Ever Failed at 21

On Friday night, we (our friend, Sheffia, who works at the L’Hotel Majestic, which we stayed at our first week; Michael, from Minnesota; Leungo, from Botswana and Williams college; Jude, who writes for al-Jazeera and is from the south of England; and Sheffia’s two friends, Jawad and Sufyan, the former the owner of the “beach house” for which we were destined) went to Mohammedia, a small city just next door to Rabat, which is known as “the city of flowers and sports”. If this sounds like a traditional romantic nickname for a charming suburban hamlet, it isn’t. It’s the typically cynical nickname given to a depraved exurban ghost town, which is brilliant in a particularly Moroccan way for using one phrase to say two things: to those not in the know, that this is a charming romantic hamlet; to those that are, that it is a typically depraved cynical ghost town populated by a bipolar smattering of those not in the know and those that are but stopped caring. Like so many Moroccan cities, Mohammedia (renamed for the king just after independence) has dedicated itself to tourism; its uniqueness is in its utter failure, which has created a shell of a city that is weirdly moving for its incompleteness.

If time and space are economized in the United States, they are viewed with a resentful amusement in Morocco. For example, going from A to B in Morocco is never a straight line; you really do get the sense that it could be (a straight line), but that whichever Moroccan is leading you is at once unaware that there is a faster, better way and very much aware but nonetheless interested in such a way. I’m not sure yet why this is. To get to Mohammedia from Rabat, we took a train; two cabs (that is, two cab rides, six people stuffed into each); a bus; and then walked about three miles. We had bought wine and whiskey for the occasion of my birthday, and the bottles petulantly clanked the whole time, announcing what felt like our infidelity to whoever was on the train, bus, or walking past us on the dirt road. I don’t think people actually paid us—or our bottles—any attention; if they judged us, it was in a particularly private way, that is, not in the I’m-going-to-stare-you-down-and-make-eye-contact-with-other-people-to-feel-good-about-myself Western way... but then really, the private way is more torturous, if only because you’re deprived of any sort of surety.

In Mohammedia, there are more dogs than people. At least, there are more visible dogs then visible people. Watching gangs of mutts romp single file through neglected fields of flowers, or a duo share a forgotten stack of bread, the fact that dogs have a civilization reminiscent, if distantly so, of human civilization seemed irrefutable. Was it the lack of human civilization that made this always-true (and simple) fact eerily true; or was it the lack of human civilization that allowed the otherwise repressed (and “civilized”) animals to naturally develop their own social order?

There are also more half-built homes than completed homes. This is the unique thing about Mohammedia’s failure: you might not be able to call it a failure, because everything seems “in the process”. On our way to Jawad’s “beach house”, we passed scores of wooden skeletons of homes; or filled-in homes half-painted; or plots of land marked by freshly painted signs announcing their imminent development; or finished nice-looking homes announcing their readiness for people. Settlers that have not yet set foot in Mohammedia nonetheless own the place by marking their imminent arrival. Objectively, this has got to be called “progress”; but you just can’t call it that. Mohammedia is an irreligious post-apocalypse; that is, the promise of something after is clearly symbolic.

That Friday night, in Jawad’s one-story empty house, which is literally off the beaten track, hidden by weeds, painted a bright blue and clean by virtue of the merest form of living, we sat around on cushions in the Moroccan living room (this, too, seems so Moroccan, in the same way that the trashy pool hall will serve you mint tea on a silver platter in a beautiful classic teapot: the insistence on Moroccanness, perhaps to the exclusion of necessities) and quietly celebrated my birthday. Two of the three Moroccans didn’t drink; the other, Jawad, who was eyeing my Jack Daniels with a really genuine curiosity, made a motion to me halfway through that he wanted to try it, loudly cringed upon doing so, but bravely and steadily continued to drink throughout the night, clearly proving it to himself. Sheffia and Sufyan rolled several hash joints and ate lots of “happy cake”, which is what you think it is.

