A Hidden Gnawa bathes himself with sacred incense to repair his aching body.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Hidden - part 2
The day before I left Marrakech I went on a personal errand to find a famous Gnawa Master of the Guembri more famous for his singing voice than his instrumental dexterity but a Master nonetheless. I wanted to give him a glossy World Music magazine featuring a photograph I had taken of him six years ago. I found him in a ancient but recently renovated caravanserai where he had set up his small shop, a colorful hole in the wall lined with his beaded guembris, photographs, posters of European concerts, etc... His French was poor, so we sat there for a while, exchanged news of common friends, drank coca cola, he smoked some kiff… I left having performed my duties and just as I was about to turn the corner I noticed an antique looking black and white photograph hanging on the wall over another musician’s shop. Three old, almost toothless Gnawa, dressed up in their Lila best stared at the camera with a knowing grin. It had the look of the kind of ethnographic photography from the 1930’s. But the caption under it, which was as faded as the image itself said it all: Le Maroc d’Autrefois. The Morocco of the Past. Of course we tend to believe that a certain kind of “restorative” nostalgia only belongs to the present. If only things were like before! Everything was better when…! But how often do we stop to think that someone from that very past we now idolize had the same longings?
Documenting marginal groups has been a traditional documentary genre since the early days of “salvage ethnography” when Western anthropologists roamed the world desperately trying to capture on film the nature of rapidly vanishing cultures. Ironically, today it would seem that the ancient taboos against photography might be coming true. We are all “vanishing” in some way or another, lost in a world of manufactured images that perpetuate the hope that if we keep on filming, if we keep reaching for the margins, if we keep searching for that “other” we will find ourselves in them. And what are we looking for anyway? The enduring stability of traditional cultures versus our westernized cultural suicide? Westerners of developed nations easily forget that they too were once members of a native culture with its traditions tightly bound to community, earth and the spirits of the past. We separate ourselves from our past in exchange for modernity and then, when we feel empty inside; we try to reclaim it in someone else’s. But, if you believe, like me, that there are no boundaries that separate human beings, be they cultural, political, geographical or even physical, then you can go through a red door and come out through a green door. It doesn’t matter. The energy that allows you to find “yourself”, to sail that “sea of tranquility”, to lift the societal veils that bind you like a slave to your assigned roles, that energy, is not local. It does not obey the Newtonian laws of mechanics of our known world. It’s everywhere and belongs to no one. Shamans, spiritual leaders and Gnawa Priestesses like Malika are just better conductors than most.
“The Morocco of the Past” has always been vanishing. When I lament that ten years ago, it seemed that the Gnawa were more stable and truer to their culture, I am acting just like those European photographers caught in their misguided and egocentric circles. It’s a necessary step of deception. One of holes the mind loves to dig for itself. The Gnawa have always been in a state of transformation. They are uprooted slaves, survivors. This is their essence. They deal in Spirits, in that Baraka, that energy that knows no bounds and has the power to get you out of that comfortable hole you’re living in.
Everything that I say about the Gnawa has to be understood from this context. Yes, there is a clear corruption. There a divisions. There is jealousy. There is a flood coming and it seems to me that the ones that will survive are the ones hiding as we speak from my inquisitive gaze…though I have managed to find a few that believe it is still possible to hide in plain sight!
Documenting marginal groups has been a traditional documentary genre since the early days of “salvage ethnography” when Western anthropologists roamed the world desperately trying to capture on film the nature of rapidly vanishing cultures. Ironically, today it would seem that the ancient taboos against photography might be coming true. We are all “vanishing” in some way or another, lost in a world of manufactured images that perpetuate the hope that if we keep on filming, if we keep reaching for the margins, if we keep searching for that “other” we will find ourselves in them. And what are we looking for anyway? The enduring stability of traditional cultures versus our westernized cultural suicide? Westerners of developed nations easily forget that they too were once members of a native culture with its traditions tightly bound to community, earth and the spirits of the past. We separate ourselves from our past in exchange for modernity and then, when we feel empty inside; we try to reclaim it in someone else’s. But, if you believe, like me, that there are no boundaries that separate human beings, be they cultural, political, geographical or even physical, then you can go through a red door and come out through a green door. It doesn’t matter. The energy that allows you to find “yourself”, to sail that “sea of tranquility”, to lift the societal veils that bind you like a slave to your assigned roles, that energy, is not local. It does not obey the Newtonian laws of mechanics of our known world. It’s everywhere and belongs to no one. Shamans, spiritual leaders and Gnawa Priestesses like Malika are just better conductors than most.
“The Morocco of the Past” has always been vanishing. When I lament that ten years ago, it seemed that the Gnawa were more stable and truer to their culture, I am acting just like those European photographers caught in their misguided and egocentric circles. It’s a necessary step of deception. One of holes the mind loves to dig for itself. The Gnawa have always been in a state of transformation. They are uprooted slaves, survivors. This is their essence. They deal in Spirits, in that Baraka, that energy that knows no bounds and has the power to get you out of that comfortable hole you’re living in.
Everything that I say about the Gnawa has to be understood from this context. Yes, there is a clear corruption. There a divisions. There is jealousy. There is a flood coming and it seems to me that the ones that will survive are the ones hiding as we speak from my inquisitive gaze…though I have managed to find a few that believe it is still possible to hide in plain sight!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Hidden - part1
About one third into the Lila Ceremony, sometime near 3AM, I noticed that my Gnawa Priestess friend Malika, who had been spiritually in charge of the evening, was nowhere to be seen. A bit surprised, I turned to her daughter who told me that Malika had left. She gave me no reason. I got a bit worried. Who was in charge? But a few minutes later, the Blue spirits (my favorites) began to be played and I quickly joined the inner circle of dancers who were slowly and gracefully circling a blue bowl of rose water laid on the ground. The bowl of water is used in a dance where the adept places it on his or her head and dances with it, carrying inside those waters, the spirit of Moses who comes bearing down the seas to take the slaves away from their imprisoned fate. It’s a powerful image, a testament; some have confided me, to the influence of Jewish culture on the Gnawa of Casablanca. Ten years ago, it this very section of the ritual that ultimately “broke me down”. Here’s a decade old description of that event:
The next color was blue. Here the other companion who came on the bus, Hassan, performed and incredible dance. From the moment I had seen him that morning I was struck by him. It is as if you could see his aura around him. This man had presence. He was my size with androgynous features. A very chiseled face, always quiet and soft spoken, with eyes that reveal but the outer edges of his mystery. He was seduction itself. He began to dance with a bowl of boiling water and fresh mint leaves placed on top of his head. He moved like a snake in water. Actually this blue color represented and an ancient spirit that swims across the waters. The color of Moses. At one point the bowl of water fell and spilled on the carpet. Silence! He gasped for air as if coming to the surface after a long swim and collapsed his face in agony. Quickly his friends helped him up, filled the bowl and encouraged him to start again. The music began and this time it was as if he was flying through water like a dolphin. He moved in four different directions at once, lied down on the floor and began to undulate as if a continuous stream of waves were pouring through his body, the bowl still on his head. He was water! And he was very far away from us at that moment. He stood up and finished his dance as calmly as he had begun it. Someone took the bowl of water from him and offered it around. I was very impressed by what I had seen. The earlier mistake had given his dance a powerful drive. We all wanted him to succeed. It was high drama indeed and as I took a drink from the bowl he had carried on his head back from the other side I felt moved and full of tenderness. I was given a blue shawl and invited to join three other participants who were already dancing in a row facing the musician. My head bowed, wrapped in blue, I began to follow with the steps I had seen others take. Slow at first, two little hops to the right and then two little hops to the left, a gentle swaying, a calm sea. The music began to intensify and so did my dancing and as I was breathing in that blue incense my mind began to wander away, my body felt very tired, exhausted, spent, as if I was ready to let go and die. Calm and peaceful. Now this was not a “near death experience” or an “out of body experience”. I just felt taken by something very powerful which made me collapse to my hands and knees. At this point my breathing was long and deep. I don’t remember what happened next but I was lying on the ground against the cushions. The sounds of the room seemed very far away. I opened my eyes and Hassan (the one with the bowl) had also collapsed next to me. His body was shaking and his eyes were white. His hand fell on my chest but I could not move. I remember curling up like a child and then I began to cry. I cried for a long time. I cried and I cried. I was thinking of Chile and how I was robbed of the possibility of having a community like this, to be part of an ancient tradition, to feel the deep meaning of belonging. I cried for my father who lost Chile and my grandfather who lost Russia.. Like an endless wheel I was also thinking of Isabella, my soon to be born daughter and how I did not want her to live how I lived. And I cried even more and all the sadness of these past twenty five years came streaming out like rivers absorbed into the sea and the sea was this community of people I barely knew but they were here and Chile, my country of my lost childhood, was not.
