“A” Ventura: Rabat Detective

I acci­den­tally told my mom she was an incred­i­ble kitchen instead of an incred­i­ble cook.

Everything’s been going well here. Except for the fact that it gets really cold at night (the build­ings are designed to keep the cold in which appar­ently is a bless­ing dur­ing the sum­mer). Thank­fully, I have a ques­tion­ably sheep­skin blan­ket and tra­di­tional Moroc­can slip­pers called babouche that are embla­zoned with two sabres. Day to day, I’ve been get­ting into my groove, doing Ara­bic and Eng­lish tongue twisters with Lat­ifa, and teach­ing my fam­ily about crockpots.

And in accor­dance with this article’s aspired accom­plish­ments as well as to assure this assignment’s avid and ardent analy­sis with an adept, arranged, and allo­cated ambiance all while avoid­ing appear­ing abecedar­ian, I have adjudged that this assay will abide as an amal­ga­ma­tion of affi­late affairs alone (and ancil­lary adden­dum), all ante­ceded by an A.

Ara­bic

I sup­pose the most inter­est­ing point to dis­cuss is the lan­guage here. I’m start­ing to get a bet­ter sense of Dar­ija, the local dialect here. I’ll try to explain it as well as my friend Kyle ana­lyzes Andalu­sian Spanish.

Dar­ija is con­sis­tently adver­tised as being the clos­est to Mod­ern Stan­dard Ara­bic (MSA–the stuff that I’ve been study­ing at Tufts) in com­par­i­son to all other dialects in any other Arab coun­try. And this is not nec­es­sar­ily a lie. The only prob­lem is that its com­pre­hen­sion requires con­sid­er­able ear-training before the thick layer of WHAT IS GOING ON begins to dissolve.

For starters, I’ve noticed peo­ple don’t like say­ing “th” around here. Sort of a counter-lisp, if you will. So words like katheer (a lot) and itheth (fur­ni­ture) become kateer and itet. But in another effort to econ­o­mize let­ter usage, Moroc­cans don’t like say­ing the dh sound in Ara­bic which is equiv­a­lent to the begin­ning sound of the. So words like lad­heedh (deli­cious) and telameedh (younger stu­dent) become ladeed and telameed. Most Moroc­cans under­stand these noises or at least under­stand that you’re a fum­bling for­eign speaker on the sec­ond try, but upon their par­rot­ing returns, it’s like there’re no dif­fer­ences between the noises you made and the noises they made. MSA is spo­ken on some TV and radio sta­tions, so it’s not like those sounds haven’t per­me­ated the area. Instead, it’s just some giant, grad­ual, dialec­tal deci­sion to Make Things More Complicated.

To add to this, Dar­ija is specif­i­cally designed to make use of every crevice of your mouth. Thank­fully, it con­denses every sin­gle word and steam­rolls all short vow­els turn­ing full, flush Ara­bic words into curb-stomped vomit frag­ments. For instance, peo­ple say mjhid instead of maj­hood (mean­ing pow­er­ful but deriv­ing from the root jahd which means effort and should sound slightly famil­iar as in form III it becomes jihad which lit­er­ally means to strug­gle for some­thing). To ask some­one if they work, one asks, “wsh ktkhadm?” Yup. Try pro­nounc­ing that in your head. I don’t under­stand how my orally con­fus­ing Moroc­can pals pos­sess the fac­ul­ties to say five con­so­nants simeota­neously and then can’t man­age to use “dh” or “th”.

Let’s just say I tried prac­tic­ing Dar­ija on my host brother and his response was, “What?”

Yet, it’s sup­posed to get eas­ier to under­stand just by being immersed. I’m imag­ing­ing Dar­ija to be sort of a more real­is­tic Davinci Code, and hope­fully I’ll crack it and the Gift of Gab will be given to me and all shall be mafhoom (under­stood). 

Lat­ifa and Eliot explore a hid­den cor­ner of the souk.

