A Month in Morocco / Un Mois en Maroc, Part 2

At the daycare, getting ready to do “The Hokey Pokey” with the kids.

Those first two weeks in Morocco, Cecile and I settled into the rhythm of our days. Two hours devoted to one-on-one language learning, a restorative coffee at one of the many sidewalk cafes, two hours spent channeling kid energy (or trying to) at the daycare, then a stroll around Rabat. After dinner at the riad, some language homework and daycare lesson planning for the next day.

My young French teacher, Douae, est très gentille et patiente (et aussi très belle). Her English skills were not strong, all the better for me because it challenged me to communicate with her in French. We usually met two hours a day four times a week in the third-floor offices of the Moroccan Center for Arabic Studies (MCAS), above busy Avenue Hassan II. The pervasive debate of car horns would drift up from the street and through the open windows into our classroom, not to mention the Arabic instruction seeping in from the next room, a cacophonous background to our French dialogue.

The daycare was a ten-minute walk from the MCAS classrooms, down an alley off busy Rue Souika, near Rabat’s Grand Mosque. We were getting to know our young charges, two dozen children like eggs in an egg carton, tucked into two low rectangular tables that filled a room. I’m grateful Cile decided to bring a suitcase of books and supplies. Of course, the daycare already had some art supplies, but the kids were thrilled by the crayons, markers, and paper we brought the first day (plucked from shelves stocked for my grandsons when they were younger) because they were brand-new, the paper wrappers still intact, the marker colors still vivid.

We quickly learned that after forty minutes of that, the kids’ interest would flag. Sensing their antsiness, we’d get them out of their chairs and into the two-story central room, where we’d all start moving our bodies. Their favorite songs were “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” and “Baby Shark,” but we introduced them to “The Hokey Pokey” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” Lots of English practice on body vocabulary and “shaking it all about.” As for “Baby Shark,” I’m not sure – maybe they learned “safe at last.”

For the last forty minutes or so, we’d cajole the kids to wind down with books. We added two or three to the daycare library every day. Classics such as Hop on Pop and Old McDonald Had a Farm, which I revised to “Old Mustapha Had a Farm.” The children loved to page through the books with us, naming colors and animals and counting anything that could be counted. Those two hours were loads of fun, but exhausting.

In our free time, we explored the city beyond the medina, following Avenue de la Résistance west into the middle-class neighborhood of Quartier de l’Ocean. We discovered the Musée National de la Photographie, located inside the thick walls of Fort Rottembourg, erected in the late-nineteenth century to house two 30-ton cannons donated by the German government. The fort marks the eastern terminus of the Corniche, a popular promenade that hugs the Atlantic coastline and offers stunning views of waves crashing on rocky cliffs below.

We also walked south out of the medina, discovering the peaceful botanical gardens of the Jardin Nouzhat Hassan and strolling along Avenue Mohammed V into the Ville Nouvelle, built by the French in the early twentieth century, past La Grande Poste, the Parlement of Morocco, the Gare Rabat Ville, et les musées d’art et d'archéologie. This section of the city is a blend of Moorish and Art Deco architectural styles. We wandered, a couple of flâneurs of boulevards lined with stately palm trees, past buildings with rounded corners and balconies and smooth white stucco walls, their horseshoe arches decorated with intricate geometric patterns.

Just as Cile and I were learning to navigate an unfamiliar city, we were learning to feel at home in a new language. Douae continued to guide me toward French fluency, feeding me lists of vocabulary and coaxing me out of my comfort zone of present tense. I began to learn the distinctions between l’imparfait and passé composé. I worked on my pronunciation, trying to perfect the French “r,” moving the sound to the back of my mouth while exhaling. Douae mixed in sentence exercises, oral questions, short reading and writing assignments. For one of my essais de français, she asked me to describe my early impressions of Rabat and the Moroccan people. I concluded that piece: Je suis reconnaissant que les Marocains, même les vendeurs, ne nous prêtent pas beaucoup attention. Mais quand je croise le regard d’un Marocain dans la rue et je lui fais un signe de tête amical, il me répond toujours à mon salut.[1]

View from the train to Marrakesh.

After those first two weeks, we were ready to explore other parts of Morocco. That Friday morning, we caught an ONCF train from the gare to Marrakech.[2] While we waited for the train, I felt compelled to pull out my phone and play Graham Nash’s “Marrakesh Express” for Cile. “Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes/ Traveling the train through clear Moroccan skies.” We followed the Atlantic coast down to Casablanca and then turned due south to Marrakech, the panorama shifting from short-grass savannah to rocky desert occasionally interrupted by the irrigated greenery of olive groves and gardens, the High Atlas Mountains looming in the distance. It was a pleasant trip – 330 kilometers in less than four hours. We shared a compartment with six Moroccan travelers, including a mother and her two toddlers, who smiled shyly as they stole glances at me.

When we arrived in Marrakech, we decided to walk the two kilometers to our riad, both to avoid the taxicab hustle at the gare and see some of the city. When we reached the famous red sandstone walls of Marrakech’s medina, we passed through Bab Doukkala, the main gateway on the medina’s northwest edge, threaded our way through an open-air food market, took a left onto Derb Ahlaka, and then wandered up and down that dead-end alley for ten minutes before realizing the dark passageway we had to stoop to enter led down four worn steps to the doorway of Riad Atman.

Looking for the passageway to our riad in Marrakesh.