I have cried before thinking of what I lost after the coup but never quite like this. It made sense here. There was a reason, a way out. If I cried enough maybe Isabella will never be able to see in me what I have lost but rather what I have gained. I don’t want her to be born in a world where her father’s emotional psyche is torn to pieces across continents and ideologies.
It took me a while to come back to where I was. The music subsided and people milled around. There was also another woman who had been crying just like me. She was sitting at the other side of the room her puffy eyes still far away, her pain not yet gone. I stood up slowly. I felt so weak I almost collapsed. I drank a little water and felt better.
I never expected a replay of what had happened ten years ago. But I expected a deepening of my relationship to this to this color, to this sound, to this vibration in the key of Blue. All through this voyage I’ve been reading a most precious book, Rebecca Solnit’s, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, and it offers an endless supply of powerful living metaphors for anyone who has made wandering his or her mode of consciousness in life.
In the book, Solnit has a remarkable chapter titled the Blue of Distance where she explores the significance of the color blue as the physical and spiritual recipient of “distance”. “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us”, she writes. “ It disperses among the molecules of air, it scatters in water...This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, this light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue...The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
Solnit’s writings a full of longing and I can recognize its submission to certain laws of our known universe. As we walk into the Blue, the blue disappears; as we try to grasp the intense energy that flows through our bodies during a Sufi Zikr Ceremony, that energy will also disappear. It seems that this is our everyday condition, to be always reaching for what is just beyond our grasp. It’s the fire that fuels human folly and human evolution. But once in a while I believe it is possible be inside the Blue. The trick (and it feels like a trick!) is to understand that it is always there in the first place. The problem is our desire to grasp it, to understand it, to own it, the “be one with it”. This type of consciousness will make us “deaf dumb and blind”, as it is written in the Q’ran. We forget that we are already inside the Blue, if we could only transcend our drive to individuate and separate. “There is no there there”, goes the famous Sufi maxim. Of course, transcendence is often the realm of fools and playing the fool is a dangerous game indeed. It’s a game that saddles madness, sickness and despair. Three qualities any real Gnawa has to inhabit, I have been told. Rimbaud was a Gnawa you ask? Baudelaire, Poe, Schubert, Van Gogh, Kurt Kobain? There is a price to pay for being possessed. That much is clear. The reward is the incomparable experience of possessing – if be for an instant – that very Blue that Solnit so longingly describes. In a nut shell, this is the art of the Gnawa. To posses and to be possessed at once. Not through substance intoxication or expert meditation but through communal celebration. It is often violent and euphoric full blood, screams, convulsions and contortions; but it can also be soft and silent when the only sounds heard are the thumping of the goat strings against the camel throated body of the guembri and the heavy breaths of the Priestess, usually a woman of age, a woman who carries with her the life experience of living among a cohort of Master Spirits she literally “works” during the Lila Ceremony.
What comes out, what is transferred and negotiated is the most desired and yet most ephemeral of energies: what is referred to in popular Islam as the Baraka. The Blessings of the Divine Creator. In Morocco, the term is used in everyday life when you give an extra tip, when you give alms, when you give a gift but it is also used when you want to stop giving. Baraka! That’s it! Enough! You got it, now enjoy it! But inside the sacred realm of the Lila Ceremony the Baraka is serious business. I use the ideologically charged term “business” very carefully here. Trying to understand the relationship between money and blessings is as tricky as trying to understand why people have faith. After a while it’s bound to be a waste of time because it’s not a rational equation. During the Lila, extra money is given by those who want to be openly and verbally blessed by the Gnawa Couyous, the musicians who accompany the Master of the Guembri. Money flows, the blessings flow. The bigger the bill, the bigger the blessing both in terms of volume and gesture. Now, on a very rudimentary level this sounds like a scam. And it has every potential to be one. This is where the “art of the Gnawa” comes to play an essential role in trying to understand why the hell Malika left at the 3 AM, well before the Lila was over. To put is simply if Dali doodles on a napkin and sells that doodle for a small fortune, it’s OK, no matter how outrageous this may seem. He’s a Master of the form. The doodle has Baraka. Aura. Authenticity. Simple. But, on the other hand, if someone impersonating Dali does the same trick, it’s a scam, even if the doodles are formally identical.
I had written about the proliferation of “fake” Gnawas and the dangers they posed to the integrity of the culture. But I had only witnessed it in the streets or restaurants. Never during a Lila. As we danced around the blue bowl of rose water I was about to see first hand how deep this crisis of identity really is.
The next color was blue. Here the other companion who came on the bus, Hassan, performed and incredible dance. From the moment I had seen him that morning I was struck by him. It is as if you could see his aura around him. This man had presence. He was my size with androgynous features. A very chiseled face, always quiet and soft spoken, with eyes that reveal but the outer edges of his mystery. He was seduction itself. He began to dance with a bowl of boiling water and fresh mint leaves placed on top of his head. He moved like a snake in water. Actually this blue color represented and an ancient spirit that swims across the waters. The color of Moses. At one point the bowl of water fell and spilled on the carpet. Silence! He gasped for air as if coming to the surface after a long swim and collapsed his face in agony. Quickly his friends helped him up, filled the bowl and encouraged him to start again. The music began and this time it was as if he was flying through water like a dolphin. He moved in four different directions at once, lied down on the floor and began to undulate as if a continuous stream of waves were pouring through his body, the bowl still on his head. He was water! And he was very far away from us at that moment. He stood up and finished his dance as calmly as he had begun it. Someone took the bowl of water from him and offered it around. I was very impressed by what I had seen. The earlier mistake had given his dance a powerful drive. We all wanted him to succeed. It was high drama indeed and as I took a drink from the bowl he had carried on his head back from the other side I felt moved and full of tenderness. I was given a blue shawl and invited to join three other participants who were already dancing in a row facing the musician. My head bowed, wrapped in blue, I began to follow with the steps I had seen others take. Slow at first, two little hops to the right and then two little hops to the left, a gentle swaying, a calm sea. The music began to intensify and so did my dancing and as I was breathing in that blue incense my mind began to wander away, my body felt very tired, exhausted, spent, as if I was ready to let go and die. Calm and peaceful. Now this was not a “near death experience” or an “out of body experience”. I just felt taken by something very powerful which made me collapse to my hands and knees. At this point my breathing was long and deep. I don’t remember what happened next but I was lying on the ground against the cushions. The sounds of the room seemed very far away. I opened my eyes and Hassan (the one with the bowl) had also collapsed next to me. His body was shaking and his eyes were white. His hand fell on my chest but I could not move. I remember curling up like a child and then I began to cry. I cried for a long time. I cried and I cried. I was thinking of Chile and how I was robbed of the possibility of having a community like this, to be part of an ancient tradition, to feel the deep meaning of belonging. I cried for my father who lost Chile and my grandfather who lost Russia.. Like an endless wheel I was also thinking of Isabella, my soon to be born daughter and how I did not want her to live how I lived. And I cried even more and all the sadness of these past twenty five years came streaming out like rivers absorbed into the sea and the sea was this community of people I barely knew but they were here and Chile, my country of my lost childhood, was not.
I have cried before thinking of what I lost after the coup but never quite like this. It made sense here. There was a reason, a way out. If I cried enough maybe Isabella will never be able to see in me what I have lost but rather what I have gained. I don’t want her to be born in a world where her father’s emotional psyche is torn to pieces across continents and ideologies.
It took me a while to come back to where I was. The music subsided and people milled around. There was also another woman who had been crying just like me. She was sitting at the other side of the room her puffy eyes still far away, her pain not yet gone. I stood up slowly. I felt so weak I almost collapsed. I drank a little water and felt better.
I never expected a replay of what had happened ten years ago. But I expected a deepening of my relationship to this to this color, to this sound, to this vibration in the key of Blue. All through this voyage I’ve been reading a most precious book, Rebecca Solnit’s, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, and it offers an endless supply of powerful living metaphors for anyone who has made wandering his or her mode of consciousness in life.
In the book, Solnit has a remarkable chapter titled the Blue of Distance where she explores the significance of the color blue as the physical and spiritual recipient of “distance”. “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us”, she writes. “ It disperses among the molecules of air, it scatters in water...This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, this light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue...The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
Solnit’s writings a full of longing and I can recognize its submission to certain laws of our known universe. As we walk into the Blue, the blue disappears; as we try to grasp the intense energy that flows through our bodies during a Sufi Zikr Ceremony, that energy will also disappear. It seems that this is our everyday condition, to be always reaching for what is just beyond our grasp. It’s the fire that fuels human folly and human evolution. But once in a while I believe it is possible be inside the Blue. The trick (and it feels like a trick!) is to understand that it is always there in the first place. The problem is our desire to grasp it, to understand it, to own it, the “be one with it”. This type of consciousness will make us “deaf dumb and blind”, as it is written in the Q’ran. We forget that we are already inside the Blue, if we could only transcend our drive to individuate and separate. “There is no there there”, goes the famous Sufi maxim. Of course, transcendence is often the realm of fools and playing the fool is a dangerous game indeed. It’s a game that saddles madness, sickness and despair. Three qualities any real Gnawa has to inhabit, I have been told. Rimbaud was a Gnawa you ask? Baudelaire, Poe, Schubert, Van Gogh, Kurt Kobain? There is a price to pay for being possessed. That much is clear. The reward is the incomparable experience of possessing – if be for an instant – that very Blue that Solnit so longingly describes. In a nut shell, this is the art of the Gnawa. To posses and to be possessed at once. Not through substance intoxication or expert meditation but through communal celebration. It is often violent and euphoric full blood, screams, convulsions and contortions; but it can also be soft and silent when the only sounds heard are the thumping of the goat strings against the camel throated body of the guembri and the heavy breaths of the Priestess, usually a woman of age, a woman who carries with her the life experience of living among a cohort of Master Spirits she literally “works” during the Lila Ceremony.
