You Can't Spell "Tunisia" without the Word "Tun"

As you undoubtedly know, a tun (or tunne, as you sometimes see) is a large cask for holding liquids, especially wine, ale, or beer. You might not think that there’s really much of a relationship between the two, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Back in college I interned for a semester in the Office of Science and Technology Cooperation of the US Department of State. In my first few days I had the honor of setting up my good friend and mentor, Bob, with some much needed translations before he left for meetings in the Grand Maghrib. He then said something to me that was probably the supercoolest and most vexing thing I’ve ever heard: “If I’d know about you two weeks ago, you’d be on that plane with me.”

He brought me back a bottle of Tunisian wine – which is still sitting back home in the States – and thus began my lifelong ambition to go to Tunisia, the home of Carthage and Tataouine. Five years later, my lifelong ambition was achieved. The following is taken from my adventure journal, edited for time, content, and to fit your screen.

11 August 2009

8:46 PM. Today I arrived in Tunisia, the twenty-third country I’ve been in – though it almost didn’t happen. I got to Casablanca on Sunday, expecting to meet mom and Paulo that night to leave Monday (yesterday) morning. They never came. The reason for this is that they’d changed my flight reservation for Tuesday so as to take advantage properly of my vacation and weekend time. We didn’t. They went off to Jedida by themselves, I hung around in a hotel in Casablanca. They showed up last night and we left this morning.

I still did my best to stuff it up. On putting our bags in the taxi I realized that I didn’t have my carte de sejour. Even so, I managed to get through every checkpoint at the airport but the last one without being noticed. He asked me if I live in Morocco and where my carte was. I told him that I do and that I forgot it. He gave me a look that said, “Seriously, give me your carte.” I gave him a look that said, “This is about as pathetic as I can be, I really don’t have it.” The lesson here is that when you go to leave the country, make sure that you bring the documents showing that you are, in fact, a legal resident there. After a little more talking and being pathetic, he asked me what my number is. I didn’t know. He tapped his keyboard a bit and then asked me a few questions to verify that the records he was reading were mine, I answered them, and he let me go. The lesson there is that it’s possible to go through customs without your carte. They’ve got your information. It’s probably best to bring it anyway, unless you particularly fancy feeling like a maroon.

Our take off was delayed, and we had to wait forever to get our luggage, so I suggested that we just go straight to Kairouan and skip Carthage. A lot of people would probably disagree with this, as Carthage is probably the most historically significant piece of Tunisia. That’s true, but, first, I’ve never really cared that much about Roman history when compared to some of the other great histories of the world. The coolest thing about Carthage was its total destruction and Rome’s message to the world that if you mess with the empire, you’ll be lost to the world for all time. It’s strange then to go and see it, and disappointing even to learn the part left out of most history texts: shortly thereafter the Romans rebuilt and populated Carthage. I prefer to think of Carthage as salted earth and a poor strategic use of elephants.

The country of Tunisia, however, is quite pleasant. We’ve seen mostly rocky scrubland, similar to that on the plains outside of Azrou and Khenifra, but greener. In fact, as mom likes to say, it looks a lot like “Morocco with a fresh coat of paint.” And from what we could see of Tunis from the highway it was a big, clean, shiny city. The little villages were similar to the ones just outside Fes, but they seemed brighter. There was trash but not quite as noticeable. The environment changes more quickly, however, and I expect it will be even more dramatic tomorrow.

The city of Kairouan reminds me a lot of Sefrou with a Chefchaouen paint job. It’s got an old medina and a ville nouvelle, but neither is really all that interesting. Cute, though. The shops all sell things only a little different from stuff you get in the Kingdom: leather, pottery, metal, soccer jerseys. We wandered around looking for a restaurant that doesn’t exist and being taken to another that wouldn’t serve us (until later, they said), but we got to walk and stretch our legs. The atmosphere is a lot like a coastal town – Jedida, or maybe Essaouira – without much noise or traffic. We had a handful of people offer to be our guides, which I eventually convinced to go away.

Which is the last thing: language. So far, it’s been a little rough, and I think I’m really indebted to the handful of Fos-ha words I’ve picked up. I got along ok with the hotel clerk, and managed to make our self-appointed guides leave, all in Arabic (I should say, Darija). But their accents are hard to understand, and one or more may have spoken the Moroccan dialect. Mom’s right, though: it will be a serious test of my ability to put all I’ve learned to use outside of Morocco, and to see if I have something that might be of use in the future. A lot of the time, though, I’m letting Paulo use his French so that he feels more in control of what’s going on. We’ll see how that changes as we get down south and in the desert.