Our host, Jamila, welcomed us with a plate of dates and a pot of thé de menthe as she registered us. It was a lovely place – three rooms on the second floor and one on the rooftop terrasse, which was appointed with cafe tables where we could enjoy breakfast and a four-poster bed where we could enjoy a nap. After unpacking, we headed out to see the medina. Our goal was Djemaa el-Fna, the vast marketplace square at the center of the medina, proclaimed an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2001 by UNESCO in recognition of the unique role played by this gathering place for juice and food stall workers, snake charmers, trained monkeys, Amazigh water vendors, henna artists, storytellers, Gnaoua drummers and dancers.[4]

Douae later asked me to draft a couple paragraphs about our trip so I could practice using the different past tenses. Among other things, I wrote about getting caught in a scrum of people in the square: Nous marchions à travers la foule sur la place quand un homme derrière moi a chuchoté en mon oreille, “Hash?” J’ai dit, “No, merci,” mais j'étais un peu fier qu’il ait pensé que j'étais si cool.[5]

That evening we ate at one of the many rooftop restaurants that look down on the square – vegetarian couscous for Cile, tajine de mariage (chicken and prunes) for me – and relaxed in the evening air, high above the hubbub, as an orange sun slowly dropped from the sky. After a half-hour of picking our way through the medina in the general direction of Bab Doukkala, we reached our riad, climbed the steep stairs to the terrasse, flopped down on the bed, and gazed up at a nearly full moon.

Next morning, we continued to explore. Cile’s mission was to buy gifts for friends back home, and I tagged along. Many of the souks have a particular focus or personality, linked to the craft practiced there. The blacksmiths work and sell their wares in Souk Haddadine, the fabric dyers in Souk des Teinturiers, the olive growers in Souk Ableuh, the leather workers in Souk Semmarine, and so on. After some shopping success, we decided to visit the beautiful architecture of Médersa Ben Youssef, an Islamic school built in the 16th century. However, we were diverted by a young Moroccan in a tracksuit who exclaimed, “My friends, you are in luck because today, Saturday, is the only day the Amazigh tanners come down from the mountains to work, and I’d be honored to take you to the tanneries.”[5] Was this true? We didn’t know, but we’d heard about the open-air tanneries, and decided to say yes to an adventure. “Not far,” he promised. As we followed him through twisting alleyways, he asked, “From the United States? I have a cousin in California!” He boasted that Amazigh leather workers produce the highest quality goods. And as we passed a pile of rubble that was once a home, he explained, “Ah, that earthquake!”[6]

After a fifteen-minute walk at breakneck pace, we arrived at the tanneries near Bab Debbagh, on the eastern edge of the medina. Camel and goat hides were being unloaded at a doorway as we slipped past. We were handed sprigs of mint – “To mask the smell!” – and handed over to another man, who gave us a tour of the tannery. The array of cement vats built into the ground were filled with hides – some soaking in water to soften them, some soaking in lye to remove hair, some in vats of flour to leach out the chemicals, some laid out in the sun to dry. Then he led us down the street to a building where the leather was being dyed – indigo blue, olive oil brown, mulberry purple, henna red – and then farther down the street to a shop, where he introduced us to the owner, who invited us up the stairs and into the shop’s backroom. Ahmed Drissi was also Amazigh. He shook our hands and asked us to sit down on a cushioned bench. “You are from the United States? Then we are brothers.” He told us of an American Red Cross doctor who had cared for the people in his home village in the mountains.

Handwoven Amazigh rug in its new home in Iowa City.

By the time we’d been escorted to the tanneries, then given a tour, then made comfortable in the recesses of his shop, then shown an array of leather and woven goods, it would be hard to imagine walking away without buying anything. From a bargaining standpoint, Ahmed had us where he wanted us, and we had to admire his game. Cile picked out a small handwoven camel hair rug – the colors and geometric design reminding us of Dine blankets of the Southwest U.S. – and a bright blue sabra bedspread. The merchant pulled out a sheet of paper, wrote “Me” and “You” atop two columns, making it clear that negotiation of a price was a required step in this dance. He wrote “4,700 MD” in his column and handed the paper to Cile.[7] She wrote “3,000” in her column. He shook his head sadly and wrote “3,700” in a new middle column, underlining the number three times. I took the paper and wrote in our column “3,500,” a price he happily agreed to. We could’ve bargained harder – a rule of thumb is to shoot for half the initial price offered by the merchant – but we enjoyed the experience and were happy to pay for it.

That night, we had dinner with Elena, one of our MCAS friends from Rabat, who was stopping in Marrakech on her way home to Florence. On our way back to our riad, Cile and I talked about the challenges of getting around in Marrakech’s medina. It’s nearly impossible to avoid the busy souks, where tourists slowly stroll through the narrow alleys as they shop. That evening, we followed streets just outside the medina walls, but the traffic was equally random and slapdash.  Occasionally, we saw a traffic cop, but no stop signs or stoplights. Instead, we negotiated the traffic on our own, making eye contact with drivers, who would stop to let us cross a street, because we all share this space, because we are all, as the Amazigh merchant said, brothers and sisters.

Footnotes

[1] I’m grateful that the Moroccans, even the vendors, don’t pay much attention to us. But when I do catch the eye of a Moroccan man on the street and give a friendly nod of the head, he always returns my greeting.

[2] Office National des Chemins de Fer, Morocco’s national railway system.

[3] A traditional sacred music of Morocco, Gnaoua in recent decades has become secularized. For example, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page came to Marrakech in the mid-nineties to learn from and play with Gnaoua musicians.

[4] We were walking through the crowd in the square when a man behind me whispered in my ear, “Hash?” I said, “No, thanks,” but I was a little proud that he thought I was that cool.

[5] Amazigh is the name the indigenous Berber people of North Africa use to refer to themselves.

[6] An earthquake in September 2023, whose epicenter was 70 kilometers southwest of Marrakech, had resulted in nearly three thousand deaths.

[7] 4,700 Moroccan dirhams equals 470 U.S. dollars.