by Zora O'Neill
They would work in Los Angeles for a while, to save up money, then take off on months-long trips—Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey. At some point along the hippie travel trail, they heard Morocco was neat, so they went; they liked it and returned. And then, on one of the longer stays in Los Angeles, my parents had me, and we all moved to New Mexico. Forty years passed.
Now, in 2012, I was standing with my mother and my father, Beverly and Patrick, in Tangier. Up the hill behind, the city spread like a cubist painter’s dream, a series of blocky buildings, all light and shadow, gray and ocher. The light glinted through fine sea haze from the Mediterranean behind us. In front of us was the Tangier hotel where they had stayed for several months in 1967.
The Ourida. My mother remembered the name, and how it had a front door facing the water and a back one opening into the medina. At that front door, a man named Hussein smiled with sugar-blackened teeth and beckoned us in.
The Ourida had been converted into a café, and Hussein, enjoying a break from polishing tea glasses, sprinted up and down the spiral staircase with keys, showing us all the rooms, then up to the roof to see the view across the Strait of Gibraltar, to Spain beyond.
The café patrons looked on, amused, as Beverly and Patrick pointed and conferred, peering out of windows to assess the view, pacing along where old walls may have stood. At least Tangier had a long history of Western oddballs washing up here, so surely this wasn’t a rare occurrence: a tanned man with a gray ponytail, a woman in flowing layers and sensible sandals, both squinting to make the past pop into focus again.
“This is my mother, and this is my father,” I explained to a young couple at a table on the second floor, using the phrases I had prepared my first day in Darija class, weeks before. “They lived here more than forty years ago. First time in Tangier since!”
There was a lot more to the story than that, and while my parents were occupied with reconstructing the Ourida of memory, I was tempted to tell these strangers everything, to pull up a chair at the couple’s table. I would order tea from Hussein and pour out all the details, as so many people had poured out their stories to me. I imagined myself beginning: My parents divorced when I was very young, but my father stayed with us, moving into a bedroom in the guesthouse. My mother remarried; my brother was born. The year I was fourteen, we all moved to a new house, with a separate apartment for my father. He stayed on after my mother left her second husband, and moved out only after my brother graduated from high school.
But it was fine, it really was, I would rush to assure the couple in the café, my new imaginary friends—everybody got along pretty well, at least as far as I knew. So it was nice that we were all here now, really. The three of us had never traveled together as adults.
And, actually, it was hard to believe my parents had ever been married. My mother talked and talked; my father thought and thought. She believed everything was interesting, coincidental, part of some mystical system; he subscribed to Scientific American. And here was the sad part, I’d say, the real reason I’d felt the urge to tell these strangers the whole story: According to my mother, she and my father had split on something more basic. My mother had mistaken my father’s lack of speech for lack of love.
My parents’ story didn’t involve death, doomed love, or accidental deflowering. Still, it had always pricked at me, this fundamental miscommunication. (If that’s what it was. If I had asked my father, he might have had some more practical explanation, or just said “Hmmm.”) My mother could see hidden magic in everything, but she hadn’t been able to read my father’s gestures of devotion. As I retold the story in my head in the simplest Arabic, in my fantasy conversation with the couple in the café it lost its sting. These things happened to us all, I saw now. We all had to learn—we weren’t born fluent in anything, not even love.
Hussein was waving to me from the bottom of the spiral staircase. Beverly and Patrick had gone down to the main level. I nodded goodbye to the café couple, my imaginary confessors. They were so young, they hadn’t been alive when my parents had lived here.
Downstairs, Hussein walked to the main wall, painted with a three-dimensional woodland mural. He fumbled for a switch, and a rainbow of lights glowed and a fountain gurgled, sending a tiny stream through the middle of the forest.
“Wow, that’s pretty neat,” my father said. “That sure wasn’t here before.”
After the Ourida, we made our way to Café Central on the legendary Petit Socco. This was where the Beats had lounged, Bowles had scribbled, Burroughs had nodded. Many of my parents’ more dubious stories had started here too—somewhere nearby was the place they referred to as the Dancing-Boy Café.
