9 More Things

1 - Tom and Jerry. Yes, the cat and mouse, respectively. I’m fairly sure that we all know who these two characters are; we all delighted to their antics as children and appreciated the morbid pleasure of their remanifestations as Itchy and Scratchy. Nevertheless, we can’t even begin to compare our love for two of Hanna and Barbara’s finest creations to the devoted following they have here in Morocco. Firstly, their adventures are aired nightly in prime time. Second, unlike The King of Queens, people actually watch it. Everyone. Young and old, boys and girls, no one with a telecommand (the fantastic Darija word for remote control) in their hands has ever in my experience changed the channel away from Tom and Jerry, despite the fact that even I in my very short time here in Morocco have already seen many of the episodes more than once. Finally, the illustrious Cat and Mouse have such a cult of personality that I have on several occasions had concepts explained to me using Tom and Jerry as an example.

2 - In my travels around the world I've experienced what I believe to be a very unproportional amount of difficulty with people pronouncing my name. Perhaps I’m being elitist or culturally insensitive, but I’ve never really considered "Duncan" to be all that difficult to say. In Honduras I was "Junkle," in Namibia "Tangeni" (don’t ask me how that one got there), and almost everyone who reads my name opts for "Dooncan." Not to mention the struggles I’ve had with the spelling in the Northeast of America. (Damn you, doughnut maker!) My first day in homestay in Morocco, however, my host family decided to eschew this hazardous name by renaming me Amin. I must say, I rather like it, but it has also convinced me that I will never find satisfaction with my name. You see, I’ve always written "Amin" thusly, but this is apparently not the way the French (to whom the Moroccans defer to in all questions of spelling in the Roman alphabet) do things. It seems that they like to add an "e" to the end, making it "Amine." I don’t know why I seem to care, but the final "e" just makes me feel like the name is incredibly effeminate. It just doesn’t pacify my raging testosterone the way "Duncan" – meaning "Dark Warrior" – truly represents my masculinity.

3 - Morocco has a fairly well-developed film and television industry, which, though it probably doesn’t export much of its work, is very respected domestically. Local programming is regularly competitive with American and Indian films, Lebanese serials, and Turkish and Mexican soap operas. Nevertheless, despite all these successes, there seems to be one flaw: actors. In all of my time watching television here (which, as we’ve discussed earlier, is almost a national duty), I’ve probably seen only around 20 different actors and actresses who just seem to cycle around through all the different films, serials, and programs. This is surprising to me, though; not only because Morocco has a fairly large population and should be able to field a larger pool of screen talent, but also because my experiences the youth has led me to the conclusions that (1) Moroccans really enjoy acting, and (2) despite the fact that they seem to get little training or opportunity to perform, when they are acting they do so with very little of the trepidation or reservations that you often find with American youth. Perhaps this is just a signal of a different cultural perception of shame and embarrassment, but whatever the reason, it makes it very hard to understand why they can’t get any more actors onto the tv, and why the ones they’ve got are so melodramatic and farcical with so much natural talent just lying around.

4 - You don’t often expect to have culture shock in this area, but, surprisingly, Americans and Moroccans don’t clap their hands the same way. We generally clap with our two hands perpendicular to each other, as though we were shaking hands with ourselves. The majority of Moroccans I’ve seen, however, clap with their hands in parallel symmetry. Imagine that you’re bowing like a traditional Buddhist. Bring your hands together, but before you lower your head, start banging them together in a rhythmic fashion. Now you’re clapping Moroccan style.

