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Africa » Morocco
February 26th 2009
Published: February 26th 2009
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I leave Morocco in a way that I cannot remember ever having left a place I’ve been: with no immediate desire to return.
This has little to do with the country itself; it is entirely due to the nature of my experience there. I wandered through bazaars filled with drummers and snake charmers, henna artists and acrobatic dancers. I was sheltered, fed, and entertained, I was given fresh bread and Moroccan mint tea by an old woman in a Berber village, I perused shops stuffed with traditional crafts, carvings, and tapestries. I greeted and thanked people in French and Arabic, and I stood humbly in the world’s third largest mosque. Yet the experience was diluted; the visit lacked that which I crave: honest, genuine exchange between myself and another human being.
Much of this was the unfortunate though arguably inevitable byproduct of traveling as a large group on a guided tour. A genuine experience is difficult to create when following you through the back alleys of a marketplace are 40 Americans sporting Semester At Sea sweatshirts and Nikon SLRs, reducing captured Moroccan faces to liquid crystal images faster than you can say ‘flash.’
We docked in Casablanca on the first day, piled into a sputtering bus, and drove several hours to our first destination, the vibrant city of Marrakech. I was more or less shaken to the core within my first 10 minutes on the street. As we followed our guide through the city, our group trooped blindly past an apparently homeless woman sitting slumped on the ground, and the two of us momentarily made eye contact. She was fully covered head to toe except for a tiny slit through which her eyes burned into mine. She was holding an infant child on her lap and she reached out her hand, speaking in a tongue that was strange and unfamiliar to me. In that moment, I was utterly frozen. Questions whipped through my mind like a dozen falcons slamming through a windowpane one after another and plummeting into an inexplicable heap of glass shards and bloody feathers and lifeless avian bodies. Childishly simplistic questions; why are you down there? Why are you dressed like that? Who are you? Is your baby hungry? What are you saying to me? Why are we all just walking past you? What am I supposed to do? And we walked on. Through the bazaar, past the entertainers and artists, through the markets and fruit stalls, my childish eyes wandered to the faces around me. One man with a monkey on his left arm held out his right hand to me as I walked by him, and I reached out to shake his hand. He abruptly grabbed my hand and in one motion turned his shoulder and tossed the monkey onto my arm. I jerked away only to see another of our group struggling to free her arm from the grip of a large woman roughly applying henna to the back of her hand and then immediately demanding money.
As I walked through that square, what hit me more than anything else was the unmistakable message that I DO NOT BELONG HERE. Why did that bother me so much? And it wasn’t a feeling compelling me to escape the situation, like get out of here and go home; it was a powerful desire to understand. I didn’t want to accept that I was an outsider and leave; I wanted not to be an outsider.
Later that evening we attended an exceptionally touristy performance involving a variety of horses, loud guns, and performers who, through plastic smiles, appeared as though they contemplated seriously and frequently the notion of covertly setting aflame the entire establishment. The next day, our guide (who, let’s just say, was of questionable scrupulousness), took us to several venues that seemed designed to pick our pockets while making us believe we had engaged in an act of clever investing. We visited a “traditional pharmacy,” where a supposed chemist donned a white gown and delivered a well-practiced sales pitch about a variety of products designed to exfoliate, heal, brighten, smoothen, freshen, and otherwise generally soothe our epidermic ailments. He assured us that the items were available exclusively through his venue (cash please), and to my astonishment, my fellow students actually lined up to buy bottles and jars of strange-smelling liquids and creams. Of course, five minutes after departing, laden with bags of pharmaceutical claptrap, we discovered identical products lining the shelves of more or less every shop we passed.
Despite my disappointment in the tour, I was graced with beautiful Moroccan moments as well. On the last day, I ventured out with only several other people. We were caught in the wind and rain as we searched for a taxi to take us to the shelter of downtown Casablanca, and a bus pulled up. The driver told us to hop on, and he picked up a handful of others as we drove through the port. He overheard us talking about visiting the mosque, and he decided to drive us all the way there. When someone tried to press a fistful of Dirhams into his hand, he refused to take the money. And the inside of the mosque was strikingly beautiful—so stunning, in fact, that I was able to momentarily forget the fact that we were paraded through the holy place on a guided sightseeing tour. One of the highlights of the entire trip was an event orchestrated through SAS, titled “Dinner With A Moroccan Family.” The Jbaras treated us with incredible hospitality as they invited several other students and myself into their beautiful home. They fed us an absolutely delicious meal of traditional soup, couscous, meat, vegetables, a tasty pastry known as pastia, chocolates, a delectable platter of cookies, and plenty of Moroccan wine. Interestingly, though Mr. and Mrs. Jbara spoke only French and Arabic, we were somehow able to communicate without much difficulty. Their son, Omar (who also spoke French and Arabic, as well as English and Spanish), translated effortlessly whenever our hand gestures and stumbling phrases proved insufficient. After the meal we lounged around chatting and playing guitar hero for hours before Mr. Jbara drove us back to the ship.
My final hours in Morocco were spent walking through the marketplace in Casablanca. The experience was certainly mellower than that of Marrakech, but I still carried heavily the distinct feeling of being an outsider. While standing in line at a grocery store, I felt what I thought was someone snatching my wallet out of my back pocket. I instinctively whirled around and grabbed the person, then realized somewhat ashamedly that I was clutching the arm of a frightened woman whose umbrella had accidentally snagged my pocket as she passed. While asking for directions back to the pier, people tried patiently to explain to me first in French and then in Arabic and I responded each time I could only speak English. I felt like I had a long way to go and a lot to learn before I could hope to understand anything at all.