12 August 2009

10:25 PM. Today I went from kind-of-desert to definitely-desert – though I’d expected to hit pinnacle-of-desert at the end. Tozeur, however, is only assuredly-desert. Perhaps tomorrow, but I get ahead of myself.

We began this morning with an awful breakfast (Tunisian quince jam is no mishmash, though maybe it’s just the high-class hotel), and went to the Grand Mosque of Kairouan. It’s allegedly the fourth holiest Islamic city (after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem). That remains to be seen, but the mosque was incredible. It has spiral-ridged domes that I’ve never seen before in Morocco, though are everywhere here. As we travel, we’ve also noticed that some mosques have the three-ball crowning on their minarets, whereas others have a star and crescent. Some have both.

I also made some linguistic observations. There is no گ in Tunisian Arabic, though there is a lot of the “g” sound. They use this letter: ڨ, and don’t make “v” sounds (they just do ف like in Fos-ha). I’ve learned a few new words, like نزل for “hotel.”

And I’ve begun learning about Tunisian food. At lunch in Gafsa we ate rice, lubiya (not as good as Middle Atlas), a dish of spiced beef called kamounia (with cumin, obviously), and an eggplant salad with oil and spices called shlada meshwiya. For dinner I ate camel (not great) and tried some Tunisian tagine. It’s like a big omelette, not as good as the Moroccan kind. I did get to try the harrissa, whis is fantastic, and taste Tunisian olives, which are smaller than Moroccans and harder, but with an incredibly rich taste.

That was all in Tozeur, where we got to drive through the palm oasis and go out to watch the sun set over the shotte. Perhaps we just couldn’t see enough of the shotte to appreciate it, or the experience was altered by the artificiality of the fabulous Belvedere Rocks. We’ll get our fill of the Shotte El Jerid tomorrow as we drive over it for more than an hour.

I also bought my souvenir, which is certainly more than I should have paid, but precisely what I wanted: a turban just like the one Indiana Jones wears in Raiders of the Lost Ark (some of which was filmed here, I hear). Now I can feel like I’ve been to a desert country.

Final thoughts: Tunisia is incredibly flat, aside from the measly ridges rising out of the kind-of-desert. The rear wiper (not present) is broken on the car causing the mechanism to turn constantly and not be able to shut off. The noise that the motor makes every ten seconds or so will drive me insane before this trip is finished.

13 August 2009

9:46 PM. Today was the longest day of our Tunisian voyage so far (though tomorrow may prove to be longer), travelling from Tunisia’s almost western-most frontier to its almost eastern-most.

We left Tozeur after another pitiable breakfast, striking out from the palms and into the desert. Almost immediately we entered the Shotte El-Jerid. Here there was no vegetation – only sand and a burned out tour bus. And salt. The El-Jerid is a salt pan (or some similar geological term), as evinced by the salt creek bubbling alongside the causeway. Salt crystals form wherever the water collects, often forming a crust over the water like a layer of ice in the winter. And the water, for whatever reason, is red – ranging from a soft pink to a deep purple Kool-Aid color. And it was also here that Luke Skywalker brooded over Tataouine’s two moons, so we took plenty of angsty teenager photos.

We continued past the shotte, passing unattended grazing camels and sand/salt sculptures made to look like them until we reached the town of Douz. Douz is home to Tunisia’s largest desert date palmery and borders on quintessential Sahara desert. Mom and I took a little ride with Ali, our guide, and Ali Baba and Mohammad, our camels (mine and hers, respectively), most likely so named as soon as I asked what their names were. It was delightfully touristy, having men on horses and camels ride up and offer photograph opportunities, and men on mopeds offering coke, but they didn’t make us dress up like caravan herders like some Italians near us. And I rode a camel in the dune sea of the Sahara Desert, even if it was only a half hour in the “coastal waters.” It was pretty cool.

From Douz we started heading into the mountains and to the highlighted part of today’s trip: Matmata, Luke Skywalker’s home. The ground got at once more desert-like and more vegetated – with little oases spotting the hills and the occasional grass. We passed some troglodyte houses and finally arrived in Matmata. After completely blowing through town, we were accosted by Mustafa, a self-appointing guide who took us first to his house (to see a Berber house, I guess), and then to the Sidi Driss Hotel, where Luke lived with his aunt and uncle. It was great to walk around and see all the doors and windows I recognized. We stayed for lunch, but it never came. They had nothing in the shops about Star Wars.

