When the Almohads came to town in the twelfth century, the ribat was transformed into a Kasbah, or citadel, and used as a strategic jumping-off place to reconquer Andalusia. Under Yacoub al-Mansour, the southern Spanish territory was briefly brought under Muslim rule. Rabat enjoyed its new position as an imperial city and flourished during those days, which lasted until al-Mansour’s death in 1199. After that, the city fell again into relative decay.
That changed in the 1600s, when Andalusian Moors fleeing the Spanish Inquisition settled south of the Kasbah, establishing a city called Bou Regreg. At once, on the east side of the river, a motley crew of Christian renegades, Moorish and Imazighen pirates, and a group of multinational adventure seekers settled in Salé. For the next three hundred and some years, “Sallee Rovers,” or corsairs, tormented coastal communities on both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, roving as far as the shores of the United States, looking for Spanish gold, and southern England to capture Christians as slaves. In those days, Rabat made Times Square in the 1970s and ’80s look like Disneyland.
I wonder if any of my paternal ancestors got caught up in this mess before finding their way to the Caribbean and, ultimately, modern-day Dominican Republic. The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets of shallow ocean water. Because it almost overwhelms the senses, Rabat is a fitting place to start the journey toward the Sahara Desert, through the Atlas Mountains, and then the northwesternmost tip of the African continent, in Tangier. From there, I’ll be able to see, weather permitting, the southernmost tip of Spain, where another chapter of my family history likely began.
* * *
On our way out of Rabat en route to the imperial city of Fez, a familiar sound compels me to ask Adnane to stop our black minivan in its tracks. “What is this music?” I ask him. “Who are those men marching down the street?
“It’s spiritual Islamic music. They are Sufi practitioners, the Aissawa from Meknes,” he says.
The music is familiar. I’m told the singers are chanting Islamic prayers to the polyrhythmic beat. One of the men, swaying front to back with his spiritual brothers, looks as if he is moments away from going into a trance, induced by the music. At the head of the procession is a man who looks like a close relative to Dad, dressed in a black-and-white-striped djellaba. He’s obviously the master of ceremonies or, as his Afro-Cuban Lucumí or Santeria counterpart would be called, an akpon, leading the way. A group of men follow, dressed in red and white hats with matching outfits carrying flags in vibrant hues of turquoise, emerald green, blood orange, and bright mustard. Behind them is a man balancing a bronze vessel atop a tray on his head, almost identical to what I’ve seen at a festival on Rockaway Beach celebrating the Yoruba sea goddess Yemaya. The parallels don’t stop there. Both Gnawa and Santeria music can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa and slavery.
I follow the procession to the park, where a woman dressed in hijab lets go of her daughter’s hand and falls into a spirit possession, wailing something I don’t understand and dancing around the singers. The other people in the park are not taken aback. This relationship with God is socially acceptable here.
The woman’s feverish movements, the widening of her eyes, and her trancelike state are behaviors I’ve seen before at a bembé, a spiritual drumming, in a Brooklyn basement. As the akpon chanted religious songs dedicated to the orishas, or Yoruba deities, the initiated priests dancing in front of the sacred drums fell into trances that were almost identical to that of the woman in the park. My world is getting smaller.
We jump in the car and head toward Fez, making stops to play musical chairs in the back of the truck as Amina takes naps in the passenger seat. We are hoping to make it to Fez before night falls.
* * *
We make a pit stop right outside the city at one of the best-preserved sites in the kingdom: Volubilis. Most Moroccan sites can make anyone feel like they’ve stepped into a gigantic replica of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Volubilis ruins are a breathtaking frame of what was once a Mauritanian capital founded in the third century BC. We hop out of the truck to find the last family walking out of the makeshift front gate. A petite woman with dark wavy hair tucked underneath a dark scarf, accompanied by her husband, mother-in-law, and kids, is the day’s last visitor. She walks over to me and offers her hand, asking me in Darija and then English, “Where are you from?”
