Lorca de nuevo: la vida y la muerte

A few weeks ago, before Semana Santa (Holy Week), I had a class fieldtrip to the Parque Federico García Lorca to visit Lorca’s family’s summer home in Granada, which is still preserved exactly as it was, there in what is now the park. (The regular, non-summer home of the family, by the way, was located a fifteen-minute walk away--though back then it was the difference between the city and the wilderness--where El Corte Inglés, a huge Spanish department store chain, is now.)

The house is generously-proportioned, two or maybe three storeys high, and painted white on the outside. Only guided tours are allowed. I was a little nervous about the timing of our field trip, which started at 5; I had to leave to go to class at the far-off Universidad de Granada-Filosofía y Letras campus at 6:30. But it’s just a one-family house; the tour couldn’t take that long, could it?

It did, in fact. I suspected as much as soon as our tour guide opened her mouth: she was a talker. But although I started getting very (excessively) anxious about the timing of it all, I needn’t have worried; we got done just in time for me to start my hike up the high hill to Cartuja.

Highlights of the house included its furniture, which was all original, including the beautiful cherry-stained piano (Lorca’s personal), which apparently lots of celebrity musicians have played on over the years during their visits to Granada; the framed drawings and paintings, some by Lorca, who liked to doodle, and some by Dalí, a great friend during their college years; and some original family photos.

~~~~~

Then, yesterday, we had our class’ final ‘excursión’ to Víznar, site of Lorca’s untimely death.

We took a bus a good twenty minutes out of the city, winding up into the hills that surround Granada. It was exquisitely picturesque: a perfect Mediterranean landscape, stark and scrubby, of the kind you find on Grecian islands, filled in with whitewashed, red-tiled Spanish villas.

We left the main road after a while, climbing up the hillside, winding our way through smaller and smaller towns until we were on a curving, one-lane narrow road, donkeys and horses to one side, dusty, sleeping dogs to the other.

Our driver finally parked on the side of the road and we got out. Our teacher had previously described Víznar to us as an isolated forest, and my mental image of dense, dark woods didn’t match up with the thin, light-filled pine grove on the side of an otherwise almost bare hillside that it turned out to be. Rocky soil, dry and dusty, it looked like a strand of pines that you could have found in California.

There was a little sign denoting the place as a historical monument, and a few dirt trails, all leading upwards. We paused there and our teacher filled us in on the details:

Well before the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Lorca had achieved his status as a world-famous celebrity of a writer. (Borges, by the way, who couldn’t stand Lorca—although the feeling wasn’t as strongly returned by the other—had this to say about him: “He is a professional Andalusian.”) 

He had also drawn the attention of the country’s growing Fascist faction, who perceived threatening political undertones in some of his works. Yerma, for example, which would be his last play, had dangerously subversive themes of, oh, I don’t know, yearning for freedom. Despite what the Fascists thought about him, though, scholars still disagree about how staunch of a Republican Lorca actually was: he had friends on both sides, and, though decidedly liberal, didn’t seem to so overtly champion the cause—certainly not in the way, for example, that Picasso did with Guernica.

The coup d’état that launched the war took place just three days before Lorca had planned on traveling out of the country (he had postponed his journey to be able to celebrate his Saint’s Day with his family at home in Granada). The situation escalated very quickly, and Lorca suddenly felt himself under scrutiny and unsafe. He had disturbing dreams he was looking down at his own dead body.

One day, a few weeks after the coup, some members of the guardia civil came knocking at the García Lorca house to take away some young men who worked for the family whom the police accused of killing a Fascist soldier. Lorca, who was there when the police arrived, stepped in to defend the men, and was told ‘we’re taking them with us, and when we come back, we’re taking you, too.’

Lorca, terrified, immediately fled. One of his best friends since boyhood was a higher-up in the Fascist ranks, and Lorca knew he could count on him for protection. He stayed in hiding at his friend’s house for nine days, until someone betrayed him to the police, and then they came for him and took him away.

He was taken to a secret prison (his family had no idea of his whereabouts), and although his ever-loyal maid was able to find him and smuggle him some money, which he hoped he could use to buy his freedom, it was to no avail. They came for him, along with three other prisoners, and led them on foot all through the moonless night out of Granada and up into the mountains, to Víznar.

There in the forest was a detainment center where the prisoners waited to be killed. They were always kept busy, digging the holes that would serve as the mass graves after the next round of executions were carried out.

Not long after his arrival, Lorca and the three men he’d arrived with were led out and shot from behind, then buried together, disappearing into the anonymous earth.

(One fact which became important later was that one of the men Lorca was buried with, a schoolteacher, had only one leg. More on that a little later.)

Lorca was the first poet to be sacrificed for his beliefs in the war, and became a martyr-figure for the Loyalist side. It’s a tragic story.

Lorca’s family had been searching for him for a month, completely unaware of his fate, before they found out he’d been killed. Lorca’s father, quite rich, tried everything he could to find out where exactly his son had been buried, to try to reclaim his body, at least. The official story holds that he never did get his answer. The rumors that grow with time, however (and which my teacher herself believes), contend that he was able to bribe some soldier into giving him his son’s bones, and that the family took them to America with them when they moved soon after.

This second version of events might help explain why the García Lorca family was so resistant through the years, in the eighties and beyond, when Franco started recognizing Lorca once more as a great Spanish author (during the war, there was an absolute moratorium on his name, and all his books had to be either burned or tightly hidden away) and started permitting investigations into his final whereabouts. Lorca's family was staunchly against any efforts to locate and exhume his body. They claimed his spirit was in his writings, not in his physical remains, and they wanted to leave things as they were. The rumor whisperers suggest the family took this attitude because they didn’t want it to be discovered that they had, in fact, retrieved his body some years before. (A large constituency of Lorca’s supporters and devoted followers would have felt very angry and betrayed should the truth have come to light.)

Whatever the reasons behind their reticence, the García Lorca family found themselves in the middle of 

controversy when the family of the schoolteacher with whom Lorca had been buried (remember, the distinctively-bodied man with one leg) decided that they did want to try to recover their own family member’s remains. Were they to be successful, Lorca’s body (or the lack thereof) would have been unavoidably discovered as well. After a good deal of heated arguments between the two families, the García Lorca family finally relented and allowed the search to take place—but it yielded nothing.

There with my class, we walked up the trail a little bit until we came to a clearing. In a recessed area a cross had been formed out of dusty, planted flowers, and there was a headstone: “LORCA ERAN TODOS” (“They were all Lorca”). Scattered around nearby were various plaques recognizing certain people, or incidences of killings (one recognized the fourteen women, mostly maids, who had been led out of a building and shot all together). There were also two other plaques, set at a distance from each other, commemorating Lorca with two fragments from one of his poems, Preludio (Prelude) (translation mine):

1⁰  El viento está amortajado                       1^st  The wind is shrouded

     a lo largo bajo el cielo.                                  stretching under the sky.

2⁰ Pero ha dejado flotando                          2^nd But it has left its echoes

    sobre los ríos sus ecos.                                    floating over the rivers.

The project of finding and identifying remains is still ongoing; government-sponsored testing occurs regularly, where the soil is probed to test it for bone and other materials. It is believed that about 3,000 people are buried in the vicinity. At least, one thinks, watching the doves fluttering in the branches and feeling the wind blowing through the pines, this is a beautiful place.

Marruecos (المغرب): Parte 2

The next morning for breakfast we had rounds of khubz with cheese (the kind that comes in little personal wedges, wrapped in foil) and tea.

We met the rest of the group near where we’d been dropped off by the van the night before. It was a lovely, fresh-feeling morning.

We drove not far into the city to a gleaming-white marble building. This was the royal mausoleum. (I can’t remember the Arabic name for it.) It was built by the current king of Morocco’s grandfather, completed in 1971, and for all its size has just three tombs inside, those of the grandfather and his two sons, although preparations are underway for the tombs of the current king and his son.

The building is beautiful, with the outer marble richly carved in Arabic (passages from the Qur’an, no doubt) and floral designs; going inside, you are on an upper deck, about two-people wide, which looks down on the only room in the shell, where the three tombs are. The lower floor is a lovely, semi-translucent jade/limestone around the edges and a dark stone with sparkling minerals in the middle; there is a main tomb in the center of the room, which is the largest (a simple rectangular design of that beautiful, almost translucent jade/limestone with carved Qur’anic passages around the lid), and two smaller, white-marble tombs on one side. There is also a shaggy rug between the tombs in front of an open Qur’an resting in a wood bookstand and a microphone nearby. Why? Well, for many hours each day a reciter comes and reads the Qur’an into the microphone. We didn’t get to hear him, but just as we were leaving I saw him come in: padding lightly on socked feet over that shiny stone floor, taking his seat on the rug…

On the upper deck, where we were, the high walls were entirely covered with a rich design of colored, geometric ceramics of the kind you see everywhere in Andalucía. I’ve seen these kinds of walls a thousand times, but they never fail to amaze me: each tiny piece that forms, say, an interlocking star design, is carved by hand and fired separately. Each. Tiny. Piece. I can’t imagine how many (hundreds of?) thousands of pieces make up the whole design; the pieces are set together upside down, I’ve heard (though I don’t know how it works) and each artisan has no idea of the grand design. It’s really exquisite.

