The Public Face of Fez

At Home

I was twenty-two years old when I decided to borrow Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from my University library to read it at home. I had long heard so much about that story that I was eager to know the first words that Romeo would exchange with Juliet. Because of the aura that had been created in my mind about that "love story", I was proceeding through my reading with so much awe. Yet, I had a radio by my side as I read.

The presenter on Radio Rabat announced the name of the song that would follow. It was Eddar Lli Hnak (The House Yonder) by Abdelouahab Doukali, who was my favourite singer for most of my life. The song disrupted my reading, not only because I liked it (I had heard it before), but also because of these lines:

"Time has passed

Our dreams have changed

And what has become of our neighbours?

All has become past!

All is lost!..."

As the song reached that point I just laid aside the book and turned the volume up until the song was over. Exactly the same thing happened to me two days later. It was the same song –but on another Moroccan radio– , and I was reading the same book, and I just put the book aside and turned the volume up when the song started reminiscing about "our neighbours".

A few weeks later, that "home" was no longer ours. We left that house for good. We went to another house. So some members of my family moved to that new house while others stayed in another house which we had had before and where we still live today. So I had already had "new" neighbours before even I left the home where I read Romeo and Juliet. But those "old" neighbours remain special up to this day and will always be.

I will always remain the same person I was when I lived amongst those neighbours. My feelings remain the same. My way of thinking remains the same. My personality remains the same. And so does "my home".

Now all those old neighbours –with very few exceptions– have moved elsewhere. Now I often go past that "old" neighbourhoud and don't even take notice of it. My home now is the place where I live. It's here where I eat, where I sleep, where my friends come to visit me. But that "home" where I put the book aside is always there, somewhere in my world. It often surfaces in my dreams.

My mother, too, has her own home. It's where she was born. When we were kids my mother would take us to her native countryside, her "home". In fact, that home is mine too somehow. As a kid, I always longed to go there, and I was always enthralled by the "beauty" of that place. My mother still makes the trip at least once a year. Personally, I haven't gone there since 1990. Yet, the images that stuck in my mind of that place have made their way into my novels. The presence of a river in each of my novels is one manifestation of those abiding images. My imagination was more impacted by the captivating view of Oued Telmest in my childhood than by the two streams that line up my hometown of Mohammedia. I will never forget the silver colour of the Oued Telmest water, the kids splashing their faces with water, their mums glancing at the grenade-trees hanging over the banks, the mud huts overlooking the stream. All that is part of my mum's home, which is my home too.

Mogador, too, is part of that home. I still go to Mogador occasionally. On my way to and back from Mogador (commonly known as Essaouira), I just can't miss glancing at where my parents came from. Because that's part of my home! No wonder then that both "The Tailor" and "The Philosopher" are set somewhere around that area. It’s there that I saw a lot of reed by a river. See The Philosopher (Chapter One) mamgoon 947

It’s there that I saw shepherds playing on the utar in the fields and in berrakas .See The Tailor (Chapter Seven) mamgoon 1,648

Now, what about you? You have your own home, maybe your own homes, haven't you? Well, I made a number of trips by bike. I went to all the neighbouring towns and cities: Casablanca, El Gara, Benslimane, Mellila, Bouznika and Rabat. I went there by Mini bike, which only town dwellers normally use. So it was easy for anyone outside of towns and cities to notice that I was a "stranger". I went past kids going to school, women going to neighbours' homes, peasants working in their fields, youths sitting in cafes, others playing football near their homes. They were there miles and miles away from my home, and I wasn't as much surprised as they were seeing me riding my Mini bike through their hamlets and villages. I looked as an intruder, and people made me feel that by their way of looking at me. Kids asked me "where I was from". They asked me how far my hometown of Mohammedia was and where I was going and why I was there. The truth is that they needed not remind me that I didn't belong where they lived, where they had their home. I knew I was away from home, and I always wondered whether I could get back home before nightfall. I always “pined for” home on my way back. A Moroccan proverb goes, "The best place for a horse is its stable." How very true!

On the eve of eed you would find bus stations overcrowded with people wishing to celebrate eed with family. They know that they might be victims of road accidents on their way to or back from "home"; but they too go back "home" after the eed. Their number one home is the one where they live, where they earn a living or study for a better future. The one they visit on the eve of eed is relegated to a second place. They could be away from the number two home, but they just can't do without their number one home.