What comes out, what is transferred and negotiated is the most desired and yet most ephemeral of energies: what is referred to in popular Islam as the Baraka. The Blessings of the Divine Creator. In Morocco, the term is used in everyday life when you give an extra tip, when you give alms, when you give a gift but it is also used when you want to stop giving. Baraka! That’s it! Enough! You got it, now enjoy it! But inside the sacred realm of the Lila Ceremony the Baraka is serious business. I use the ideologically charged term “business” very carefully here. Trying to understand the relationship between money and blessings is as tricky as trying to understand why people have faith. After a while it’s bound to be a waste of time because it’s not a rational equation. During the Lila, extra money is given by those who want to be openly and verbally blessed by the Gnawa Couyous, the musicians who accompany the Master of the Guembri. Money flows, the blessings flow. The bigger the bill, the bigger the blessing both in terms of volume and gesture. Now, on a very rudimentary level this sounds like a scam. And it has every potential to be one. This is where the “art of the Gnawa” comes to play an essential role in trying to understand why the hell Malika left at the 3 AM, well before the Lila was over. To put is simply if Dali doodles on a napkin and sells that doodle for a small fortune, it’s OK, no matter how outrageous this may seem. He’s a Master of the form. The doodle has Baraka. Aura. Authenticity. Simple. But, on the other hand, if someone impersonating Dali does the same trick, it’s a scam, even if the doodles are formally identical.
I had written about the proliferation of “fake” Gnawas and the dangers they posed to the integrity of the culture. But I had only witnessed it in the streets or restaurants. Never during a Lila. As we danced around the blue bowl of rose water I was about to see first hand how deep this crisis of identity really is.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Heaven 3
Zukaina had gotten the best grade of her class and had won a special engraved phrase from the Q'ran that she had given to me. I told her that this outing was to celebrate her good grades at the end of the year - and that's what I did with my daughters back in the USA.
Heaven 2
We take the "Spider Moto" bike, along with Yussuf, the younger brother who did not really want to eat ice cream but play in the playground.
Heaven 1
Zukaina is nine years old - she was born a few days before my oldest daughter Isabella.
Zukaina is the granddaughter of Malika, the Gnawa Priestess who opened the door of mystical Islam for me. Ten years ago, like my Isabella, Zukaina was still in the womb.
Today I'm taking the family for a special treat in the Ville Nouvelle: ice cream and games!
Fading image
The Mosque and the TV antennas compete for the skyline. Soon this image will be a thing of the past. Television will be beamed through telephone cable giving Marrakchis more than one hundred channels. Yet another radical mediated change in their lives.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
After the Lila
Nothing is, as it ever seems, especially in the spirit world of the Gnawa. Untrained eyes like mine are easily fooled, seduced by acquired intellectual knowledge and a passion for the form. I have seen and heard only what a handful of Westerners have ever witnessed. And yet, what I know is a mere drop of sweat. The one who says he knows, knows nothing, my Teacher used to say.
These past few days in Marrakech have been everything I could have wished for: I set up a trap for myself, I fell in it and when I got out of it, I found a new door. As I write these words I am slowly opening it. What lies beyond its threshold is a hidden world, a place that only exists within the very distinct realm of actively participating in a Lila, the Gnawa ritual of Spirit Possession. This is where the real knowledge lies. In the making. Everything else is an intellectual exercise. Nothing wrong with that either. By now I have a feeling that my intricate and baroque mind games are nothing more, nothing less than the shovel that digs the trap I will eventually fall into. Such a complicated process just to dig a simple hole!
The Lilla I witnessed had everything I was looking for. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was a fascinating mirror of the tensions that live under the surface of modern Gnawa culture.
More to come....
These past few days in Marrakech have been everything I could have wished for: I set up a trap for myself, I fell in it and when I got out of it, I found a new door. As I write these words I am slowly opening it. What lies beyond its threshold is a hidden world, a place that only exists within the very distinct realm of actively participating in a Lila, the Gnawa ritual of Spirit Possession. This is where the real knowledge lies. In the making. Everything else is an intellectual exercise. Nothing wrong with that either. By now I have a feeling that my intricate and baroque mind games are nothing more, nothing less than the shovel that digs the trap I will eventually fall into. Such a complicated process just to dig a simple hole!
The Lilla I witnessed had everything I was looking for. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was a fascinating mirror of the tensions that live under the surface of modern Gnawa culture.
More to come....
Lila - The Sacred 2
The last Spirit that was played. Aisha Khandisha - a goat footed woman spirit who seduces men and makes them her slave.
Lila - The Sacred
Photographing the Lila is a tricky proposition. I was not going to do it but I'm trying to help Malika to do a website so she can get clients from Europe who want to be "healed" by her Spirits.So I took this photograph of her while she "worked" with candles and fire.
Lila - The Profane 3
The Aada precession begins. Candles and milk with rose water are being blessed. with the deafening sound of the drums calling the Spoirits to come to their party. After all it is their party.
Lila - The Profane 2
Now it's the turn of the muscians to show off their skills and warm up the room.
Lila - The Profane
We're gathered in a medium size Ryad with an open courtyard. The Entertainment section of the Lila has begun. Malika dances to warm up the Spirits. This section is profaner because no Spirits are called.... but there was a hundred year old woman who fell into possession.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Sacrifice: Dancing before the Spirits
The Maalem begins to play. The Gnawa Priestess begins to dance.
The Sacrifice: The Knives
The Master of the Baraka takes out his knives. These are the same knives he will used during the Lila to cut himself.
The Sacrifice: Here's the comes the jaoui
The small room is filled with a special incense that pleases the Red Spirits of the Slaughterhouses. Everything has to be blessed with it: people, animals, musical instruments and knives ..
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Mohamed and his motocycle
Every morning Mohamed gets up at 3AM, does his prayers and delivers vegetables to the markets in the Kasbah.
He took the morning off to help us buy the animals. His mother is a great Gnawa Priestess.
Marrakech - 6:40 AM
After a rice pudding breakfast that tasted more like old French fries than anything we load up the animals. Mohammed the driver takes the picture.
Marrakech - 6:20 AM
The haggling continues all around us. Hundreds of sheep, goats, rabbits and roosters are sold.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Marrakech - 5:30 AM
It's still dark. I'm inside a small metal wagon pulled by a motorcycle. Like the one in Fellini’s La Strada. Every bump feels like an earthquake.
I’m with two Gnawa on our way to the animal market to buy a black goat and three roosters.
Tomorrow at noon there will be a sacrifice and then a Lila, the sacred ceremony of the Gnawa.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Marrakech 1 - Smoke and Mirrors
I’ve now been on the road for a whole week. Malaga. Granada. Algeciras. Tangier. Fes. A week long warm up. Landing by plane in Marrakech is like trying to run a marathon without stretching. You’re coming in cold and when you try to run, you’re going to get hurt. You’ve got to be able to see mystical journeys from an athletic perspective and be prepared to hit the ground running. The preparation is key to the success or failure of your journey because it’s there that you’re laying down all the signposts that will guide your future steps without being trapped in the oldest con in the book: forcing the story to take shape instead of letting it unfold as it should. It’s a classic tale where choice meets destiny and in the end – hopefully – it’s not a tragic love story.
I arrived late in the night because there was a fire on the train from Fes. But I never heard a thing, never saw all the passengers get out, never wondered why we had stopped in the middle of the desert. I was much too much involved in a free for a all spiraling conversation with two young Moroccans born in Belgium and two elderly Moroccans about European Islam, Jihad, Western Media, Sept 11, The Q’ran and Obama. When two young women walked into our cabin and told us the news, I had a good belly laugh.