The ceiling of the mausoleum, which was domed, was very dark and textured with little insets and tiny stained-glass windows that all together combined to have the very unique effect of looking like rows of thousands of tiny votive candles in the darkness.

The mausoleum also had tons of guards. There was a guard in each of the four corners of the room and at each of the four doors, one per side (two guards at the main entrance). As we had arrived there had been some kind of a changing-of-the-guards ceremony; it had been hard to see clearly, but there had been horses involved. Lots of pomp and circumstance, so much self-aggrandizing for these kings.

It was beautiful, though, to stand in the doorway looking outside. It was pouring, but very light out, and the rain splashing on the marble stretching outwards from the building in all directions was lovely.

Across the way from the mausoleum is a large mosque (I think the grand mosque of Rabat? Maybe? We weren’t allowed to go in any mosques, so I have no idea), and its minaret is very distinctive. As I mentioned earlier in this post, the North African/Andalucían style of minarets is quite different from other models you might be more accustomed to, like the Ottoman style, which is slender, rounded, and capped. The North African style is much more chunky, with big, square towers that look like buildings in their own rights (Ottoman minarets definitely do not). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger one than the minaret there facing the mausoleum. It is the Hassan Tower, dating back to the 1100’s, and it is unfinished. It is square and monolithic, of red sandstone, and though respectably tall (Wikipedia tells me it’s 140 feet), it was intended to be more than double that in height. Too bad for its creator, the vigorous Hassan who equated architectural might with political muscle, that after his death his successors didn’t feel the same way, and left his project as it stood. I know there was also an earthquake at some point that partially destroyed the tower, and further discouraged extensive rebuilding, but I don’t know how that fits into the time frame…

When we’d arrived at the mausoleum it had started pouring, but that was no matter, because we’d gone inside. Well, after visiting the mausoleum we had to emerge and get to the van, about five minutes away… There was no helping it. I had an umbrella, but it was still one of those triumphant, everything-in-its-path-must-be-soaked kind of downpours. On one level it was extremely beautiful, because it was so intense but the sky was so light, too, and so it all felt very fresh and cleansing. On another level, my pants and shoes got soaked black, and it was only early morning….

We made it to the van at last, and drove to Chellah, a site of Roman ruins on the outskirts of the city. Mash’allah, very improbably Chellah was all glorious bright blue skies with fantastic cloud formations. The sun streaming down was warm and pure and the plants (and us, all wet) were steaming, wet from the earlier rain. It’s so lucky for us, too, that it had stopped raining when we got there; the whole place was exposed outside, and I don’t know what we would have done if the downpour had followed us there. The sun was so toasty I completely dried out within minutes. Alhamdulillah!

The entrance to the ruins was a stepped garden of big trees and leafy green plants and twining flowers, not too tamed and tidy, just the way I love. With, as I’ve said, the recent rain and then sudden sun, I had the feeling of stepping into a garden of Eden, a fount of creation, everything lush and newly-made. The air was heady with delicious fragrances, lilac and others.

Down the stairs we came to the ruins, Roman columns and fragments of buildings, enclosed by a “muralla” (ancient city walls, Islamic era). I admit I looked less at the ruins themselves than viewed them as a small component of a grander, glorious scene. If I had to pick the most beautiful point of the trip, this would be it for me.

Beyond the ruins were lush, green grassy hills, leading down to the river in the distance. There was a nearby little wood house flanked by banana trees, and a miniature building, whitewashed, with its dome painted turquoise, a kind of Muslim equivalent to the tiny one-saint altar/chapels you find scattered across traditional Catholic countries. One of the real marvels were the dozens of giant storks who had made their nests in the trees and in the ruins themselves. They were all around us, so big you wondered how they managed to stay up in the air when they flew, bundles of twigs in their beaks for their nests. They were very vocal, too, clacking their beaks loudly, as part of their mating rituals (it’s mating season, apparently). The place reminded me a lot of the village communities I remember passing by on the train from Cairo to Luxor.

Interspersed with the ruins of the Roman city was an ancient Muslim necropolis, with a few plots that looked like graves and the ruins of what looked like it must have been a mosque (lots of arches, stork-topped, and what looked like the niche of a mihrab).

There were also a few pools here and there, and one of them, next to one of the miniature turquoise-domed religious buildings where a kind of caretaker of the place lived, had three fat eels in its depths (as well as countless tiny black fish). Our guide paid the caretaker a few coins and he threw a hardboiled egg in the pond. We saw the shadowy eels sluggishly emerging from their secret tunnels to eat. The eels in this pond are traditional; it’s called the Eel Pond—I’m not sure if this is from the Roman or Islamic era—and tradition goes that girls hoping to get pregnant would come and throw eggs into the water for the eels.

I’m not sure of the pond’s fertility powers for humans, but its magic definitely seemed to have rubbed off on the cat population there, centered around the caretaker’s residence next to the pool. There were rolly-polly kittens everywhere, some looking a little sickly, others clearly subsidized by the caretaker or by tourists. I didn’t touch them, but I always love to be near to cats and watch them doze in the sunlight.

After Chellah we drove back into the city to visit the office of IES Rabat (nice to have these connections! And IES Rabat just came to Granada this weekend in reciprocity). Nothing can touch the glory of the IES Granada building, but IES Rabat did have a cool “Berber tent” on their rooftop terrace, big enough for about twenty-five people, where they apparently hold class sometimes.

We were served pastries and Moroccan tea (I skipped on the latter) and then sat down for a talk on the role of media in the Arab Spring from a professor of Media Studies at the nearby university. I really enjoyed the talk, which was about an hour and a half long—he was a very engaging speaker (he spoke in English to us), and it was fun to see how much I’d retained from my Arab Spring class this Fall Semester—I could rattle off the names of the various Arab dictators, the order in which the countries had revolted, etc. 

The whole time I was wondering, though, about how this man, who spoke as liberally as my own Arab Spring professor had, was affected by Morocco’s censorship laws. Was a professor at a public university really allowed to be publishing research condemning the propaganda of the state-controlled media (“state-run television runs nothing but lies”), and how was this research on the Arab Spring—which itself must have made the king of Morocco nervous—received by the powers that be? I did notice that despite general statements about how “we were all following the Arab Spring closely,” he didn’t mention Morocco’s king, or the situation in Morocco itself, once—although that was what I was really curious about, how Morocco’s own dictator had weathered the storms of revolution around him.

After the talk we went back to our host families for lunch (the rain had started back up once more). I don’t remember what we ate, but it was delicious and there was bread involved. For drinking, there was buttermilk (thank you, King of Morocco, I thought to myself), and for the first time in my life I absolutely loved the stuff and had several glasses’ worth. Dessert was strawberries, which gave we Americans pause, having been warned against all things not boiled-peeled-cooked. (The whole time we drank bottled water, and even used it for brushing our teeth. The water is supposedly safe in Rabat—I’m sure if I were living there for any stint of time I’d at least be brushing my teeth with it—but since we were only on a five-day trip, IES advised us against risking it and ruining a very short trip with stomach illness.) But our group guide had come home with us for lunch that day, and she told us it was probably fine, so I had one strawberry and called it at that.

After lunch we regrouped at the entrance to the old town market. We divided into small groups of five, and were matched with two University of Rabat students per group. We walked and talked with them through winding market streets, down to the beach (another point of ocean I’ve stuck my feet in), which had wild, wonderful waves (lots of surfers); past a cemetery built against the side of a hill (Islamic cemeteries look distinct from Western ones because instead of headstones they have flat, raised slabs to mark the graves); and wound back in a big circle to a café in the marketplace where we had tea.

Our guides were Zinab and Murad (girl and boy respectively) and both fun, interesting people. We spent about three hours with them. This is what I appreciate most about how IES planned this trip: they arranged for us to meet and get to talk to many different Moroccans and learn about the culture that way. I think it’s a really amazing, important opportunity. (Putting us in host families = same idea.) As they told us at our trip orientation, “This is not about being tourists.” Thank you, IES!

