as a result of the rules of fasting during my particular time here. I don’t know if this is actually the case, but it was just something I noticed.
It seems kinda strange to be leaving; like I was running a race and suddenly around the bend the finish line appeared out of nowhere. My time here went by so very quickly, and looking back I’m really impressed that we got to do as much as we did, even though there are still a handfull of things I still wanted to do. I’d love to go back to Chefchaouen and hike to the waterfall, I’d probably enjoy seeing Marrakesh even though it is just a huge tourist trap, and there’s a both a beach town in the North called Assilah and a town in the south famed for its’ horses called Essilia that I could stand to visit. And even in Rabat there are more things I wanted to check out but was unable to due to Ramadan; the bibliotechque nationale, the Mohammad V Art Museum, the roman ruins site in the middle of Rabat, and I really wanted to go to a hammam again (due a poor decision at the beach on Sunday I have a very nasty sunburn on my back, arms, and legs so the exfoliating hammam massage that the other students got yesterday would have been very painful at the moment). But despite all that, we did get to see Casablanca, Fes, Meknes, Tangier, Chefchaouen, Rif Mountains, the Atlas Mountains, the Ziz Valley, Ifrane, Azoua Cedar Forest, Marzouga and the Erg Chebbi dunes of the Sahara Desert, the Atlantic Coast, and the Mediterranean Coast, even some of Spain and Senegal. That’s not bad for 7 weeks!
I wouldn’t go as far to say that Rabat has become a second home to me though. As long as I’m fair-(ish- see sunburn explanation)-skinned western female I’ll never really be considered totally a part of this country. No matter how much darija I learn and use, no matter how less-mangled my french gets, no matter how tan I get, no matter how many “welcomes” I get from men in the streets, it doesn’t stop the stares, the curious looks, the direct attention, the different treatment, or the continual target on my back as a tourist, as someone who clearly isn’t from here. And yes while that saddens and bothers me, it doesn’t change anything about the country itself. Neither I or the people can help our perceptions of each other. What we can do is do our best to live beyond perceptions and actually try to know and accept each other.