Moroccan life, at least as little as I have experienced it so far, is consistently divided in twos. You wipe your ass with your right hand; you eat with your left. Even with the advent of Western plumbing, this dichotomy survives as a cultural rule. It goes further than this, though. The dichotomization of everything creates a very banal but nonetheless unsettling schizophrenia in so many ways. This is no more than true than in the example of drug and alcohol usage. Moroccans do not drink; those non-Muslims who visit Morocco do. But Moroccans do drink, and when you trek to the supermarket on the outskirts of Rabat and follow the frathouse smell downstairs to “the cave”, you’ll find more condensed energy in the hordes of men lined up with cases of beer than virtually anywhere else in Moroccan society. Even Sheffia, who is at once a pious, hospitable, excessively good friend and an ignorant young 22 year-old who told Michael he would go to hell for being gay, put two plastic cups in my face at one point during the night, asking for both whiskey and wine. I poured; he left them filled on the table. What had he been thinking? He talks about the happy cakes he eats on a daily basis like they are the most natural of indulgences; they are for enjoying yourself, which (implicitly) is sanctified by Allah, or at least some higher authority; and they are, he says grinningly, “good for you” if you don’t partake in any other sins. This, along with the deceptive confidence with which Moroccans arbitrarily reject and accept habits, may be the worser consequence of their pathological dichotomization of things: Moroccans, I think, like to play dumb, at least with Westerners. The ones who know English, I’m realizing, manipulate your expectation that they don’t by pretending not to understand anything you’re saying while in response forming perfect sentences; they use your own preformed expectations of them to pretend that they really think that hash is harmless, or more importantly allowed, perhaps to further their own delusion. I feel tested a lot—mostly with regards to whether I will call a Moroccan out on his own feigned confidence in the categories he knows he himself, and no else, is dividing life into.

On our way to the beach the next morning, we were passed by several men riding donkeys moving that much faster than we were walking; two Parisian joggers; a running flock of human-less sheep; and, mom, a red jeep. A man on a bike with two halves of one shark sticking out of the basket on the back of his bike rode by us twice. The beach, which was the sort of beach with more rock than sand, was ours. It was my birthday, and I put my sack down on the beach, covered myself in my Puma jacket, dug my feet into the sand, and read William James until the sun made me fall asleep. I woke up an hour or two later because Sheffia had put a crab on my chest. Moroccans really don’t respect your sleep that often. That morning, Sheffia made Moroccan tea, and we ate 6 loaves of bread and lots of laughing cow cheese. We agreed to leave Mohammedia, which is theoretically 45 minutes from Rabat, at 2 pm, and got home at 5 pm.

My host mother bought me a souvenir du Maroc keychain for my birthday. My 16 year-old brother, who I thought was 18, took me to a billiard hall where they show Spanish soccer on at least six screens, serve strong hookah, and sick sexily scowling waitressed on you who sing and shake to European techno as they replace your coals. It seems to be a, if not the, university hangout, and we drank mint tea and smoked apple hookah and played several seriously competitive wordless games of pool. We won twice, or rather Abbas did, but no way do you celebrate here: not even a high five when you sink the eight ball. Maybe a surreptitious holding of hands beneath the table. There are other ways of boasting in Morocco; in fact, the less you say, and the more polite you are to your opponent, the crueler your superiority to him seems to be.

I really liked--like Abbas’ two friends, both my age, studying advanced physics and computers, respectively, who we hung out with at the billiard. Birthdays are not worth stopping for in Morocco; they say, literally, “happy year”, and move on. When I mentioned I was 21, Mahmoud said, me too, and turned away—he only turned back and said “congratulations” on second thought, because he was smart enough to realize that was probably something like what they did where I was from. When we left the billiard hall, the four of us walked the streets of Rabat, which walking the streets of Rabat is an activity in itself. I think walking the streets is an activity in itself in New York, too, but here the anxiety about doing something else, or “better”, is absent. What I loved most about walking with my brother and our two friends was the eating along the long way home. First, Mahmoud disappeared, only to reappear minutes later with four cones of salted chickpeas; then, Abbas disappeared, reappearing minutes later with four small pieces of Chocolate. I tried it, but when I was trying to casually hold back and disappear, Abbas, with a shine in his eye that was either knowing or loving, asked me where (I thought) I was going.

---

---