5 - As you know, meals in Morocco are generally eaten from a single, communal plate in the center of the table. This is a lot of fun, but it does pose a problem for what to do with all the bones, peels, seeds, pits, and other refuse you accumulate while eating. In the states, of course, you would just use the edge of your plate and then forget about them until the time comes to clean up. In Morocco, though, you don’t have your own personal plate to decorate with all these undesirables, and it would be quite unsavory – even from a Western perspective, I think – to return your just-chewed-upon debris to the communal plate, regardless of it being in your own personal section. Fortunately, however, most Moroccan families are significantly larger than those in America, requiring them to eat from tables a good deal larger than the central plate. This leaves a fair amount of unoccupied space, into which Moroccans have collectively decided to discard everything they don’t want to eat. "But what," you ask, "about said table?" A good question, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel strange about adding my share at first, but Morocco comes complete with a solution to this problem as well. All tables are equipped with a special plastic, much like what you find covering all the furniture in your grandmother’s house. This plastic serves a very useful purpose, however, rather than just being a terrible fashion decision made some time around 1974. All you need to do is take a moist cloth and wipe everything away into the now emptied plate at the end of the meal, and you have a pristine dinning table ready to be used again. Which it will be, and a lot sooner than you expect.

6 - Morocco also has a rich and vibrant musical heritage. Wherever you go, you can hear traditional music and modern – Moroccan – artists’ work. In fact, one of the most popular television programs is a weekly musical "variety hour" (hosted, in rotation, by one of the 20 actors). The vast majority of cell phones seem to be equipped with a lifetime supply of Moroccan MP3s. Of course, as every country, Morocco has not been able to escape from the tentacles of globalization, and so you can find your fair share of American music here as well. But it’s not quite the way you’d expect it. Rather than the vacuous Top 40 that Casey Casem has been brainwashing the youth back home into spending all their parents’ money on for the last 136 years, you find some of the most obscure American hits. Of course, you get some immortals like Bob Marley and Michael Jackson, but Moroccans also seem to have an unnatural appreciation for Cat Stevens (understandable since his becoming a Muslim and renaming as Yussuf Islam), Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Akon, and the Eagle’s classic "Hotel California." Don’t ask me how these lucky few have made such an impression on the citizens of the kingdom while so many others have failed. I’m still working on converting them to Queen and Jamiroquai.

7 - Although I haven’t posted any of them here, I’ve taken my fair share of photos here in Morocco, and this has exposed one of the biggest differences between American and Moroccan culture: Moroccans don’t smile. In pictures, that is. They smile all the time in their daily lives, just like any other group of people I’ve ever come across. But in pictures, you get only straight faces. This, from an American perspective, is kind of funny. You have a lot of people who look incredibly serious all the time, reminiscent of those old photos you see in history textbooks of frontier life in the 1800s (especially since there are so many mustaches). But, ironically, this goes both ways. The Moroccans I’ve met tend to think that smiling in a photo is ridiculous. In fact, while taking some pictures of my family, I happened to catch my cousin while he must have had a spontaneous burst of laughter and was, as a result, smiling. I thought it was a great picture. My family, however, thought it was absolutely preposterous to see his big toothy grin, and insisted that I should erase such an outlandish photo. In fact, it turned out to be the only one from the entire photo shoot that they didn’t want to get a copy of.

8 - With the cold weather we’ve been having, you find that people generally wear gloves around here. This isn’t really surprising or remarkable in any way; people tend to wear gloves the world over when it’s cold. What is interesting, however, is the way gloves get in the way of greetings. In Morocco we pretty much always just use the standard handshake, but apparently this is not done while wearing gloves. What happens, is when you show up somewhere and begin the greetings, you find everyone quickly taking off their right glove, while at the same time telling everyone else not to worry about it and just keep their glove on.

9 - There are dogs and cats all over the place here in Freedonia, and, from my experience, most every town and village in Morocco. The question I have is where they all came from. You see, people (with only a few exceptions) don’t keep pets, so all of these animals are just street roamers. You’ll occasionally find a few that live in or around someone’s house – usually cats – but the family will generally tolerate them the same way you would tolerate a bird that decides to make its nest on your porch; you let it do what it wants until it gets in the way, and then you chase it off until it comes back and you ignore it again. While living in Truck Stop Number 9 we had a cat like this. He was given free roam of the house, but whenever the family saw him they would chase him away. I think the most astonishing thing they ever saw was when I let him sleep in my room at night. I enjoyed the company, as well as the warmth he provided at night, but they just thought this was completely ridiculous.