I had planned to arrive at sunset and bathe in the primordial energy of the legendary medieval square they call Jemma el Fna - the Gathering of Annihilation – a place that in the past has stirred in me painful, uncontrollable energies. Annihilation. After all, this is where, for a thousand years, heads would roll and slaves were bought and sold, while storytellers told tales of cuckold peasants, ancient Sufi Saints and warriors. A thousand years of collective history lay beneath my feet; a continuous drama played out in nightly rituals of public performances: snake charmers, men disguised as belly dancers, knife throwers, steamed snails for sale, children acrobats, sadomasochistic clowns and yes, Gnawa musicians…The public executions may have been long gone, but other subtle forms remained hidden among the smoking grills and marinated meats, holistic healers, petty thieves, homeless shoeshine boys, veiled tattoo henna artists, blind fortune tellers… But this heightened description comes from a vision I had many many years ago, and incredibly enough does not match what I felt this time. This time, instead of being pulled in like a wild horse – I stepped back.
Here’s a taste of what I experienced ten years ago as I took my first steps in Jemma el Fna (from my 1999 journal):
I had barely stepped into Jemma el Fna, recording microphone in hand, excited beyond belief by the cacophony of exotic sounds, when a hand reached out and pulled me into a frenzied circle of street performing Gnawas. Five musicians illuminated by small kerosene lamps were sitting on flattened cardboards while five others danced clapping their metal castagnettes. It happened so fast; I didn’t have time to wonder at the sight. No time to say to myself: “Hey! Rodrigo! Here they are! This is what you traveled 7,000 miles for”. Luckily, I was in good shape. Years of playing soccer in small youth clubs in Amsterdam had given me strong legs and I was able to keep up with their acrobatic dances. We danced, we pranced, we laughed. But then I foolishly decided to get ahead of myself. I took the lead and dared the Gnawa to imitate my backwards-Russian crab move. On all fours, backwards on my back, right leg up, left arm up. It took less than five beats before I knocked down one of the kerosene lamps and the cardboard went up in flames. Total pandemonium. The musicians jumped back in unison as if bitten by a snake. They were angry, indignant. The crowd laughed and hollered. From the corner of my eye I could see someone running with a burlap bag in an attempt to put out the fire. All the while I kept on the dancing with the other Gnawas, who, in an attempt to be heard screamed in my ear that the lamp would cost 50 dirhams (5 dollars). No problem I shouted back while hopping on one leg. I reached in my pockets, pulled out a rumpled 100 and gave it to him declaring to anyone that cared to listen that the extra 50 was for the one I was going to break next. There was no time to think about the consequences of my actions; about the meaning of my transgressions. I was driven, madly driven, to participate in the footsteps of the history I was dancing on.
That was then. Tonight the darkness seems empty, the mystery appears to be gone. There are no Gnawa in Jemma el Fna – not like the ones I encountered ten years ago. These are “fake” Gnawa, crude pretenders in disguise, a byproduct of the globalization of Gnawa culture, “the opening”, as some pissed off Gnawa call it, into a commercial world where their music is now for sale beyond the context of their sacred rituals. I’m a part of that history now. My website on the Gnawa is the top hit on the Google search engine. I contributed to this opening – for better or for worse, I rode a history in the making where a whole culture transitioned in a matter of two decades from obscure sect to viable commercial representatives of a culture that once despised them a African gypsies. The “Arab” cultural hegemony of Moroccan culture is for ever broken. Paul Bowles made the first crack when he published the transliterated life story of an illiterate Berber into English, boldly bypassing the Arab/French paradigm that had defined all “official” Moroccan literature.
But now, ten years later after my first encounter with the Gnawa I can see the consequences of a history I am now part of. I’m not dancing on some abstract image of a mystical Moroccan past conjured up by a dream I had ten years ago. No. I’m dancing with the awareness that there’s been a forest fire and that the “real” Gnawa – and I hesitate to use the term – have gone underground again. Jemma el Fna is now the realm of smoke and mirrors, even the beautiful simpleton shoe shine boy, I photographed back then, who had kept his sanity in the midst of the hell that is Moroccan street life, had become a wild drunken beast, his face ravaged by alcohol and fist fights. Dark spots everywhere like a dead moonscape. The servers from my favorite restaurant told me had gotten into a fight with an orange juice presser and later that night the OJ kid had died of a heart attack. The shoe shine boy was sent to prison and when he came out – he was never the same. I’m still waiting to give him his photograph, but I wonder if it’s wise to expose him to an image of who he once was. He might see in his long lost face the possibility of redemption, or the might see the gates of hell. I’m not sure I want to be responsible for what happens. I’m thinking of tearing the photo and throwing it in the garbage.
Tonight Jemma el Fna died for me. I took a step back because I don’t want to fall into the grave. Tomorrow I will see the Gnawa priestess who opened the door for me. I hope she is still underground, hidden from view. I hope we will be able to see each other.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Waiting for the Azan - Fes
The sun sets very slowly today
Patience
What is there to do after
Ablution?
Watch a little girl play among the men in the courtyard
She is still too young to get cloistered up with the other women in the small cramped prayer room by the entrance of the mosque
She plays in the water
She giggles
She squeals
She rolls on the carpet
She holds her loving father's hand
A cool breeze blows now announcing the setting sun
Waiting for the Azan
Men talk
Take pictures of each other like tourists
Why not?
It is after all the oldest Mosque in Morocco
They roll up their pants and wash themselves
Outside in the Bazars its sell sell buy buy
Inside I'm still waiting for the Azan
My stomach grumbles
I have stumbled from one mosque to another
No food yet today
at least not the kind that drips down your lips
The only food here is patience
I'm tempted to ask a man slitting next to me at what time is the call to prayer?r
He stands up and walks away saving me from having lost desert
The only food here is patience
Tangier Slight Return Part 2
Tangier: Slight Return (part 2)
Ten years ago I landed in Tangier in search of a dream. Now I was tracing those steps. Here’s an excerpt from my journal from that day back in 1999…
“I checked in at the hotel El Muniria, famed for being the place where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. If the days of the Interzone were long gone I thought, I could still try and catch his ghost. Peter, the quirky English owner received me, though he swore to me, unequivocally, that he never really was in Tangier anymore. Spent most of the year in the Old Country, he did. If I was talking to him right now, it was by pure chance. This moment was almost a statistical improbability. I grabbed my bags and followed this slow ascending improbability up a steep narrow magenta stairwell to the second floor where I was showed room 8. It was non-descript and ready but failed to excite my bleary eyes. On the other hand room 5 wasn’t ready but was the one Kerouac used to stay in when he visited Burroughs and company. The room immediately pulled you in. A giant palm tree stirred against one of the open windowpanes; behind it you could see the immaculate white minaret of the local mosque and further on the gritty arbor of Tangier with its deep blue scintillating sea. The light was bright, brighter than in Los Angeles. The other window overlooked the narrow Rue Magellan and the competing Hotel across the street with a maze of stairs and alcoves leading to a cozy roof top terrace café from which a couple of young hip-looking urban Moroccans, listening to blaring pop music and rolling what looked like a big fat joint, glanced at me with an air of complicity. A cool breeze came in, blowing the green velvet curtains and bringing with it the far away sounds of a schoolyard full of children.
“I’ll take it,” I immediately said. “If it’s not ready I can wait. All I really need is a shower.” An older Moroccan woman peeked her head inside the doorframe and frowned. She was the deaf mute maid of the hotel. The one really in charge, it seemed. She and Peter got into an argument filled with grunts and gestures mixed with Peter’s exasperated invocations of God’s Sake and a clean towel for our new guest. Burroughs was never so close, or so I thought.
A quick shower later, I left the room to go for a little roaming around Tangier hoping a bit of fresh air would put me to sleep later that afternoon. But Burroughs’s ghost didn’t let me get off that easy. The key to the room was twice as long as the door was thick and hundred times more difficult to manipulate than the French language. I imagined Kerouac coming back to his room, in the middle of the pitch dark night, high as a kite, trying to open this damn door, transferring to the moment a heavy rhymed spiritual test of epic proportions. There he was - key - door - the East - must open and take a piss. Here I was, fifty years later. People come and go but doors never change.”
I wanted to return to El Muniria, to that room number 5, where possibly Kerouac and I shared the same existential frustration with that fateful door. I had tried to call ahead of time but the connection was bad and probably wrong. So, I had left it to chance. The only place I hadn’t booked a place to stay was Tangier and since the Hotel – though famous in certain rarified literary circles – was a dive well outside the universe of everyday tourism. So, I wasn’t worried. I knew it was close by because I remember seeing the harbor from my now mystical room. I stepped into freedom and found a taxi. The driver was nice (they’re all nice until they scam you) started driving while telling me that he had no idea how to find Rue Magellan, where the Hotel was located. True, it was a small dead end street. But he seemed oddly lost. So, I told him to take me to Boulevard Mohammed 5. From there we can find it. He took me to Boulevard Mohammed 6! Ok. He was trying to scam me. I made him take me to the right Boulevard and I stepped out in a corner I seemed to recognize, where I could see the Bar Berlin. I walked in. It was a small bar/restaurant where they serve hard liquor in the basement and beer and Moroccan tapas on the main floor. Seven tables at the most. TV on. Everybody was waiting for the US/Brazil world soccer federation cup game.
