It's been interesting to see how quickly I've slipped back into my old "Moroccan" habits. I've only been here two days, yet already I seem to have remembered how to give wares in the souq a sort of sliding gaze, looking just long enough to take them in, stopping just soon enough to avoid indicating the degree of interest that will bring a merchant to my side. I've become sort of unconsciously conscious about things like where I'm pointing my feet (to avoid facing my soles towards anyone, a serious offense) and where I'm pointing my fingers (which can also be quite rude.) More than once, I've begun a sentence in French and ended it in Arabic without even realizing it until the conversation was over.
Yet for all that, Morocco still finds plenty of ways to keep me off-balance. It's exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, as I am being constantly reminded how much more there is to communicating with people than speaking their language. There are so many layers beyond that, from facial expressions and body language to different cultural expectations to "assumed knowledge" in the forms of history, politics, religion, and media...all of which make up a much greater part of communication than I think any of us realize until we try to get by in a place where we don't understand those unspoken aspects.
Unfortunately, being too aware of that fact can also cause problems, because it can make you seriously overthink things. Yesterday, A and I were out for a walk in downtown Rabat, and saw a huge crowd gathered around a car. Most of them were grinning and looked very excited, and A and I decided that there must be some sort of celebrity or politician inside. After several minutes of speculating about who it might be (and talking about how frustrating it was to be so ignorant about the "Who's Who" of Morocco), we got closer and saw that, actually, it was just a really big dog* that people were wanting to pet. Go figure.
Just an hour or so later, A and I were sitting and eating lunch at a cafe when we saw an enormous mass of people begin marching down the street chanting some sort of a slogan. There was too much background noise for us to even make out what language they were speaking, much less understand it, but we imagined it must be a political march of some kind. While we were a little nervous, there were several police officers nearby who were carefully watching the marchers, and no one at the cafe seemed at all concerned, so we contented ourselves with trying to speculate about what they were protesting. Finally, I decided to just ask someone else at the cafe. She laughed and said that they were cheering on their football (soccer) team. Oh.
As ignorant as it can make me feel, I love that Morocco resists my most intellectual attempts to pin it down. I love that one day I underthink it, the next day I overthink it. I love that it keeps me off-balance, because that's the best way to stay willing and able to learn. Besides, I can always find some comfort in the fact that, as a white American Christian who speaks Arabic and sometimes wears the hijab, I throw them off-balance, too.
* You may have heard the common claim that Muslims/Arabs hate/fear/are religiously offended by dogs. While there's some truth to that, it really just depends on the Muslim. Basically, there's very little in the Quran about dogs, but there are some Hadiths** of debateable reliability that call dogs unclean. In our (limited) experience, there are a lot more stray dogs in the Middle East than in the U.S., and those dogs would be considered "unclean" by almost anyone. At the same time, it's not at all unusual in Morocco to see people who are, by all appearances, observant Muslims outside taking their pet dogs for walks.
** Hadiths are records of Muhammed's life and sayings. While Hadiths are taken very seriously by Muslims, there are a vast number of them and they have a huge range of "reliability" (basically, the likelihood that they are accurate and truthful.) To further complicate matters, different schools of thought in Islam may have radically different ideas about the reliability of any given Hadith.
