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Marrakesh in a Time of
Terror
by Theresa Hunt
In a sun-lit haze of desperation, faces scatter around the market
place, struggling to fulfill an unforeseen purpose. Bells hang
from alleyway stalls, noise is everywhere, spanning a range of
languages from the sharpest German to the most rhythmic and
striking Arabic. The heat is oppressive; nonetheless heavy brocade
fabric is everywhere. Amidst the dust kicked up by road-side
beggars, donkeys, scooters, and tiny trucks are women in the most
beautiful and elusive fabrics, cascading from the tops of their
heads and reaching down past their ankles.
 Market
stalls in crowded, haphazard souks offer prayer rugs,
leather sandals, and silvery metal boxes covered in colorful
stones hauled up in trucks from Mauritania, a sign insists. I
pause among some of the stalls, picking up the little boxes and
trying to pry the lids off. My mild interest is met with a swarm
of young men, some of whom are sellers, and some of whom have been
trailing me since I entered the row of shops. Whether they’re
there to talk to me, to watch me, to get something from me or just
because they were so amused at my attempt to haggle the night
before over a silk scarf, I don’t know. I don’t mind them at all,
though, and surprise a few by asking their names. Mohammed.
Mahamoud. Sameh. Hassan. The littlest one, who couldn’t have been
more than ten, wants to know where I’m from, but guesses instead
of asks. “Canadianne? Françoise?” I pause. I am plagued by the
warnings that have been thrown at me, plagued by the memories of
the media coverage of the bombing in Casablanca, just weeks ago. I
am disturbed and haunted by the face of my own president,
muttering the phrase “Axis of Evil” over and over again. I am
brave, I take a breath.
“Je suis American,” I say. The men don’t flinch, the boy
seems indifferent. “Avez-vous un guide?” He asks, not
missing a beat. Do I have a guide? “Non,” I reply, smiling to
myself, and to them. “Je ne veux pas un guide”. I don’t
want a guide. Like a good little businessman, the boy, Sameh,
insists that I’ll need one, that it’s very difficult for tourists
to navigate the market place, and that he will keep hawkers and
beggars away from me. I explain in broken French that I prefer to
walk alone. He explains – half with words, and half with gestures
after he realizes that my French is extremely limited – that he’s
concerned for my safety, furrowing his brow and looking to the
other, older boys for support. They nod in unison, though only
Sameh talks to me.
In sweeping, overly dramatic motions, Sameh very seriously
pantomimes what he must perceive of as dangerous situations, but
then gives up halfway through when he sees I’m not going to change
my mind. Older men in a stall behind him selling sacks of grain
laugh at his seriousness, or perhaps at his warnings of danger
lurking in every corner. Feeling somewhat odd at being the center
of attention and having drawn a crowd, I begin to step away.
Worried that he’s lost an opportunity to make a few Dirham,
Sameh’s warnings start again, coming more quickly and furiously
now. He calls after me, he jumps and waves his hands wildly,
seeming to say that great boulders will fall from the sky and fire
breathing dragons will hunt me down if I do not hire him for the
afternoon. The old men behind him roar with laughter, and I can’t
help smiling myself. I tell him “Bon Chance,” good luck with the
other tourists, and say good bye. I walk backwards as I say this,
wanting as much to keep moving as I want to stay and figure Sameh
out. There’s a tenderness in his face, a hopeful stubbornness that
attracts some part of me – the part of me that wants to believe so
desperately that for all Marrakesh can be, it’s far from the
nucleus of some imagined evil.
 Hours
later, I sip mint tea from a clear and smudged glass. I lean back
in an unstable chair and stare at the broken mosaic that lines the
floor of a café I stumbled across on my way back to the hostel. I
imagine the existential thoughts filling everyone's head around me
and wonder why I'm not having them. Everyone seems to have them,
from the hawkers to the thieves, from the backpackers to the
weavers. Their purpose is bigger than me, bigger than what I could
ever understand. Life is different here, a complex maze of
survival instincts that reflect the difficulties in navigating the
medina. The meditative gazes of the Moroccans I’ve met, the
genuine curiosity and thoughtfulness they so openly present
overwhelms me with warmth, making me feel as if I belong, as if
it’s possible that if I stay here long enough I will understand
something greater than myself.
Understanding myself, understanding others, understanding
something is what I came to Marrakesh in search of. I look at the
faces around me. Dark, shining, weary, age-tracked faces; young,
fresh, optimistic and hopeful faces. Workers, gypsies, children
covered in dust, begging for a look inside my pack, laughing at my
every move fall in step with men in linen business suits or police
in stiff, nearly spotless uniforms who seem oblivious to me as I
pass.
