Muriel Johnston, 84-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanant, Morocco.
Submitted by Richard Sitler
For my book photographing the every day lives of volunteers of today I met some wonderful people including the current oldest serving volunteer, 84-year-old Muriel Johnston.
Muriel is a volunteer in Tanant, Morocco. Muriel and her host mother and daughter share a laugh in this photo. Muriel lived with this family through the three months of training.
She was thrilled to find out that she had been placed to serve in the same community, so now she lives in her own place, but within walking distance of her host family, so she visits often.
| 03/21/11 BEN NOVAK |
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Washington / Morocco Board News- To the youth of Morocco: I have never lived in Morocco or been there. Therefore, I do not know any of you personally; I know you solely by your presence on the internet—your “web-persona,” as it were. In this regard, I feel that I have personally come to know the electronic image you project—at least in English—as intimately as possible.
I have also studied your country and followed the development of your economy, government, and society for a long time, and most especially since the Great Arab Revolution of 2011 began. You have a remarkable country and therefore I care very much about the future of your revolution.
You know old men: we are always giving young people advice. What else are old men good for? Therefore, I hope that you will allow this old man to offer some advice based on what events look like on the web.
Although I am only a crotchety old man, my heart goes out to all the youth of Morocco at this important time in Arab history. A long overdue revolution is sweeping North Africa and the entire Arab world. It would be like commanding water to flow uphill to expect Moroccan youth not to want a revolution in their own country—any revolution—just to be able to hold their heads up high to the rest of the world—especially to other Arabs.
For, what young Arab-Moroccan is not proud of their fellow Arabs who have stood up to tyranny and stared it down in the streets of Tunis and in Tahrir Square—and are now facing bullets, tanks, and bombs in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen? And what young Moroccan is not concerned about the question he or she will inevitably hear from other Arabs—and even from his or her own future children: “What part did you play in the Great Arab Revolution of 2011?” What young Moroccan today does not yearn to answer: “I made revolution, too.” If I were young, I would want to be there making revolution with you.
But, if you will let a wizened old man have his say, this is what I would advise you: 1) when you make revolution, think first of what you are doing—because a lot of revolutions are regrettable affairs; 2) there is more than one thing about which to make a revolution; and 3) there is more than one way to make a revolution.
Let’s start with the first point. The first Arab revolution of modern times was the Great Arab Revolt of 1916. This was a revolution against the arbitrary and corrupt rule of the Ottomans. Arab youth then joined with the British and French who were at war with the Ottoman Empire because it was allied with Germany in World War I. Arab youth and their allies won. But what was the result? It merely allowed the British and French to carve up the Middle East with arbitrary lines and establish their colonial rule over it. Most of the rest of the 20th century has been spent on trying to throw off the results of the Great Arab Revolt of 1916.
The next great Arab revolution was the revolution of nationalism led by Gamel Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. That revolution was sparked by the dream of Arab unity that seemed to be well on its way with the joining together of several states into the United Arab Republic. But the revolutionary dream led to humiliating defeats in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, and the end of the dream of Arab solidarity. Instead of Arab unity, it eventually led to the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria, and Muammar Gadaffi in Libya—all the regimes that today’s youth are revolting against.
So, this crotchety old man has this piece of advice to today’s Moroccan youth: Don’t go off digging a revolutionary hole that you will regret. Remember that when you dig a revolutionary hole, you drag the whole country into it with you. So, think before you make revolution: Don’t condemn several future generations of Moroccan youth to trying to dig themselves out of the hole you might be digging now.
This brings me to the second point, which is that there is more than one thing about which to make a revolution. Reading over a multitude of press reports, opinion pieces, and blogs, this old man is impressed with the paucity of reasons and goals for revolution in Morocco. They seem to come down to one single goal—get rid of the king’s powers—and one simple demand—turn those powers over to elected politicians.