It was about 7:30 PM by the time we got back. We were told to go back to our host family residences and get our stuff together as quickly as we could. We were off to the hamam!

Getting scrubbed at the grand hamam in Istanbul will always be one of the great experiences of my life, so I was extremely excited for the second hamam of my life.

Most Moroccans don’t have showers in their homes, and so they go to the hamam about once a week to get clean. This hamam we were going to, then, was no fancy “grand bathhouse,” but rather the local shower.

Naturally, we were divided by gender, men to one hamam, women to another. There was an entrance room where we got undressed and left our things. The price for a hamam visit, I learned, was 7 dirham—that’s a little less than 70 cents. The cost was part of our everything-included IES fees, but if you wanted to get professionally scrubbed you had to pay for that out of pocket. It was a lot more expensive, too, relatively-speaking: 50 dirham, or a little less than $5. I splurged. You don’t get to do this every day!

The main room was steamy, all-white stone tiles, floors and walls, very cozy but nothing fancy. There were dozens of buckets of all different sizes, and two little girls whose job it was to be running around, constantly filling them up with water of varying temperatures from the two big spigots, very hot to cool and everything in between. There were three large, topless women (we were all topless, too, though we had swimsuit bottoms on—that seemed to be the appropriate dress code), who were the scrubbers. They were good-natured and chummy, sitting around gossiping and enjoying themselves, and when we came in and sat down on the floor, starting to get ourselves wet by pouring water over ourselves with the cup-sized buckets, they came over and grabbed the giant buckets and dumped the whole things over us!—much to everyone’s laughter.

We were each given a rough, pumice-stone-like glove for personal scrubbing and a tube of Moroccan soap. That soap stuff was incredible. It was off-green, roughly the color and consistency of the oxidized inside of an avocado, and extremely oily and slippery. To put it on your skin was like bathing in olive oil butter. To contrast, the glove was very abrasive. The technique seemed obvious enough: squirt some “soap” on a tract of skin and rub for a while, rinse and repeat.

After a while it was my turn to get scrubbed. My scrubbing lady laid me down on the floor (nope, tried not to think about the carpet of dead skin I was lying on) and took to it. She had her own rough glove (which she’d used on uncountable numbers of women before me—again, trying not to think about that), and boy, did she scrub. My skin was reduced to sheets of dead skin coming off in rolls. That was the aim, too: the goal of scrubbing is to get off as much dead skin as you can, and this skin is affectionately referred to as “spaghetti.” It was painful, and I’m not sure how healthy it would be on a regular basis, but hey, once in a decade my skin’s probably ready for it.

My scrubbing lady put me into all sorts of positions, having me sit up, put my head down so she could get the back of the my neck, extend my arms to get those, etc. Then she pinched my cheeks, laughing, and scrubbed them, too! She did my whole face suddenly—which was really painful! Imagine scraping a pumice stone vigorously on your (mildly sunburned) face!—and then I was done. (I found out later no one else had had their face scrubbed—everyone was shocked to hear that I had, wincing sympathetically.) My scrubbing lady pointed to my rolls of “spaghetti” appreciatively, and left me to rinse myself off. No doubt about it, the last time my skin was that smooth (yes, my cheeks, too) was after the Turkish hamam. We all came out of that place glowing: warm, smooth and purified.

It was raining again. We were taken to a nearby building (I’m not sure what it was—it was big, stately, and empty) where two Moroccan women were seated at a long table. They were henna artists, and we were there to get our henna done. They had Tupperware containers of the thick, brown henna (it’s roughly the consistency of smooth peanut butter), and they would use their fingers to deftly load the stuff into their syringes. The needles didn’t pierce the skin, of course; using a needle tip just allows them to have more control over the stream that comes out.

I enjoy henna; I’ve done it probably thirty times at school, but it’s always fun. It goes on your skin as a dark brown gel-like substance and dries and hardens black, and then when it starts to crack and flake off you can rub it off to reveal a faint orange on your skin which darkens over a few hours to a darker brown, depending on your skin color and how long you let it dry for.

The henna artist gave me a swirly, flowery design (and then sprinkled some silver glitter on top—which flakes off when the henna dries, so it’s pointless, but pretty for a little while, anyway), and I left it on for a while so it ended up coming out nice and dark. It should be around for a few weeks. Predictably, it was a big point of interest at the elementary school that I assistant-teach at for my internship. Spanish people tend to be vocal about aspects of physical appearance, and kids especially so; so, of course, the whole day I got lots of wide stares and compliments and questions and I had to explain it wasn’t permanent or anything…

We were reunited with the guys there in the building waiting to get our henna done, and it was interesting to hear about their different experience. They had been in a dark room, with only a single, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and their male scrubbers had “massaged” them by cracking them—bending their legs behind their heads, cracking their backs very intensely, all that. Very different! Maybe this is common to all male hamams, because later, back in Granada, I was at the elementary school and one of the teachers was asking me how Morocco was and if I’d gone to the hamam, and I told him I had, that I’d had a great time, etc., and he said “Oh God, when I was in the hamam in Istanbul, that man cracked me like I’ve never been cracked in my life!”

After henna we went home for dinner, and guess what—more spaghetti! Haha. We had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, with bread and tea, and fruit for dessert.

After dinner our hosts gave the three of us the finery that they wear to weddings so we could dress up and have a fashion show. A lot of Moroccan women and men wear these robes, which have long sleeves, fall to your ankles, are cut shapelessly, and which have big pockets on the sides and a pointed hood, often with a tassel on it for women (although it seems like men are more likely to actually wear the hood), in the back. One of my friends was given one of these in a white-with-purple-stripes design; the other, a pale orange color; and mine was a striking dark navy blue with bright red embroidered designs. Our host mother tied headscarves on us, too, and then we took pictures with the family. It was a lot of fun. The clothes were incredibly comfortable, and I was sorry I couldn’t wear them all the time…

They also gifted us with Chinese-style tea glasses, which was so nice of them. I bundled mine up in a shirt in my backpack and alhamdullilah it survived intact back to Granada with me.

That was our last night in Rabat, and we had to get up very early the next day. But we had been warned that overnight was the Spring-forward time change, and that many Moroccans wouldn’t know about it/wouldn’t believe in it, and so we would have to make sure our host families knew the correct time. We told this to our host family (Hefna was at work, so she wasn’t around, but Maryam and Esma spoke a little English), trying to be as clear as possible, but we weren’t sure the message had gotten across, that when we said we had to be at the meeting place at 8 it was really going to be like 7.

The next morning as we got ready and packed up it became clear the message had not been received, as the rest of the house dozed on. Then, just when we had to leave, our host mother got up and started to move around the kitchen. We awkwardly had to tell her that we were leaving right then. She looked shocked and confused, and woke up Maryam, who had been sleeping in the TV-watching room/hall. Maryam was a really funny person whom I really enjoyed, and amazingly her mother said a few words to her, and she opened her eyes and was instantly in the moment, and said “Girls, what’s the matter?”

We told her about the time change, and her eyes widened with understanding. “Ohhhh,” she said. “No, I think that’s tomorrow, that’s not today.” “No, it really is today,” we told her; “No, I don’t think so…,” she said, her mother shaking her head too, saying “Not today,” in Arabic. “We’re so sorry, but we really have to leave right now,” we kept insisting, and finally they decided that if we were leaving, if the time change was that day, at least they’d get some breakfast into us, and started laying out all the food at the table… We were already five minutes late at that point, so very sadly we had to refuse to even sit down and keep repeating that we had to leave. Finally our host mother gave us some big slices of savory bundt cake to take with us and some cheese wedges, and then quickly threw on her coat and hijab and walked us there to the meeting place. It was sad we had to leave the way we did, but we got to hug her goodbye and thank her for her wonderful hospitality. (On our way out the door, Esma told us, “So, welcome always in our home, your family also” very sweetly.)

We drove for a few hours across the countryside, inland, stopping in the town of Ouezzane for a tea break (hot chocolate for me, thanks). We sipped our drinks in a languid café, the other patrons all men (as we'd been told repeatedly, the world of the streets is men; the world of the home is women), and I watched how even the cloud of flies near the ceiling seemed lazy and relaxed.

We walked to the nearby bazaar, where our guide bought various fruits and vegetables and other foodstuffs for later. I liked the feel of the town.

We went back on the road, and I got to look out the window at rural, inland Morocco: green, rolling hills; little villages; boys with their herds of sheep, men loading grass onto their donkey’s backs. I was struck by how clean the streets had been in Rabat—gritty, maybe; with smeared mud, sure; but very little trash, despite there being no trash bins around—but here in the countryside there would be a peaceful, pretty field marred by trash strewn around, reminding me of Tanzanian villages where you’d see little eddies of trash collected by the wind.