“Remember Flute in the Boot?” Patrick said to Beverly after our tea had arrived. “He sold drugs right there?” He pointed across the square.
“Why did you call him Flute in the Boot?” I asked. I had heard snippets of all these stories, never imagining I would one day hear them told in the place where they happened.
“He always kept a little flute tucked in his boot,” Patrick answered. A tour group shuffled into the plaza, its leader holding up a paddle with a number on it; like the fountain at the ex-Ourida, cruise-ship day-trippers hadn’t been here before either.
Flute in the Boot had picked a fight when the guy became convinced my dad was cutting in on his turf. “We got into a big yelling match,” my father said. “Right there in the middle of the square. It was a very Arab fight, a big, loud scene. After that, he didn’t bother me anymore.”
A showy altercation was a remarkable thing for Patrick, who raised his voice only at his car—and once, just once, at my mother, years after the divorce.
“And just up that street to the right was where Betty Blowjob got her apartment, on our second trip,” my mother said. I didn’t bother asking how Betty got her name.
“She was in a big fight too,” my mother continued. “Remember? The neighborhood prostitutes threatened her with a knife because she was turning tricks to pay her rent.”
I smoothed down my ankle-length skirt and tried to imagine myself on the road with my parents back then. I loved their stories, but would I have enjoyed the trip? The thought of having an “Arab” fight with a drug dealer or traveling with a part-time hooker made me cringe with self-consciousness. Striving for fluency—both linguistic and cultural—called for being as inconspicuous as possible. In Morocco, no one had ever offered me hash, and though I wouldn’t have minded some, I saw it as a point of pride, because it meant no one mistook me for a hippie tourist.
The tour group shuffled on. In its stead came a man pushing a baby carriage filled with a blaring speaker, powered by a car battery. The music reminded Beverly of a party—that one in someone’s basement where they had drunk too much Chaud-Soleil, the Moroccan rosé they had liked, and a veiled woman had tried to kiss her.
“What were we thinking?” my mother mused, with four decades of hindsight. “We were in the medina. It really wasn’t cool to drink wine in the medina.”
My parents had traveled in Morocco barely aware of the guidelines for behavior, such as not drinking in the most traditional urban quarters. But they had also been free of the self-consciousness I carried. My mother had worn a pixie haircut and no bra. They spoke only English and some textbook Spanish, which helped in Tangier but not much farther south. Unlike me, with my sharpened pencils and my dictionary at the ready, they had winged it, just made it all up, and had a fine time.
Moroccans had been fine with them too—they didn’t wilt at the sight of a few odd visitors in a beat-up VW Bug. Al-Maghrib, the place-where-the-sun-sets, shares a root with ghareeb, the word for strange, and Morocco and strangeness do seem to go together. Was that an albino kid stealing fruit in the market? Was that a donkey wearing pants? Was that a couple of stoned Americans with backpacks? People shrugged it off. Nta fil-maghrib, fa-la tastaghrib, the saying went. You’re in M
orocco, don’t be surprised.
“So, what was Tangier like then?” I prodded them. “How does it compare to now? Has it changed a lot?”
Patrick was looking around the square again. The baby-carriage music vendor had been joined by another one, playing dueling music. Mopeds buzzed past, weaving between the pedestrians. “I’m surprised at how dirty it is,” he said tentatively.
I had hoped coming to Morocco would revive good old memories for my parents, not show how the world had changed for the worse. Patrick looked tired; he had arrived only that morning from California. I probably shouldn’t have dragged him out like this after such a long flight, but I was hungry for his stories.
Patrick had sucked his mint tea down to the syrupy bottom. “Mizyan bzaf, right?” he said to me. “That means very good? And zweyna—that’s pretty. And the numbers: wahad, zhuzh . . .” Even after forty years away and twenty-four hours of air travel, he spoke better Darija than I did. I still never remembered to use that special word for two.
The waiter, a fleshy man with slightly crossed eyes, arrived. As he bent down to leave the bill, he murmured in my ear, “Ana uhibb al-fatat al-ladheedha.” He pursed his plump lips in a suggestive smile, then turned to the next table.
“What did he say to you?” Beverly asked, leaning forward.
