It’s now been a full year of living in Morocco, which means that we’re right back where we started: Ramadan. I landed in Morocco on September 9th, 2008, and, coincidentally, my brother got married on September 6th of that same year (happy anniversary, by the way). It’s gotten me thinking about my relationship with the Peace Corps. I should have expected it, but it’s been a rollercoaster romance. We’ve had passionate chemistry and lovers’ spats. The honeymoon is probably over, but I think that’s good – I came here to engender understanding and develop opportunities of Moroccan youth, not for a vacation.
Last year, I wrote about the history and customs of Ramadan, but it was as much from my academic experience as it was from my observations. A year later, I can see much more of the daily life, and understand even more of it. That is how I would like to mark my anniversary, by reevaluating some initial impressions and looking for some kind of cultural growth.
I landed on around the fifth day of Ramadan last year, so I missed out on all the preparations and general run-up, as well as the opening ceremonies. Getting ready for Ramadan involves pretty once one thing: going home. Freedonia had been absolutely packed with tourists – almost all of them Moroccan – and they’re all gone. In their place are all the college-aged sons and daughters and the family members who went away for work. It’s not true that everything stops during Ramadan, but it is true that business hours are cut and many people take their annual vacation.
As for “grand openings,” like so many other Moroccan holidays, there aren’t any. This is partly because no one knows exactly when it will start. Ramadan begins with the first sliver of crescent moon (the fast starts as soon as the sun rises), which modern astronomy could easily identify years in advance if it wanted, but modern Islamic society has retained the ancient astronomical tradition of relying on the visual sighting of the crescent by the scientific community. This often means that different Islamic countries will have Ramadan beginning on different days – usually the eastern Muslim world starts a day or two before.
This means that everyone has a generally good idea when it will happen, but they never know exactly what day it’s going to be, but they can’t be sure, so they have to have everything ready a few days in advance. “Everything” means tomatoes; “tomatoes” mean harira; “harira” means Ramadan. People don’t celebrate the start of Ramadan with parades or fireworks or gatherings. They go to the mosques, get together with their families, and – most importantly – they eat breakfast. Breakfast is at sunset (around 6:45 - 7:00 this year) and every evening is like an all-you-can-eat buffet at the International House of Pancakes.
Different families and different regions have different traditions concerning their breakfast spread, but there are a few staples that are omnipresent in Morocco. Islamic tradition calls for breaking the fast with dates and milk, and we stick to that, but with the addition of figs, which are in season now, and we also drink tea, which is a Moroccan civic duty. And you’ve got an array of breakfast breads. The most common is millwi, a type of fried, flaky pancake. (“Millwi” is the Amazigh word; Arabs tend to call it mismin – or sometimes millwi.) If your family really feels like going a little crazy you might have a millwi variant such as rrghaif, the “Moroccan pizza,” which is made with onions and peppers in the batter, or khubs shahamah, “fat bread,” which is fried with little pieces of fat that dissolve into greasy deliciousness. You’ll likely also find, either as replacement or in concert, a plate stacked with bagharreer. These incredible little pancakes are spongy on scale with Ethiopian injeera bread and are usually served cold, supersaturated with butter and honey.
Ramadan is about thirty days long, so you’ll have a few variations from day to day, but there will always be harira. Harira is a tomato-based soup with a selection of pieces of meat, small noodles, barley, small bits of fat, and chick peas, and always highly seasoned, most notably with cilantro. Everyone is required to have several bowls of it, usually as the final course of their breakfast. There’s also going to be a couple wheels of bread or lengths of baguette to go with it.
All the while there’ll be a plate or two of shebakiya, the spiral dough pastry that tastes like fried honey, a handful of hard-boiled eggs, eggs that have been submerged in boiling water, and a few saucers piled with a dry peanut and sugar paste called zumeta (the Arabs call it sslou). Unlike everything else on the table, these only come out during Ramadan, though it’s hard to eat more than a teaspoon or two of zumeta at any one sitting, so this one lasts for a little while after the fast.
And no breakfast is complete without the entertainment: the world famous Ramadan television programming. Ramadan is the season when the best actors from across Morocco get together to present a tour de force of nonsensical comedies, melodramatic soap operas, and inane hidden camera shorts. These shows all air every night on the two major Moroccan stations, 2M and Al Maghribia, and only during Ramadan. We didn’t appreciate the full extent of this last year, and took our favorites for granted until they were taken away from us. This year (like all the rest of the country) we couldn’t contain our impatience waiting for the season debuts. Unfortunately, it’s pretty unanimously agreed that this year’s offering is a record low, and I’ve even been told that Al Jazeera ran a segment on the poor quality of Morocco’s Ramadan programming. Perhaps it has something to do with the much higher than usual incidence of random English words in the dialogue.
But they watch them anyway, and I hope that marketers have appreciated just how big this is. I mean, every night for 30 days is as big as the Superbowl. Literally everyone is at home, eating breakfast, and doing what every Moroccan loves to do: watching tv. I didn’t quite realize the extent of this last year, but sometimes I’m late for breakfast, and I’ll find myself walking through town five minutes before the a’adan (call to prayer) and I won’t see anyone. Once, I was travelling and happened to arrive in Fes right at sunset. I had to walk across town (there weren’t any taxis) and it was incredible, I rolled my suitcase through the center of the busiest intersection in the city, and walked right down the middle of some of Fes’s biggest avenues. There was no one to get out of the way for.
During our initial entry to Morocco last year, we weren’t allowed out of the hotels and training centers at this time for security reasons, and it makes sense. It may only be around 6:30 in the evening, but the streets are populated like its 3:30 in the morning. Police have to have breakfast, too, you know, and, fortunately, so do criminals. You still have to be careful, though.
The worst time, however, is from about 4:30 onwards, what is generally referred to by volunteers as “Unhappy Hour.” This is when all the people who usually like to smoke or drink coffee and haven’t been able to for about twelve hours just can’t take it anymore. Have you ever had a friend who tried to give up smoking and you had to tiptoe around him or her because of the nicotine withdrawal emotional swings? Well, imagine that your friend is actually several thousand people, and that’s what it’s like in your town right before breakfast. Particularly in places where people have to drive or pay for things, but I once went over to a friend’s house to watch the Moroccan national team play against Togo, and we got together with the rest of his extended family and neighbors to have a little soccer game of our own afterwards. I have never seen so much fighting, arguing, and general bile in all my time in this country. An hour later, though, and we were eating baghareer and joking like we’d just gone on a picnic.
It’s like that every day.
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