Now, if Morocco’s king were as tyrannical as Ben Ali, Mubarak, Bouteflika, or Gadaffi, I would certainly applaud your goal—and even wish that I were young enough to join you. But Mohammed VI is not a tyrant. In fact, he has been a reforming king, and his goal all along is to make the country into a modern and democratic nation. There will be more reforms and changes to make Morocco more democratic, just, and respectful of rights. That has been his policy since becoming king, and he proved it again on March 9th. While to the rest of the world, “The King’s Speech” refers to a movie, in Morocco it means the speech in which the King said he meant what he has been saying since 1999. It isn’t often that a nation gets a leader who actually means what he says.
Therefore, the fact is that Moroccan youth have little but an entirely abstract argument to make to justify their revolution to take away the power of the king in favor of elected politicians. Yes, there is also a serious corruption issue, and it has to be addressed. But, the naïve assumption—that getting rid of the king’s powers and turning them over to politicians will solve the problem—is ridiculous. While the idea—that democracy will be less corrupt than monarchy—may have been a tenable hope in the long-ago 18th century American and French revolutions, experience since then amply proves that even the best democracies refuse to take second place when it comes to corruption.
Remember: Ben Ali was elected president of Tunisia five times, and Hosni Mubarak was elected president of Egypt in democratic elections four times. Merely being able to vote for them was no defense against tyranny and corruption. But let’s look not only at democratic tyrants to prove that corruption is endemic to all systems. Just take a look at the corruption of American democracy by Wall Street and foreign lobbies (to mention only two sources of corruption). That makes all the corruption in Morocco that has so far been brought to light by WikiLeaks, etc., seem pretty petty by comparison.
So, the advice of this old American on my second point is that, if the revolution is about corruption, don’t allow it to be sidetracked into a revolution about dividing up the king’s powers. I can assure you that democratically elected politicians are just as easily corrupted as the king’s advisers—maybe even more so. Rather, use your revolution to aim directly at the corruption—naming the corrupters and how they are stealing from the government or the people. Attack the corruption, not the king. For, if you simply aim at the king, the corrupters will still get their way with the democratic politicians you elect after the revolution is over.
Finally, we come to my third point, which is that there is more than one way to make a revolution. The old idea of revolution had just one goal: “throw the bum out.” Unfortunately, that is about all that the revolutionary youth of Morocco seem to be demanding—at least as reported in the press and stated in the blogs. If the king gives up a substantial amount of power—i.e., removes himself from the picture by becoming merely a ceremonial king—the revolution will be deemed a success. Speaking bluntly, (after all, that is what crotchety old man do best), this is so petty that I can confidently predict that you will be ashamed of it in future years.
“But if we do not demand more powers from the king, how shall we have a revolution?” I hear you ask.
Well, this is where we have to get beyond the idea of simply shifting the distribution of power at the top. All that that kind of revolution accomplishes is to exchange one set of bums for another set of bums. In the end it is purely negative and only benefits politicians and journalists. If there is only change at the top, the revolution may as well never have happened—at least as far as ordinary people are concerned.
What is needed, therefore, is a positive revolution. What I mean by a positive revolution is this: rather than following the course of the Great Arab Revolution of 2011, by blindly demanding a change of government, why not try to lead the Arab Revolution? If Moroccan youth take this approach, you will have much to offer other Arab nations and peoples struggling to find their own path to: freedom under law, economic growth, and societal stability. For, if Moroccan youth think about it, Morocco is a great model for other Arab countries to follow. For the past dozen years,
➢ Morocco has been following a path of increasing respect for human rights, democratization, and economic growth;
➢ Morocco has a stable society that neither wants nor expects disruption;
➢ Moroccans have strong national feelings while at the same time reaching out to Arabs everywhere to increase economic, social, educational, and cultural ties;
➢ Moroccans have a strong sense of personal dignity, respect for Muslim values, reverence for tradition, and societal purpose.
These are exactly the values, goals, and personal dispositions that Arabs in other states, such as Tunisia and Egypt, who have just toppled their tyrannical leaders, will need in order to establish stable and free societies in their stead. Moroccan youth should be saying to them: “Come, look at the Moroccan experience: we have something good to offer you on the way to the future we all desire.” Now, this would be a real contribution to the Great Arab Revolution of 2011. It would also be real and useful leadership that the Great Arab Revolution of 2011 desperately needs in order to not go the way of so many previous revolutions.