I tell her, “New York City and the Dominican Republic.”
She gives me a once-over. I’m not showing any of my tattoos. I’m wearing a pair of loose-fitting jeans and an embellished long-sleeved rust-colored tunic.
“I thought you were Moroccan,” she says. I go on to tell her about my ancestral DNA exploits and Dad’s link to this part of the world. She’s read about the science on the Internet, she says.
“I feel at home here,” I say to her. “I wish to come back alone and experience more of the country—maybe attend a Sufi mystic ceremony.”
“Insha’Allah, I hope to run into you again, sister,” she says, shaking my hand. “I would like to have you over for tea at our home.” The woman slips into the driver’s seat of her car and leaves with her family.
Adnane is able to sweet-talk the security guards into letting us in for a few minutes to walk around the site and retrace the oldest footsteps in the country, aside from the Sahara, as the sun gradually sets above us.
* * *
By the time we pull into the hotel’s driveway in Fez, it’s almost pitch black outside. Lisa and I are disheveled, starving, and sore from taking turns riding on the hump in the middle of the backseat. Amina awakens refreshed from another nap and places a phone call on her cell, presumably to the hotel’s manager. Adnane, who is based in this dreamy city of about one million, slips into the night with Mounir.
We enter the lobby of the hotel. I look over at Lisa, who is likely thinking exactly what I am: Did riding the hump in the backseat of the truck finally kill us on the way to Fez and transport us into another dimension akin to heaven, if there’s such a thing? The air is pungent with the smell of rosewater, sweet almond cookies, and tagine. My stomach rumbles. I try not to look around too much. The colorful tiles, the ornate chandeliers; everything is exquisite, almost overwhelming. “You welcome,” says a gorgeous young woman with a strong accent. Several people have told me that Fassi women are considered the country’s most elegant, prolific cooks, and sought-after wives. I hear it’s because they are also known to be lighter-skinned and therefore more beautiful than other Moroccan women. The colonial white-is-right mentality is pervasive even here, in Eden.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Welcome to Palais Jamaï,” says a woman who I assume is the hotel’s manager.
Though rolling with Amina has literally been a pain in the ass, at the end of the day, it’s been worth the hell ride it took to get here.
The only thing more beautiful than this place in the evening is the view of Fez in the morning from my balcony. It feels almost like I’m floating on a fat meringue cloud overlooking the medina. If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground. To my left, I can see the roof of al-Karaouine, the first and oldest functioning university in the world, and below that, exquisite Andalusian-style gardens.
After a breakfast of strong coffee, sweet mint tea, local pastries, and fruit, we meet Adnane and our driver in the hotel lobby and head over to the medina of Fès el-Balim in the old part of the city. While Fez’s foundation dates back to the ninth century AD, the thousands of Andalusian Moors who fled Spain during the Reconquista cultivated its character. Today this city is the spiritual and cultural center of the country. The medina is also the largest living Islamic medieval city on the planet, and quite possibly the most immense refugee camp for stray cats.
There’s something about the culture of the marketplace
that excites me. The frenetic vibe of the medina makes me feel more at ease than I do strolling in the tranquility of, say, a street in Rabat. I see old men on donkeys yelling into cell phones and women clustered in groups rushing in and out of the gate. Children shouting in French, German, and Spanish, looking for work as unofficial guides, compete with elderly homeless women for whatever dirhams tourists can spare. The scent of fresh bread, herbs, and cat urine drift through the air from every winding road, as do sounds of American and Moroccan hip-hop.
The hip-hop of Morocco—where Casablanca is akin to the Bronx—is crazy fresh. While graffiti art isn’t as popular as it was in New York City back in the day and, more recently, in Paris and Amsterdam, every other branch is fully represented here. The music, rapped in Darija and in French, sounds really dope, and the lyrics reflect what’s going on with the country’s young people. The content—I’m told by rapper Masta Flow and my favorite local hip-hop producer, DJ Van—ranges from tolerance, police corruption, respecting women, and other sociopolitical issues to partying and spirituality. In Fez, the medina is where it’s at.