The waiter – who had a dashing black moustache, straight out of casting central -shook his head and then turned to a group of three men sitting at table at the end of the restaurant. A big man with short hair and a voice hoarse from smoking too much signaled with a lazy gesture for me to come to him. I lifted my luggage and stepped through the door that had just opened.
The man, I will call Karim, was happily drunk. He had the swagger of a seasoned pro who knows exactly what he’s doing even if he’s shit faced. He reminded me of an old friend who had the same hard hybrid Mediterranean exterior but soft eyes that betrayed it.
El Muniria! He exclaimed loudly for all to hear. It doesn’t exist.
It does, I said.
He plucked a napkin, took a pen from one of his friends (more later on this motley crew in their 40’s and 50’s) and starting writing the names of hotels.
These are the hotels I know that are worth shit. After five I stopped him.
I’m looking for the El Muniria.
How do you spell it?
I spelled it for him, he wrote it down and with a knowing smile picked up his phone. I’m going to find out if this place exists or not.
Now he was on a mission.
The other men turned to me. One of the them, another one of those Moroccans that reminds me of my uncle Pato in Chile, tells me that he’s going to find out because he knows “people”. He’s a very high up customs security agent! I wait. They tell me to pull up a chair and sit down. Karim hollers to the waiter to get me a drink. I ask for a lemon soda. They ask me where I’m from. Chile, I said. The one that looks like my uncle, is name was Hassan begins to tell me that the two people he most admires is Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. I tell them I was in exile and they shake their heads in approval. Karim gets off the phone and with a resigned gesture nods that I was right. I should have told him that it sits above the Tangerine, a well known bar where left wing intellectuals used to drink and share their dashed hopes for social change in Morocco.
I drink there all the time, he exclaimed. You’re hungry? What do you want? My treat. And so began a two hour trip into what Karim described as “Moroccan Hospitality”. It became quickly clear that he was a sort of “godfather” who was paying for everyone at the table. There was an engineer, a lawyer and a businessman. Food starts arriving: fish, rice, meat, shrimp, olives, tomato salad, roasted turkey chunks, and beer, lots of beer for everyone. Except for me, I told them that I was not drinking. I had decided to be totally dry for the length of the trip. They ask me if I was Muslim. At this point I had to make a choice: I had not been practicing for a little while and was not sure how I would approach the subject while traveling through Morocco. After a flash in the pan – I told them that yes, I was.
You are a lucky man, said the Engineer.
Why?
Because I was born a Muslim. You had the chance to become one.
Karim interrupted and began an insane line of logic: so, do you hate Pinochet?
That was a tough one. I told them that I have been trying to avoid hating anybody.
So, you like him? Is you suitcase filled with the dirty money he stole from his people?
I laughed.
You are Mossad aren’t you? The Mossad woks with agents of Pinochet.
But he’s dead.
He’s dead, but not the agents.
I could not tell if he was serious or not because he was drunk. So, I told them the story of having once planted a nail smack in the middle of the photograph of Pinochet and how it really screwed me up. He didn’t buy it, but he finally moved on and asked me how long I was staying in Tangier. I told him that I was leaving for Fes in the morning.
Do you have a ticket?
No.
Alright. I’ll buy you one. I’ll get a taxi to go and get it for you and then the taxi will take you to the Hotel and you won’t pay a dime. That’s Moroccan hospitality! And when you go back to America you will tell everyone that we welcome everyone with open arms. Will people believe you?
Yes, I said. Thank you.
Have more food. Have a beer.
I paused and said, you know what, I used to have a sheikh that told me once never to refuse anything that is offered. So I said yes. He hollered for four more beers. They came, we drank them.
He looked at me. Sheikhs are full of shit he said, with their beards and their turbans. You know why I made you drink that beer? To break the connection between you and your Sheikh!
I shuddered. One of the hidden reasons I had come to Morocco was to figure out what I was going to do now that I didn’t have a Sufi Teacher anymore. But that was secret and this man had in his drunken haze had cut to the bone.
You are right, I said. I have lost that connection.
He scoffed. I’m sure your Sheikh liked to screw young girls.
I said nothing.
Have another beer, he ordered.
Alright.
When I come to the US, I come with 8,000 dollars in my pocket and I expect to have a good time. So, where do you live?
North Carolina.
Good. I’m going to go and visit you there and we’ll see how you receive me.
I’ll pick you from the airport.
No, I take a limo and stay at the best hotels but I expect that you will show me a good time.
Wow, I thought. What am I getting into? For a second I had a thriller vision. That’s when, in flash, I see the premise for a thriller movie in my head. Young visitor to small town is helped by the worst torturer of the secret police and he is slowly pulled into the fringes of that world.
If you come, I said. I will what I can.
We’ll see about that, he professed.
The taxi boy came, he had my first class ticket and he took me to the Hotel where I was lucky to get the last available room. Room Five was taken and I never got to see it. That’s all for the better. I’m starting to believe that if you go back to a place you have turned into a memory – then that memory will forever disappear and be replaced by a new one. It’s a gamble we should be careful to take.
Tomorrow Fes, “Spiritual Capital of Morocco”. I really hope no one offers me a beer again. Some truths go down better with something sweeter.
Ten years ago I landed in Tangier in search of a dream. Now I was tracing those steps. Here’s an excerpt from my journal from that day back in 1999…
“I checked in at the hotel El Muniria, famed for being the place where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. If the days of the Interzone were long gone I thought, I could still try and catch his ghost. Peter, the quirky English owner received me, though he swore to me, unequivocally, that he never really was in Tangier anymore. Spent most of the year in the Old Country, he did. If I was talking to him right now, it was by pure chance. This moment was almost a statistical improbability. I grabbed my bags and followed this slow ascending improbability up a steep narrow magenta stairwell to the second floor where I was showed room 8. It was non-descript and ready but failed to excite my bleary eyes. On the other hand room 5 wasn’t ready but was the one Kerouac used to stay in when he visited Burroughs and company. The room immediately pulled you in. A giant palm tree stirred against one of the open windowpanes; behind it you could see the immaculate white minaret of the local mosque and further on the gritty arbor of Tangier with its deep blue scintillating sea. The light was bright, brighter than in Los Angeles. The other window overlooked the narrow Rue Magellan and the competing Hotel across the street with a maze of stairs and alcoves leading to a cozy roof top terrace café from which a couple of young hip-looking urban Moroccans, listening to blaring pop music and rolling what looked like a big fat joint, glanced at me with an air of complicity. A cool breeze came in, blowing the green velvet curtains and bringing with it the far away sounds of a schoolyard full of children.
“I’ll take it,” I immediately said. “If it’s not ready I can wait. All I really need is a shower.” An older Moroccan woman peeked her head inside the doorframe and frowned. She was the deaf mute maid of the hotel. The one really in charge, it seemed. She and Peter got into an argument filled with grunts and gestures mixed with Peter’s exasperated invocations of God’s Sake and a clean towel for our new guest. Burroughs was never so close, or so I thought.
A quick shower later, I left the room to go for a little roaming around Tangier hoping a bit of fresh air would put me to sleep later that afternoon. But Burroughs’s ghost didn’t let me get off that easy. The key to the room was twice as long as the door was thick and hundred times more difficult to manipulate than the French language. I imagined Kerouac coming back to his room, in the middle of the pitch dark night, high as a kite, trying to open this damn door, transferring to the moment a heavy rhymed spiritual test of epic proportions. There he was - key - door - the East - must open and take a piss. Here I was, fifty years later. People come and go but doors never change.”
I wanted to return to El Muniria, to that room number 5, where possibly Kerouac and I shared the same existential frustration with that fateful door. I had tried to call ahead of time but the connection was bad and probably wrong. So, I had left it to chance. The only place I hadn’t booked a place to stay was Tangier and since the Hotel – though famous in certain rarified literary circles – was a dive well outside the universe of everyday tourism. So, I wasn’t worried. I knew it was close by because I remember seeing the harbor from my now mystical room. I stepped into freedom and found a taxi. The driver was nice (they’re all nice until they scam you) started driving while telling me that he had no idea how to find Rue Magellan, where the Hotel was located. True, it was a small dead end street. But he seemed oddly lost. So, I told him to take me to Boulevard Mohammed 5. From there we can find it. He took me to Boulevard Mohammed 6! Ok. He was trying to scam me. I made him take me to the right Boulevard and I stepped out in a corner I seemed to recognize, where I could see the Bar Berlin. I walked in. It was a small bar/restaurant where they serve hard liquor in the basement and beer and Moroccan tapas on the main floor. Seven tables at the most. TV on. Everybody was waiting for the US/Brazil world soccer federation cup game.
The waiter – who had a dashing black moustache, straight out of casting central -shook his head and then turned to a group of three men sitting at table at the end of the restaurant. A big man with short hair and a voice hoarse from smoking too much signaled with a lazy gesture for me to come to him. I lifted my luggage and stepped through the door that had just opened.
