cafe hafa

steps

Overwhelmed.

After 30 minutes of walking from the snug and air-conditioned compound I am at the sea, at the place where the expanse of the Atlantic is interrupted by Mediterranean blue. This place once meant the meeting of an old life with a new one, where my heart began to break.

sea, bird

There is something about the sea, a single entity which at the same time touches the shores of my own country and, impossibly, those of the tamazirt that gave me so much. Walking here I passed a royal residence, women in wheelchairs, political graffiti: all I could think of was how much I have been given.

Overcome.

seat

Pale blue walls, sturdy green tables, plastic chairs. And old man with kind eyes offers to sell me peanuts and I quickly refuse, responding instinctually from a place of very American suspicion. I am swiftly ashamed of my abruptness and apologize, paying a few dirhams for a handful of freshly roasted peanuts. With great care the man folds them into a makeshift paper tray and places my camera on its edge, protecting it from the wind. My heart hurts.

snack

A furtive cat, a barking dog, a call to prayer. The waiter asks what I want as the wind tips an empty chair back and forth on the uneven stone; the metal tables are unmoved. All around me are signs that bend but do not break: the wind is rubbing up against the trees and seagulls ferry across the currents of the sky, over a serpentine seaside highway where the waves crash endlessly against the rocks. One day the waves will overcome this place, but by then it cannot matter any longer.

The waiter carries tea in a cast-iron sort of brace. He praises my Arabic and I demur. Today was a good day. There is a forest of mint in my glass.

Overjoyed.

scene

libya: narrative, nuance, nourishment

When you’re supposed to be a joint degree student in Arab Studies and Arabic Language & Literature it’s a little humbling when an Arab country is in the news and you find you can’t offer much (or any) insight about it. Which is basically what’s happening right now when it comes to Libya. I scoured my bookshelves for books on Libya and came up with Children of Allah, your classic American-woman-follows-husband-into-exotic-Arab-land-and-writes-about-it narrative, and The North African Kitchen, which has recipes from not only Morocco but Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya as well.

Both interesting, but not exactly the enlightening tomes I was going for.

Fortunately we live in the internet age. For some more nuanced and informed insight on what’s going on right now in Libya, check out this piece on the Libyan opposition movement and this one, which gives a little context and clarification to the information (or misinformation) out there about the “African mercenaries” allegedly fighting opposition forces there.

In the meantime, a recipe for a basbousa, a Libyan semolina and honey cake. It’s like great cornbread but sweeter and reminds me a bit of some similar semolina cakes from Morocco. This recipe is an adapted version of one from The North African Kitchen, mentioned and linked above.

mix it up

women in morocco and iraq: a few links

Just wanted to post two links to (very different) pieces I’ve written that you can read elsewhere on the web:

My response to a recent NYTimes article about what women are wearing in Iraq

A Wikipedia article I wrote as part of an initiative of the Wikimedia foundation to improve their public policy content; this one is about the relatively recently reforms to Morocco’s Family Laws (also known as the Moudawana or Personal Status Code). In many Arab states, these types of laws are the only part of the legal code that draw primarily from Islamic law, so the fact that reforms to it were passed in Morocco has of course been the subject of much discussion…

black friday brew

So instead of battling the masses at Target this morning (even though I really could use an inexpensive toaster, as my cute vintage 1970′s toaster recently went down in a cloud of smoke) I opted to sleep in and help my brother with his latest homebrew. This one should be ready in time for Christmas…in the meantime I enjoyed a bit of his latest batch, which is a delicious Irish stout that makes you think of coffee, crisp mornings, and…history lessons?

The point is, my brother is about a million times cooler than I ever will be, and I’m ok with that, as long as I’m allowed to help him make delicious beer.

Last year I spent Thanksgiving surrounded by a family of friends met abroad – it was a meal made up of dozens of traditions coming together, gathered from the markets of Barcelona and fueled by a sense of nostalgia at leaving a special place, excitement for our collective homecoming, and a heavy dose of Cava Mimosas. This Thanksgiving couldn’t look more different: I’m surrounded by close family and friends and the traditions I grew up with, nestled in a cozy rural place about as different from Barcelona as I can imagine. But the feeling is the same: a day isn’t enough to fit all the thanks I owe for what I have, but sharing a beautiful meal with loved ones is the best way I can think of to try.

what do ramadan in morocco and wine in morocco have in common?

…really not much at all, to tell the truth. Alcohol is of course forbidden in Islam, so Moroccan liquor stores (which technically are there to serve non-Muslims) close down completely during the month of fasting. However, I recently wrote a little something on both topics here (though not at the same time)!

A little shameless self-promotion: part of what’s kept me busy lately is that I’ve been writing things elsewhere. See, I’m still around! In any case, HeyMorocco.com has lots of great travel information for anyone interested in visiting Morocco (that should be everyone! Really! Go!). You can find my own contributions here, in an essay about the joy of experiencing Muslim holidays as a non-Muslim American – especially relevant right now, since Ramadan is drawing to a close this week! – and here, where I wax poetic about the Moroccan wines I came to know and love so well.

around the muslim world, 5th ed.

Paul Staniland on what the empirical evidence says about counterinsurgency, on The Monkey Cage

“Counterinsurgency is still fundamentally war, and coercion, extraction, and ethnic dominance are often integral to the exercise. It’s possible, and indeed very common, for counterinsurgents to be both “population-centric” and ruthlessly coercive (population displacement and control, torture, abductions, blackmail, assassinations, etc). This unpleasant truth should seriously temper enthusiasm for COIN: the game is frequently not worth the candle.”