So we ate elsewhere, and were treated respectfully (rather than like livestock rolling off a tour bus) and ate a lovely meal al fresco. We sampled brik, a kind of poached egg, parsley, and potatoes in an eggroll-fried crust, and Tunisia’s couscous, a bit courser than the Moroccan kind and with a spicy tomato base. Very good, though I’m partial to what I get back home. We left Star Wars country and headed on, glad to have seen it and completely ready to go.

Aside from mom being flagged over randomly by police and then sent on immediately upon being recognized as foreign, we had no incident on reaching the island of Djerba – supposedly the Land of the Lotus Eaters. (I don’t care much about Rome, but the Odyssey is my bag.) The ferry is a short fifteen minutes, and the island has a very Newport or Block Island feel. We pulled up just after sunset and walked to the port, photographed the fake pirate boats, and ate dinner. With dinner we tried ojja, another egg dish, this one of seafood with poached eggs in a tomato sauce, and had some crepes. It was delicious. We also discovered the most poorly translated menu of all time. I got one to take home.

Finally, I popped into a souvenir shop to get something for Salma and got into a fantastic conversation with Mohammad, the clerk. We talked about tea services, rosewater sprinklers, horses and elephants, and almost everything else. It was great because he definitely spoke Tunisian Arabic, but we understood each other really well.

And a final note of linguistic discovery: it may be that “g” and “k” sounds are nearly the same. The towns of Gabes and Kebili were written on street signs as ڨابس and ڨبلي , both with the Tunisian ڨ . The town of Kettana, however, starts with a ك . And ث may be pronounced like an “s.” An ice cream company, ثلجة , was written in French as “Selja.”

Somehow, while trying to operate the windshield wiper fluid, mom unintentionally shut down my nemesis: the rear wiper, which by this time in its eternal struggle with an imaginary wiper against imaginary rain had taken on the tone of a very angry machine.

14 August 2009

10:26 PM. Tonight is my last night in Tunisia – for this trip, at least. I turned out to be right yesterday when I wrote that today would be the longest drive. We went a good 400 kilometers (I think) from Houmt Souk to Nabeul, a little town part of the Hammamet touristopolis, almost all of it pretty uneventful. We rode the ferry back across from Djerba and I was almost tempted into buying a GStar hat, we drove by endless miles of olive groves and tried to photograph the little roadside gas stands, and mom got pulled over again at a random inspection stop.

Our highlight for the day was El Jem, a tiny town with the largest Roman arena in Africa (and in terms of its preservation, more glorious than the Coliseum in Rome). Approaching the town, the ruins tower over everything else, much like a modern stadium would. In fact, it was a lot like any other arena I’ve been in, aside from being 2000 years old and the site of violent ritual death. It was also absolutely amazing. You could walk up into the stands and down into the gladiator holding dungeons.

And I finally found some of those guardians of the bey to get as presents for the Assekours and Seghirs – and one for myself. I didn’t bargain any, but I got a free desert rose (I think for speaking Arabic and being Moroccan).

Finally, we drove the rest of the afternoon and into the evening to Hammamet. It turns out that this is the vacation capital of Tunisia, and was more packed with tourists – both foreign and domestic – than I’ve ever seen here in Tunisia or elsewhere. We also didn’t have a reservation anywhere, but they found a place in the sacred tour book. We spent the next hour trying to find it, learning, at this time, that it was in Nabeul, or “North Hammamet.” Eighteen kilometers later and there were more tourists, and no sign of the Hotel Alya. In the end, we settled for a different place, from a different tour book, which required driving back across Nabeul to find. We found it and had a lovely dinner on the beach. No new foods, though.

On the road, I noticed a sign for the town of Zrig, written as زريق . I don’t know if it was just missing a dot over the final ق , but if it wasn’t, it’s strange to see that letter transliterated as a “g.” I know that Kairouan is spelled القيروان .

And the biggest shock has been here in the Greater Hammamet Area: humidity. It feels like noontime in Atlanta in the middle of the night, an exaggeration only because I haven’t felt that ever while living in Morocco. I don’t know if I’m going to miss East Coast summers or not.