The man, I will call Karim, was happily drunk. He had the swagger of a seasoned pro who knows exactly what he’s doing even if he’s shit faced. He reminded me of an old friend who had the same hard hybrid Mediterranean exterior but soft eyes that betrayed it.
El Muniria! He exclaimed loudly for all to hear. It doesn’t exist.
It does, I said.
He plucked a napkin, took a pen from one of his friends (more later on this motley crew in their 40’s and 50’s) and starting writing the names of hotels.
These are the hotels I know that are worth shit. After five I stopped him.
I’m looking for the El Muniria.
How do you spell it?
I spelled it for him, he wrote it down and with a knowing smile picked up his phone. I’m going to find out if this place exists or not.
Now he was on a mission.
The other men turned to me. One of the them, another one of those Moroccans that reminds me of my uncle Pato in Chile, tells me that he’s going to find out because he knows “people”. He’s a very high up customs security agent! I wait. They tell me to pull up a chair and sit down. Karim hollers to the waiter to get me a drink. I ask for a lemon soda. They ask me where I’m from. Chile, I said. The one that looks like my uncle, is name was Hassan begins to tell me that the two people he most admires is Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. I tell them I was in exile and they shake their heads in approval. Karim gets off the phone and with a resigned gesture nods that I was right. I should have told him that it sits above the Tangerine, a well known bar where left wing intellectuals used to drink and share their dashed hopes for social change in Morocco.
I drink there all the time, he exclaimed. You’re hungry? What do you want? My treat. And so began a two hour trip into what Karim described as “Moroccan Hospitality”. It became quickly clear that he was a sort of “godfather” who was paying for everyone at the table. There was an engineer, a lawyer and a businessman. Food starts arriving: fish, rice, meat, shrimp, olives, tomato salad, roasted turkey chunks, and beer, lots of beer for everyone. Except for me, I told them that I was not drinking. I had decided to be totally dry for the length of the trip. They ask me if I was Muslim. At this point I had to make a choice: I had not been practicing for a little while and was not sure how I would approach the subject while traveling through Morocco. After a flash in the pan – I told them that yes, I was.
You are a lucky man, said the Engineer.
Why?
Because I was born a Muslim. You had the chance to become one.
Karim interrupted and began an insane line of logic: so, do you hate Pinochet?
That was a tough one. I told them that I have been trying to avoid hating anybody.
So, you like him? Is you suitcase filled with the dirty money he stole from his people?
I laughed.
You are Mossad aren’t you? The Mossad woks with agents of Pinochet.
But he’s dead.
He’s dead, but not the agents.
I could not tell if he was serious or not because he was drunk. So, I told them the story of having once planted a nail smack in the middle of the photograph of Pinochet and how it really screwed me up. He didn’t buy it, but he finally moved on and asked me how long I was staying in Tangier. I told him that I was leaving for Fes in the morning.
Do you have a ticket?
No.
Alright. I’ll buy you one. I’ll get a taxi to go and get it for you and then the taxi will take you to the Hotel and you won’t pay a dime. That’s Moroccan hospitality! And when you go back to America you will tell everyone that we welcome everyone with open arms. Will people believe you?
Yes, I said. Thank you.
Have more food. Have a beer.
I paused and said, you know what, I used to have a sheikh that told me once never to refuse anything that is offered. So I said yes. He hollered for four more beers. They came, we drank them.
He looked at me. Sheikhs are full of shit he said, with their beards and their turbans. You know why I made you drink that beer? To break the connection between you and your Sheikh!
I shuddered. One of the hidden reasons I had come to Morocco was to figure out what I was going to do now that I didn’t have a Sufi Teacher anymore. But that was secret and this man had in his drunken haze had cut to the bone.
You are right, I said. I have lost that connection.
He scoffed. I’m sure your Sheikh liked to screw young girls.
I said nothing.
Have another beer, he ordered.
Alright.
When I come to the US, I come with 8,000 dollars in my pocket and I expect to have a good time. So, where do you live?
North Carolina.
Good. I’m going to go and visit you there and we’ll see how you receive me.
I’ll pick you from the airport.
No, I take a limo and stay at the best hotels but I expect that you will show me a good time.
Wow, I thought. What am I getting into? For a second I had a thriller vision. That’s when, in flash, I see the premise for a thriller movie in my head. Young visitor to small town is helped by the worst torturer of the secret police and he is slowly pulled into the fringes of that world.
If you come, I said. I will what I can.
We’ll see about that, he professed.
The taxi boy came, he had my first class ticket and he took me to the Hotel where I was lucky to get the last available room. Room Five was taken and I never got to see it. That’s all for the better. I’m starting to believe that if you go back to a place you have turned into a memory – then that memory will forever disappear and be replaced by a new one. It’s a gamble we should be careful to take.
Tomorrow Fes, “Spiritual Capital of Morocco”. I really hope no one offers me a beer again. Some truths go down better with something sweeter.
Tangier Slight Return Part 1
Written on the train to Fes
I should have been more careful with my metaphors, I thought as I watched the metal door of the ship slowly close itself shut on me. The view of Tangier disappeared, I felt one last breeze from the harbor and that was that. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side. It looked like I might be shipped back to Spain without having set foot in Morocco.
For the past two days I had been photographing, almost obsessively, every single ancient looking door I could find in Granada. On the night before my journey to Tangier it came to me as I was talking to my newfound Brazilian friend: that’s what I was looking for in Morocco: a DOOR! Ten years ago, a door had opened for me on a very special night in Marrakech and now I was going to find out if there was another door there for me to go through. And if I got there and the door was closed. So be it. My friend made a joking gesture as if saying don’t be so melodramatic. I shook my head. I was dead serious. Well, as I said, be very careful about what you imagine. There was the proof. I had found a door. The exit door of the ship and now it was closed because I had not gotten my passport stamped on the ship by the custom agents. I realized this as I was exiting the ship, giving some casual words of advice to a tourist couple on their first visit to Morocco. They had asked me if there was a “shuttle” from the harbor to the train station. I chuckled inside. This is Tangier, baby. They had slept the whole way, inside the lounge while I had lapped every single juicy moment of the boat ride, the blue, the salt, the straights of Gibraltar, two lovers almost kissing. And yet, they had stamps on their passport. And I didn’t. Who was the fool? I was so “awake” during the 2 and half hours of sheer visual bliss that I missed the real world! It’s happened to me before. Once on my way back from my second trip from Morocco, I missed my flight to Durham from JFK because I wanted to pray before the flight. Not an easy thing to do in JFK. Ablution, towel, finding the East… There’s a reason why there is an exemption in Islam from all rituals while traveling. I’m just a fool.
What? You were sleeping? Said one of the attendants.
On the contrary, I protested. I heard every single announcement, In English, French and Spanish! I’m tri-lingual. And it said that people with card needed to clear customs on the boat. Not pedestrians.
There was another message.
Yeah, I heard it. It said after docking in Tangier we needed to go to some “passage” named something I can’t remember.
Yes. That was a passage inside the boat, she said clearly exasperated.
No one could leave the boat without a stamp. I had not realized it, and the police would have stopped me later on, for some reason or another, they would have thought I was a Mossad agent for sure. From the Israeli Intelligence. And then I would have been royally screwed. I would have watched another kind of door altogether shut itself on me. So, for now I waited. The only way I was going to get off the ship is if they took pity on my and decided to bed the rules. I told them that I was going to a wedding in Al-Jadida. So, I waited went over some calming prayers in my head. I really should have been more careful.
After thirty long, excruciating minutes of watching Morocco refracted from the hundreds of windows lining the ship and listening to the worst imaginable elevator techno Arab music I have ever endured one of the security guys showed up – pissed as hell – and said grab your things and follow me. Ok.. That was kind of good. We walked down stairs, a few sliding doors and next you know I’m stepping out of the ship through the empty car vault.
I walk out accompanied by another guard, up a rickety stairwell, down a hanging bridge, in through the back door into customs. I put my luggage through the X-ray, they stamped my passport and told me to get out. So I did. I went through the front doors, stepped into the Moroccan sun and smiled to myself.
On the road I was once told: thoughts have a life of their own. They are born, they mature and they die. They can travel long distances carried by angels and can do good or do harm. So, never mind what comes out of your mouth! Make sure you control the main switch and you won’t be stuck on a boat on the wrong side of that door. Now I know. I should have never uttered the words “if it’s closed, so be it.” No, all the doors are open. And believe me, in the next thirty minutes I was about to get a taste of that limitless power.
I should have been more careful with my metaphors, I thought as I watched the metal door of the ship slowly close itself shut on me. The view of Tangier disappeared, I felt one last breeze from the harbor and that was that. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side. It looked like I might be shipped back to Spain without having set foot in Morocco.