So, what is this old American’s advice to Moroccan youth? Be leaders not followers.
If you will look upon your own country, its history, its traditions, and your own characters a little more honestly, you will find much more to offer other Arab peoples than just copying the them in toppling governments. Think on just this one thing for a minute: Is it not true that if any of the leaders toppled in North Africa in the past few months had followed the example of Mohammed VI over the past twelve years, would there not have been a greater revolution without all the violence?
I know that this sounds so contrary to most assumptions that it will shock many young Moroccans. But, really, does not the history of Morocco over the past dozen years, present the best example of what other Arab nations and peoples should follow—after they come out of their own “years of lead”? Of course, there have been mistakes, and maybe it could have gone quicker. But there are many lessons Morocco has learned, and it is these lessons that your fellow Arabs in other nations most need today.
If the revolutionaries of Tunisia, Egypt, and all the other Arab nations undergoing revolution right now are ever to get the kind of jobs they want, they will need peace and stability, investment, and economic growth. Big ideals are nice, but what is most valuable are the lessons learned in real efforts to achieve them. That is what Morocco has to offer.
So, here is your opportunity, Moroccan youth. Stop complaining about what you have, and start leading with it. Don’t just ape the others—prepare yourselves to help them when they need it most—after the revolutions are over.
Moroccan youth can—and should—be a light to the Arab world, not a shadow.
Morocco's Amazigh push for language recognition.
2011-03-22 By Imrane Binoual in Casablanca and Naoufel Cherkaoui in Rabat
The Amazigh community hopes that the Moroccan king's promises of reforms will translate into official recognition of their language.
For years, Morocco's Amazigh community pressed for the consitutionalisation of the Amazigh language. King Mohammed VI's pledge to implement comprehensive reforms instilled hope that their dream might soon come true.
In his March 9th speech, the Moroccan sovereign emphasised "the rich, variegated yet unified character of the Moroccan identity, including the Amazigh component as a core element and common asset belonging to all Moroccans".
"The speech prompts the legal framework to promote the Amazigh culture," Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) director Ahmed Boukous told Magharebia. "Making the Amazigh language part of the constitution means for us the development and provision of legal protection for the Amazigh culture."
Others, however, caution that it's too early to believe the king's words and urge patience to see the content of the constitution, which will be proposed by the consultative commission set up by the king.
"The royal speech brings about a positive step, and we hope that it will be followed by a series of important steps, especially the literal texts about the fact that the Amazigh language is an official language," Amazigh League of Human Rights chief Boubaker Ounghir told Magharebia.
"We hope that the constitutional revision commission will take into account the legitimate demands of the Amazigh movement," he said.
Ounghir, however, complained that the determination "came late for the fact that this demand was adopted years ago by some international organisations such as the Human Rights Council, with the aim to restore the value of the cultural and linguistic dimensions of Tamazight."
To discuss the issue, a number of Amazigh activists gathered March 12th-13th in Agadir.
According to researcher and member of Amazigh Observatory for Rights and Freedoms (OADL) Meryem Demnati, the activists fear that the Amazigh identity will be relegated to the second order after the constitutional reforms.
"For us, the word identity must be included, but what matters most is that the Amazigh language must be an official language as well as Arabic, not just a simple national language in the constitution," she said.
If the committee only focuses on the Amazigh identity and not on making their language official, it will be "dangerous", according to Amazigh researcher and activist Ahmed Assid.
"It means that the Amazigh movement will boycott the referendum," he threatened.
The community is preparing a document with proposals that concern the constitutional reform of the Amazigh language as well as regionalisation to submit to the commission, according to Amazigh activist Mohamed Moussaoui. Activists are also lobbying by forming groups that will be in charge of contacting political parties and non-governmental organisations to explain their position.