Every village had its mosque and minaret, with loudspeakers. The villages we passed through looked nice; they all had character and I would have enjoyed stopping in any of them. 

After a few hours we turned off the main highway and went up some steep hills on a rough dirt road. We parked in an isolated little village, a collection of houses and one building where you could recharge your phone (I remember being equally surprised in Tanzania to see these phone-recharge places in the most rural of villages), a mosque nearby and a school a couple kilometers down the road.

We were stopping at a family’s home for lunch. Thus, the food we’d picked up in Ouezzane: the idea was, “you all are going to help them prepare lunch!” Cute idea, but it ended up being a little painful for all involved: we were chopping vegetables with very dull knifes, and some of us had never chopped vegetables in their lives, and the women in the family who were standing nearby watching us couldn’t stand the sorry spectacle and kept cutting in to grab some carrots to do it themselves. (One girl in our group, watching one of the women peeling a carrot: “Wow, she’s so good at it.” Our Moroccan interpreter: “She’s had a lot of practice.”)

The house was very large and pretty, with a central courtyard of cement with a drain (easy cleaning!), and rooms branching off from there. We sat in a large room whose walls were lined with big, stiff Moroccan couches piled with pillows, two tables in the middle. Shoes were left at the door, of course.

We ate makeshift sandwiches we made from platters of all kind of vegetables with meats and cheeses. After we’d thoroughly eaten our fill, and our guide had laid out the nuts for dessert, suddenly the women came in with giant platters of couscous and chicken they'd cooked. There was a huge collective inhale of shock mixed with a groan of painful fullness. Apparently our guide had had to change travel plans, and since we’d been intended to go to another family’s house, he’d had to call this family at the last minute, so they hadn’t had time to prepare lunch. But apparently they’d whipped it up while we’d been cutting vegetables. We dug in for a second meal… Delicious and excruciating in equal measure.

After eating (the family didn’t eat at all, just watched us), it was time for questions. We had picked up an interpreter at a nearby town; he was Moroccan, and spoke perfect English, and was also part of the tourist organization IES was partnering with for this trip (I think it’s called Morocco Exchange?). We asked questions of the family, and our interpreter relayed them and the family’s response back to us.

It was so interesting. We learned about rural Moroccan life—the man of the household was a farmer—and things like schooling, marriage, and even emergency medical care. (As for the latter, apparently if something bad happens, like someone has a heart attack, the family calls someone who has a car, who comes and gets the person, and then they drive half an hour to the nearest larger town for the hospital. Marriage is not arranged [though I’m sure there’s a lot of healthy family consultation] and is usually between people in the same village [this village had about 700 people]; the bride rides on the donkey and it’s a great celebration.)

One thing that I’m not sure how to feel about is the fact that all of our questions, including those which people prefaced specifically with “this is for the women—,” were answered by the man of the household. He was a good-natured, friendly, funny guy, and I liked him a lot; his wife, mother, sister, young son and young niece sat next to him. At the time I of course noticed this, that he was answering all the questions, but it didn’t surprise or bother me--that’s just the culture, right? I was more surprised when later, at the end of the trip doing a reflection exercise, several girls in our group noted how striking the silence of the women had been for them, how sexist, how patriarchal, how lucky they now felt to have the voice that they do and to be able to speak for themselves… I don’t know what to think. I think yes, it is cultural; and I think in such matters it’s always better to err on the side of not labeling these things, simply registering them as they are; but is it strange that I am unwilling to find this sexist? Should I? I don’t know. Yes, always better to just take it as it is…

It was a really interesting, enlightening talk, and we stayed at their house for about three hours. We walked down the road a little and enjoyed the magnificent views of the green and brown valley, gleaming in the sun. A beautiful, quiet place.

Then we drove on to Chef-Chaouen. (I’m mystified, by the way, as to why they spell the town’s name this way in the Latin script. The commonly-accepted form of transliterating Arabic uses “sh” instead of “ch” for that letter of the alphabet, but whatever…)

Chef-Chaouen (pronounced shef-shao-wen) is known as the “City of Blue,” and with good reason. The city is whitewashed, and then drenched in a hundred shades of the color. Viewing the city from a distance, just before sunset, it didn’t look that blue—you could see pops of the color, but it wasn’t like the whole thing was blue, the way I’d heard it described...

Entering the maze on foot, however, showed a different story. Within the network of streets (narrow and steep, set on a hillside flanked by high, rocky mountains that reminded me heavily of those you see around Cape Town) it is all blue. Blue doors, blue walls, and even blue ground in some places. This is how the city makes a name for itself, after all. (Fun fact: it’s the sister city of Issaquah!) And yes, the city lives and breathes tourism (the vendors even all speak Spanish, so that’s nice), but it’s still so pretty and the blue is so fun.

We checked into our hotel and then we had two and a half hours for shopping. This was the only shopping time we had on the entire trip, so better make it count! Also, we’d changed money the first day in Tangiers (we’d been warned there wouldn’t be other opportunities), and once you get dirhams no one will buy them from you, so you had better spend them or enjoy saving them as souvenirs.

Chef-Chaouen was actually the perfect place to do souvenir shopping because all the shops were tourist shops and they were all in a small, concentrated area. I had dreaded having to haggle, but it actually wasn’t so bad. Although—I didn’t haggle so well for the beautiful leather bag I got to replace my old fake-leather bag which has had it. I said a price, he said no, no, no, I said a higher price, and the way he instantly said yes I knew I should have stuck with the lower one. Ah well. Still a very good price! I’m very happy with all my purchases.

After shopping we got dinner at a nice restaurant, and everything was delicious. I had the Moroccan soup I’d had before in Rabat (kind of similar to miso, if it were flavored tomato) and a kind of meat pie topped with flaky filo dough and powdered sugar and cinnamon—a blend of sweet and savory that I really liked. Fruit salad for dessert.

There was a shock at dinner when a German man at the only other occupied table upstairs where we were keeled over on the floor. There was a call: “Who knows First-Aid? Who’s CPR-certified?” and it turned out just me and one other girl in our group were. That was really scary. Actually implementing my training? I was terrified (though glad there was another person there). Thankfully, it turned out the other girl had been a nurse’s aid for two years and figured out he was in diabetic shock and didn’t need CPR, and he wasn’t fully unconscious and they were able to get him help. Whew. Thank God.

The next morning we got up early for a hike to see the sunrise over the city. We actually didn’t go very far, just up a little foothill where a beautiful white mosque was perched, and then as the sun began to stretch the shadows of the mountains further and further over the city we were treated to Chef-Chaouen bathed in a rosy pink glow. The temperature was perfect. What a more perfect way to start a morning, or any day, than with an early hike in a beautiful place? Everything was right with the world.

We stayed up there for a good, long time and then leisurely walked back down for breakfast in a restaurant. We were treated to heaping, oft-replenished platters of delicious flatbread and every kind of topping you could put on it—honey, olive oil, butter, goat cheese (milder and less salty than any I’ve ever had—I liked it the best of any I’ve ever had, too), marmalade, Nutella, and crushed tomatoes (which were bright pink, not red in the slightest—I thought it was pulpy grapefruit juice initially), with fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is like a sunrise in a glass, and mint tea.

Then we said goodbye to Chef-Chaouen—although I know it sounds like we were only there for a little while, we definitely got our fill—and hit the road once more. We wound through the gorgeous hillsides, so vibrantly green, through beautiful villages with some really nice houses. A lovely country.

Then we started glimpsing the water once more—the Mediterranean. Around midday we came to Tetouan, a city, very clean and developed with blocks of apartment buildings. A little further and we got to the border with Ceuta.

Ceuta, along with Melilla, is a Spanish enclave. They are two cities right in Morocco, on the Mediterranean Sea, which belong to Spain (though Morocco believes otherwise). The border between Morocco and Ceuta can be very tense: just one fence, as a recent New York Times article I read puts it, “separates the promise of the European Union from the despair of Africa.” IES purposely wanted us to make this border crossing on foot to see the reality of it. I didn’t feel uneasy at the time, but reading that New York Times article the day afterwards, I learned that just a week before 800 people had made a concerted rush for it, trying to scale the chainlink fence… So yeah, things are tense.

We had to leave our van and driver and go on foot. I couldn’t tell where the official border was. The in-between space stretched on quite some ways, and part of it was under construction. On the hillside beside us scurried an unceasing flow of people bent double under backbreaking loads bigger than they were. As I learned the next day in that New York Times article, most of them are women, called “mule ladies.” Because they live near the border, they are granted the special privilege of being able to freely cross the border during the day. They eke out a living by taking advantage of their status to transport goods from Spain into Morocco to sellers who then don’t have to pay taxes on these goods, because they’ve been ‘personally’ transported, and count in the same class of goods as luggage.