 Aromas

For the most part, things smell mediocre at best with the excep­tion of the aver­age male Moroc­can passerby. All men here feel a need to serve as human air fresh­en­ers or per­haps are just inter­ested in the annoy­ance value of olfac­tory over­load. Thank­fully, every­one on my pro­gram has comes to terms with smelling eh for the dura­tion of this semester.

Besides that, every­thing smells like cig­a­rette smoke. Peo­ple smoke in the bars and in the cof­fee shops and then they prob­a­bly smoke the smoke that some­how has bur­rowed itself indef­i­nitely into my clothes.

My bed in my room… all fur­ni­ture cour­tesy my dad.

Ath­let­ics

Wit­ness­ing sports in Morocco is hilar­i­ous to say the least. Many men will go to cof­fee shops to watch the games with their friends to smoke and be rowdy.

Here, sports, espe­cially soc­cer (cue giant laugh from the US), are a big per­for­mance. The play­ers in the African Cup will clutch their legs and cry after get­ting scraped; the goalies will limp back to their posts to stall time. Marwane’s friend Miz­ian joked with me that he had “seen all these play­ers before in a Hol­ly­wood movie” sug­gest­ing that the pre­req­ui­site for being a soc­cer player around here is being a good actor.

But it’s not only the play­ers. Peo­ple yell Seer, seer! (Go! Go!) and even beg Allah to grant suc­cess (we’re talk­ing heads bent over, palms-faced inward sta­tus). Moroc­cans scream and shout and even cry after missed shots. Yet every valiant effort is wel­comed by unan­i­mous, unques­tioned applause from any cof­fee shop audi­ence. Miz­ian at one point exited the cof­fee shop to take a breather due to how bad a Moroc­can shot was. But that’s totally undramatic.

I took a video of one such occa­sion of coffee-shop-game-watching. Once I stum­ble upon a fly­ing pig bear­ing a shirt that says “Fast Inter­net Here”, I’ll upload it, as YouTube is calmly telling me it’ll take 600 min­utes right now. Click here to watch the video of 30 sec­onds of the experience.

Side-note: I cur­rently hear the soccer-loving cheers of Moroc­can men pound­ing like frat base­ment music through the tiles beneath me from the cof­fee shop below our apartment.

All of Morocco is obsessed with this “true” Turk­ish soap opera.

Aca­d­e­mics

Classes so far have been going well. The first thing I learned is that syl­labus week is unde­ni­ably unin­volv­ing and unin­ter­est­ing wher­ever you go through­out the world. My Arab Spring class will be dis­cussing all sorts of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­ries as well as lookig at case stud­ies from all over the region. My Moroc­can Cul­ture class seems also cool, find­ing a nice bal­ance between anthro­pol­ogy and dare I say the more phys­i­cal state of affairs. Plus, it’s taught by an exu­ber­ant pro­fes­sor who dons cor­doroy three-piece suits. (Check out Mar­garet Lau­rence short story, “The Mer­chant of Heaven”. It’s not about Morocco but it’s really good).

Marwane’s 21st birthday!

Also

Some­thing inter­est­ing I’ve noticed since liv­ing here for my citizenship-granting two weeks regards the hijab, or head cov­er­ing. I’ve come across it described as an indi­ca­tor of pub­lic ver­sus pri­vate but never really under­stood to what extent this descrip­tion stayed true. From what I’ve noticed, women who nor­mally cover thier heads here will take off their scarves when at home, regard­less if some­one is vis­it­ing or not. And it doesn’t yield embarass­ment if I, for instance, wit­ness my host mom’s next door neigh­bor in all her uncov­ered glory. The hijab, unlike its west­ern por­trayal, is maybe thus dis­con­nected from the inter­per­sonal inter­ac­tion and instead asso­ci­ated with the environment.

Mar­wane, Miz­ian, and me

Things to look for­ward to are top­ics not begin­ning with the let­ter A, David mem­o­riz­ing so many flash­cards he ceases to exist, and an in-depth analy­sis of Marwane’s exotic Moroc­can court­ing of an Amer­i­can girl exclu­sively through text messages.