In one of the oldest neighborhoods of Fez-el-Bali (Morocco), where artisans such as tanners, copper and brass smiths create their wares, is the Bin Lamdoun bridge. The name means “between two cities; and the bridge links the two river banks where the city was founded.
Yet most buildings have their backs turned to the river which, in dry periods, becomes a dumping ground for rubbish.
An international competition was held to redesign the area and the winning design was announced in the Ville Nouvelle on Sunday night. The US$55,000 winning entry is by London-based Mossessian and Partners, with Casablanca-based architects Yassir Khalil Studio. Their vision includes public squares, shops, residences, a hotel, restaurants, an art gallery and lots of space for artisans’ workshops.
“It is a space where the artisans can be busy and active,” says design principal Michel Mossessian. “The local authorities and government wanted to maintain the nature of the space and the environment of production. It’s a way forward for the 21st century.”
You can see the winning entry, along with the other 174 competition entries, on display at the "Palais des Congres" in the Ville Nouvelle until March 30. It is intended that the Place Lalla Yeddouna project be completed within two years. “The money needs to be spent by 2013, says Richard Gaynor of the Millenium Challenge Corporation - a bilateral development fund set up by the Bush administration in 2002.
“The US government has made an agreement with the Moroccan for a $700m dollar investment in agriculture, artisanal fishing and the Fez Medina project, which involves vocational, educational and literacy training and enterprise suThe $42.4m Fez Medina project, administered by the Agency of Partnership for Progress (APP), with its implementing partner, the Agency for the Development and Rehabilitation of the city of Fez (ADER-Fès), includes the refurbishment of four fonduks and the improvement of Ain Noqbi as well as the redevelopment of Place Lalla Yeddouna.
Although some may view such a major revamp of a section of the World Heritage listed Fez medina with concern, it seems the jury panel comprising international architects and the Moroccan Prime Minister, Abbas El Fassi, have chosen the winner well. Rather than going for the “wow” factor, Mossessian and Partners’ winning entry for the redesign of Place Lalla Yeddouna uses traditional forms, with careful consideration for cultural, historical and environmental issues.
The firm is known for the inclusive way they involve stakeholders from the outset. Their previous projects include the Carmine Building, at Five Merchant Square in London and the design for Barahat Al-Naseem Square in Doha, Qatar.
“All too often the end users are ignored”, Mossessian says.
The design is intended to blend in and enhance what makes the city so special – a difficult task to achieve in two years, when the Medina has developed organically over more than a thousand.
Mossessian says he understands the need to maintain the complexity of the fabric of the Medina. “What we have tried to do is to enhance the inherent values the medina is already offering; to enrich our thinking of what the space wants to be,” he said. “We kept the pattern that the Medina tells us. Here, there is a very strong hierarchy of open, public and private space.
While some historically significant buildings will be preserved, others will be replaced. “We have measured the space of rooms by that which the artisans need to do their work and that defines the shape of the buildings...But the emphasis is the space between the buildings. The medina is not on a grid and keeping the streets narrow provides more shade; breaking the linearity of them enables the pattern of the wind to be altered.”
Enabling spaces where people can meet and linger – either alone or together – is an essential part of the life of the city and a major economic catalyst. “We tend to respond much better to conditions where we can meet and exchange,” he says. “Successful spaces are those where people can enjoy being together.”
In contrast, public spaces in European cities were built as public statements reflecting the power of kings, queens and popes. “It’s about showing the power in place. Here we are talking about the city as a tool, to meet and exchange which generates value.”
“(Our approach has been) to listen to the way the space can be occupied naturally. There is a notion of protection in these types of cities (such as the Fez Medina). The city is a protective environment for people to be alone or in groups. It’s totally the opposite of the mode of functioning in Western cities developed in the last 50 years, where most public spaces – such as shopping malls and airports - are designed not to stay in. They end up being places where it is not pleasant to be; where people get in your way, rather than it being an opportunity to meet.”Locations such the Fez Medina, “challenge our rational grid...matrix type of thinking,” Mossessian says.
