{"id":24387,"date":"2023-01-09T19:00:01","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T17:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=24387"},"modified":"2023-01-21T15:12:05","modified_gmt":"2023-01-21T13:12:05","slug":"sudden-journeys-morocco-encore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/sudden-journeys-morocco-encore\/","title":{"rendered":"Sudden Journeys: Morocco Encore"},"content":{"rendered":"

A former longtime resident of Casablanca returns and observes the city’s changes, traveling to Marrakech for good measure.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Jenine Abboushi<\/h4>\n

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The great inverted cone, narrowing to a vertex, that greeted arrivals to Casablanca Airport, I could no longer find on my last November trip \u2014 but its presence surely persists in graphic memory for many. Underneath this sharp point was a transparent, circular barrier topped with grassy tufts, presumably to protect travelers from accidental impalement on the way to passport control. The golden spike nonetheless remained formidable (c\u2019est fait pour<\/em>, deliberately so, as we used to say) and every time I returned home to Casablanca, I would fix my eyes on it as I passed. I had first moved to Morocco one week after the death of King Hassan II in 1999, and this airport sculpture held its post into the reign of his son, Mohammad VI. Then it was apparently displaced sometime after I had left, in 2009.<\/p>\n

Once settled into my friend\u2019s home in the Oasis neighborhood, I headed to center-city. Despite all the new, upmarket neighborhoods and business centers, the downtown endures as I remember it. With poor, struggling people living amidst magnificent and largely neglected Islamic-Art Deco structures, Casablanca is a \u201clonely place\u201d in the rich sense Pico Iyer used to describe Havana, Bhutan, and North Korea. New additions include bright trams humming along the main boulevards, Mohammad V, Hassan II, and Abdelmoumen, as well as Tifinagh, the geometric script in which Tamazight (formerly called the Berber language) is written, embossed in gold onto government buildings \u2014 the fruit of an organized struggle to make Tamazight equal to Arabic as an official language, and voted into the constitution in 2011.<\/p>\n

I walked from downtown to my old home in the Boulevard Gandhi neighborhood. Many of the small villas from the French Mandate period, as well as newer constructions, had been torn down and replaced by three-story buildings and businesses. The overgrown white, mustard-yellow, salmon, and pink-colored bougainvillea I had planted along the garden wall years ago now blooms high and over onto the street \u2014 a tell-tale sign, this miraculous majnouna<\/em>, of houses abandoned, just as in Lebanon, by people chased away by war, disinheritance, and other misfortunes.<\/p>\n

I postponed entering the garden until the following day, when I was accompanied by my friend Yakout. By her perspicacity and kindness, she was my eyes during this visit, as I averted my own to most details surrounding me. Walking around my former small house and garden, once sweet and elegant, I was saddened by its abandoned condition. As a result of the humidity, the plaster had fallen from the ceiling in large patches, and a caretaker had covered the Tadelakt (a traditional, natural plaster of Marrakech made with lime, savon noir, and egg whites) around the fireplace with contact paper of a beige and grey pattern. And ouf<\/em>, that peculiar shade of light green I had chosen for the stairwell was portentous, I thought idly, but I could not read this sign at the time. \u201cLook, this must be from one of Milo\u2019s toys,\u201d Yakout remarked, pointing to two animal figures near the back door. Parts of my son\u2019s puzzle I remembered well, I slipped both giraffe and eagle into my purse \u2014 it bewitches me that these puzzle pieces are in perfect condition \u2014 and briefly looked around for the stones in the garden painted by the children who had lived there before us.<\/p>\n

Yakout later took me on her habitual beach walk, and I was relieved to see that it still offers a vast, open public space, with children playing boisterous soccer, the Atlantic waves and the marabout Sidi Abdelrahman in the distance. A warm downpour soaked us on our way back to the car. We visited a couple of our favorite places, eating hearty harira soup on the ramparts of La Sqala restaurant. After that, there were mundane errands to do in the neighborhood: stopping at an extended motorcycle street cart selling some of the best fish in Casablanca, which the fish monger slips into pink plastic bags for one to carry home; visiting the improbable sliver of a keymaker\u2019s shop between two buildings; and going to the fruit and vegetable vendor, who handed Yakout some persimmons she had left behind from her last purchase. We bought a few carrots she still needed to complete the tagine she was making over charcoal. All things are negotiable personably: where to park, where to buy, for the caretaker, a new bed in Souq Ould Mouina, followed by bedding and clothes at the second-hand market of Hay Hassani.<\/p>\n

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The Big Match Big Mac billboard in Casablanca anticipated the 2022 World Cup (photo Jenine Abboushi).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Walking through neighborhoods, my eye caught the same things that interested me in the years that I lived here: the creative ways people with little space hang laundry; the surprise of Morocco\u2019s lush bougainvillea; the smart, amusing advertisements in Darija, the Moroccan Arabic vernacular (like the McDonald\u2019s World Cup billboards that punned on Big Mac and \u201cthe big match, for real\u201d). There are new street murals that seem to ground Morocco in Africa. Morocco has a strong culture, I observed anew on this trip, where people develop inventive vernaculars, wear traditional caftans and jellabas, or innovate in matters of dress, still go the public hammams, and eat mostly Moroccan cuisine. Like in India and Pakistan, roots are deep, and it is hard not to notice how much people of all generations love and respect their own regional cuisines, clothing, customs, languages, even when they like to borrow and are good at finding ways to make new things work for them. I have never met people as talented in languages as the Maghrebins. It is astonishing. Two official languages (Tamazight and Arabic), as well as useful European ones (French, Spanish, English), all taught in schools, would not be challenging. [It was Standard Moroccan Tamazight (which combines elements of Tashelhit and two other Amazigh dialects) that was made an official language. ED]<\/p>\n

Without recognizing it, I was nonetheless apprehensive before arriving in Casablanca, and probably the whole time I was there. For one thing, I did not know what to expect after the king\u2019s deal with Trump and Netanyahu, one part of the 2020 Abraham Accords<\/a>, whereby Morocco openly \u201cnormalized\u201d relations with Israel in exchange for US president Donald Trump\u2019s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. I had heard that Palestinian flags and keffiyehs are not permitted by the police, that the road from the airport is plastered with billboards celebrating the Accords with Israel, and that travel was encouraged on the new direct Royal Air Maroc flights between Casablanca and Tel Aviv. I had also heard that large numbers of Israelis travel visibly and easily throughout Morocco. I arrived at night, missing any billboard publicity, and otherwise did not come across concrete signs of Israeli presence.<\/p>\n

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