While looking through the bootleg hip-hop CDs at a stall in one of the many winding streets I won’t commit to memory, a fortune teller dressed in a black burqa steps to me. Her eyes are aquamarine, and the parts of her face I can make out are a dark brown. Her hands are painted in an intricate pattern with what looks like dried henna. The woman says something in Darija I don’t understand. I motion to Adnane, talking to a man nearby. I ask him to translate discreetly, hoping that no one else in our scattered crew notices, especially not Amina, who’s shopping nearby. She’s starting to make us all feel like we’re rolling with an FBI agent and not a rep from the tourism board.
“She says she wants to give you information, but for free,” says Adnane, “and that she’s seen you before in Ouarzazate.”
“Sure, I understand,” I say, eager to hear what she has to say.
“You are from here. Your soul, that is,” she says to Adnane, who translates. “And this will certainly not be the last time I see you. You may want to bring your father here someday, the man born with good fortune,” she says. Adnane is puzzled. I understand. Dad, the caul bearer whose luck I’m not sure has found him yet.
She takes my hand and traces the lines of my palm with her thick index finger. “An ancestor, one who left not so long ago, may come back soon and—”
“What’s going on here?” asks Amina, carrying a bag with a belly-dancing outfit and other goodies. “Is she begging for money?”
“No, she is asking if I want henna. It’s nothing, let’s go. Thank you, sister,” I say to the woman through Adnane. “Next time we meet, maybe I will have something to offer you.” The woman disappears into the crowd.
“It’s time to head out to the Sahara,” Amina says. “We don’t want to be on the mountain at night.”
I’m almost sad to leave Fez, a city I feel kinship with. However, after Bennett mentioned Dad’s probable link to the Imazighen, I’m eager to get started on the long drive through the Atlas Mountains, where clusters of these ancient people live in virtual isolation.
* * *
They say that Atlas was a Greek god before he became a North African mountain chain extending through Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Atlas was, as you might imagine, a gigantic specimen, a Titan constantly beefing with other freakishly large creatures roaming the Mediterranean at the time. After clashing with the wrong Titan, Atlas decided to hide along the African shoreline. When he laid his head down to take a nap, his head rested in Tunisia, and his feet burrowed in Morocco. Even during the months when it snowed on parts of him, he found comfort in the warmth of the desert. He made himself so comfortable in that position that he never awoke from his slumber, eventually morphing into a mountain range.
Atlas can be a scary god, especially for people afraid of heights like I am. We zip up narrow winding roads past other cars and trucks. Along the way, we stop for Mounir to rest and say his prayers. Water up here is scarce, and the living conditions are, by Western standards, so minimal that I doubt many people could wrap their heads around it. We see very old women with a series of tattoos on their faces, loaded down with large bushels of wood and branches, accompanied by goats. The sun and wind have turned their faces and hands into leather. I’m too intimidated to stop and talk. I’m afraid I’ll contaminate them like a Western explorer would a newly discovered nation living deep in the Amazonian rain forest.
A small Amazigh girl who bears a striking resemblance to Djali is playing by herself in front of her tiny home. Her nearest neighbor must be miles away, in one of the insular communities we can see dotting the arid patches of land on this side of Atlas. The girl runs up to our truck and asks if we have anything to spare. Her smile reveals decaying teeth, but her large dark eyes and the wild curly hair framing her pretty face are arresting. She is quite something, and we all scurry to see what we can give her—water, dirhams, gum, aspirin, and sweet dates. I ask her through Adnane what she sees for herself in the future.
“If I am lucky, I will find a husband who will take care of me.”
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.
* * *
What feels like hours and hours later, we arrive at a Vegas-style über-cheesy hotel in Erfoud, not far from the Merzouga Dunes. Thank the gods that we’re here just for a few hours, to eat and shower before heading to the desert.
