“Where are you from?’ It’s a question that in some contexts can sound like a challenge. As if what they’re really asking is, “What the hell are you doing here?”
But on the streets of Tangier’s medina, it really is about where you’re from. The query comes from a face bright with curiosity.
“Mars,” you want to say, but you say “South Africa.” Your questioner’s eyes tighten with uncertainty. So you try again: “Afrique du Sud.” And still again: “Janub ’Afriqia.”
By now, you’ve used up most of your French and Arabic, and you have no Darija, the Moroccan Arabic vernacular. You also don’t have Tarifit, Tashelhiyt or Tamazight, the major languages spoken by Amazigh people, whom the colonists called Berbers.
Their lexicons took shape while many of their speakers were nomadic. Consequently, the Amazigh have no linguistic concept of national borders. This philosophy isn’t only ancient. Here’s John Lennon in 1971: “Imagine there’s no countries ...”
The Amazigh have never imagined countries. They’ve lived for aeons in what others call Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Canary Islands.
Telling an Amazigh where you’re from takes more than arbitrary lines on a map. They describe their origins. They don’t label them. “The place south of the Orange and Limpopo rivers, between the Atlantic and Indian oceans” might cut it. But that’s a long way to say South Africa.
The argument against borders is unimpeachable. Amazigh translates as “free people”. You are not free if someone is able to demand your vote, your taxes and your blood when the shooting starts.
None of us would think of leaving home for another country without a passport, but the modern version wasn’t part of our lives until 1920 — when nation states exploited the aftermath of World War 1 to impose another layer of themselves on us in the shape of this document.
You could have an illuminating discussion with an Amazigh on the subject. If only you could talk to them. Never mind. The face you’re looking at suddenly clears: “Ah! South Africa! Welcome! We are Maroc! We are the front door to Africa!”
Does that make South Africa the back door?
You don’t have enough shared language to be sure your joke won’t be taken as an insult, so you don’t make it. You smile, accept the good wishes with a pat of your hand to your heart and a slight tilt of your head, and move on.
CATS AND CAKES
You are, of course, lost in the medina. Your phone can guide you only so far into an apparent anarchy of lanes that might have been inhabited as many as 12,000 years ago. But you have the time and inclination to play the psychogeographer — wandering without direction, dreamily mislaying the self. Where am I from? Can’t quite remember. Where am I? Dunno. Don’t really care ...
You are never far from a carpet or leather goods shop, a bakery or patisserie with their accompanying clowders of cats.
At a patisserie, you choose what you want from a glass case festooned on the inside with bees in search of sweetness. You hold out a handful of coins. The woman behind the counter picks out the required amount and gives you the change. Do buy meloui (also known as msemen): small layered semolina pancakes drenched in butter and honey
They are as habit-forming as the hashish that drew William S Burroughs and the Beatles, among many cultural colossi, to Tangier. That and the ease of finding transactional sex.
From 1954 to 1956, Burroughs confined himself to room No 9 of the Hotel El Muniria to write “Naked Lunch” between bouts of drug-fuelled debauchery. Burroughs claimed that, during this febrile time, he rarely took a bath or removed his clothes “except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction”.
DOWN TO THE WATER
You remove some of your clothes. On the beach. There are many shirtless men in the water, but all the women are covered from neck to wrist to calf. It’s alright for you, a man, but your female partner in her one-piece demurs. She has worn a kaftan over her costume, and there’s no way she’s swimming in that.
You return two days later, your partner armed — legged? — with a pair of shorts over her swimsuit. As you emerge from your first dip, three of the world’s whitest women arrive, strip to their bikinis, dip their toes in the water, decide it’s too cold and return to their towels.
One of them plops onto her stomach; the other two lounge on their backs. Nobody blinks, much less tells them to get dressed.
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
Being treated impolitely in any way in Morocco seems impossible. Complete strangers show each other a level of kindness unheard of elsewhere. On the platform in Tangier, on your way to Fez, a man walking past sees you steel yourself, a heavy suitcase in each hand, as you contemplate a looming flight of stairs. He stops to gesture you to a route to the same destination that doesn’t involve stairs.
Once you’re on the train, you look up from wrestling your bags out of the way and see a queue of people waiting. There is no shoving or complaining. There is only patience.
On some trains, bigger luggage is left near the door of the carriage. A man can see you’re nervous about not being able to see your stuff from your seat.
He tells you, in his smattering of English, not to worry; he will watch your bags. You’re waiting for him to name his fee. Halfway into the three-hour journey, as the train approaches a station, he pops up to say, “Monsieur. Pardon. I leave now. Your things safe.”
You’re still struck by him apologising for daring to disembark, and wondering how much you might have to pay him, when he hops off the still slowing train and strides along the platform. Your luggage, just like he said, is exactly where you left it.
The contrast with London, where people step through you to grab the seat on the Underground you were about to sit in, is palpable. It’s also infectious. Soon you are treating people with as much respect as they do you, regardless of where they’re from.
“Where are you from?”
This time your answer sparks enthusiasm from your questioner, who yells, “Manilla!” You look puzzled. So do his companions, who whisper at him urgently. “Pardon,” he says, and tries again: “Mandela!”
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THE CALL TO PRAYER
Fez is more conservative and traditional than Tangier. “The people there are very disciplined,” someone says. The city has more than 300 mosques. Heard in splendid isolation, the call to prayer is a beautiful reinforcement of the best of what it means to be human. But 300 muezzins doing so en masse, all at slightly staggered starting times, deploying different pitches and intonations, sounds like the start of an F1 race. You can’t help hearing Murray Walker: “And away they go ...”
On to Oujda, a provincial backwater in the northeast — basically, it’s Bloem without booze. In the handful of hotel bars where you can get a drink, the gin isn’t often in the same room as the tonic. But the people are as empathetic as everywhere else.
In Casablanca, a vast industrial sprawl that could easily be in southern Europe, Sam is still playing As Time Goes By on the piano at Rick’s Café. But he’s actually called Issam Chabaa. Rick’s opened in 2004 — 61 years after the movie, shot entirely in California, was released. The “letters of transit” central to Casablanca’s plot never existed.
At least, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, at Rick’s the tonic is close to the bartender’s hand.