15 August 2009

12:14 PM. I’ve just taken my seat now on the Tunisair jet ready to take me back to Morocco. Today has been spent almost entirely in the airport, but it’s given me a chance to reflect on this experience.

I also had a most amazing encounter sitting at a little café and meeting another American – a Peace Corps volunteer just CoSed from Mauritania – sitting next to me and having the same sandwich. He’s on his way to Casablanca to see a bit of the country before returning to the States and whatever fortunes await an RPCV. We might even meet in Fes.

And now I’m here thinking about all I’ve done and seen in Tunisia. Mom made a good point last night when she said that it seemed like we’ve been doing a lot of driving, and we did that, but we also saw a lot of the country. And though we probably spent as much time each day in the car as we did out, that’s where we got to experience the desert, the mountains, the palmeries and olive groves, the little towns and homemade gas stations.

We pretty much did or saw only one thing in each city or town where we stopped, and there are plenty of places left where we never went, but I enjoyed what I saw and did. The people were friendly, and it was fun to actually be a Moroccan. I got by with Darija, which bodes well for a PC Moroccan’s chances after service when it comes to being a useful “Arabic” speaker. Almost everyone I talked to thought I’m either full-on Moroccan or that at least one of my parents has to be (usually my father if they saw me with mom).

And so the question remains: am I glad to have come? My answer is yes. Not only is it a new place to add to my list, but I’m content with the way I saw all that I did. I ate as many different Tunisian foods as possible, I spoke the closest form of the local language as I could, and I never bought anything without first learning about it. The man taught me how to wear the desert turban, my friend went to great lengths about rosewater sprinklers (and everything else in his shop), and I forwent bargaining over guardians of the bey in exchange for learning about their history. I even demanded to know the harvest year before buying a box of dates.

Would I come back? Tunisia won’t be at the top of my travel lists, but that’s because there are so many other places I still want to see. If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll certainly take it. I haven’t seen the deep desert or Cap Bon, Carthage or Tunis, and I’d like to spend more time in some of the places I did see, especially Kairouan and Djerba. All that, however, will have to wait until the next time, inshallah.

On Language, Part IV: Berber

We need to start this with a brief talk about that word. “Berber” comes from the Greek word barbori, meaning “someone who does not speak Greek.” A lot of people will tell you that it comes from the word “barbarian,” though, if you think about this, that would be a little egotistical of us to think that it was English that define this ethnic group, especially as they’ve been on the world scene since long before anyone was speaking English. No, the truth is that our “barbarian” comes from the same root. This is a lot like the evolution debate. Humans aren’t descendent from monkeys – no one wants to think that – we both come from the same place. By the same token, Berbers aren’t barbarians.

Still, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from believing that “Berber” is a derogatory term, a situation that isn’t helped by the way it’s been used in the past. Rather than represent the complex and storied culture of the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Africa, it has come to suggest all the worst of Orientalist prejudice. As a response, activists and progressives have proffered the word Amazigh, the Berber word for “Berber.” The reasoning is simple: Berbers are backwards, uneducated peasants, Amazigh are proud mountain people. Although we can disprove the origins of the word “Berber,” we can’t ignore the fact that it’s been used for the purposes of subjugating the collective consciousness of this people, and, despite the fact that the Amazigh word for “foreigner” literally means “Roman,” we can support their re-identification by using “Amazigh.”

It’s beside the point, anyway, since we’re talking about language here, and there’s really no such thing as the Amazigh language. It’s more like the scores of Amazigh languages, which is the biggest problem we have. There are some universal words, like “bread,” “water,” and “foreigner,” but where you have one ethnic identity, you actually have at least five distinct languages. In the north, most Amazigh speak Terrifite (taken from the Rif Mountains). You’ve got Tassousite in the Souss Region of the Anti-Atlas, Tashleheit in the High Atlas, and Tamazight in the Middle Atlas. Finally, there’s even a separate term for the language spoken by the Amazigh in the Sahara: Tasaharouite.

Even then you’re misleading yourself if you think that with only five languages, someone might be able to master all this. The history of the Amazigh is one of mountain isolation, and, as a result, you can go thirty kilometers down the road and you’ll find Shleu (another Amazigh word meaning “Amazigh”) saying something completely different. Some people claim that if you speak one Amazigh language natively, you can understand the gist of any, but I doubt that. I’ve seen my host brothers (who speak Tamazight) watching a tv show in Tassousite, and they have about as much clue what’s going on as I do.