Great post on disentangling the subtleties of culture, religion, and women’s rights when it comes to Saudi women and Muslim women in general

Our oil spill: not the only oil spill around, it turns out

around the muslim world, 4th ed.

Muslims and America: Internalizing the Clash of Civilizations – what do Muslims around the world think of America?

Could biomass systems be an answer to some of Afghanistan’s economic, environmental, health, even gender-related problems?

How Western journalists reported the ban on burqa: a Muslim woman’s view on powers-that-be forcing women to wear or not-wear forms of Islamic dress – and how we talk about it.

Nazi Sheikhs: who speaks for modernist Islam and what do they say?

Foamhenge: The Greatest Tourist Trap You’ve Never Seen

FOAMHENGE

Traveling northwards through Virginia on I-81, we noticed a series of billboards advertising the Virginia Natural Bridge. It rang a distant bell in my memory, but I wasn’t sure if I’d been there as a child, or if I’d just been told stories about it as a child, or if it was all a dream.

In any case, it only took us an enticing billboard and a half to realize that the Natural Bridge really was something not to be missed. For one thing, it has the distinction of being located on US Route 11 (actually, technically, it’s directly under US Route 11), otherwise known as the Robert E Lee Highway south of the Mason-Dixon line and the Molly Pitcher Highway north of the Mason-Dixon line. I find this to be nothing short of remarkable: not only did the US produce two people as different and noteworthy as Robert E Lee and Molly Pitcher; it manages, to this day, to eternalize the memory of both in a single highway. And not just any highway, but one that passes right over a natural landmark once surveyed by George Washington, owned by King George III, and bought by Thomas Jefferson.

I mean seriously. I put it to any other nation on earth to assemble such a cavalcade of personages within a single geographic reality.

But I digress: the point is, there is something even better about the road to the Virginia Natural Bridge than all that, and that is all the tourist traps one passes on the way to visit it. The greatest of these harks back to something older and greater than George Washington, Bobby Lee and Molly Pitcher put together: Stonehenge. Who knew we had a to-scale replica of the most famous stone monument of England’s Salisbury plains and a life-size model of the central joke of the funniest and greatest scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap? The fact is that we do.

And it’s made of foam.

Sadly it was closed to the public the day we drove by so all we were able to do was to stare and marvel and photograph it from afar, our jaws agape with wonder at its existence.

I think you’ll agree that the best part is the sign.

road trip by the numbers

on the road in western michigan

Days it took to travel from Charlotte, NC to Monroe, Michigan: 14

Days it took to travel from Monroe, MI to Charlotte, NC: 1

Dead deer seen on the side of the road on trip from Monroe to Charlotte: 6

Percentage of trip from Monroe to Charlotte spent on I-77: 80

Number of times the Moroccan dish chicken rafisa was made on the road trip: 4

States visited in two months of traveling: 9

Countries visited in two months of traveling: 2

Number of community theater/student productions seen: 3

Number of professional theater/music/dance productions seen: 4

Museums and galleries visited: Too many to count

Number of vineyards visited: 5

Magnitude of shock and awe and disappointment at the American people for voting Siobhan off American Idol: immeasurable (seriously, we go to Canada for a DAY and this is what happens??)

roadside glass sculpture in honor of siobhan. we will buy your records, ms. magnus!

what’s the difference between a symphony in detroit and a symphony anywhere else?

…it turns out the answer is the Ford Motor Company.

Last night I went to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform, and there was a large car in the lobby. Also a Ford representative spoke beforehand about the company’s long-time sponsorship of the symphony. Oh and the drive to the hall included a trip through an industrial complex so enormous it reminded me of an industrial Lord of the Rings landscape (like there were factory smokestacks spewing fiery fumes and stuff…it was intense).

In short, Detroit is crazy, and their symphony is crazy good.

The program started off with two pieces by Richard Strauss. The first was a Serenade for Wind Instruments, which was lovely. It was composed when Strauss was only 16 years old, so it’s among the more traditional or even conservative of his compositions – full of perfectly woven, lushly Romantic harmonies. Next was a more familiar piece, the tone poem Tod und Verklärung - Death and Transfiguration. Strauss was a student of philosophy and it shows – his best moments feel like they contain all the wisdom and brilliance of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with about a millions times the transcendence. Strauss is no easy feat for an orchestra but watching this performance was like being transported somewhere else.

The program closed with a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, the composer’s final work, complete with a full chorus and four solo vocalists. It was beautifully performed as well, though I feel like in any requiem nothing is ever quite as exciting as the “Day of Wrath” section, which happens kind of early on.

It was the first time in a long time that I’d been to a performance like this, and it was one of the most cathartic experiences I’ve had since returning from Morocco. It’s amazing to me what people can do together; amazing to see a hundred highly trained artists so highly attuned to one another, and amazing to see hundreds and hundreds of people gathering simply to hear them play. So many people crammed into one room, and all quietly focused on one thing at a time. It’s not your typical everyday American experience, and yet it happens every day in America. It was a reminder of many of the things I missed while I was abroad – parts of myself and parts of my culture – and in many ways it made me feel like last night, for the first time in a long long time, I was home.

The drive home through the rain, past that menacing industrial smokestack (which was still spouting fire), was a reminder of the things we have in common: that in a city as new and foreign and strange to me as any, in a corner of our country I am just getting to know, there are more than enough chances to celebrate humanity in profound ways. And that is a comforting thought.