Were these the people I was warned about before I left home? Were
these the people who were supposed to spit on me as I passed,
kidnap me, an American traveling alone, in the interest of making
a political statement about the war or fulfilling some jihad?
These young women, these old men, these impish children – were
they the ones who were going to bomb the bus I would climb aboard
in a few days, hoping eventually to get to Fez?
I was warned to stay out of Morocco, told by nearly everyone that
as an American woman, I’d only be looking for trouble if I went.
“There’s a war going on,” I heard again and again, “and any
Islamic nation won’t be a safe place for an American, particularly
a female American.”
I wasn’t past fear – I was cautious and let these warnings settle
into the forefront of my consciousness when I first arrived in
Marrakesh. The chaos, the noise, the aggression of market peddlers
seemed overwhelming. I was glad when I was back alone in the
hostle, behind the locked door of the private room I indulged in
getting for the night.
But the more I venture out, the more I force myself to interact,
the more I can distance myself from all the conditioning I’d
experienced back home. It gets easier and easier to ignore the
echoing chorus of voices who’d insisted that any and every Islamic
person I met would want to harm me. I begin to understand
Marrakesh’s market place as alive and thriving, as a living,
breathing, reactionary organism in its own right. After some time
walking the same worn paths through the center of the city, around
the market place and past the great, crumbling walls that encase
the medina, no one seems to notice me. If they do, it is only to
smile or try to sell me something different than what they’d been
selling the day before. Insistent, they are, violent, they are
not.
I
remain at the café for hours, still sipping slowly from the same
glass before the owner, dressed in a long, white and blue striped
kaftan insists that he refill my glass from a fresh pot. I accept
with a nod and a smile. I try to write, try to read, but mostly
wind up staring at all the life passing before me. Two people talk
to me, first a woman, a university student, who through twists and
turns in our conversation, eventually winds up asking me how it is
we can bear to keep animals on a leash in the United States. They
belong roaming free, she insists to me, they are for everyone to
take care of. They do not “belong” to anyone. I agree with this
and she smiles. She must leave at dusk, so she wishes me well in
my travels and scribbles down the name and address of an
Australian friend she has living in Fez, where I’ve told her I’m
headed next.
 Minutes
later, I meet a man, Saiid, who works as a musician, playing in a
restaurant around the corner for tourists. He is on a break, and
has stopped in to get
a snack. He tells me about his job, rolling his eyes slightly as
the words fly out of his mouth, but then seems a bit apologetic,
as if I’ll be offended at his disdain for his sometimes loud and
obnoxious foreign clientele. We laugh together, talking about why
Coca-Cola isn’t sold in glass bottles anymore in the US and the
salary of the average teacher in this part of Northern Africa. He
insists on buying me a snack as well, so that he “doesn’t have to
eat alone.” I smile when I realize he offers after I’ve remarked
that I’m running out of money and wonder if I can pick up some
work anywhere around Marrakesh.
I'm wistful as I sit, and want mobility so bad I can feel it
burning in my muscles. I listen to Saiid tell me about his family,
but I am desperate to get up and go, to keep moving on, to get out
to the desert and see a sky so big that any problems I have will
feel minuscule in comparison. I am desperate to let the endless
combination of muted earth and distant horizon soak into me so
deeply that I’ll be forever changed. I know there’s a place where
the sand stretches out for hours and days, a place where sudden
recognition of just how many shades of red there are is lucid and
commonplace. I know that the wind makes patterns in the hills of
sand and dust, forming lines that snake down to your feet. I want
to be there, away from everyone, from everything, from the chaos
and crowds of people in Marrakesh.
Something tells me to wait, though, and to sit a while longer with
Saiid, who smiles warmly at me from across the table, sipping his
tea. I think back again to the warnings, travel advisories, and
scrolling headlines that begged me to stay out of Islamic North
Africa. I think about the picture everyone painted for me of the
Moroccans, of ugly, spiteful, malicious and desperate people. I
think about how ridiculous the one last dramatic warning –
they’ll try to kill you – was, as Saiid invites me to come and
meet his other friends from the restaurant. I politely decline.
Afraid that I may be offending him, I explain that I must return
early to my room to prepare for my trip north in the morning. He
seems to understand, though, and for the first time, away from the
propaganda, I seem to finally understand some things as well.
© Theresa Hunt, 2004
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