Imagine then, that you’re an American Peace Corps volunteer trying to figure all this out. Youth development volunteers like myself all learn Darija, but a little more than half of the small business development, and the significant majority of health and environment volunteers I know learn to speak Amazigh. This is because we have spring and summer camps with kids from all over the country, and they tend to live in much smaller communities (and stay there). It can be a real problem, though, when they do travel. Our spring camps include volunteers from all sectors, and we were fortunate enough to have two environment volunteers who spoke Tashleheit. Unfortunately, not a single kid in camp could understand it. Granted, it was an English immersion camp, but let’s not kid ourselves, they were left to the mercy of the other volunteers whenever they wanted to say just about anything.

The worst, though, is training. You can’t go five miles without finding a new Amazigh dialect, so imagine what happens when you train in a town on one side of the country, and then find yourself serving on the other side of the mountains. Most everything you just learned has to be unlearned and then replaced with something new. This goes for grammar as well as vocabulary, since, being a proletarian household language, there aren’t really any “rules” – only generally accepted forms and structures. Anything goes, really, as long as everyone else knows what you’re trying to say. I know a guy near me who trained in the Azilal Province, and he couldn’t say anything to his host family when he showed up here, and, already three months into his Peace Corps service, he had to deal with his town asking him why he couldn’t speak.

But if it’s crippling on mobility, it makes up for it in spades when it comes to integration. If you ever wanted to ruin someone else’s service, all you have to do is show up in their site and speak the local dialect. Until that volunteer leaves, and probably longer, they’ll never hear the end of people in their site talking about that other volunteer, who came and visited for just a few hours, and how great he or she is for speaking Shleuha, more likely than not with the added “better than you.”

I don’t speak Tamazight, but I’ve learned, and Dr Peter Venkman would undoubtedly agree with me, that when someone asks you if you speak Shleuha, you say, “Yes.” At first (and we’re talking within my first days in site), I would make the very reasonable response that I’d just gotten to Morocco, that youth development volunteers need to speak Darija, that I hope to learn the one and then the other but don’t want to mix them together by learning both at the same time. “No,” they would reply. “You need to learn Amazigh.” Now, when someone asks me, I just say, “Sure, etch agharom” (“eat bread”). If they press me, “Su ahman” (“drink water”). It doesn’t matter if they just asked me if I think the weather is hot, if I want to go home to see my parents in America, if I’m on the way to the hammam, and they don’t seem to really care, either. I’ll say everything else in Darija, including “I don’t know what you’re talking about” in response to anything said in Tamazight, and I’ve never once had a person tell me that I don’t know enough. In fact, they tell their friends that I have supernatural abilities. Even if I try to say that, in reality, I only know about twenty words, they have no desire to believe in anything other than my absolute fluency.

Which, unfortunately, isn’t likely to ever actually occur. Despite the aesthetic and intellectual attraction of the Amazigh languages, they really can’t be called “essential.” Granted, there are some people here you’ll meet who don’t speak a word of Arabic, but, on the whole, that’s a very small minority. The truth is, that, being so community specific and informal, someone who speaks a dialect will invariably have to speak another language during their service. And, to top it all, the Tamazight spoken here in Freedonia is so full of Arabic that I can pretty much understand the general idea of anything that my family is talking about, as they only speak when they’re talking to me. And the few times that I’ve gone and learned something in Amazigh, I’ve come back to my host family and repeated it for them, only to be told that that’s not our Tamazight.

I’m glad I know what I do, especially when I can impress my friends here with a few words, but I don’t think I’m going to be an Amazigh scholar when all is said and done. And I don’t think my community expects me to, either. They probably won’t ever stop talking to me about how great Jawad (Josh) was for knowing how to speak Shleuha, but I think that all they really want to see is some validation of their culture. They speak Darija the majority of the time, too.

On Language, Part III: French

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.

On Language, Part II: Arabic

Officially, Morocco is an Arab country. Despite what many people believe, Arabic is the only official language of the country. The news, whether broadcast or in print, is in Arabic. Official proclamations are done in Arabic. Speeches are given in Arabic. Road signs and nutritional labels are written in Arabic. That’s probably not very strange to you. If you changed “Arabic” to “English,” and “Morocco” to “the United States,” you’d feel such a strong sense of “duh” that it might actually hurt. I wouldn’t recommend trying. The problem with Morocco is that pretty much no one speaks Arabic.

