Before we came to Morocco, I did a little homework — too little, for someone visiting such an ancient and complex place as this, but as much as I could manage as I went about the business of detaching from my everyday life. As usual, my self-imposed assignment included reading other writers. I had plenty to choose from. Morocco has attracted some of the greatest, including the three I chose as companions: Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Paul Bowles.
I’ll get to them in a minute — or perhaps even in a future column; time has a way of racing away like a dust devil in this sun-baked place — but now, sitting on the roof deck of the Riad Nezha, a mud-and-straw-walled inn at the the edge of the Sahara, with towering sand dunes rising like great buried beasts along the horizon, and the brutal eye of the sun chasing me slowly around the circumference of a tiled table, causing me to drag a cast-iron chair into new shade every few minutes, those other authors seem far away, almost as far away as the Morocco they experienced.
What’s immediate now is the day’s agenda: a drive into the nearby hill country to sit with some Gnawa people and hear their stories and their music. And inevitably, to be offered a glass of the ubiquitous sweet mint tea, the so-called “Berber whiskey,” which lubricates virtually every social transaction here, at least the ones we’ve been privy to, the touristic kind, whether it be an afternoon’s haggle with a jeweler; a ceremonial welcome to a Riad, where the tea accompanies the filling out of a hotel registration form; or even a quiet afternoon moment with our superb guide Youssef — one of the many, many Youssefs we’ve met here — listening to an earnest, if somewhat suspect, lecture on the history of his tribe, or a disquisition on the Berber people, Morocco generally, the monarchy, Islam, or world affairs.
Nevertheless, Twain, Wharton, and Bowles come back to me, surfacing from time to time as we encounter some of the many unchanged aspects of Moroccan life, landscapes and rituals that have their roots deep in the Atlas mountains, the traditional home of the Berbers, an ethnicity shared by the majority of Moroccans in some form or another. There have been Berbers here for thousands of years, living in tension, brief alliance, or equilibrium with the parade of invaders who have forced their way inland from the Mediterranean or the Atlantic coasts, attracted by the climate; the ancient trade routes, with their promise of extracting protection payments from passing caravans; the natural resources; or even a new population of potential religious converts.
We tourists are only the latest invasion, with our absurd demands for water, entertainment, and Wi-Fi. Tourism is a major component of the Moroccan economy. If water is needed for hotel toilets and long, Western-style showers; then there will be water. This is an extremely dry country. Life radiates outward from water supplies, along ancient rivers, the dry gravel beds of which have been used as roads by camel caravans for thousands of years. Whizzing by at eighty miles an hour, you can still catch a glimpse of small camel trains, two or three animals led by a shimmering figure in a black head scarf, nothing like the great caravans of the Silk Road, the great pioneers of international trade, whose goods, and whose perilous life of travel, shaped the ethos and the aesthetics of Moroccan culture.
So here I am on the terrace, thinking about the Silk Road, and the ride into the desert on camel-back that’s planned for us this afternoon, culminating in a overnight in a Berber tent. It’s what tourists do these days, a gesture to Morocco’s exotic past. Our hosts want us to find the Morocco of our daydreams no less than we do. They’re in the dream business, an easy business, actually, given the peculiar hungers and prejudices we all bring to travel. We see places as we want to see them. Twain sought buffoonery and barbarism here, and found it; Wharton sought aesthetic transport and cultural inferiority here, and found it; Bowles sought the grotesque and a release from bourgeois morality, and found it here.
Me? At the moment, I’d be happy with a few seconds of Wi-Fi, a resource ever-promised, but rarely delivered.
These are modern times. I have a column to file!
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 21 March 2013
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