We are deliriously tired from the trip, but no matter, it’s the Sahara or bust. Plus, we don’t want to see this place during the day. We change, shower, and meet downstairs in the lobby in one hour. I’m determined to lay my eyes on a stretch of the planet where I’m certain some male ancestor of Dad’s, at some point in his life, journeyed across on camel or on foot. I want to see what he saw at least once in this life. I sort of wish Dad were here.
My New York City instincts are starting to kick in. I’m paranoid. “Are Mounir and Adnane so sick of us that they’re going to whack us right here, wherever here is?” I ask Lisa.
“I know, girl, right?” she says, “Not for nothin’, but I’m thinking the same shit.”
It’s darker here than any place I’ve ever been. It’s darker than driving through the thick bush in Sierra Leone. It’s darker than driving through a campo or mountain range in the middle of the night in D.R. It’s so dark, I can’t see my hands in front of me. I can only feel.
“If we’re going to go out, we might as well go out together,” I whisper sort of jokingly.
“Don’t fuck around like that,” Lisa snaps.
There are no streetlights dotting the path we’re taking to Merzouga. I’m afraid we may run over somebody along the way. We’re driving fast, making wrong turns down streets that all look the same: dark.
“It’s nothing, sister, we were just a little lost,” says Adnane. “Mr. Mounir has never been here before.” To my surprise, neither has Amina.
“Are you sure you’re not trying to whack us?” I say, laughing nervously.
“What is this? Whack?” Adnane responds, laughing.
Minutes later, I feel like we’re driving on top of an ocean, swaying from side to side, undulating to the rhythm of whatever is underneath us. At first it’s a little disorienting. Mounir turns on the headlights, revealing a hideous crew of desert rats tagging along, jumping from side to side like kangaroos. This goes on for another twenty minutes.
“Here is the desert,” Adnane says. It feels as if we’ve parked atop a sinkhole.
“That’s it. Goodbye, Lisa,” I say. We erupt in laughter, tipsy from a cocktail of nervous energy and delirious exhaustion.
A man dressed in a radiant blue caftan-style top with matching pants and a white turban appears like a ghost before us. I can only make out the outline of his body. It’s so dark I don’t want to get out of the car for fear I’ll drown in the sand, but I do. I’m told to sit down
on something I’m assuming is a camel. Slowly, the large animal rises to its feet, and I’m hoisted at least ten feet into the air. For some strange reason, I’m not scared of the dark anymore. I submit to it.
As we make our way across the sand dunes, the sun gradually begins to ascend above us. I can hear drunken Spanish tourists howling in the distance in Castilian Spanish. I can make out the outline of a couple hopping up and down, clinking beer bottles. A few others are rolling around atop a large rug. We move as far away as we can from the group, our camels traversing thin strips of sand that threaten to swallow us whole.
The sun is looming above us as the moon, directly behind us, sets. In the single cheesiest instant of my life so far, my eyes begin to well. I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind: “Oh, this place looks like God’s own personal art gallery.” Lisa doesn’t respond. Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people. It’s not easy to get here. Nor is it cheap.
Lisa’s eyes are wet, like mine. We say nothing for a while. Mounir, exhausted from driving so many hours without much of a break, is sleeping on the rug next to us. Adnane, who’s been here before, is talking softly to the local tour guides nearby. The only loud voice I hear is coming from Amina, wearing a huge straw hat and black Jackie O. sunglasses. She’s complaining about the sun and applying another layer of SPF 50 to her face so vigorously that she’s missing what’s going on around her. Maybe I’m exhausted from the lack of sleep, or perhaps I’m on the verge of heatstroke, but Amina is growing on me. She’s like a physical manifestation of Eshu, the mischievous Nigerian trickster god who owns every crossroad in the world. When bored or provoked, he’s known to play jokes on his children and inject a little irony into life’s mix.
Bird of Paradise Page 20