We passed though a long, snaking passageway of chainlink fence, covered by plywood, and finally got to an office, where some no-nonsense Spanish officials glanced at our passports for a millisecond before waving us on to the next round of officials, who stamped our passports as quickly as they could. Ah, the privilege of an American passport… How difficult (I really can’t even imagine it) to think about being from anywhere else, from Morocco, maybe, and having to look across that ocean at Europe, so close by, and know you’ll never get to go there, because of your nationality…

Ceuta was like any other Spanish city, from what I saw from the taxi window as we drove to the ferry port: sun-soaked, red-tiled, all that. It was nice to talk with the taxi driver and get to hear him cursing in Spanish and be back on the same linguistic page as the people around us. We took the hour-long ferry back across the Strait to mainland Spain and then had a three-hour drive back to Granada. The countryside was beautiful, through the provinces of Cádiz and Málaga, all ocean and Mediterranean flora.

I slept extremely well that night and woke up sufficiently revived. I had an excellent trip which I’ll remember forever. Insh’allah someday I’ll go back to Morocco—maybe once I speak Arabic, French, or both? That would be wonderful.

Thank you to my wonderful parents for paying for the trip, thank you to IES, thank you to the wonderful Moroccans I got to meet.

Love to all. 

Marruecos (المغرب): Parte 1

This is by far my longest blog post ever, and since Microsoft Word tells me it’s eighteen single-spaced pages, I’m going to divide it into two blog posts to make it easier on your eyes and scrolling. Deep breath—and yella! (Let’s go!)

We left on Thursday morning, before eight, via bus. It was a leisurely three-hour drive to Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, a Spanish city just fourteen kilometers (about 8 ½ miles) from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. And we could see that other continent from shore, too: there were the mountains, just across the water.

The ferry ride took just an hour. We got into Tangiers, Morocco a little after two. We had about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk to our hotel from the dock. It was surprisingly very quiet and still, with not many people out. (I remembered Dad's stories about being overrun by swarms of obnoxious hawkers in Tangiers. Not my experience, thankfully.)

Our hotel was called something like the Hotel Continental, and it was respectable (clean, but with the trappings that even ‘nice’ hotels are beholden to: doors that don’t close all the way, shower parts that have been lost, leaky faucets, etc.). I got a chance to explore it at one point and there were so many unexpected nooks and crannies: beautiful sitting rooms and courtyards, and even a place that was called “The Bazaar”—a kind of wood atelier, it looked like. 

The staff all spoke English, Spanish, French, and Arabic (and maybe Tamarzigh, the "Berber" language, as well—who knows?). The head of the hotel—maybe we’d call his position the manager?—was quite a character. He would ask everyone what city they were from in the U.S., and then would tell you instantly what zip code and phone area code you had—unbelievable! (Yep, that’s me with the 98502/360…) He had also been featured on the cover of Forbes magazine, and had hosted Hillary Clinton, the President of Spain, John Malkovitch, and scores of other celebrities (he had all their pictures and signatures in a photo album he proudly showed off to us).

We had an hour’s break, and then we headed out to the city. To start, we went to the American Legation of Tangiers. Fun fact, which we were treated to many, many times: Morocco was the first country in the world to recognize the United States’ independence from Great Britain after the Revolutionary War. The American Legation building itself, now just a museum, is nothing to talk about; I think our visit there was rather pointless, and certainly much too long, looking at some paintings that had been gifted to the building and hearing about famous American expatriates in Tangiers (Paul Bowles foremost—who?).

Then we went for a walk around the “medina” (it means ‘city’ in Arabic, but I guess it’s also used to refer to the ‘old town’), aka the Qasbah, for a few hours. I was struck by how similar the network of streets in Tangiers was to the maze of Stone Town in Zanzibar. Although Morocco in general has a very strong, distinct smell (exactly what you might imagine Morocco to smell like—like exotic, musty spices and leather), there were also many smells on the street familiar to me from Egypt and  Tanzania, especially the unmistakable smells of the fish market and the chicken market. 

Unlike Zanzibar, Tangiers didn’t seem to have the same level of tourism, and subsequently seemed more catered to the locals but also dingier. The port was tiny and unremarkable, just a spit of concrete pylons. In general, I enjoyed taking in the feeling of being in another country, but as for Tangiers itself, it didn't feel like a destination.

After several hours around the medina we came back to the hotel for a talk from Juanma, someone who was a friend of one of the IES higher-ups, a young Granadan man who had been in Tangiers for several months working with street children. He talked about African immigrants trying to cross from Tangiers into Spain, particularly the children who attempted the crossing by hiding away on ferries and other boats. He also talked a little about Moroccan culture in general and his life there, which was very interesting. One thing that he mentioned which was surprising to me is he said a flat in Tangiers was more expensive than one in Granada. The reason is because of the desirability of the city’s proximity to Europe. That makes sense, but still, wow, that must be expensive! 

We had dinner in the hotel, the main course of which was chicken tajine. Tajine is a style of cooking where you throw various things in a big clay pot and then let it slow-cook for many hours—exactly like a crock pot, and just as easy, apparently (accordingly deemed a "man's dish" for men to cook). It was absolutely delicious, with lemon rind and various spices, the meat so soft I easily pulled it off the bone with just my fork. Moroccan dessert is usually fruit, and yes, we had fruit salad.

We had been told not to go out on our own after to dinner, but to stay in instead for safety. They had warned us ahead of time that especially due to its status as a “border town” Tangiers could be unsafe. During the day it felt quite safe to me, at least the parts we were in, but of course night is always a different story.

The next morning, after a delicious breakfast that was almost entirely carbohydrates (every pastry you could imagine, with flatbread and crepes), we went to Darna. Darna (Arabic: “our house”/”our place”) is a community center that helps women become financially independent by teaching them skills like sewing and weaving, while also offering literacy classes in Arabic and optional French. Literacy is a big issue in Morocco, with about 50% of the adult population illiterate, the vast majority of that percentage women. Education is free from primary school all the way through one’s doctorate, but of course there are many factors that prevent people from completing their education. Foremost in rural areas is the lack of access to schools, which may be many miles away from one’s village, and what is a long trek for boys (one man we spoke to had had a round-trip commute of over six miles a day, all up and down steep hills, to elementary school) is impossible for young girls. I’m sure there are plenty of other cultural factors at work as well (girls getting married earlier, perhaps girls getting educated not being seen as important in the family, etc.).

(A side note: there are three official languages in Morocco. One is Arabic, which includes Moroccan Arabic [I forget what it’s called], which is the specific spoken dialect, and is a blend of Arabic, French, Spanish, and other things; and the written form of Arabic, which is Modern Standard Arabic. [All across the Arabic-speaking world, the written form of Arabic is the same, and is MSA; the spoken dialectical form of Arabic in each particular country is often completely different from MSA, practically a different language, and often not very mutually intelligible between different countries.] French is also an official language and nearly universally spoken, at least among people in urban areas [I can’t speak to rural people], due to Morocco having been a French colony; and finally, Tamazight is also an official language, as of only a few years ago. Tamazight is the language of the Amazigh people, aka the Berbers [since the word ‘Berber’ is derived from ‘barbarian’, the term is not preferable], who make up about half the Moroccan population, the other half being Arab, with lots of mixing in between. 

Tamazight is a principally oral language, and its written version was only contrived pretty recently. They came up with a kind of symbolic cipher for that purpose, which you can see on some governmental signs. I guess the move to make Tamazight an official language was also a bit controversial because there are at least two main dialects of it, which are pretty different, and there was the question of which of the dialects to use, or if the two should be combined in what would certainly be an awkward, unnatural way, etc…  I’m not sure of how many Tamazight speakers there are; I only met one person personally whom I knew was a speaker, but who knows.)