I should probably clarify. When I say “Arabic,” I’m referring to Modern Standard Arabic, often called “Fos-ha.” And despite the fact that many people do actually know how to speak it (it’s the language of school, as well as the language of almost all major Arabic television programs), it’s not the language of Morocco. Moroccans speak their own version, Darija Maghribia, the “Moroccan Dialect.” Everywhere you go, you hear Darija. This can be really hard for volunteers (and other Americans) who speak Standard Arabic (henceforth, Arabic). It can be hard for Arabs who come to visit the Kingdom. Darija is the language of the street, of the souks, of the young, and of the old. It’s not slang or street language or the result of poor education. Darija is the language spoken by Morocco.

But that’s also part of the problem, it’s the spoken language. Whenever anything gets written down, it’s back to Arabic. Not only does this mess with the grammar, the two languages don’t always even use the same word. Back in training we had a homework assignment to learn the names of a bunch of things in a picture. One of them was a snake. Now, I knew that “snake” is “hensh” in Darija, but there are two H-sounding letters in the Arabic alphabet, so I asked a boy how to write it. He started writing, and when he’d finished I read a word that I’d never seen before: “theu’baan.” I didn’t understand. I asked him, “This is a hensh, right?” “Yes,” he said. “But you wrote “theu’baan,” I insisted. “Yes,” he said.

It turns out that the Fos-ha word for “snake” is “theu’baan,” and, as we’ve mentioned, Darija is never written. It’s just the way it is. To this boy, it would have been as strange to him to write “hensh” as it was to me that he would write “theu’baan.” He sees the one and thinks the other. Never mind the fact that none of the three TH-sounding letters in the Arabic alphabet are used in Darija.

But it doesn’t always work out so well. I was working with some kids to make a peer tutoring program for their junior high and we needed an informational brochure to give the teachers. I don’t speak – let alone write – in Arabic, so I helped them come up with the words in Darija and let them do the translating. We were able to figure out what we wanted to say in about ten minutes, but it took another thirty or more to switch it over to Fos-ha. In fact, they may have had to take it home with them. It amazed me that these boys, who are very eloquent in their own language, would have so much trouble trying to write.

And why is this? Well, first, Arabic is an old language, and old languages often have very complicated grammar. That’s not a rule, per say, but it’s definitely true in this case. Just think of Latin, with all its genders and declensions and what have you. The course of human progress has gotten rid of most of that nonsense, and Darija is a much more modern language. It’s also been affected pretty seriously by interactions with Berber languages and French. Most Moroccans, when they can’t think of the word they want to say in one of these languages, just use the same word from another. A lot of these have caught on enough that a water faucet, for example, is a robinet. No one knows how to say that in Arabic.

A lot of Moroccans like to compare this to the relationship between British and American English, but the analogy falls short. There are significant differences between the way we speak English that go beyond the standard deviation of a mere regional dialect. I may have grown up hearing people talk about the “colah of youah apahtment,” but whether you’re from Providence, Dallas, or Vancouver, you’ll write it as the “color of your apartment.” I don’t have a “favourite colour,” and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a “flat.” These colors don’t run. That’s something we just don’t understand about each other here. We have our own English and use it for everything, they’ve got their language for speaking and another for writing. I’ve never been able to get a good answer as to why they do that, nor have I been able to satisfactorily express why we do things our way.

So, how does all this affect your volunteer? The worst is all those volunteers who wanted Morocco because they’d studied Arabic in college being crushed by the realization that they’re going to have to start from the beginning like all the rest of us. I met a couple poor suckers who were doing two-month trainings at a university in Fes to learn Arabic, learning Arabic in class but then being spoken to in Darija whenever they leave.

Then there’s all those times when you get Fos-ha instead of Darija. Whenever I tell someone I speak Arabic (which is usually a term for either Darija or Fos-ha), they start talking to me with all the complicated grammar and melodramatic inflection of Modern Standard. And, we get a lot of Syrians here in Freedonia. They come for the summer and, apparently, to dig wells. I’ve started to take it as a compliment when people speak to me in Fos-ha because they think I’m from Syria. It’s clear that my Darija isn’t my first language, but it sounds like I have at least some business speaking an Arabic-inspired dialect.