Expatriates too come during the summer holidays to see family and go back "home" within less than a month, despite horrific road accidents that happen every year. This proves that absence from the "old" home is just out of necessity, but going back home from time to time is no less urgent necessity when one can afford it.

Ibn Battuta went to God only knows how many countries. He lived there for years and years. He got married in several places. But in the end he came back to his native country, Morocco, where he dictated his journey accounts to a Moroccan scribe, to the Moroccan king's delight.

In his writings, such as TAWQ AL HAMAMA (The Collar of the Dove), Ibn Hazam talked about Cordova as his "home". He described it in every detail possible. You could feel his heart bleeding as he wrote about what it meant for him to be driven out of his home and live the rest of his life far and far away from the home of his childhood and youth. This would make a present-day Spaniard raise his eyebrows.

Even homeless people do have their "home" in this sense, don't they? Wherever they might go they will always think of a place as "their place", their home.

So it is anything but bizarre to see the family of a dead person try everything they can to return his remains to the place he or they consider(ed) to be his home. The remains of the French explorer of Italian origin Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who gave the Congolese capital its name, were transferred from Algiers to Brazaville, Congo-Braza, many decades after his death and burial because his family considered Brazaville as his "home".

Some people, like Ibn Hazam in Muslim Spain, are forced from home. They become refugees in other people's homes. These will always dream of returning back home unless they find better living conditions in the land where they have taken refuge.

But other people leave their own home without being forced from it. They migrate to lands where they see their El Dorado. With time the new land becomes their adopted home. Then these immigrants become full citizens of the country that has adopted them. But even with naturalization, many people still find themselves "sitting astride" between two "homes". African Americans perhaps have no other home than the one where they were born and raised. So they have no choice than to be integrated, assimilated into the societies where they live. But those who were born in other countries or into families coming from other countries do have "another home". These people bring in their "old" homes to their new ones. Satellite TV, radio stations, the Internet, Western Union and the like, all these serve as links between the two homes.

For many, those links are not enough. They need stronger links to the home country. They need places where they can meet other people from the home country, where they can hear the music and eat or buy the food of the home country, where they can buy the clothes of the home country, where they can celebrate all that is celebrated back in the home country. In New York, for example, you have China Town, but also "a town" for the Italians, the Hispanics, the Greeks, the Germans, the Mid-easterns, etc. Everyone has his own little home and N.Y. is home to all.

The question is: do you call any place you live in home? The Queen of Britain may call Buckingham Palace home, but can the President of U.S. call the White House home? What about the settlers and their children who were born and raised under occupation? What about the people who were living in those places before they were deported by the settlers and became refugees in other peoples' lands? What about the children who were born in countries where their parents are considered no more than immigrants?

Many immigrants tend to become "full" (not only naturalized) citizens of the countries where they are. They make their own lives where they are. They give their children the "same" education as the children of the land where they are. They do this because they love this land they found themselves in –not because of a bad experience of deportation, persecution or poverty.

Aljazeera TV has broadcast a series of programs called, "Asdiqa Al Arab" (Friends of the Arabs), featuring ordinary people from America, China, Europe, etc., who chose to live in this or that Arab country where they found their happiness and decided to stay until the end of their lives.

Mohamed Ali LAGOUADER

Morocco

Copyright ©2007 by Mohammed Lagouader

Americans have always been on the move, since the first Native Americans crossed the Bering Straits, since the first Europeans crossed the ocean in ships (whether it was Leif Ericsson or Christopher Columbus). The language, perhaps like any other, is full of proverbs like "home is where the heart is" and "you can't go home again." Americans move on average every seven years, and the American sensibility is full of a sense of "rootlessness."

My home of the moment is one of the least permanent places in America: Washington, D.C. Although I was born here, most people who live here came from somewhere else and stay only as long as they have to. (I wonder if perhaps Casablanca is similar in this respect.)

Although Washington is at the moment my "home," I have had a number of other homes along the way. I often think of Michigan, where I spent my teenage years, as home. And in Morocco, there is no doubt my home is Outat El Haj, where people worked every day to make me feel welcome even though I came as the most complete stranger.