For the Morocco trip we’d been put into groups of fifteen, including one IES leader (most of them IES professors) and a guide (most of them Americans, many of whom had been in the Peace Corps, now living in Africa). In our group we sat in a room in Darna with one girl about our age, Hafsa, whom we’d met before for the tour around the Qabah, and a man and a woman who helped at Darna, and asked them questions about Moroccan culture in general. It was fascinating. There was also an interesting range of perspectives represented between Hafsa, who does not wear the hijab (head scarf) and the other woman, who does; and the man. We talked about such things as official languages, literacy and schooling, foreign policy, and even a little bit about the king…

Which is a very delicate subject. Morocco’s official name is “The Kingdom of Morocco,” and the king is both the head of the government and the leader of the faithful—the head of religion in the country (Sunni Islam). He’s also the fourth richest king in the world. He has palaces upon palaces, exotic zoos, you name it, and owns various industries (the country’s whole dairy industry, for instance)… And he’s a dictator, and speaking ill of him, even in private (there are spies everywhere), can land you a heavy prison sentence. As is common with dictators, his framed portrait graces the halls of government offices, hotels, and even gas stations. We had been warned by IES before the trip not to ask Moroccans about the king and not to talk about him ourselves; I was surprised, then, when Hafsa herself launched into a list of all his ridiculous extravagances, clearly incensed, her two compatriots nodding along in agreement, and then closing with—“and I wish him all the best, of course,” with a big, sarcastic wink. “Careful,” the man advised her, mostly—but not entirely—jokingly, “you know he’s here in the city right now.” It was true. Every Friday (the holy day) the king emerges publicly to lead the midday prayer at a mosque (as Hafsa noted, it’s probably the only time he prays all week), and that Friday he had come to the main mosque of Tangiers, only a few blocks from where we were. Later, when we were driving down the street, we passed the mosque in question, flanked by security and scores of curious Moroccans hoping to get a glimpse of the king.

Back to Darna. As the midday call to prayer wafted in through the open windows, we sipped tea and passed around the tray of cookies a dozen times. Moroccan tea is ultra sweet; too sweet, in fact, for my taste (and I thought such a thing was impossible!), and comes with anywhere between a few mint leaves to practically a whole mint plant stuffed in the little glass. Moroccan sweets, which are bite-sized and often involve honey, almonds, or powdered sugar, are similarly guaranteed to make your blood sugar spike. (In fact, not coincidentally Morocco has a high incidence of diabetes.)

A little later some of the women who work at the center brought in our lunch. The plate was huge, piled a good five inches high, with a big piece of chicken on a thick bed of couscous, surrounded by various cooked vegetables (squashes and sweet potatoes) and garnished with caramelized raisins. It was out of this world; one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Apparently that’s the traditional Moroccan midday Friday dish. Mash’allah, it was delicious.

We were at Darna for several hours, but then it was time to move on from Tangiers. We got in our van and hit the road, driving along the Atlantic coast.

After a few hours we pulled over on a sandy beach. It wasn’t the ocean, exactly—maybe a quiet little inlet? And there, kneeling in the sand, were seven camels. Three were saddled and connected by ropes to one another, and another three, which were a little smaller, had their ankles tied, so they could only take tiny, halting steps. There was also a baby, all wooly and long-legged, fearfully staying as close as possible to his mother, who had a blue saddle on. He wasn’t tied up, but although he could run fast there was no need: he wouldn’t leave his mother’s side for a second.

The scene was beautiful, because the water was beautiful and camels are beautiful creatures (I think they’re so incredible), but it quickly became very ugly as well. The camels were on their knees in the sand, with their back legs down as well, so that the rider could mount; then they were whipped with a belt or rope until they got to their feet, with a terrible creaking of their knees and heart-wrenching groans of pain. They were led a little distance down the beach (the baby desperately running alongside his mother, kicked aside now and then by the handlers who walked nearby, whipping the camels intermittently), turned around and walked back, and then to get them to drop down onto their knees again they were kicked in the knees and whipped repeatedly until, with more terrible groans of abuse, they knelt. It was agonizing to watch. And since there were about thirty of us there on the beach (at that time—more groups came later), each camel went through this ten times without stop, every time groaning louder, looking more and more wretchedly miserable. Everyone was smiling and happy, and I get it—camels are really cool. But I just felt so sick inside. I couldn’t enjoy the spectacle—we were there watching beautiful animals enslaved and tortured.

For all that their pain pained me, however, I did ride one of the camels. The distinct, rhythmic motion they have was extremely relaxing, and the saddle was very comfortable. I could have ridden off into the dunes for days… The last time I rode a camel I was a small-for-my-age nine year-old and I remember a very bumpy ride, worried I was going to fall off. Size, and acquired balance skills I definitely lacked back then, helped a lot this time around, and I was very much at ease. I just hated everything else about that experience, though. I’m definitely going to note in my evaluation of the trip that I think it’s unconscionable that IES supports these people twice a year. Sure, animal abuse is the norm in many places, in fact most of the world; but that doesn’t mean you should put money into such a system if you don't have to.

After we left the camels we drove into the town of Asilah. It was raining. Asilah is on the sea, and it was beautiful to look out from the city walls across the stormy ocean. Asilah on the whole was pretty unremarkable, though. The best thing about it was that every year they have a graffiti contest where they bring in artists from around the world to paint designs on many walls, and then after a certain period of time they paint them over once more. Not all of them, though—my favorite I saw was by El Niño de las Pinturas, who is actually Granadan. His work is everywhere in Granada, especially in the Realejo district, and I always enjoy it (very distinctive, flowy lettering, lots of shading and real talent in the drawings), but this picture was by far his best. It was a vast, sparkling collage scene of Moroccan people and birds and cities and oceans that was just beautiful. May they never paint it over! Another cool painting was a monochromatic scale of a stormy gray-blue that was formed by hundreds of individual Arabic letters overlaid one on top of the other to form a texture. From a distance you couldn’t tell what it was; you had to be close to it to see its secret. Very neat.

After Asilah we continued along the Atlantic Coast to Rabat, and got in just as the sun was setting. We said goodbye to our driver for the night and then went into a building where representatives from the host families were waiting to collect us. We had divided ourselves into groups of three, and each group went with one of the families. What an incredible opportunity that we got to live in host families there in Rabat for two nights.

The three of us went with Hefna (Hesna? Now I’m not sure), a woman who looked to be in her early thirties who didn’t wear the hijab. One of the provisions for the host families was that there had to be at least one person around in the house able to speak enough English. (Some families satisfied this by inviting over a neighbor or a cousin who knew some English just for the weekend.) Hefna was our contact in this regard; she had studied English for three years, she told us.

The house/apartment (I’m not sure what it was) actually shared the building with a mosque. You unlocked the door, and directly in front of you was another door, behind which was the mosque (an amazing moment: once we came in and the door was open, revealing the prayer hall itself, and there was the mu’adhin yelling out the call to prayer—he was just standing there in the middle of the room, bellowing, rocking back and forth with his whole body, projecting his voice); to the right was another door, which led up to the family’s living space. An extremely narrow, steep set of uneven stairs which twisted around led up first to a landing where the toilet was (a squat toilet with a faucet and a bucket of water for “flushing” and a minuscule alcove with another faucet and soap); continuing upwards one came to the rooms.

There were at least five rooms, three of which we saw. There was a kitchen, whose entrance was just slightly low enough that you had to duck to get in (once, in a hurry to brush my teeth in the morning, I plowed through and nearly knocked myself unconscious—ouch!), a room with two couches on either side that functioned as the family/TV-watching room, but which was also kind of a hallway connecting sides of the house; our room, which was quite spacious and made up of couches on all four sides (“couches”—very firm, no backs, patterned in a luxurious silk-like material with an Oriental design and piled up with huge, extremely heavy, similarly-stiff and identically-patterned pillows) and a table in the middle, a bejeweled chandelier above. (The room, like most rooms in traditional Islamic design, was multifunctional: sheets were brought in and the couches served as our beds. Similarly, people would sleep on the couches in the TV-watching room, and who slept where varied from night to night.) There were also at least two other sleeping rooms, which from the sounds of it several people shared, and a roof terrace off of the kitchen for hanging up laundry, etc.

There were a lot of people in this house. There was a mother, maybe in her fifties or so, and a father, more grizzled, probably in his sixties; three daughters (Hefna, Maryam, and Esma) and a son (Hussain), who all looked around the same age, maybe ranging from early to late thirties; and Esma’s baby girl Sīham, whom my friend who knows early childhood development guessed was about 18 months old. (I don’t usually ‘get’ children very well, but I loved Sīham. Talk about a beautiful baby with an endlessly sunny disposition.)

We weren’t hungry just then when we got in, around 8 PM, so Hefna proposed we go for a walk on the town and come back for dinner after. It was dark by then, the kind of indigo-skied time just after twilight. The street the house was on was a main drag of sorts: a pedestrian area closely lined on both sides by vendors selling anything from street food to household cleaning supplies, rows of dishwashing soap carefully lined up on the ground. Everything was abuzz with life, seeming all the more vibrant because it was nighttime and all the lights stood out brightly. Also, it seemed that just like in Spain, the night makes the city come awake: everyone getting home from work was out and ready to walk the town. We passed a bright mosque with open doors, whose minaret in the solid, square style typical of North Africa and Andalucía was the best landmark in a sea of low stalls.