Just the other day I was having lunch with another volunteer who’d come to visit me in my site. He’d ordered a salad with his kebabs; I don’t like the mayonnaise they put on salads here, so I just got the kebabs. While we were waiting for our kebabs, he was eating the salad and we were talking. Two guys sitting next to us were talking, too. One of them leaned over and told me to eat my friend’s salad. He said, “Kool ta’am,” which means “eat the couscous.” I was a little confused because he was eating a salad, not couscous. I was also a little confused because this guy was offering me some of someone else’s lunch. I looked back and said the only thing I could think to say, “Hadshi mashi ta’am” (“This isn’t couscous”). He gave me the strangest look I’ve ever seen, and said, “But you’re Syrian, aren’t you?” I told him that no, I’m actually an American, we chatted for a few moments about where I live, and then we politely ignored each other for the rest of our lunches.

But it’s a very good example. “Ta’am” is a common Moroccan word for couscous, but the actual Darija word for it is “kus-ksu,” “Ta’am” is the Berber word for it, but it comes from Arabic originally, where it simply means “food.” (That’s got to be an anthropologist’s dream.) This guy was just telling me to eat the food, but how was I to know? We say “makla.”

We really don’t get too much Arabic, though. Not spoken to us, anyway. The hard part is the writing. People say that not too long ago there used to be a newspaper in Darija. They printed it for the foreign population who’ve learned how to speak the local dialect but don’t know anything about Fos-ha. Granted, it was in the Arabic alphabet, but the spelling, grammar, and vocabulary were that of Darija. All you had to know where the sounds of the letters. It would be great if that was still around.

As it stands, I’m functionally illiterate here, which has taught me the most important lesson of all this: illiteracy really sucks. You take for granted just how much information reading gives us access to. It’s not just the heavy, sacred tomes of The Iliad, The Wealth of Nations, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that you’re missing out on. You wouldn’t know what’s on television tonight or how much it costs to park your car. You wouldn’t be able to say you read Playboy for the articles and your wife would give you a bunch of doodles instead of a grocery list. You wouldn’t know if the aerosol can your toddler’s been sucking on is poisonous or what to do if it is. You’d have gained nothing of my wisdom since I’m not there to read this for you.

It is the ultimately humbling experience, and it makes you feel just how vulnerable you can be when you have to ask or figure everything out with only your best guesses to aid you. The only comfort is knowing that 47.7% of everyone else around you is in the same boat. On second thought, that's not very comforting at all. I guess that's why we're here in the Peace Corps.

On Language, Part I: An Introduction

Probably the most important aspect of life in the Peace Corps is language, especially in Morocco. Anyone you meet will gladly tell you that Morocco is a country full of languages. There’s Arabic, Moroccan Arabic (Darija), French, Spanish, English, and five major indigenous language families (Berber). Not to mention the thousands of local dialects. Morocco is home to three distinct alphabets, and even among those there are variations. Volunteers study at least one of these – often two or three – and will encounter all of them whether they want to or not.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now – to try and make some sense for both you and me of all this. Dealing with language is a daily struggle, in so many more ways than simply not knowing the word you’re trying to think of or someone is yelling at you. It’s not just forgetting everything you’ve learned when it starts to get around 11 o’clock at night or after you’ve been spending a little more time than usual with other volunteers and English speakers. It’s also just the shock of being in a place where people get around not all knowing the same language. It’s trying to understand the frame of mind that grows from being surrounded by so many different ways of speaking. It’s an incredible sight, and one that seems more and more foreign the more you think about it.

And now, please indulge me as I take you through a brief tour of your PCV and language.

On Piety

As Ramadan draws closer, more and more conversations have taken a turn towards religion. For PCVs in Morocco, this almost exclusively means answering the Most Frequently Asked Question: Are you Muslim?

As far as I’m concerned, Islam is a beautiful religion, and, as my grandfather once put it, though referencing Catholicism at the time, those who believe have a blessing. There is, however, a rather distinct gulf between the American-Western and Moroccan-Islamic conceptions of belief. Islam is the state religion of Morocco, and roughly 98.7% of the kingdom’s citizens are Muslim. The percentage of Muslim Peace Corps Morocco volunteers is significantly lower, and, thus, many who respond truthfully to the above question are then queried with the Second Most Frequently Asked Question: Why not?

