business/travel
Over an extended weekend I traveled to lively Marrakech for the second time and seaside Essaouira for the first, both with my friend Kristen. In Marrakech we discovered new street sandwich stands, looked in shops in the classy Guéliz quartier, discovered the bookshop-café-restaurant of our dreams, and made a huge fish tagine for dinner. The bookshop was beautiful, sunlit, furnished with sleek white and eggplant-colored velvet cushioned chairs, filled with smart contemporary books in English. The two French women who run it spoke English well and loved our gasps upon arriving. “That’s exactly the reaction we want!” We had Earl Gray, and salads with chèvre and Moroccan-style sweet, cinnamony cooked onions (My new favorite component of Moroccan food). We stayed for hours and spent a long time debating what to buy. I decided on Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner and a Haruki Murakami reader, saving Milan Kundera for next time.

Pretty Essaouira was more tourist-filled than I had expected. Kristen and I got the best of both sides of it, I think, enjoying the foreign treats and souvenirs, and getting some sense for how locals there really live. As for the foreigner-oriented side we ate large servings of gelato twice, lounged and read at a seaside café, ate extremely fresh fish at an outdoor stand and sipped amaretto in a multi-level club.

And as for the real life, real Essaouira, we ate at the same inexpensive restaurant both nights of our stay (Creamy seven vegetable soup! Chicken tagine with almonds and the onions I love! Fish tagine with dates!), and befriended the women who worked in our hotel. One, our new friend Nadia, took us to her esthetician friend’s house away from the tourist area, where we both got our eyebrows done. She trimmed them with a straight razor and they are the best and sleekest I’ve ever had. The four of us laughed and laughed about a supposedly thinning type of massage (“It hasn’t worked yet for us!” they said, indicating to their round bodies), considered the sexual implications of bikini waxing (“I’ll get everything done before I get married”), and shared tea and sesame cookies in the little, windowless room decorated with torn out magazine pages. Nadia and a teenage girl who’s known for doing make-up well had tea with us at the restaurant the night before we left. Kristen made them laugh by saying “Rhadi nheeya!” the equivalent of “I’m gonna bring it!” Nadia called the waiter over to bring the check, staging a time for Kristen to say it to him. She couldn’t do it at first because she was laughing too hard. She did it on the second try and the waiter loved it. I laughed and smiled so much my face ached.

Kristen and I have hypothesized that there is something inherently pleasing, some sonic secret code, about the music of Sean Paul. Are there hypnotic subliminal messages in the incomprehensible lyrics? All over the world people cannot help but shake it to “Get Busy.”

Taking a bus back to Rabat was interesting too, though longer and more cramped than taking the train. We stopped in a village and ate street food and unusual squishy bread, and stared at unfamiliar flower-covered fields. For hours I did nothing but look out the window.

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Since returning to Rabat my days have been work-filled. I’m studying Arabic, gathering books and articles I don’t spend enough time reading, and most significantly, I’ve finally lunged into conducting interviews, which I find, as my mom would say, nerve-wracking. As my ever-positive friend Alex reassured me, what I am discovering are the pitfalls of foreign fieldwork: offices are hard to find; people stand you up or behave horribly; conversation veers far from your intentions; your information about the someone’s work or affiliations is often outdated or incorrect; and jumping into anything blind, without a “this person gave me your number” is utterly disastrous. I’ve had a few very good interviews and just as many useless ones. Any allure of importance to sitting at an outdoor café table making appointments is short-lived and misleading. I feel like some yippy little dog eager for a scrap of anything.

For one failed appointment I went to meet someone and he wasn’t there. His secretary suggested I give up on him and gave me the cell phone number of someone she said would be more useful to me. In true over-caffeinated, would-be professional style one morning I stood in front of the raggedy downtown apartment/office building, planner and pen balanced in hand, shouting into my cell phone because reception seems to be worse when you most want to be heard.

« D’accord, rappelez-moi à quatre heure. » (Alright, call me back at four o’clock.)
« Quand? » (When?)
« Quatre heures. » (Four o’clock.)
“QUAND? J’AI PAS ENTENDU » (WHEN? I DIDN’T HEAR.)
« QUATRE ! » (FOUR!)

I swore under my breath, additionally gathering the attention of passers-by (since no one else, especially women, sets up office on the street), packed up my things and walked away more slowly than I’ve walked in a while, dejected with all of the delays and complications. I thought, “Be gentle,” then went home to make lunch.

I’ve been frowning a lot and hustling my rigid body down the street. Is it that this is simply what happens to most urban and professional people—becoming upright, unsmiling, unfazed, a brick, unresponsive to cat calls or pleas for money? It’s not the first time I’ve felt this but I forget from time to time and it hasn’t ceased to alarm me. I’ll do it, I’ll accept it if it’s just a mode, if as soon as I am off the street or have declared the workday over I shed all-business’s grayish skin and appear softer, more rosy-cheeked and revived.

A few afternoons ago, on an appointment-making spree, I called a Rabat publisher I’d barely heard of. The director was out and so a secretary gave me his cell phone number (cool Moroccan cell phone informality). I called him and to my surprise he said, “I’ll be in my office after four, come on in” (but in French). Friendly enough, I figured. So I raced over to a cybercafe, furiously researched him and his maision d’édition, and grande taxied to the other side of town. I announced my arrival then sat on a leather sofa for half-an-hour while an oversized Moroccan man dressed up like an English gentleman, complete with hat, ambled around dinosaur-like between offices. I thought, That must be him. I gestured at his turned back and whisper-asked a man sitting at a desk doing nothing if that was him, the director. He nodded and may have even rolled his eyes a little, smirky.