I explained that our attentive waiter had advised me, in quite formal Arabic, that he loved the delicious ladies.
“Oh, really?” Patrick said, pulling a tiny spiral notebook from his shirt pocket. “What are the words exactly?” His pen was poised for dictation.
What Is the Name of This?
“Oh, honey, it’s amazing!” Beverly exclaimed, bounding up the street in Chefchaouen. The medina in this mountain town was built up a hillside and painted every shade of blue, from the doorsills to the parapets. It felt like an Escher drawing at the bottom of a swimming pool.
“Ooh,” Patrick mused. “Hmm. Ahh.” He stopped periodically to look down side alleys or glance back to appreciate the view.
Chaouen was the center of the Rif Mountains’ pot-growing zone, which should have made it an obvious destination in my parents’ earlier travels, but somehow they had never come here. Our apartment was a stack of rooms, one above another, up to a tippy-top roof terrace with cushions set around the edges. From here, we could see across the whole valley and up the mountains behind. The sun was just setting.
Patrick leaned back on the cushions and let out a long, satisfied sigh. He had dozed on the ride up and seemed to have recovered from his slump in Tangier. “Ahhhh,” he said, smacking his lips with satisfaction. “No mopeds.”
Here, in Chaouen’s calm dusk, without the background buzz of engines, we could hear thin threads of melodious conversations winding up from the street below.
“Oh, it sounds like Tangier used to!” my mother said to Patrick. “Remember? It was lovely to lie in bed and listen to the sounds outside the window.”
“Ahh, yes, just this soft shush-shush-shush,” he said. “The sound of hundreds of feet walking.”
“And the call to prayer—there were no microphones,” Beverly added. This was harder for me to imagine than no mopeds. In comparison with the overwhelming adhan of Cairo, modern Tangier’s soundscape, in which only a few muezzins competed, was positively serene. Still, I envied my parents’ experience with the adhan in its original form, an invitation cast into the air through the power of the human voice alone.
I had heard something almost like it here in Chaouen, in fact, on a previous trip. My traveling companion and I were both lovesick, for different reasons, and I proposed a distracting hike up into the mountains. There we met a handsome young goatherd who happened to speak lovely Fusha. I played translator, which made me feel useful, and the goatherd offered to sing for us, a classical love song. Out came pure silken sound, a ribbon of notes that rose and rippled in the thin air between the mountains. I couldn’t translate the words, but my friend and I felt their meaning. It was the first moment I understood how people could fall in love across cultures and languages, how communication encompassed so much more than the words we spoke.
Now, here in the medina with my parents, the light had faded from the landscape, and the day’s last adhan rang out over the hills. One call came from a whitewashed tower like a pile of sugar cubes on a far hill, and another rang out closer, from somewhere below us in the medina. The calls fell in and out of sync, the far voice smooth and well modulated, the nearer one creaky and faltering. Perhaps that muezzin had sung his heart out back in the days before microphones.
After breakfast, I found Patrick frozen midstep on a landing, peering down the stairs. He had discovered an ancient baggie of hash in the kitchen, left behind by some previous guests, and smoked some.
“Phew,” he said when he heard me. “I’m glad this house is so small. And all stacked up like it is. You only have to think in two dimensions.”
We headed downhill to the weekly street market, where the sidewalks were lined with secondhand clothes, fresh eggs, live sheep. At a heap of brushy, gray-green weeds, Beverly stopped to rub their leaves. Her professional curiosity, as an herbalist, was piqued.
“What’s the name of that?” I asked the tiny man attending them. I used my best beginner-Darija-class diction. For myself, with silly things like cotton candy, I couldn’t be bothered to ask these questions. But for my mother I wanted to be helpful.
The little man peered up at me. “What? In Arabic?” he croaked, his eyebrows wrinkled in confusion.
It figured that when I finally worked up the nerve to use the little bit of Darija I had learned, I would be in a place where it wasn’t commonly spoken. All around us, I noticed now, was the buzz of Berber.
The Berber people had been in North Africa long before the Arabs marched across, and their language gave Darija its distinct accent and complete lack of vowels—or that’s the way it sounded to me. Whenever I overheard Berber spoken on the street, I felt I should understand its rush of sibilant sh’s, staccato t’s, and buzzy r’s. Then I was relieved to find it was not just the world’s fastest Darija, but a language I genuinely did not know.
