The train ride to get there took about six hours and was a vivid reminder of the stark contrast between the large cities of Morocco and the rest of the countryside. Seeing the sometimes-fertile but mainly scorched landscape, the rainbows of plastic bags strewn everywhere and the crumbling concrete buildings, it occurred to me how different my experience here would probably be were I a Peace Corps volunteer instead of a Fulbrighter. The pensión in which we stayed in Tangier was far from glamorous -- squat toilets, bare walls, no hot water -- but we were certainly not roughing it. Basically all the comforts to which we are accustomed are within reach within these big cities, if only we're willing to shell out for them.
Arriving in Tangier felt refreshing, not only because it meant stretching out after a long train ride but also due to the breeze coming off the Mediterranean Sea and the currents of Spanish flowing around us. Spain is right across the Strait of Gibralter from Morocco, visible from the waterfront, and the influence of this European neighbor manifests itself in various ways, from architecture to cuisine to language. Finally, I didn't have to rely on the other Fulbrighters to communicate with locals.
We walked around a bit that first night but did most of our medina explorations the next day, under blue skies and a late summer sun. Tangier is really a great city. Although its heyday was several decades ago and it since became known for grime and crime and seediness, this prior international zone has apparently undergone major improvements since the 1999 ascension to the throne of Mohammed VI, the current king and a big fan of Tangier. In fact, one of the Fulbrighters from last year is currently finishing up a project on all the new business and industrial ventures that have been taking place there. So it could be none too bad of a place to live once February rolls around and it's time for me to switch gears from language into research.
Anyway, in the course of our medina wanderings, we stumbled across a little structure in the kasbah, furnished inside with rugs and tea holders and all kinds of musical instruments -- a sort of café slash improvisation room run by a white-haired and pleasant man in a red fez. This discovery was all the more fortunate, as we already had music slated as a focus of the weekend: two of the Fulbrighters are conducting music-centered projects, and one, Rod, hoped to hunt down a leading figure in the gnawa (ga-now-ah) scene, whom he knew to hold jam sessions every night in Tangier. The morning, then, was a sort of unanticipated tune-up.
After a furtive lunch in the pensión lobby (still Ramadan, still no public ingestion), we spent some time at the waterfront, populated mainly by boys and men strolling around or playing soccer. Evening brought a tajine dinner and then a walk to the petit socco (small market) to ask around for "Abdellah" -- Abdellah Boulkhair El Gourd, this big-time gnawa musician. A café owner recognized the name, plunked us down for some tea and told us someone would arrive shortly to pick us up. Sure enough, fifteen minutes went by and a man in a yellow t-shirt appeared to lead us to -- gets this -- a door some twenty steps away from our pensión. Abdellah was there -- a small man with dark, dark skin and a wispy white beard -- smoking up with some friends, music done for the night. His welcome was warm: he showed us around the lobby of his dimly-lit, centuries-old medina house, where photos, posters and other pariphernalia cover the walls. Two display the faces of Randy Weston and Johnny Copeland, famous U.S. jazz musicians with whom Abdellah collaborated back in the late sixties and seventies.As he explained, the partnership was a wholly natural one, given the sympathetic histories of jazz and gnawa: both arose out of the suffering of black slaves. For gnawa this formational period was the early 1700s, when the great Moroccan sultan Moulay Ismail had brought tens of thousands of sub-Saharan men to his capital in Meknes to serve as his elite "Black Guard." The music relates to Islam, with each song in the 240-song repetoire corresponding to a djinn, or spirit, and Abdellah's description of it very much centered on the creation of a relationship between instruments, bodies and God.
We said good-bye after a bit, with talk of returning the next night, and retired to the pensión roof for hookah and conversation. Rod told us about his Jewish Iranian parents, his mother's communist days and the death threats still received by his satirist father. A college-aged girl, Shukri, also studying in Fes, shared what it was like to be a Somalian refugee -- to have had the war there break out on her very first day of kindergarten and to have fled her town that same afternoon and her country shortly thereafter. All through the weekend, stories emerged: Cath growing up in the Philippines, Anissa with an Algerian father and Becca with a Brazilian mother, Kim all over the place and often not with her Thai mother. It was inspiring and humbling and invigorating to listen to each of them. I'm not sure yet where my narrative fits in -- or even quite what it is -- but that will come.
Monday: Eid mubarak! Happy Eid -- Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the final breaking of the Ramadan fast. At last, eating and drinking in public. A couple of us girls celebrated with a café breakfast and morning cigarettes. Afterward, we wandered the Ville Nouvelle and eventually found lunch at a Lebanese restaurant. I invited a young foreigner sitting alone to join us; it turned out he's Italian-born, a civil engineer working for a company based in Brussels and Dubai and contracted by the Moroccan king to build a new industrial port between Tangier and Tetouan on the Mediterranean coast. Another interesting story and a now a new friend up north.
In the evening, we made our way back to Dar Gnawa and had a chance not only to continue asking questions of Abdellah and his colleagues but also to bask in his prowess on the oud (a three-stringed instrument), as accompanied by several drummers, singers and lots of clapping. Pretty unbelievable.
And now we're back. To a new Fes! says Cath, referring to the end of Ramadan hours and habits. Also, just back, to Fes, which is still here, having continued its life even while we were away. Leaving a place and then returning to it is the best way of affirming its realness, I think -- of giving it a shape and solidity now defined more precisely by its contrast to the place you just visited. We'll be seeing, then, what a Tangerine-tinted Fes looks like.
I hope, at least, they were Gauloises. Dad
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