Understanding Without Words in Morocco

By Sarah Rogers

The woman across from me handed us a piece of paper with her address and phone number in Casablanca.

“When you come to Casa next week, come to my home. We will have a traditional Moroccan meal. Afterwards, my daughters and I will take you to the baths,” the woman told Leigh, another student, and me in French. I smiled, nodded, and tucked the slip of paper into my pocket.

At first, it had been difficult to shrug off my American caution, a caution that I had learned was called “street smarts,” essential to American city life. According to this American logic, when someone offers you something, your first thought should be, “What do they want in return.” I had been living, studying, and traveling in Morocco for two months, however, and so I knew this woman's offering was genuine, without an expectant gift in return. Despite the veil, I knew this woman was smiling from her eyes. And her smile was as true as mine. By this point in my stay in Morocco, I had come to expect this open and honest hospitality.

Leigh and I, along with the ten other students on my semester abroad program, were on the train from Rabat, heading to Southern Morocco. We were about to embark for a week in our “village stay.” We didn't know what to expect. All we knew was that two students were staying in each of the surrounding Berber villages and our stay was to last a week. That limited information, a case of bottled water, and some supplies, a gift to our host family, was all with which we were equipped.

Early the next morning, all twelve of us and Abdelhey, our program director, loaded onto the back of a rattling pick up truck and headed into the mountains. The cloudless, pure blue sky seemed closer to us than it did at home. Two by two the truck dropped us off at each village. We didn't even know how we would find our way on Friday to the souk, the group's meeting place. We didn't even know what would happen between now and next Friday.

Greeted by two men, Leigh and I were led to one of the houses. All of the houses were in close proximity to each other. The pale brown color of the houses reflected the pale brown of the surrounding mountains. We had had two months of Arabic lessons, but this was a Berber village and so therefore, we had no way to communicate when we first arrived. We couldn't even ask simple questions, such as, “What is your name?” Even reading body language was tricky. As Leigh and I quickly realized, one reads one's body language within one's own cultural framework.

We were immediately served mint tea and bread, still warm from the fire. The house was composed of several bare rooms. In the front room, a large loom was set up and several elderly women were weaving a blanket. The main room had no ceiling and several mats were laid out for sitting, along with a small table. That night, after a silent dinner with a few adults and several smiling children, Leigh and I went to bed.

The following morning, we awoke and went into the main living room. Thinking we would go for a hike in the mountains, we opened the door of the house, only to be greeted by a huge group of smiling faces, all the women and children of the village.

The voices of the women and children sang through the air. I felt a child's hand slip into mine. I looked down, comforted by the smile of a stranger. We spent the next few hours dancing and singing in the morning sun. That night, some of the women of the village put henna on our feet. When it got dark, the women worked by candle light. All of our dancing partners from the morning surrounded us like a cocoon of protection in what should have felt like utter chaos and confusion. As night grew, Leigh and I grew tired. Sensing our fatigue, our host grandmother shooed away our guests.

After dinner that night, Leigh and I sat with our host family in the main room. The only light was the candle and the glimmer from the stars above. The time passed quickly that night. The hours filled with attempts to communicate with our host family. I thought of my friends and family in the United States. If they could have seen me at that moment, they probably would have laughed. Yet it was a moment which I will never forget. Every sense each of us had was used to express and communicate some little tidbit about ourselves. The next morning when we woke up and had breakfast, there was an ease in our company. I will never know how much I understood of what my host family was trying to tell me, nor how much they understood of what I tried to tell them; that morning it was irrelevant. What mattered that morning was an understanding of an effort to communicate and a smile.

Soon it was Friday morning. Leigh and I arose with our host father and the sun. We followed his steady footsteps and several mules down through the mountains, to the souk, where we met the rest of the group.

My village stay is a story I have difficulty telling, difficulty communicating. Maybe there truly are no words to describe that night under the stars, in the mountains, in Morocco. The words may be lacking, but the feeling, the senses of that moment are in my heart, my mind, and my soul and in the clay dirt of the mountains, which is embedded in the silver ring given to me by my host mother in the village. The open and honest generosity of the woman on the train is spread like the wings of a colorful butterfly throughout the country of Morocco.

Sarah Rogers is a student in the graduate program of Art History and Museum Studies at Tufts University. In her undergraduate program at Bates College she wrote her thesis on “The Utilization and Definition of the Self in Contemporary Arab-Islamic Art.” She is continuing her interest in the relationship between politics and national identity in the visual world, both its creation and its reception.