The 60-some-year-old English gentleman finally glanced in my direction and said simply, “Come on.” He sat behind his desk and said nothing. I cheerily thanked him for meeting with me and went about explaining my affiliations and my work: criticism and reception of francophone Moroccan women’s writing. I explained that because my work concerns not only books but the discourse surrounding books—not only Moroccan literature but Moroccan literary culture—I am interviewing writers, academics and editors. He told me irritatedly though with no particular interest or conviction, “I’m not going to do your work for you,” then had his secretary fetch him their catalog. Wordlessly, he proceeded to pen in an F next to each work written by a woman (femme). Baffled though still cool, I told him I was familiar with their books (which is a lie, but beside the point) and that what he was doing was not quite what I had in mind (I have no idea what I really said). Though I sat ready with my typed interview notes he told me to just give him my interview “so we don’t waste time.” I suggested I email it to him and he said dismissively, infuriatingly, as many Moroccan men do when they aren’t willing to consider what a woman is saying, “Comme vous voulez” (As you want—not even “as you wish”). I thanked him again, inquired about their current projects and even attempted joking a little. He said something vague and ushered me out. Come Monday morning Monsieur will receive the smartest, punchiest questions evs in response to his assholery.

What saved the evening was the search to find the office. At rush-hour dusk I stopped a woman to ask her which of the unmarked streets was Boulevard des Nations Unis. She said she’d take me there, and so we set out along the huge boulevard to find the address. We chatted about what we were doing just then (she was looking for a bookshop) and what we do in general, comme travail (she taught French to elementary school kids). When we thought we were almost there to the office my nice, new lady pal stopped every passerby to ask if they knew where the place was. As we asked one person usually another joined to see if they could help. No one had ever heard of the publishing house, but we found it instantly when I mentioned who runs it. In classical Moroccan style, human relationships were more noteworthy than institutions. “Oh! [so-and-so]! He works over there!” The helpful group of Moroccans who helped white girl find mean man was much comfort, a great journey to a disappointing destination.

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I’ve been compiling my knowledge of adulthood. At 23 and one twelfth years old, I think that adulthood is, first, being—dealing with being—utterly lone, standing by yourself, singing your own praises. Selling your fine points, “doing your own PR,” as a friend put it. Increasingly believing (understanding?) that you are, in many ways, on your own. And, second, I think that adulthood is finally understanding those deodorant commercials that show someone with a really insane day and say that’s why they need a deodorant that really works. Adulthood is being too busy to have ineffective deodorant. That’s all I’ve got so far.

I’m considering getting a new personality. This one I’ve got is so sensitive! It’s self-conscious and reacts to everything, feeling terribly nervous, embarrassed, slighted all the time. I wish it were fancy-free instead of causing me so often to make worried-face, a deep line appearing between my eyebrows. Of course my ways occasionally do impress me too, for example last night when I heard myself challenging—in recklessly ungrammatical French—a declaredly anti-feminist prose poet I interviewed. I was proud of my scribbling self. I am less proud of the incessant nodding I did, like some corporate yes-man or celebrity personal assistant. C’mon fancy-free self in 2006!

Many other strange things have happened. For example, I went to a free, invitation-only concert that was filmed for 2M, the national TV channel. We had to do multiple takes because the extremely dressed up, be-gowned announcer woman kept messing up. And my friends and I quietly judged the cocky director and his flared girl jeans. The program broadcasted a few days after and I was less than pleased to see multiple shots of my bland outfit and make-up-less face. I had thought the event would be more like a huge crowd concert, not so fancy. My friends and I met a stylish Moroccan brother and sister and plan to get together with them soon.

Also strange—the woman who cleans my apartment once a week, Zora, yelled at me for sleeping in my damp, occasionally lightly flooded room. There’s a problem with rainwater collecting on the balcony, the drain stopping up and it all seeping into my bedroom through some mystery crack in the wall/floor. The rug has been damp for weeks. I talked to my landlord about it and he didn’t seem interested. The thing is that Moroccans think temperature changes, hotness, and coldness make a person sick, e.g. don’t sit too close to a heater, don’t drink water that’s too cold. So, about my room she shouted “It’s all wet! It’s all wet!” and looked completely disgusted with me (I didn’t know the Arabic word for “wet” but gathered that she said it) She asked if I’d been sleeping in there and—standing over me where I was sitting—told me to sleep in the salon. She finished up a few things then left without us exchanging the usual goodbye cheek-kisses.

Meredith and Megan are coming to Morocco a week from Monday. Not to be a hater, but in all of this busyness I haven’t considered the full loveliness of their visit, besides daydreaming about a cross-country, all-inclusive, skyscraper to squat toilet travel route. Realizing they’ll visit soon is a great surprise.

My dad’s funny. Tonight on the phone he told me, “I sent you an article about Can-ye West. I thought you were interested in him. I’ve seen some of his videos. One of them, I think it’s called ‘Golddigger’? I go on Yeah-hoo and get ‘em.”