Whereas Western cities have developed almost interchangeable forms of architecture, “there is more value in listening to an environment for its cultural and historical notions than trying to say something new. When we talk about sustainability, we have to talk about how previous generations did without electricity and the consumption of resources (we take for granted). We need to change the way we use space and energy and this is a beautiful model.
“What I am aspiring to respond to is sculpting the void. We are in a void today in knowing how to create values. Values are not just the economy, but cultural, about society, about the ownership of a place where you live and what you receive and give back.”
Make It Easy: Grilled chicken inspired by Morocco.
Jun. 3, 2009
Written by
Classic North African ingredients like lemon, cumin and paprika inspired Jennifer Bushman's "Make It Easy" (www.RGJ.com/MakeItEasy) take on grilled Moroccan chicken.
The chicken is served with warm pita triangles and paprika-spiked hummus. If you've got time, add Bushman's zingy carrot, jicama and cabbage slaw.
GRILLED MOROCCAN-INSPIRED CHICKEN WITH JICAMA SLAW
For chicken:
4 chicken breast halves, placed in large resealable plastic bag and pounded with meat mallet or rolling pin to even 1-inch thickness
1 teaspoon smoked paprika OR paprika PLUS extra for use on slaw below
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons olive oil
Preheat oven to 400 F. Leave chicken in bag, then season with salt and pepper. Add paprika, chili powder, lemon zest, lemon juice, and oil to bag.
(If using 2 bags with 2 halves in each bag, season each with salt and pepper, then divide paprika, chili powder, zest, juice and oil evenly between bags.)
Press out air, seal bag and massage marinade into chicken. Marinate in refrigerator at least 1 hour or up to 8.
For nuts:
1 tablespoon whole fennel seeds
1 tablespoon whole cumin seeds
1 cup blanched almonds
Meanwhile, crush fennel and cumin seeds together in spice grinder or with mortar and pestle. Toss with almonds and place on baking sheet.
Drizzle with olive oil to coat, season with salt and pepper and toss until all nuts are coated with crushed seeds.
Toast in oven until mixture is light gold, about 7 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool. Once cooled, place nuts in heavy plastic bag, seal and crush with rolling pin.
For slaw and hummus:
2 carrots, peeled and grated
1 cup jicama, peeled and sliced into strips
2 cups shredded red cabbage
1/4 cup red onion, finely sliced
1/2 cup mayonnaise
3 tablespoons barbecue sauce
1 teaspoon lime zest
2 tablespoons lime juice
1/4 cup cilantro, finely chopped
2 cups hummus
6 pieces pita
In medium bowl, combine carrots, jicama, cabbage and onion. In small bowl, mix together mayonnaise, barbecue sauce, lime zest, lime juice and cilantro.
Combine well dressing with slaw mixture, season with salt and pepper and set aside. Place hummus in bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with extra smoked paprika.
To serve:
Preheat grill to medium-high heat. Place chicken on grill and cook 8 minutes per side, turning once, or until cooked through and juices run clear.
Serve chicken with slaw on side and accompanied by warm pita, hummus and nut mixture. Serves 4.
| 03/20/11 | |
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Many years ago, while sitting with a friend in a café in the Moroccan city of Tangier, I expressed my unfailing admiration for Mohamed Choukri, author of the acclaimed memoir For Bread Alone ( al-khubz al-hafi) and its sequel Streetwise (the somewhat inexplicable translation of what should have been The Time of Error, or zamanu al-akhta’). I told my friend, a Ministry of Justice official on his way up to a judgeship, that what I liked most about Choukri was his literary courage (al jur’a al-adabiya).
My friend, a conservative man with a classical education in Islamic Studies, dismissed such courage as mere silliness, the ranting of a down-and-out man seeking attention and literary fame. Our society, my friend pronounced, was light years away from appreciating such openness and candor. We trade in appearances, not in existential truths. We reward conformity and punish daring acts of individualism.
