Kulshee Hoot

Said, my sister's husband, the one who is threatened by the possibility of being threatened by me, who works for the Moroccan ambassador, i.e. greets French-speaking important peoples at the airport, invited me and the two shlumpy midwesterners living with us to go to his hammam with him last night. The one he's been going to since he was old enough to walk. His mother's house is a stone's throw, and when he enters not only does everyone know him but the people who don't (know him) line up to introduce themselves to him. He has a personal man, smaller and older than him, who scrubs him down and brings him glasses of water, which water Said won't share, of course. One skinny young man with a "panga", i.e. rat tail, who didn't know Said came up to him, introduced himself, and asked to see his new cell phone, which cell phone apparently had been much talked about in the hammam anticipating Said's weekly Monday visit.

My two younger brothers came with us, too. Said took the 6 year-old into a corner of the hammam, put him over his lap like he was going to spank him; flipped him like a piece of meat, scrubbed him; scrubbed his face equally roughly till the 6 year-old cried, safie!; at which point Said smiled, gently patting the kid's stomach; stood him up, pulled down his pants; scrubbed him even rougher vertically; on his penis, too; finished, put him back together and sent the reddened shocked cleaned kid into the other room to wait for the adults (me included, nicely) to finish. Funny, Said's personal man scrubs Said down gently, lovingly, like he was Said's mother and father, and brother and slave...

Later, drying off, Said would explain that their generation--implying the young boys in the corner watching him speak about them--didn't know how to do things on their own, i.e., take care of themselves proper. When he was their age... This is an education that they don't like, of course....Saying this, he kissed Reda, who grabbed for his hand, which Said casually let him have. Then he added, it's not their fault; it's their parents. That was the part that most got me. Saying that about the parents of his wife (who is actually turning 20 to his 36 in a few weeks: her level of excitement, which I mistook for our having the same birthday, was re: our having the same chinese calendar sign) who, in my short life experience, are some of the gentlest, if aloof, parents I have ever met.

In light of all this supra, I guess it makes sense that me and Said butted heads in the most nonviolent symbolic predictable exhilarating way possible. I stayed in the hammam after he and the shlumpy midwesterns had left. That was the first move. It gets hot, man. And I was getting nauseous. But there is never any clear time to be done, since the thing is premised on really going too far, codifying excessive cleaning. So I stayed when Said left (I made it up to 44 in English and back down in Arabic with my eyes closed right after he left: challenges create challenges: life here can feel very made up in this way).

He came back in immediately after leaving and handed me his gold necklace, which has a picture of his mother and a verse from the Koran inscribed on two separate pendants. Just handed it to me and left; he didn't make eye contact in that dramatic way that implies a dark transaction. Well, boy, was I not losing that necklace. And the more I thought about losing it, the more I was worried I was going to.

I left the inside of the hammam ten minutes later and offered Said back his necklace, extending a wrinkled hot hand, proud, but he, loving it, said, No, no--hold it. That, I sensed, is all he'd ever say to me about whatever was between us. It really sounded the way he said like he was helping me to do something good, like predetermined charity. I can't explain it; I became really nervous and spiteful at once (though there was this new element of confidence a 13 year-old doesn't have). In the dressing drying antechamber I put the necklace in my pile of clothing; held it in my closed palm; put it, finally, into my sweatpants pocket. Omar came to retrieve it from me when he saw that last strategic switching of the valuables but no way I was letting go of the thing now.

And when Said came back to us after being shaved he extended his hand in passing and I placed the necklace in his hand and he thanked me and it was over in the most anticlimactic way imaginable. There's this thing in Morocco, this way that men are in the world: it's like a warrior saint complex. The men, generally, I mean, are gentle--they hold hands and pinkies and weep and raise children with shows of pride, make loud jokes and eat messily--and at the same time obsessed with propriety, defensive of their women and children in a rigid unimaginative way that seems so at odds with their other gentle selves. Sometimes it seems they really do consider it their duty to look down upon non-Muslims, yet while still offering them hospitality, even being interested in them, in the crossing of cultures Morocco seems to be embarrassed by in front of other Muslims and proud of towards the West...

It's almost enough to wildly make me think that the women are actually in control in so many ways here. All of life's daily needs are met by women: cooking, cleaning, shopping, they do, they get life done, which this it gives them power here it might not at home (in the US) because so many of the men here are unemployed, rather inutile (partially self-designed); and so whatever gets done gets done by women, and the men praise them, because they're really thankful; praise them, because it's proper; but must really resent them, too, for finding solace, e.g., in bad soap operas and make-up catalogues (and not in the Koran or principles or booze). You hear a lot of men here talk about the 75 percent illiteracy rate amongst women. And talking, like everything else, has become so symbolic. It's true in an ugly straightforward way--with the exception of the anomalous academics that populate the Cente here, maybe-- that only women help women here.

Morocco has a way of fitting together things, ways of beings, ideas, styles, that really I don't think would go together anywhere else. Like, making 3/4 and 1/6 equal a whole. As far as Said goes, as far as the Moroccan men I've known here in general go, brotherhood is both the deeply beautiful binding bonding soulful concept that makes social change and heroes alike, and the empty politicized symbolic socialist copout that a man whose life is premised on the unoriginality of his circumstances seems to resort to. Watching Omar and Reda fight on Abbas' bed last night I wrote this:

They both want to fight. The younger, being younger, even 6, still knows that continuing to kick the older brother will earn him a continual beating. The older brother loves the younger for continuing to solicit an ass beating from him. They can wrestle, even cry, kick and punch, and then sit calmly next to one another in front of video games afterwards. How has this made them closer? Because this is the writing of an agreement between the two that if the other needed to be violent for the other, he would; this is practice for the world where most men aren’t brothers. This is training, which can go as far as good training can go, because it is guaranteed by love.

Reda called for me every time Omar would get him into a headlock after he kicked Omar; I would go eventually, and I felt like maybe I should let them “work it out”, but then I realized that Omar loved that I was coming to aid of his younger brother the way he would.

Why is it that writing about the things that could happen anywhere, so to speak, feels most right?

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