Moroccan doughnuts

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Sunday October 14, 2007
Eid Said. We have just emerged from a day of eating our way through the Eid Said celebrations. Yesterday was the last day of Ramadan, so last night’s sleep was uninterrupted by a call for the midnight meal. Instead we were left to sleep until a knock came at our door to announce breakfast. It was the first of four meals that we sat down to today, and set the tone appropriately for a day of doing nothing much other than eating Moroccan doughnuts, disks of round bread with olive oil, peanut butter sweets and cous cous soup. Honestly little else was accomplished today. At some point we dressed up in our finest Indian salwaar tops and made our way down to the sitting rooms, where we sat with the guests who were paying Eid visits: women at one table, men at the other. Soccer games and Al Jazeera cultural programs played on the television while we learned card tricks, played cribbage, and tried to keep various babies from crying or eating small objects. Everything was comfortable. Even though Tahara (the family matriarch) speaks only Berber and Arabic we managed to communicate efficiently today, through translators and smiles. An old matronly neighbor sat next to me at the pre-dinner meal, poking me in the hip and sternly urging me to eat more as she piled pieces of harsha in front of me. “Cul. Cul.” Eat. Eat. Earlier in the evening I had been sitting in the bread/laundry room with Nazua, learning how to make harsha: a dough of corn meal, olive oil and salt patted onto an industrial sized skillet so that it is about an inch thick and larger than a record. When I asked her if I could take pictures of her as she presided over the harsha in the smoky room she told me to wait. She put on her head scarf and told me she was ready. I wish I could have asked her whether that decision was for religious or aesthetic reasons—does she wear it because she thinks she should or because she likes the way it looks?
Nazua has promised to teach me how to make harsha and her carrot salad. Though she is 25, she is also married and the mother of a year and a half old, so our experiences set some distance between us. After only two days, however, I feel an incredible ease with her and this family—an ease facilitated, I believe, by small things like eating with our hands from the same plates, using one water glass for a whole table of people, or lounging for hours on cushions in a room full of cousins, aunts and babies who call everyone and anyone “mama.” Though I have no desire to have six children, this is the kind of household I want to run some day. One where somebody is always watching the children, and someone else is running around the courtyard with a soccer ball. One where men kiss babies all the time, just because they want to. And women break into singing and clapping for no apparent reason at all. One where three couples with three children sleep in the master bedroom and the grandparents of the family sleep on the cushions in the high-ceilinged salon to make room for all the guests. And one where there are so many guests already that two more uncles, a distant cousin and a few foreigners living upstairs only makes the house that much livelier.

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Comments

[Feekus]

keep 'em coming
Loving the entries thus far. getting a good taste of what its like over there, which I could never had imagined! More pictures! Miss you!

[anonymous]

Ill be living upstairs with my family and we all lounge in the common area teaching our babies how to dance and trade vintage jewelry while our husbands play music.

[court]

the comment above is from me p.s.