In Fes, with its deep Arab roots, I didn’t hear much Berber spoken in the streets. Across the country, though, censuses showed that anywhere from a third to half the population used it daily. In 2011, Tamazight (as Berber is more properly called) was declared an official language of Morocco, alongside Arabic; the spare, alien-cuneiform alphabet could now be seen on government buildings as well as in mobile-phone ads. This was a major reversal from the 1950s, when Arab nationalists were so bent on spreading their message of linguistic unity that they had imported Syrians to teach Fusha in remote Berber villages.
Still, the official acknowledgment of Berber culture was so recent that Moroccan identity was in flux. At a lecture at my school in Fes, I had witnessed its negotiation in real time. Midway through a professor’s talk on modern Morocco, a college-age woman in a black hijab had raised her hand and asked, “What is the need of this Berber movement, Professor? What did they do? Who are the heroes?”
“You’re not Amazigh, are you?” the professor had replied, using the now-preferred terminology for the Berber people. As for the heroes, did she know Tariq ibn Ziyad, the general who led the Arabs into Iberia in 711? Did she know, as every Arab student should, his famous speech, delivered after burning his own ships on the European shore? “My men, where will you flee?” the general had thundered. “The enemy is ahead, and the sea behind you!” And did she know his seven thousand troops rousted Visigoth king Roderic’s hundred thousand, thus extending the Islamic empire across the Mediterranean and into Europe? Well, Tariq ibn Ziyad was Amazigh.
When the professor moved on to discuss the influence of the Tamazight language, the student again objected. “They accept Islam,” she said, “so they must accept Arabic!” The professor pointed out that no one expected
Chinese Muslims to speak Arabic; maybe they read a bit of the Quran in Arabic, but they spoke Chinese, lived their whole lives in Chinese. The exchange gave me uncomfortable flashbacks to Lebanon and its identity issues. But when the woman approached the professor after the lecture, it was not to continue the argument but to thank him.
The town of Chaouen, in the Rif Mountains, was a majority Amazigh town in the middle of a deeply Amazigh region. For nearly five years in the 1920s, the region had declared itself an independent republic. As my parents and I strolled through the market, Berber culture was still in evidence everywhere. Older Berber women, swaddled in woolen garments tied over one shoulder, bustled from vendor to vendor, pursing their lips critically at the goods. Some wore traditional red-and-white-striped blankets; others were wrapped in terry-cloth towels.
On the way back up the hill, we passed a cemetery. At the gates, women were selling bundles of some woody shrub. I decided to try again. “Excuse me, what’s the name of this?” I asked one of the women. Her outermost layer was a thick white towel, covered in a pattern of large marijuana leaves.
“Rihan,” she said to me, crushing one of the leaves for me to smell.
This at least was Arabic, not Tamazight—it meant fragrant. In my personal dictionary, compiled in Cairo, where I had said Badawwar ’ala rihan to every greengrocer, it meant basil.
My mother joined me. “Oh, that’s myrtle, honey,” she said. I thought of Si Taoufik’s idea of walking across the Arab world, through the spectrum of dialects—at some point between the Nile and the Rif Mountains, rihan had transformed from one fragrant green to another.
One night, I took Beverly to the hammam, the public bathhouse. The word hammam, with a breathy h like the relaxed exhale it provokes, comes from the verb hamma, to heat. (With a different vowel, the verb becomes humma, to decree, by God—so, really, we were obligated to go, I told my mother.) Hammam also means bathroom, so context is important. Fortunately, the hammam bucket, an essential part of the bathing process, announced one’s destination as if it had been said aloud. I had spent the afternoon collecting everything to carry in our bucket: towels, flip-flops, shampoo, gooey black olive-oil soap, and, for each of us, a kees, a little crêpe de Chine scrubbing mitt. On the way there, bucket in hand, I nodded in silent recognition to other such bucket carriers, women headed home with hair wrapped in a towel, beejama peeking out from under their djellabas, and blissed-out smiles.
