I initially struggled with some self-inflicted pressure to find a place in the medina. As a certain academic adviser once pointed out, "If you're going to live in Fes and in the Ville Nouvelle, you might as well live in Rabat -- same idea but cooler." The insinuated point being: the medina is what's cool about Fes. And it is. It's really, really cool.
Built not long after the Arabs swept across North Africa and up into the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal) in the early 700s, the medina expands over some 2500 acres and currently houses around 150,000 residents, as well as a plethora of pro
duce stands, restaurants, workshops and shops. It can be divided into almost 200 "neighborhoods" (distinguishable only to the people who live there), each of which contains at minimum one of the following: a school, a mosque, a public bath, a public fountain and -- my personal favorite -- a public oven. Every family brings their dough to the baker, and it's his job to keep track of all of their trays. Used to be, he also served as the local matchmaker, since he had so much contact with everyone in the neighborhood.What the medina essentially feels like to me, a visitor, is a giant labyrinth. Easy to get lost, difficult to understand. Perhaps as some small step toward remedying this overwhelming-ness, we (the Fulbrighters) heard two lectures on the old city this past week. The first came from a Moroccan feminist, whose aim was to shed light on the nature of the architecture of the medina by examining it through the lens of gender roles. She began with two main points: 1) that patriarchy in the Islamic world is space-based, grounded in the establishment of spatial barriers between the sexes (via the headscarf, for example), and 2) that because the construction of Fes took place so soon after the Arab conquest of North Africa, the medina had to accomodate the worldviews of both the Islamic Arabs and the indigeneous, tribalistic Berber population. As it turns out, for both these latter two groups, protecting their women was of the utmost importance. Muslim law prevents a woman from inheriting and Berber culture places a heavy emphasis on purity of bloodlines; therefore, it was crucial to keep Fassi women hidden away so as to limit their exposure to unsuitable men and the chances of them having babies by them.
What these mindsets meant for the architure of the medina were, on the one hand, big, lavishly decorated, public, male spaces, like mosques and ras dderbs (central congregating places whose name derives from the word for head, insinuating that men are at the head of the community and are the possessors of wisdom), and on the other hand, the "veiling" of private spaces like the home.
Medina houses are typically quite large and very beautiful, featuring all kinds of beautiful wood and tile work, but you would never know this from the outside. Their exteriors are drab, their doors small and simple. No windows face outward onto the street. Instead, there are small holes that allow women to look out but prevent anyone from looking inside.
The streets of the medina, too, contributed to the concealment of women, privileging circularity over linearity in an effort to limit the ability of strange eyes to gaze straight down a long thoroughfare and check out the womenfolk walking along it. Our speaker even went so far as to claim that the medina doesn't even really have streets, in the modern sense of the word; the corridors are so twisting and, in some places, narrow, it seems silly to put them in the same category. Like I said: labyrintine, impenetrable.
Mysterious, according to our second speaker. His talk was called "The Story of Fes" and basically consisted of an ebullient outlining of various representations of the medina that scholars have created over the centuries -- Fes as a narrative, as a text, as a letter. No lies here: I was incredibly sleepy that afternoon, and the only thing I remember thinking during the lecture was how nauseated my brother would be at all the humanities mumbo-jumbo ("Fes as a letter? A letter? What does that even mean? I bet even he doesn't know what that means"). His overall point, however -- I think -- was simply to emphasize that mysteriousness, that captivating spell that the city and its aura of sacredness has cast on people over the course of its long existence.
Apparently the sacredness is gone now. Fading, at least. As an English teacher I met here said, it used to be that the medina was commercial without being commercialized but that between colonization and the onslaught of tourism, that distinction is growing fainter. People have figured out the tourism game. Faux guides abound -- more than happy to guide you through back alleys and into their friends' spice, medicine or leather shop. Restaurantiers pounce on you with menus the second you're within their two-meter orbit, and shopkeepers wave their wares enticingly from doorways. What's intolerable for me, though, is the attention I attract as a foreign woman. Every man within eyeshot seems to think that it's his business to call out to me: "ca va?" "bonjour!" "gazelle!" "very nice..." This phenomenon is complex and not something I understand well enough to want to delve into it right now. My point at the moment is simply that, all coolness aside, the medina had to be crossed off of my potential places to live list.
The other Fulbrighters (minus one) and I in an old madrasa in the medina.
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