For the past two days I had been photographing, almost obsessively, every single ancient looking door I could find in Granada. On the night before my journey to Tangier it came to me as I was talking to my newfound Brazilian friend: that’s what I was looking for in Morocco: a DOOR! Ten years ago, a door had opened for me on a very special night in Marrakech and now I was going to find out if there was another door there for me to go through. And if I got there and the door was closed. So be it. My friend made a joking gesture as if saying don’t be so melodramatic. I shook my head. I was dead serious. Well, as I said, be very careful about what you imagine. There was the proof. I had found a door. The exit door of the ship and now it was closed because I had not gotten my passport stamped on the ship by the custom agents. I realized this as I was exiting the ship, giving some casual words of advice to a tourist couple on their first visit to Morocco. They had asked me if there was a “shuttle” from the harbor to the train station. I chuckled inside. This is Tangier, baby. They had slept the whole way, inside the lounge while I had lapped every single juicy moment of the boat ride, the blue, the salt, the straights of Gibraltar, two lovers almost kissing. And yet, they had stamps on their passport. And I didn’t. Who was the fool? I was so “awake” during the 2 and half hours of sheer visual bliss that I missed the real world! It’s happened to me before. Once on my way back from my second trip from Morocco, I missed my flight to Durham from JFK because I wanted to pray before the flight. Not an easy thing to do in JFK. Ablution, towel, finding the East… There’s a reason why there is an exemption in Islam from all rituals while traveling. I’m just a fool.
What? You were sleeping? Said one of the attendants.
On the contrary, I protested. I heard every single announcement, In English, French and Spanish! I’m tri-lingual. And it said that people with card needed to clear customs on the boat. Not pedestrians.
There was another message.
Yeah, I heard it. It said after docking in Tangier we needed to go to some “passage” named something I can’t remember.
Yes. That was a passage inside the boat, she said clearly exasperated.
No one could leave the boat without a stamp. I had not realized it, and the police would have stopped me later on, for some reason or another, they would have thought I was a Mossad agent for sure. From the Israeli Intelligence. And then I would have been royally screwed. I would have watched another kind of door altogether shut itself on me. So, for now I waited. The only way I was going to get off the ship is if they took pity on my and decided to bed the rules. I told them that I was going to a wedding in Al-Jadida. So, I waited went over some calming prayers in my head. I really should have been more careful.
After thirty long, excruciating minutes of watching Morocco refracted from the hundreds of windows lining the ship and listening to the worst imaginable elevator techno Arab music I have ever endured one of the security guys showed up – pissed as hell – and said grab your things and follow me. Ok.. That was kind of good. We walked down stairs, a few sliding doors and next you know I’m stepping out of the ship through the empty car vault.
I walk out accompanied by another guard, up a rickety stairwell, down a hanging bridge, in through the back door into customs. I put my luggage through the X-ray, they stamped my passport and told me to get out. So I did. I went through the front doors, stepped into the Moroccan sun and smiled to myself.
On the road I was once told: thoughts have a life of their own. They are born, they mature and they die. They can travel long distances carried by angels and can do good or do harm. So, never mind what comes out of your mouth! Make sure you control the main switch and you won’t be stuck on a boat on the wrong side of that door. Now I know. I should have never uttered the words “if it’s closed, so be it.” No, all the doors are open. And believe me, in the next thirty minutes I was about to get a taste of that limitless power.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Granada - Sacromonte
There were two places I wanted to visit in Granada: La Alhambra and the Sacromonte where the gypsies have been living in caves for centuries. I had fantasies of hanging out with the Gypsies. So, I took a short cut through the old Muslim quarters and started going up the hill on a small back street I thought would lead me there. I stopped when I saw street sign for a “dead end”. I took it literally, not thinking twice that it may have been directed at cars and instead made a left on an even smaller alley made of broken stairs that also went up the mountain, After walking past mostly inhabited and abandoned cave dwellings, pointing my finger at a couple of wild mangy dogs, I saw a dirt path, more of a goat path, cut up the mountain. It was seven PM and the sun was still burning bright. As I trekked up through the Dr. Seuss like cactus flora I could see the whole of Granada under me. Then, out of the dust, literally, small cave dwellings inhabited by African immigrants began to appear, trashed leather couches; water barrels for rain; a hippie couple fixing a motorcycle, and old man smoking a cigarette, traces of large bone fires…These people were out of the grid with the best view in Granada!
I came to a large fortification wall I had seen the day before from the city and thought it would be fun to climb it. It was built like a staircase for giants, maybe twenty feet high, three feet wide. It zigzagged up the mountain, ending against what looked like an abandoned church. This was Sacromonte? I got close up to the wall and noticed that someone had chiseled away pieces of stone, creating a way to climb it without superhuman powers. I secured my camera bag and went up.
The view was even more breathtaking. On the other side of the wall I could see another hill and the faint glint of tourist buses. Allright, I was not on Sacromonte after all. But what the hell, I was going to make it my Sacromonte. I decided to take a chance and follow the wall up to the top. The steps were sometimes five feet high. I took off my shirt and started climbing, quickly transforming myself into a goat. It seemed endless. The son was hot, the wind cool, the sky electric blue and the dreaded Alhambra just another dot in the distance. As I spent myself I stepped out of my goat personae and could see that there was no way of actually getting down again. Every step I took, I was going to have to take it back. And that would have been lame. So, I kept going until I came to a spot that looked like a possible descent without the risk of severe pain and broken bones. I sat down, letting my legs dangle like a child, drank some water and lost myself in thought.
When you’re down, you got to go up. And there’s nothing like climbing a mountain to remind you that you’ve got to earn the climb. And when you do, with a little blood ( I did scrape myself) and sweat then you’re back to normal. You’re not “high”, actually. You are back to yourself.
I went down the mountain and took the street with the dead end. It led to Sacromonte, the real one, and I quickly came to a small plaza overlooking the Alahmbra. The sun was setting, the palace was turning red and there was a little café bar with some tourists, children running and a stunning Gypsy man with a white gleaming pants, pointy leather shoes and an open bright yellow shirt revealing a golden cross resting on a field of thick black chest hair. His hairdo was slick and he wore golden raybans. I wanted a soda and he directed me to an older woman who asked me where I was from. I said Chile and she replied that the wife of her nephew was from Chile. Her name was Paloma and she was standing right there against the parapet of the hill.
I introduced myself. She was in her early thirties and looked like the typical Chilean woman: small, beautiful round face, a bit of an overbite and jet black hair. Except that she had a small black dot tattoed right at the base of her forehead: she was a Gypsy. After some chitchat we quickly realized that we both spoke French. She asked me how come.
The Pinochet Scholarship I said.
She looked at me weird. Never heard of it she said in all seriousness.
I laughed and explained to her that in exile, Chileans who had gotten to travel the world, learn languages and expand their universe beyond anything imaginable if they had stayed behind, called their gains the “Pinochet Scholarship”.
She smiled and said that she left Chile in 1981, when she was seven. So she had been born one year after the coup and had lived her entire childhood during the darkest days of the dictatorship. But she didn’t remember anything. She had left just in time without being poisoned. She wound up in France and that’s where her mother is. How she wound up with a Gypsy, having a child and standing here, she didn’t tell me. But she had big dreams. In the past years, Sacromonte has been gentrified to the point where the gypsies are moving out selling their cool caves to Germans and Scandinavians who fix them up and rent them at exorbitant prices. Imagine. You get to live among the Gypsies! Not for long she said. In twenty years, there will be no more Gypsies here. Only Gringos. Her dream was to go back to Chile and figure out how to build luxurious cave dwellings and sell them all along the coast. The only problem she thought was the issue of earthquakes but she had an engineer friend that could test the ground. It all sounded like total madness but I smiled and egged her on. Why not, right?
Her six year-old daughter came up with her ten year-old cousin and I gave them one of the organic lollipops from Whole Food I had brought with me for precisely this occasion. They smiled and ran down the hill to play at another house. Paloma whispered: there’s my mother in law. We don’t get along. That’s why I’m taking my daughter back to Paris. I glanced at the woman in question and got hit with the evilest eye I had ever seen. Half her face was disfigured by a skin disease and the other half looked like white glass. I felt a jolt and decided it was time to leave. I wanted to see if I could go into one of those cave restaurants for tourists where they play gypsy music. We bid each other farewell and I started walking down the hill. I quickly came up to a large cave house where I saw the two kids eating their lollipops. I stopped and asked them how it was. They smiled. I looked up and saw the sign at the entrance: Gypsy Music School. Two gypsies were fixing a generator and a skinny young woman was smoking a cigarette.