Things have changed since then, and Choukri is now universally acclaimed across Morocco and much of the Arab world. The die-hard Tangerian is long gone, too, as is my friend, who, one day, collapsed in Fez and never got up. Yet I now find myself asking the same question about the mesmerizing memoir of a Moroccan woman that kept me engrossed for two days straight. The more I read into Wafa Faith Hallam’s The Road from Morocco, the more I realized I was holding a book that—if all literary lights are not dimmed by convention—should become an instant classic.
I honestly cannot recall a time when an autobiographical account has spoken to me as forcefully as Hallam’s memoir. In fact, I never ever read anything remotely comparable to it. Hallam’s trailblazing book shatters literary and social conventions with such force that it is bound to provoke strong reactions. The book contains precious lessons about why freedom and equal rights matter, why the male oppression of women in Arab and Muslim societies is a sad farce, why rich life experiences are still the only reliable ingredient for a soaring story, and why identity is a complex construct that is nearly impossible to tease apart. There is more—way more—in this fast-moving and intense account, but I’ll return to some of these issues after I provide a sense of the plot.
The life of Wafa, now a vivacious fifty-four year old woman living in the state of New York, begins in the sedate Moroccan city of Meknes, where her mother, thirteen-year old Saadia, is given to a thirty-three year old man in marriage against her will. The union is doomed from the start. Although she loathes her husband, Saadia gets pregnant and, in short order, gives birth to four children—two girls (Wafa and Nezha) and two boys (Abdu and Larbi, the surviving half of twins). Because some of these pregnancies are so traumatic, and because she has no meaningful relationship with her husband, Saadia undergoes an abortion every time she gets pregnant. (The contraceptive pill was not yet available in Morocco.) Meanwhile, the oblivious husband and father, a government employee without ambition, continues to spend his time with friends in cafés, bars, and mosques, doing very little to help his growing family.
Saadia’s brothers take it upon themselves to help her family and employ her husband. Thus, the family moves to Sidi Kacem (a well-kept small town then and home to a few French families) where Wafa enrolls in a French school. Saadia, a beautiful woman in her twenties, enjoys the freedoms her new lifestyle affords. She helps her husband in the store and learns how to play tennis. When she travels with her brother to Madrid in 1965, she finds the social milieu in the Spanish capital liberating, not like the culture of shame (h’shouma) that permeates Moroccan society. To be sure, her brothers in Rabat throw parties as if they were in any European city; but, as with Saadia and her children, they do so in their privileged enclaves, against prevailing trends and mores.
Ever seeking self-improvement and independence, Saadia takes hairstyling lessons in Casablanca and, in the process, exposes her children to the big Moroccan metropolis. There, she briefly allows herself to be kissed by a lifeguard and schoolteacher and gets a taste of what real passion and love could be. Dependent on the patronage of her brothers, the family moves to Rabat, returns to the outskirts of Sidi Kacem to run a citrus farm, and eventually moves back to a two-bedroom apartment in the capital. By this time, Saadia has managed to get rid of her husband, leaving the children without their father for the rest of their lives. The father, rejected by his wife and family, seeks solace in the mystical traditions of Islam, known as Sufism, and marries the delicate daughter of a Sufi lodge master who is even younger than Saadia. Such marriage, also doomed to misery, engenders no children, so the couple eventually adopts a daughter (whom the father ends up mistreating as well).
Newly divorced at age thirty-four, Saadia starts dating and “living on the edge of appropriate behavior.” Meanwhile, in the summer of 1972, Wafa, worrying about her family’s precarious financial situation, succumbs to severe depression and is committed to a psychiatric hospital in Rabat overnight. This is not the first time that Wafa exhibits self-destructive tendencies. She is held back in second grade and, at the age of fourteen, attempts suicide following an argument with, and a slap from, her mother. Her sister Nezha is also affected: she flunks out of school and takes up smoking and partying, although she avoids drugs and sex.