Then we emerged onto the real main drag, big paved streets teeming with cars. A surprise to see: all the crosswalks were regulated with walk/don’t walk red/green lights, and the pedestrians by and large heeded them, even where, had this been Spain, no one would have. (There was some essential jaywalking elsewhere, weaving between cars backed up at traffic lights, which was more in line with what I expected.)

The streets were broad and lined by restaurants, clothing stores, and things like bed and bath supplies—we went into the latter, and I enjoyed the song playing on the radio, whose bilingual chorus went “Alhamdullilah, all praises to Allah.” Hefna popped into a clothing store briefly to exchange a pair of jeans. As she was on her way out, she stopped in front of one of the shirts on display and asked the man who’d been helping her, “and this one—do you have it in a large?” I would have never known I knew how to say that in Arabic, but apparently I do. That was fun.

We walked down the big, broad boulevard up to the historic train station. The flag of Morocco, by the way, is an eye-aching combination of a green five-pointed star, pentagram-style, on a bright red background; and the five-pointed star featured solo on lots of public buildings like the train station, contextually disarming me, as if it were a Wiccan sign, or something (just like in the Indian district in Dar es-Salaam this summer where the “swastika” sign was on lots of temples as a Hindu symbol).

It was about a half-hour walk all-told, and then we came back for dinner, which was served at the table in the kitchen. It was a middle-class home, with all the amenities one could wish for in a comfortable apartment, but my friend told me in hushed tones, “I’ve never seen a kitchen like that before.” I’m not entirely sure what she meant by that, which particular elements she was referring to; and to be honest I wouldn’t have taken note of it except because my two friends were so shocked… Personally, my impression was “no frills, but serviceable.”

(It was something I wondered about the whole time: for most people in the program, Morocco was their first time in a developing, non-Western country, and things awed/shocked them that didn’t have the same effect on me. I don’t want to become inured to these things and jaded. But it was also interesting to reflect and try to remember back to what had been my first moments of culture shock during trips along the years, what had made me comfortable or used to these things, etc. I think my process of becoming used to certain things might be different from other people’s because I went to Turkey and Egypt at such a young age. I remember everything, but from a child’s perspective, which I’m sure would be radically different were I to go back now. You don’t register certain elements of poverty and difference in the same way as a child, because you’re ignorant and oblivious to these things. For me at that age, everything was just so exciting and exotic. I still get excited about so-called exotic places, but I see other sides to it, now, too—although I’m still ignorant and oblivious about lots of things as well, of course.)

For our first course at dinner we were served delicious soup—I’m not really sure of the ingredients, except tomato for sure—which had the kind of viscous texture of miso. We were also given at least two rounds of khubz apiece, the thick, sturdy bread that is a staple of Moroccan life. The rounds, about personal-pizza size around and two inches thick, are stacked in the center of the table, and you rip off large pieces for yourself, or else whoever’s taking on the role of server passes you ripped-off halves.

(One morning, walking to our group’s meeting place, I saw a little boy helping an old man, who was a bread vendor, transport some rounds from the bakery to his cart on the back of his bicycle. The boy only looked to be about six, and although he was trying to carry the rounds carefully, the load of about five slipped out from his arms and landed in the street which was coated in mud and grit from the recent rain. I watched, and the old man told the boy “no problem” with a kindly wave of his hand and picked up the rounds and put them in his cart along with the rest…I wasn’t sure how I felt about this; I felt very ambivalent. Part of me thought I should be grossed out, part of me didn’t care, part of me thought anything else would have been a stupid waste.)

After the soup, which was quite filling enough (I was plied with food the whole trip, and the entire time was in a perpetual state of extreme fullness), our host mother brought out a big platter of the same dish we’d had for lunch the day before in Tangiers, of chicken on a bed of couscous with cooked vegetables. Well, that never gets old! I ate up. You’re supposed to eat with your hands (or, hand, that is—you can only bring your right hand to your mouth, and so you generally keep your left hand in your lap, but you’re allowed to use both for certain tasks that essentially require both, like ripping bread. Boy, on this trip, did I become aware of the range of my ambidexterity. There are certain things I really just prefer to use my left hand for/find difficult to do with my right hand, but so it goes…). Eating couscous with your hand is extremely difficult! Our host mother showed us how, grabbing a portion and then shaking it within her palm to roll it into a ball; and I tried this method, but I just couldn’t stand the sticky, messy texture of the couscous all over my hand and preferred to use my spoon instead.

The communal-platter style is how Moroccan family meals are eaten, and there are certain necessary, tacit cultural rules that accompany it. For instance: although it’s a communal platter, each person does have their own portion, that which is directly in front of them—to lean over and take from elsewhere on the plate would be very rude. That said, if you’re eating more than someone else, the hostess will note this and shift the food around a bit to give you more.

We also drank tea with our meal, which in such a short period of time I had grown to dread. Just too horribly sweet; essentially liquid sugar. The food was heavenly, though—and really, in the whole country I had food that ranks at the top of my list of my best meals ever. Dessert was a choice of apples or bananas. I was painfully full and had neither. Bedtime.

Un cuento de dos mezquitas

I’m going to combine my long-neglected Córdoba post (we were there about a month ago) with my morning, today. The common factor? Mosques!

Today is Friday, which means I don’t have class, which means I should have been enjoying the luxury of sleeping in (during the other weekdays I have to get up at seven). But no, I had to get up at eight—and I was so excited to do so. The reason is because in my Islamología class (the study of Islam, and sometimes also the study of the study of Islam), which is the class I’m taking at the University of Granada, we were having a morning field trip to the city’s showcase mosque.

The mosque is located right next to the Mirador de San Nicolás, which is possibly the most touristed place in Granada, besides the Alhambra; it’s a lookout point in the Albayzín that has a wonderful view of the city below, the Alhambra, which is on the opposing mountain, and the Sierra Nevadas beyond. It’s a gorgeous place, and always packed with people. (Interestingly, locals go there a fair amount, too.) To have the mosque there, then, seems to me to be prime realty. I’ve passed the mosque a thousand times, but I didn’t think it was open to the public so I’ve never gone in. To get a chance to go—well, for me, nothing could be more fun or exciting!

The mosque is unassuming, but pretty; white, in classic Andalusian style with a red-tile roof. It has a quiet, lovely garden out front which features, obviously, the exact same view everyone swarms to take pictures of at the next-door Mirador. It also has a minaret (rectangular, not very high—originally it was going to be much higher, but people complained that it would be higher than the neighboring church of San Nicolás), and I’ve read that they have a live muezzin for the call to prayer, which is something I’d love to see. (They don’t have speakers to project the call because neighbors complained.)

I’m not sure what the exact position in the mosque of our tour guide, but he was part of the organization, somehow; he was youngish, white, non-Arab, in his early thirties, well-dressed and with a well-trimmed beard. His Spanish intrigued me, because he spoke very fluidly, at a high, academic level, and had a very good accent, but he would also make some very basic errors (“un otro,” for example), so the mix was interesting. He was a French convert, I later learned.

The first room of the mosque was the open-air, enclosed patio, which was breathtaking. Everyone oohed and aahed over it: floor and walls all a perfect, pure white marble, sparkling clean, with two big drains in the middle. Off to one side was a simple fountain decorated with the colored geometric ceramic designs that are ubiquitous here, and on one wall was a gilded version of the Nazarí family motto, which can be found all over the city and in every room of the Alhambra: it translates to “there is no conqueror but Allah.” The patio with a fountain is an essential feature of a mosque, for the requisite ablutions that Muslims make before prayer.

The next room was the prayer hall itself. (It’s so strange to be writing these terms in English; I’ve grown so accustomed to hearing/saying them only in Spanish: “la sala de la oración.”) Interestingly, I already knew what it looked like inside. Over winter break I watched a fantastic documentary on PBS that I think was called “The Five Pillars of Islam,”  which featured five Muslims from around the world, including a young Granadan man, with the footage showing him praying in this very mosque.

The mosque is actually only ten years old, although the city’s Muslim community has owned the land for longer (they had trouble raising funds—eventually the emir of the U.A.E. gave them a hand), and the prayer hall does feel fairly young, or modern, with the slanted angle of the ceiling, although the designers tried to incorporate traditional motifs as well, with a mihrab (the decorated wall that shows the qibla, or the direction of Mecca) which has borrowed elements from the famed mihrab of the mosque of Córdoba.

Like any mosque, there’s no furniture in the prayer hall, just a vast tract of flat carpet; this carpet was a rich red color, with ornamental lines marking row guidelines. (There must have been something underneath the carpet, too: it was impressively comfortable and squishy.) The mihrab featured a caliphate horseshoe arch (un arco de herradura califal), as I’ve learned from my Islamic Art and Architecture class, with carved wood in flowery (ataurique) designs.