I said hello, They stopped. The younger gypsy asked me if I wanted to smoke pot, in other words if I wanted to buy weed. I said no thanks. I had smoked so much in my life it drips from my fingers, I joked. The woman asked me where I was from. Chile I said. Just like Paloma. The older Gypsy, who was the master musician said he was her brother in-law. The exchanges went back and forth and they decided they liked me enough to have one of my cigarettes and chill out sitting on the parapet. The sunset by now was stunning. A few seconds later Paloma appeared running down the hill. There’s a big fight and the witch (the mother in law) is accusing the ten year-old cousin of sexually molesting the little girl. The young Gypsy woman gets all pissed, grabs a metal bar and walks up the hill shouting that there was no way that Shit Faced Whore was going to talk like that about her little brother. (There’s no easy way to translate Gypsy insults here.). We smoked our cigarettes and five minutes later she comes back saying that the Whore is going to call the cops. The young man takes out his knife and says it’s time to get it over with. Everyone tries to stop him. He is screaming at the top of lungs that he going to cut the bitch up and feed her to his dog. Neighbors are now running to see what’s going on. Just when it looked totally out of control, everyone calmed down suddenly, just as fast as the fire started, someone pulled out a joint, it was smoked and a murder was averted.
The master musician sighed and looked at me. All I want is a meal at night and some peace and quiet. He was the most forlorn Gypsy I had ever seen.
I decided to go back to my hostel. I didn’t need to “see” a gypsy show. I had witnessed the real thing. It’s funny but Unesco has declared both the Alhambra and the Sacromonte world heritage places. You can guess which one is more alive. I had seen both and now I was ready to go to Morocco.
Monday, June 29, 2009
June 28 - out of Granada
Winding my way through the cut mountains of Andalusia, passing abandoned stations with names like “Las Maravillas” (The Wonders) and endless fields of sunflowers and golden wheat, on the train from Granada to Algeciras, the famed city at the edge of the Iberian Peninsula, the landing pad of thousands of African immigrants looking for a better life up North. I’m on my way south.
Two days in Granada. Much too much life to stop and write and actually put down words that reflect the extreme beauty of this city. Two days. It starting to feel like time is stretching out its wings. More time to through the motions of loss.
Many years ago my mother brought back from her trip to Granada a small tile with a timeless inscription: “Give him some alms, for there is no greater suffering than to be blind in Granada.” I tried to walk with my eyes closed through the alleyways of the Muslim quarters, but I didn’t make it too far. So, I just closed my eyes and tried to listen. Young tourists everywhere. English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, a dog barks, the bells from a nearby church, the far away blast from a construction site and the music of a dead Michael Jackson playing from everywhere, car radios, shawarma shops, tapa bars. It was definitively time to open my eyes. I looked for a blind beggar on my walks through the Abayezin muslim quarters but found none. Actually I saw no beggars anywhere. I have a feeling they’ve been forcefully removed. If I were in charge of the tourism bureau of Granada I would hire actors to play beggars. They would remind us how blessed anyone is to be in the presence of a city built on intricate twists and turns like a living wooden carving from the famous palace of Alhambra. A place I had wanted to visit for a long time. Two weeks ago, I bought, on line, the last spot for the 9 AM entry to the Palace for that Saturday morning, my only full day in Granada. Ticket receipt in hand I proudly walked up to the top of the hill through a path flanked by rushing man made water creeks fed by a mountain spring waterfall scintillating in the morning filtered sun light. Wow. Magical. At the top sits the Palace. Hundreds of disappointed tourists without tickets wait in line to have a chance to visit the gardens. I waltz in and enter the grounds of the Palace.
Now, somewhere in the middle of my visit to this palace so exquisite that any “description” would be a pointless exercise in style, I found myself in the grips of an existential nausea. The kind that grabs you and tells you it’s time to leave. It’s a slippery pressure point that wont let itself be captured by rhyme or reason. Any attempt to try to put it aside, makes it worse. Nausea is like virus, you’ve got to let it run wild and hope it leaves quickly. Or do what I did in 2000 during my second trip to Morocco when I found at the top of another mountain in the Riff mountains, outside Marrakech, in the burial grounds of a saint. Then a voice clearly said: “Leave. Go back to your family”. I had still five days left in Marrakech but I turned around, re-booked my ticket and fled back home to my wife and children.
But this time, I fought the urge to flee and I went through the main Palace with my sickness and exited through the gardens, like everyone else (the hordes of tourists) but unlike anyone else, I was guided to get lost and somehow walk out of the main path and I found myself by the entrance. There were still two more palaces I could have visited, the one built by Charles the Fifth and another Moorish smaller palace. But I could not go on. I left. Grabbed a bus and escaped back to the Hostel.
Later I described what happened to a young woman from Brazilian I had met on the Bus to the Hostel. She had just returned from Morocco with her own existential tribulations and we found we had much in common. Born and raised in central Brazil she had entered the mystical universe of a subculture of wandering healers who mixed African and Catholic energies to heal and bless the communities around them. It was her thesis, just like mine had been on the Gnawa of Morocco, who mixed African and Islam in their healing rituals of possession. I found a good hear and I was able to understand what the hell had happened.
My first thought was that it was time to leave before I started to hate everyone around me. It happens. And that’s why I stay away from touristy monuments that attract armies of visitors, camera in one hand, audio tour in the other. Restless bodies taking more photographs than they’ll ever know what to do with, them. As I moved from one vast vaulted room to another adorned beyond comprehension to perfectly manicured inner patios and small intimate places I tried to imagine how the space had actually been used. But, there was no furniture, just emptiness, and the endless chatter of inane commentary. I couldn’t stand it. It’s not that I felt superior to them. No. It felt like… on second thought, it felt like none of us belonged there. These rooms had been built for Sultans, architects, alchemists, poets, musicians, mathematicians, esoteric scholars and calligraphers. At some point in time a very limited amount of people had been given the right to actually see what I was seeing today after paying my 12 Euros. That’s all. That’s the price I paid to see with my own eyes these wonders that had once been hidden from so many. I’m all for democracy. But that doesn’t me that everything and anything should be turned into a spectacle. I mean, what right do I have to enter this palace and occupy these once private spaces with my footsteps and my digital camera? I have none. I had no business being there and I’m sorry I went because for a few precious hours I was just another foot soldier in an invading army of marauding thieves taking what is not theirs. The imaginary space the Alhambra once occupied is rotting away. I hope something else even more beautiful comes out of it. And this time it better cost me some blood.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Malaga leaving
Traces of Morocco are everywhere... the city is splattered with high quality poster of exotic Morocco as a destination that will "enlarge your soul". A young twenty something rubs a lamp ad from it emerges a vision: A white couple by a small desert fire in the night is echanted by a blue turbanned storyteller. A trace within a trace, like a dry river bed awaitig the flood.
I´m going North now. To Granada in the footsteps of the conquering Berbers!
I´m going North now. To Granada in the footsteps of the conquering Berbers!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Malaga
On the plane met a young man from Canada who had just graduated from College and was invited to a conference in Malaga on helping young graduates fin work in the global market. He took a cab from Heathrow to Gatwick which cost him a taggering 120 pounds! No one told him there was a bus for 2o pounds. I wonder who is paying all that money for this kid to travel all the ay from Canada to Malaga to find out how to get a job. Global capitalism is getting stranger and stranger...
I did look for Picasso but only found a small beach side restaurant with old ladies eating shrimps and cackling about their last trip to the red light district in Amsterdam. It helps top know Spanih while pretending to be Canadian.
I did look for Picasso but only found a small beach side restaurant with old ladies eating shrimps and cackling about their last trip to the red light district in Amsterdam. It helps top know Spanih while pretending to be Canadian.
In Transit - leaving one skin behind
Keeping with the shedding of old skins, all my preconceived notions of how nasty Britt Border Agents can be evaporated after the Agent asked me if he had seen any of my films - I put down as my profession "filmmaker". I told him about Prisoner's in Time, a film I co-wrote with my father about a WWII POW from the death march in Kanchananburi who had been tortured and was possesed by the idea of fiding the translator whose he heard during the sessions - which included waterboarding! A Japanese (and American) favorite.
He said he had seen it!
And then we veered to a conversation on the power of morbid stories to capture our imagination. Brought by my mention of Shaheed and Suicide Bombers - a script the BBC commissioned a few years back. He mentioned one of his favorite TV series from long ago"Black Box" on the retrieval of Black boxes from plane crashes. Very appropriate I thought coming from an Airport Border Agent!
Unto Malaga!
He said he had seen it!
And then we veered to a conversation on the power of morbid stories to capture our imagination. Brought by my mention of Shaheed and Suicide Bombers - a script the BBC commissioned a few years back. He mentioned one of his favorite TV series from long ago"Black Box" on the retrieval of Black boxes from plane crashes. Very appropriate I thought coming from an Airport Border Agent!
Unto Malaga!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Into the Blue
Today, I start a journey conjured up ten years ago from a dream that took me deep into the waters of Mystical Islam. And now, on St. John's Day, after going through a meat grinder, I'm prepared to leap over fire, into that dream once again. Every time a bit more awake. Shedding old skins, ready for a new sacrifice, ready to step into the Blue, the Blue of Moses the Traveller, the seeker of new lands, the seer of new forms, I'm well aware of the many traps along the way, this thirsty throat sure likes lemonade even though it knows water would be best. But the door opens and I must step through its threshold.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
