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<\/p>\nI feel as if I\u2019m on a blind date\u2014I don\u2019t know what or whom I\u2019m looking for.\u00a0 Will Hassan, my contact, be arriving by car, bike, motorcycle, petit taxi?\u00a0 What will he be wearing? How will he recognize me?\u00a0 I am standing at early dusk\u00a0in the shadow cast by Kasbah Taourirt, the tourist attraction par excellence, waiting to see how and whether I will be seen.<\/p>\n
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No joy.\u00a0 In the end, I have to go back to the car to find the phone I\u2019ve left.\u00a0 Hassan has left two messages.\u00a0 Evidently, we are neither of us what the other expected.\u00a0 Even once Hassan has told me that he is standing in front of the Marmara bus, I seem to drift right past him.\u00a0 I\u2019m about to phone again when he calls to me, coming from the direction I\u2019ve just been.<\/p>\n
We go to meet Ahmed at the Centre de Documentation Pedagogique (CDP\u2014center for teaching documentation) and there\u2019s another odd echo of a feeling\u2014this time of a bargain waiting to be struck.\u00a0 A weird benevolent-Godfather kind of vibe.\u00a0 Would I work with students as well? at the end of November?\u00a0 \u201cAh, yes, that is what we wanted to know.\u00a0 Very good.\u00a0 We invited you to work at this time with the French group, but we don\u2019t need to be limited to that time.\u00a0 There is a long history of Moroccan-American collaborations.\u00a0 Very good.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ahmed tells me tomorrow we will go to Telouet, an area associated with the de facto ruler of this part of Morocco in the early twentieth century.\u00a0 Glaoui? I venture.\u00a0 \u201cYes.\u00a0 All this area is known as Glaoua.\u00a0 So you will learn a little history, a little geography.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Thami_El_Glaoui\"](\"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Thami_El_Glaoui-300x168.jpg\")
\nThami el Glaoui: I’ve read a little about his immense power and wealth, and his lack of squeamishness when it came to extending either.<\/p>\n
After this short meeting, I follow Hassan\u2019s car over a narrow causeway to the newer section of Ouarzazate, to his family\u2019s home.\u00a0 I will be staying with them both nights I am in Ouarzazate.\u00a0 Bleary from the eight-hour drive, I try to summon the mental energy to recall my small portion of Darija.<\/p>\n
Hassan\u2019s family doesn\u2019t seem to eat much meat, and I don\u2019t think that has anything to do with my visit.\u00a0 The first night I stay with them, they eat semolina soup; the second night, rice pilaf.\u00a0 Dinner is late, maybe 8:30, about the time I\u2019m ready to crash; Hassan\u2019s nephew stays up late, and as we drive through Ouarzazate, the streets are full of children out with their families.\u00a0 Don\u2019t they fall asleep in school, I wonder?<\/p>\n
Just as my brain feels ready to explode, a friend and neighbor of Hassan\u2019s stops by to meet me.\u00a0 His name is also Hassane, though for reasons unclear to me the spelling conveniently includes a distinguishing E. I revive a little on discovering that Hassane speaks fluent English and is working on a PhD in cultural studies at the university in Fez.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you think of the landscape on your way down?\u201d Hassane asks me.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmazing! It was like driving through the Grand Canyon,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, this is what everyone says!” Hassane replies, underscoring my own sense of the predictability of my response. \u201cHere I go,\u201d I thought, looking out the window at that Grand Canyon landscape, \u201cmaking that same old American translation of the unknown into the known.\u201d\u00a0 But is there really an alternative to this habitual recoding of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar?<\/p>\n The problem with projection and transposition are the misrecognitions that come with them.\u00a0 So\u2026. focus on geology: seeing the angle of the stone, imagining the the pressures that must have thrust it up out of the ground. I have so much to learn.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I feel as if I\u2019m on a blind date\u2014I don\u2019t know what or whom I\u2019m looking for.\u00a0 Will Hassan, my contact, be arriving by car, bike, motorcycle, petit taxi?\u00a0 What will he be wearing? How will he recognize me?\u00a0 I am standing at early dusk\u00a0in the shadow cast by Kasbah Taourirt, the tourist attraction par … Continue reading Ouarzazate and first impressions<\/span>
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\nWe go on to talk about the books we have both read, enthusing together about the work of Brian Edwards in Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghrib<\/i>.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>Even on the drive down, I had been thinking about Edwards, and his chapter on how American soldiers in Morocco during the second World War responded to Morocco as a mixture of the Wild West and a kind of Biblical pastiche.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nCan we just confront the unknown head on\u2014or will we always duck aside at the last minute, giving up on the cultural game of chicken?<\/p>\n
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\nFocus on specifics\u2014the details of this particular teaching task, this context\u2014to help separate reality from imaginary projections.<\/p>\n