I was talking to a friend the other day about what we would title the Peace Corps chapter of our memoirs. I said mine would be “This Would All Work Perfectly If You Just Did Exactly What I Told You,” hers was “I Don’t Know, I Don’t Speak French.”
When I left to come here, I, like many others, was believed that the French language was the preferred means of communication in Morocco. In a way, that’s true. Tourist satisfaction is Morocco’s number one export, and, as French is the lingua franca of the tourism industry, which is the almost exclusively the only reason an American or other Westerner would find himself speaking to Moroccans, the vast majority of visitors can spend their entire stay in this country with nothing but Larousse’s Pocket French Dictionary to help them.
I must admit, I was pretty excited about this when I got here. I started learning French in fourth grade, continued through my senior year of high school when they had to make a new French 6 level to accommodate me, used a semester in college to test out of all my graduation language requirements, spent two weeks in high school in France and three months in college in Belgium. I have more trophies at my parents’ house for French competitions than I do for sports. I became a Francophile before I knew what the word meant. I even made my only password in French.
I hate French.
And I’m not the only one. French is probably the most difficult part of the schizophrenic relationship that volunteers have with language. The first reason is that although some of us know how to speak French, and so too do the merchants, guides, waiters, hotel clerks, and hustlers, the same is not always true off of the tourist track, and few volunteers work in towns big enough to attract many foreigners. Obviously, there are plenty of people here who do speak French – it’s taught to all students from around the same time I started to learn it – and that’s part of the problem. I went to great lengths to learn French, and I’m hardly fluent in it. What about the people who don’t feel that there’s any real benefit to knowing an imperialistic language when the can just as easily speak something else with their family, friends, and corner store clerks?
I learned this the hard way. My first day in my host family they brought over a neighbor who spoke French and we were able to talk to each other through her. That should have been my first clue, but my host sister later tried to talk with me in French (they all knew I could speak it). She asked me, “Am I tired?” or “Do I want to eat?” I don’t know, are you? Do you? It took me several days of confusion to understand that she only knew how to conjugate in the first person singular, and until I left to convey to her that it was so much more understandable to speak with her in Arabic. That way, at least, someone was speaking their first language.
But that’s a problem that goes away quickly. Before long, your Darija outstrips your French (or, at least, that of your host sister), and you don’t have to worry about it. In fact, almost everyone that you interact with on a daily basis will soon learn that everything works a lot easier when they speak to you in their local language. That doesn’t help with people you’ve never met before, and certainly not when you’re travelling.
And that’s exactly the reason that French is so conflicting for us. I find myself telling everyone, “I’m not French, please speak to me in Arabic.” But why? I’m not Arabic, either, and I know how to speak French. In fact, I can probably speak French better than I can speak Arabic (if you ignore the fact that my instinct currently is to respond in Darija, and I have to think about French before speaking), and I can certainly read it better. The obvious answer would be that I’m trying to learn Arabic, but that doesn’t account for the belligerence with which both I and my fellow volunteers respond to French.
I’ve yelled plenty at café barkers and taxi drivers that I’m not French, are they French? Why are they speaking to me in French if French isn’t there language? I’ve experienced an unnaturally high percentage of bad words associated with being spoken to in French. I really can’t explain it, but there’s little that causes more rage in the volunteer, except perhaps when, after responding in Darija to everything said in French, the other will say, “Tu parles bien l’arabe” (“You speak Arabic well,” in French). That’s when you drift off a little and see yourself breaking his head open with the bottle of Fanta sitting conveniently on the table.
This makes a lot more sense for volunteers who don’t actually know how to speak French, and legitimately have to convince the other to change languages. For others like myself, it’s probably just a product of daily hassle. For Moroccans, it’s probably the opposite. Foreigners who come here almost never speak Arabic, let alone Darija – they all just use their high school French (or, more likely, are French themselves). Tourism is huge here, but expatriatism isn’t. There’s little to no need to learn Arabic if you’re only coming for a short vacation, and experience has taught your average Moroccan guide that speaking French to the Western-looking people is a lot more successful. It’s more likely to be a matter of the other trying to make things easier for you, which happens to find itself in the 1:1000000 situation where it has the exact opposite effect.
But eventually – usually – you can get the other to start speaking Arabic. And this brings up the question of what he or she really thinks about these two languages. It’s a widely accepted belief that when bargaining with Arabic, you can get much better prices than if you speak French. That’s probably because they think you’re local and more likely know a good price from a bad one rather than being a sign of post-colonial consciousness, but the language is bigger than just the market. French is the language of sophistication, and you can often see Moroccans speaking to each other in French, or throwing French words and expressions into their otherwise Arabic sentences. Basically, what they’re saying is “I’ve got an education, and, presumably, lots of money and success. Do you?” There may be elements of this as well when they speak to us in French.
It's a hard idea to explain because it really doesn't make any sense. All I can say with certainty is that if anyone ever made something - a hat, maybe - that effectively conveyed to someone seeing it that you spoke Arabic and not French, you'd set yourself up for like just selling it to the 205 Peace Corps Morocco volunteers. In my case, I face an extra challenge in that I was placed in this site because I do speak French. My predecessor was French (though American as well, obviously), and he spoke French very frequently. They wanted someone who could deal with that precedent. I got here and decided I didn't want to speak French at all. First, it doesn't always work, and I can safely say that only about a quarter of the people I interact with here really speak French well enough. Second, I don't want to seem any more imperialistic than I already do. To me, speaking Darija is a great way to validate the people of Freedonia, and I'm happy to learn a new language while I'm doing it.
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