Casual sex, however, would become the main outlet for Wafa. Already on the pill to regulate her menstruation cycles, she gives herself freely to her neighbor, the painter Kamil, to be deflowered. Some time later, it is Kamil and his French wife who team up on her, the wife sending her to heights of ecstasy with her hands, and giving her the first orgasm of her life. She may have been a bit embarrassed, but with this sexual encounter, she gets “initiated to a new wonderful world of self-gratification.” The experience with her French literature teacher would, on the other hand, be disappointing, as the teacher turns out to be gay. (Later, in Paris, he hooks up with Said, Wafa's schoolmate, who eventually dies of AIDS.) Sexual escapades with a married Jewish businessman in his thirties go nowhere, and sex with a “very tall and athletic, sexy young black man,” the son of an African diplomat, is all heat. Saadia, meanwhile, falls for Berto, a married but separated Jewish gym owner. Because of social conventions, however, it would be another impossible love.
At about age eighteen, Wafa grows into a self-confident young woman and becomes the lover of a balding, thirty-four-year old Paul, a divorced man with a young son, and, like her mother, discovers the freedom of being in Europe and not having to endure a Muslim society’s public censure. French-educated and moving in Western-educated circles in Morocco, Wafa knows full well that she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a typical traditional girl, and is all too aware of the risks of embracing her lifestyle. But there is no going back for her. No sooner does Paul leave for a trip to Paris than she succumbs to the seductions of Michel, a thirty-two-year old “gypsy-half-blood” from Toulouse, in Morocco to sell leather-bound books to well-to-do readers. She tries to keep Paul and visits him on a first-class round trip ticket she wins at a Miss Morocco pageant contest. But Paul, with his hair prosthesis, is no match for the hot-blooded Michel. And so after much heartache, she joins Michel’s rolling caravan, starting in Toulouse and its environs, then Geneva, Canada, and huge portions of Europe, Asia, and Africa, making good money in the process.
In 1978, Wafa returns to Morocco to take care of her brother Abdu, badly injured in a car accident. Her bookselling income allows her to send him to a reputable French hospital. She resumes her high school studies in the Economics track that she abandoned to work in book sales and travel the world. By this time, she drives her own car, a Renault 5 given to her by Michel. It is in this car that Saadia, Nezha and Wafa make the trip to Paris to visit Abdu in the hospital. One would have thought that a scene of three women pushing their out-of-gas car in Spain could only come from the imagination of a Spanish filmmaker like Pedro Almodovar, but that is exactly what happens. The women do make it to Paris, though, after they visit with Larbi in Toulouse.
In June 1979, short of her twenty-third birthday, Wafa passes the baccalauréat--orbac, for short—exam. She discharges her brother out of the hospital and with Nezha and her boyfriend visits Italy. Around this time, Moulay, a family friend and businessman, invites her to accompany him on a business trip to New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. She accepts and they have a fabulous month together without, however, any sexual entanglements. It is during this time that she discovers the seductive powers of New York City. “I was thunderstruck,” writes Wafa, “transported by the heightened pace, boundless energy, baffling diversity, infinite ambition, fearless vision, and voracious material appetite, and couldn’t help feeling small, foreign, awkward, and totally awed.” Awed? Maybe, but one could tell that she has found her natural habitat and would one day end at the very heart of this frenzied island.
The lure of Manhattan is enough to convince Wafa to pursue her college education in the United States. The only problem is she is Francophone and knows little English, if at all. Never one to give in to such limitations, she spends six months in London learning English and Arabic, and, to top it off, taking classes in jazz-dance. She uses the opportunity to see Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, at the National Theatre. During this time, her sister Nezha discovers Florida and comes back with more enchanting tales of America. This is enough to send Wafa and her three siblings packing to Gainseville, home to the University of Florida. Within a year, she completes her associate’s degree at a community college and, before she knows it, is smitten by Robbie O’ Brien, an irresistibly handsome twenty-two-year old pot smoker, at a Halloween party. Her life is about to enter yet another boom and bust cycle.