I leave morocco ultimately dissatisfied not because of the extensive culture shock I experienced, but because I feel I did not make any significant progress towards attaining a deeper level of understanding. At first it was tempting to blame this on the nature of the trip itself, but though the itinerary was not necessarily conducive to growth or understanding, it was ultimately my own shortcoming for not making it happen. Even so, my time in Morocco led to an extensive period of reflection, and I ultimately extracted an array of invaluable lessons.
My lack of a deeper understanding of the culture bothers me. And it appeared that my inability to create that genuine exchange I was seeking was in no way an isolated experience; I couldn’t understand how anyone in that setting could have done so. Throughout the entire visit, many things that had the potential to be fantastically beautiful and inspiring were instead tainted by the influence of globalization and commercial exploitation. Essentially, millions of people are drawn to this location (and many others), for some reason of fascination or another. But how can we obtain an accurate depiction of the area when we are accompanied by so many other foreigners? How can a country cater to the genuine curiosity of “the masses” without exploiting the purity of the place by creating “tourist attractions” and “guided tours” and generally succumbing to the potentially financially rewarding pressure of commercialization? As part of “the masses,” it is impossible to obtain any form of cultural understanding. This dichotomy creates a fundamental dilemma. As attractions pop up, tourists are naturally drawn to them. As countries become more westernized in order to respond to the preferences of foreigners, we elect to stay in the more luxurious hotels and eat at fancier restaurants that, by their nature, fundamentally prevent us from obtaining a genuine experience within the region. If I want to go to Morocco, I should eat what the people eat, sleep where the people sleep, and generally experience life in the way that the majority of people there do. I should be expected to pay for my tea in Moroccan Dirhams, not be given the option to use Euros or US Dollars. Otherwise, I must seriously consider my intentions of traveling to this region. If I make no effort to respect local customs or to learn even bits of the local language, how can I justify my intrusive visit? It’s easy to imagine how a stream of arrogant travelers possessing ignorance and lacking humility has led to some level of worldwide anti-American sentiment. Were you not a direct recipient of the financial benefits of the tourism industry, how would you feel if people from a comparatively affluent nation came to your home and treated it as if it were another sight-seeing stop?
And for those deeply seeking truth, it is becoming more and more difficult as globalization progresses. We now have to reach farther and farther to find those pure, unadulterated locations. Discussing my experience with my peers, it seems that entering the city of Casablanca or Marrakech is no longer sufficient; now we have to probe deep into places such as the Berber villages nestled in the High Atlas Mountains, for example, to find people and places that have not been incorrigibly corrupted by the influences of westernization and tourism.
This ultimately leads to the thorny philosophical question of whether or not seekers even have any right to engage in this search. By visiting these remote areas, am I further contributing to the dilution and destruction of a precious culture, or am I helping to preserve that culture by genuinely desiring to learn about it? Rarely do we appreciate the tremendous fragility of these places. It is far too easy to destroy these delicate havens; in our haste to discover them, we often transform from curious and adventurous human beings into tourists who, unintentionally or otherwise, end up irreversibly damaging an area by choosing to tap into its value as an economic commodity.
As responsible travelers, we must be acutely conscious of our intentions in visiting faraway places. Is the purpose solely for entertainment and novelty? If so, perhaps the would-be traveler should consider instead a trip to a local zoo. But if a person truly desires to experience a foreign culture, to immerse him or herself honestly and respectfully, then travel can be a beautiful experience for both the journeyer and for those who receive him or her. For now, until deeper wisdom reveals otherwise, I must believe that conscious travel can help to preserve the purity of a location through honest cultural communication. Only a handful of these beautiful regions, remote and unchanged, still exist. The idea of these spots sparks in us seekers a deep longing. I believe we have no choice but to respond to that longing; to tread lightly and to journey to those wild places.

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27th February 2009

Morocco is like that :)
I lived there for 5 months last year studying, and am going back to teach English for 2 or so more years starting in the fall. I hope you go back. Morocco is a place where, people often put up a certain face in public, or to foreigners, and you are right, this is not always genuine. I think you understood much more about how they feel than you think. It takes time to gain trust of Moroccans, and to know your way around, but I only left a few months ago and I already want to go back. After travelling in many places, there is one thing that is exceptional about Morocco- their culture is SO very strong, that I think the very fundamentals will never 'disappear' to tourism. Because what is most precious to them is sheltered from tourists, because they are most kind and generous in private with those close to them, it can be hard for many to see this as brief visitors. If you want to understand, I really encourage you to go back. I was only beginning to comprehend so many things when I left. I think you're right- when you travel, sometimes you feel so out of place. Maybe the cure for this is, after this semester, you can go live somewhere, really integrate yourself in a place. In any case, keep up your courage, it seems like you have a long way to go (all the way around the world?!). :)

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