We stayed there awhile while our guide gave us a history of what sounded like an Islamic Renaissance in Andalucía: in the mid-seventies in southern Spain a small group of truth-seekers (hippies and the like) converted to Islam and formed a small community of about forty people, half of them men, half women. They received some unexpected publicity when, in the early eighties, they asked the leaders of the cathedral of Córdoba (the cathedral that once was the mosque of Córdoba) if they could pray there in the building. The powers that were agreed, but, completely unforeseen by the small group of Spanish Muslims, just when they went to the cathedral a giant tour group of hundreds of Turks came in. The delighted Turkish Muslims joined them in prayer, and the newspapers printed pictures of hundreds of Muslims filling up the hall. 

The movement has since grown and the original converts now have grandchildren. In fact, the twenty-seven year-old son of one of the original “founders” is now the Imam of the mosque in Granada. He’s fluent in Arabic and is a Hafiz, a special distinction in Islam for one who has memorized the entire Qur’an. Despite the efforts to homegrow Islam, replanting the Muslim roots that were severed here by the Moorish eviction five hundred years ago, a lot of the congregation is pulled from Spain’s considerable immigrant population, North Africans and Middle Easterners, etc.  

Later we toured the other half of the mosque, which you can only get to by going all the way around the block. It includes a library for Islamic studies, which featured the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen: shelves and shelves of books in series which were meant to be set together, because their spines featured exquisite gilded Arabic calligraphy that could only be read when the books were lined up in order. There were countless series of books like this, with the writing flowing out over twenty different books’ spines. Absolutely exquisite.

There was also a conference room and a multipurpose room, the latter of which we sat down in. The room was carpeted in Persian style, with movable cushions for sitting on. Our guide told us that later in the day they were going to be having a meal for over two hundred people there in the mosque, and the men would be eating in this room. (Yes, he told us, the men and women would be segregated. He went on and on, explaining why this was a good thing, but several in our group—myself included—didn’t seem convinced.) We could smell them preparing the couscous—it smelled incredible. A nice man brought out some ultrasweet Moroccan-style tea for us. And our guide talked.

When our guide had spoken to us in the prayer hall, it had been a bit long-winded, but okay; but this time he just went on and on on a rant about various pointless, but controversial, topics (how Jews were bankers because they were allowed to practice usury; how anarchists are dumb; how Wahhabi Islam—that sanctioned by the Saudi government—sucks; that Protestantism leads to Secularism and the breakdown of religion [uh, what?!--well, okay, maybe that's true in France, where 'Secularism' is anti-religion], etc.). The whole time he was a bit too impassioned, too much telling us about the joys of Islam (just the same as evangelical Christians do), just too much overall. (“We Muslims are the most inclusive because we recognize all the Prophets. That’s right, we recognize Jesus. We even recognize the virginity of Mary. Protestants don’t. So we’re more Catholic than the Protestants!” [He said that word-for-word. But no, I didn’t correct him. He was really into his rant and I didn’t want to tangle with him.]) Part of it was also that this is a class of all Arab Studies majors (except me), and everyone’s studied Islam extensively; but he didn’t know that, and made it his personal mission to educate us on how Islam had been misrepresented in the Occident, as if we all thought that Muslims were terrorists or whatever. 

Well, after we’d been at the mosque for two and a half hours, and about half an hour into our guide’s second big rant, our professor cut in and apologized but said we had to go because we were going to be touring the hamam and we had to get going. I thought we were going to the baths, because in class our professor had mentioned we might see some other Islamic places of interest around the Albayzín after the mosque (I went to the hamam a while back—nothing to see, actually); but as soon as we’d rounded the corner, our professor turned to us and said, “Whew! God! Obviously we’re not going to the hamam. I just told him that to get us out of there. Now, who’s up for churros?”

Hilarious! I practically died with laughter. So, we went down the street and all got churros and chocolate, and as we were eating my professor and a few of the students went on rants about our guide, the parts of his monologues they’d taken offense to, etc. We’d all been extremely polite in the mosque, of course, but I guess we’d all been thinking the same thing all along.

Now, to Córdoba. We were only there for a few hours, all of which were spent at the mosque-cathedral (which is often referred to in that way, in the hyphenated form). But hey, if you’ve only got a few hours in Córdoba, obviously that’s what you need to see.

The mosque-cathedral of Córdoba is the oldest preserved mosque in Spain, and the only that dates back before the year 1000. In fact, the mosque began to be constructed in 756, with the ascension of ‘Abd al-Rahman I, the Umayyad prince who escaped from Syria where the Abbasids were slaughtering all the Umayyads in a power grab. Muslims had already been in the Iberian peninsula since 711, but ‘Abd al-Rahman I marked the beginning of the Independent Umayyad Emirate (as opposed to the “Dependent” emirate of prior). The mosque was built on the ruins of a Visigoth church (so it goes). Construction continued for two hundred years, most markedly under the supervision of Hixam I, ‘Abd al-Rahman II, Al-Hakam II, ‘Abd al-Rahman III and Almanzor.

Almanzor, who wasn’t part of the dynasty at all, was something of a usurper; the heir to the sultanate was a preteen, and the regent Almanzor took the throne for himself. Well, under his rule Al-Andalus devolved into a civil war, and that was the end of the caliphate right there, at least for a few hundred years. 

All these various sultans were responsible for significant add-ons and modifications to the mosque. I give Al-Hakam II credit for the prettiest room, with the unique double mihrab he designed (mihrab = the wall that shows the orientation towards Mecca) which features amazing “intercrossed arches” (arcos intercruzados). 

[An interesting note: the mosque is actually not correctly oriented towards Mecca: instead of pointing East, it points South. There are various theories about why this is the case, with some believing that ‘Abd al-Rahman I chose for it to be that way is because he wanted it to point instead to Syria, his homeland.] 

Almanzor gets credit for the biggest addition of all, doubling the entire place; but his work is by far the shoddiest, just rows of identical columns copied from the previous rooms, and because he had a strained budget, instead of using brick for the red-white striped arch design, he just had them paint the arches red to look like brick. Seriously cutting some corners there! 

‘Abd al-Rahman I’s original prayer hall gets second place after Al-Hakam II’s; what makes it especially cool is that all the columns were “recycled,” taken from older, preexisting buildings. Which means that some of them are Roman or Visigoth, and no two columns are alike.

Why the grand mosque in Córdoba? Well, Córdoba was the capital of Al-Andalus (Muslim-ruled Spain) up until the dissolution of the caliphate in the civil war around the turn of the eleventh century, at which point Al-Andalus fractured into various city-states. Makes sense to make your grand mosque in your capital city the greatest of them all. 

Many of the old churches you can visit today in Andalucía were built on top of mosques once the Christians swept through with the “Reconquista” (a controversial term). The cathedral of Granada, for instance, was built over the “head mosque” (is there a term for that in English? In Spanish you’d say “la mezquita aljama”—basically, the cathedral-equivalent), and same goes for Sevilla, with the famous tower of Giralda constructed from the mosque’s minaret. Oftentimes the mosques would simply be demolished to make way for the churches (nice symbolism in that), but the Christians were also practical, too, and in other cases they used the preexisting structure and just built the churches over the mosques. In the case of the mosque of Córdoba, the reason we still have it today is because it was so pretty the Christians couldn’t bear to tear it down, and instead just built their cathedral inside it.

Which brings us to the extremely weird thing about this building. You’re walking along in this quiet, dimly-lit, cool place—it’s all marble, rows and rows of columns and arches (there is a row of arches built on top of the first row of arches, and they’re all in alternating red and white stripes of brick and marble respectively)—and suddenly you emerge beneath a blindingly-bright dome, enormous with windows letting in light galore, and everything is painted white and glows. This is the cathedral. Everything is ornamental and gilded and carved marble, just like you expect to find in cathedrals. There are saints and cherubs. One chapel area was all extremely dark wood, almost black, which provided an interesting contrast.

The cathedral was jarring, compared to what surrounded it, and unremarkable for me in comparison to the mosque (big and like any other cathedral I’ve seen), but I guess I should be grateful for it, because otherwise the mosque wouldn’t have survived. I can’t feel bitter towards the Christian conquerors, either, because that’s the story of Andalucía: everyone gets conquered and reconquered (remember, the mosque was originally built over a church), and that’s the way it is.

An incredible building, and extremely unique. Really a wonder of the world.

(I know all this thanks to my wonderful Islamic Art and Architecture class. I’ve really learned and retained a lot from it.)

Much love!