Proselytizing is forbidden within Morocco, but, despite the fact that the Qur’an states: “There is no compulsion in religion” (a very well-established prohibition on proselytizing), Islam is excepted from this law. This is probably due to a different proclamation to the effect that anyone who brings another into the fold of Islam is going to Heaven. There’s a fine line between violating someone’s freedom of conscience and a little friendly concern for another’s eternal soul.

Whatever the reason, discussing your religious views can be a daily struggle. Every volunteer handles it differently, and every instance is unique. Sometimes it’s interesting to get into a conversation about theological relativism. Some of the most fascinating chats I’ve had have been on the tenets of the Islamic faith. A lot of the time it’s doing your best to politely – or not – change the subject from a zealot’s conversion pitch.

Aside from the Most Frequently Asked Questions we get a lot of: “What do you think of Islam?” “Is Islam a beautiful religion?” “Don’t you want to go to Heaven?” Some people ask you to say the Shahada (testament of faith), one of the Five Pillars of Islam and the necessary assertion for submitting to Islam. Others will try to trick you into saying it. They’ll say, “Repeat after me: ‘la ilaha ilallah’ (there is no god but God), ‘wa ana Muhammad urasul allah’ (and Mohammad is His messenger).” Most volunteers don’t, and are often met by a grin that seems to say, “Touché, but I almost got you.”

Once, in a taxi, an older woman asked me about religion. She was curious because I had been speaking Darija. Morocco gets plenty of visitors, but almost none of them speak Arabic unless they’ve come to learn about Islam, become a Muslim, or marry a Moroccan girl (which requires conversion). I tried to employ Peace Corps’s go-to training: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” It’s never worked. She asked me a simple question: “Is there God?” In the land of the pious, that’s an easy question. She followed it up with a much trickier one: “Is there Muhammad.” “Yes” could imply that he was as the Qur’an and Hadith state, or that he was simply a real man who did important things. “No,” would almost certainly be a denial of Islam. They cheered like I’d just been born again.

The absolute most incredible happened this past week. Freedonia gets a lot of summer tourist traffic, and a volunteer friend and I were waiting for a third in a little tagine bazaar. We decided to peruse the wares, and stopped to admire some dishes that we’d normally want to call “casseroles.”

“What do you cook in this?” we asked. “Fish,” replied the merchant. “Or lasagna,” I added, chuckling more so that he’d know it was a joke than because it was particularly funny. He didn’t laugh. Instead, he responded with “Are you Muslim?”

And there we were. Now, my companion had told me how he’d recently tried to explain the complexities of his faith to a taxi driver – “I see the good of many religions but don’t follow any one path” – and this had been met by the driver’s nearly not taking him all the way to his final destination. Perhaps he was looking for a validation of his beliefs, so he tried to explain this to our friend the casserole merchant. Once again, this line of argument proved unsuccessful, as our new friend countered with “Islam is the best.”

I’m not one to get involved in theological relativism, but I’m Western enough to think it’s impolite to push your religion on someone and I’m getting awfully tired of talking about my religion so much with people I’ve never met before. I found myself facing a choice that every volunteer finds on an almost daily basis: to roll your eyes and say “sure, whatever” or to accept the linguistic and cross-cultural struggle to stand for what you really believe in. I chose the latter.

And so I pointed out to the man that the Qur’an states that followers of all Abrahamic faiths are on the same path. Granted, it often refers to the Christians as “those who have lost their way” and the Jews as “those who have incurred God’s wrath,” but they and the Saidians (who don’t exist anymore) are all destined to walk in the same Paradise as the Muslims. I didn’t add this point – I didn’t have the chance to. He repeated his earlier position that “Islam is best,” we tried to diplomatically and using Qur’anic truth remove ourselves from the conversation. He once more averred (and loudly this time) that “Islam is best,” and, to make his point all the more clear, he took the casserole dish he had been holding in his hands all this time, and brought it down forcefully on his head, smashing it into pieces.

There was clearly no more need to argue, and my friend and I walked away. It was an experience both daily and unique. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to explain my religious views, or the number of uncomfortable theological conversations I’ve had thrust upon me. I’d never seen that before, though, nor have I ever found myself in a religious debate where the other demanded that I agree with him. That’s rare, and I don’t want to give the impression that Moroccans, though pious verging on zeal, are close-minded.

I did learn one thing, though. Those casseroles he had, apparently they break pretty easily. It’s too bad, I’d been thinking about buying one.