Her married friend Cynthia wants Robbie for herself, but Wafa prevails and loses no time orchestrating a rendez-vous. The couple end up making passionate love in his trailer and soon move in together. Passion quickly degenerates into violence and abuse, but the go-getting Wafa somehow can’t extricate herself from this relationship in time. Talented and hardworking, she graduates from the University of Florida with honors and is elected to the prestigious honor society, Phi Beta Kappa. Soon major universities like Harvard, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins come knocking at her door. She accepts New York University’s fellowship for financial reasons. Before moving to New York, she visits Robbie at his parents’ house in Houston, Texas and, once again, is subjected to abuse and violence by an immature man who never manages to get his degree.
In late August 1983, Wafa arrives in New York with Robbie and about $3000 to embark on her graduate studies. She struggles to study and keep the couple financially afloat. Although Robbie spends his days lounging around and contributes nothing to the household, she marries him within two months. Eventually, Robbie, Wafa, and her mother find jobs in various restaurants. Wafa starts waitressing at the well-known Café des Artistes to take care of her ever growing financial responsibilities. Exhausted from study and work, she manages to make a down payment on an apartment and soon, at the age of thirty-one, allows herself to get pregnant. Just like she had abandoned her bac school year in Morocco to travel with Michel, she drops from her Ph.D. program (with, however, a Master’s degree securely in hand) to manage her growing needs and dependencies. She gives birth to Sophia, a colicky baby who only adds to the stress of a failing marriage. Robbie turns out to be an affectionate father. However, his laziness and episodic outbursts of violence, followed by incoherent introspective missives for truce and love, are not enough to save the relationship.
Wafa manages to get a real estate broker’s license and gather all her family, including her mother Saadia, who is also in love with the American Dream, at the Versailles, an apartment building in New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson River. Still supported by her brothers back in Morocco, and still looking for love, Saadia marries Chester, a fifty-two-year old Vietnam veteran. She is shocked and deeply affected by the sudden death of two brothers. Chester, meanwhile, mistreats her, and before long, Saadia breaks down into a psychotic attack. She turns out to be bipolar, convinced that she is a prophet. Answering questions at the hospital, Wafa realizes that mental illness may run in her mother’s family. Without health insurance and little money, Wafa and Nezha hesitate to have her institutionalized. Wafa knows from experience (in Rabat) what this means, but worsening symptoms give her no choice. She is taking care of too many people at this point and simply has no options left.
While Wafa is wrestling with endless challenges and responsibilities, Robbie, now a butler in Manhattan, starts having affairs with women, including in distant Tunisia, when he visits Nezha and her Tunisian husband Sami. By the time he proposes to bring a woman he meets in Manhattan to their bed, Wafa has had enough. She ends the relationship and obtains a restraining order against him. After one final episode of passionate lovemaking with his estranged wife, Robbie follows his parents to Costa Rica. With Sophia’s father gone and Saadia’s health condition worsening, Wafa reaches the limit of her endurance. “My income was dwindling,” she writes, “and I was inundated with hostile calls from creditors. Robbie had left me with two mortgages, two co-op maintenances, and a mountain of credit card debts. He had exiled himself and relinquished all responsibility leaving me to care for a young daughter and an ailing mother, with no steady income, no child support or alimony, and no health care.”
In 1993, Wafa changes her legal name from Ouafae BenHallam to Wafa Faith O’Brien and applies with such name for a competitive sales training program at Merrill Lynch the following year. That year, she declares bankruptcy and loses the apartments, although her co-op sponsor allows her to stay in hers rent-free. To make matters worse, Robbie’s well-to-do parents refuse to help support their granddaughter. Not only that, Robbie later calls Wafa for a loan to divorce a Costa Rican woman with whom he has two children. At this point, Wafa manages to pause and wonder whether she is too harsh on the guy or if she has anything to do with the failure of their marriage, one with “a fairytale beginning and nightmarish end.” But the force of her convictions is such—which is what, ultimately, keeps her alive—that she simply can’t see past it.
With her irrepressible life force, Wafa takes on the macho culture of Wall Street and lands big accounts. She rises quickly to the post of “senior financial consultant and vice president” and makes a quarter of a million dollars a year. Her temporarily recovered mother is obviously proud when she visits her at the corner office with a view of the East River at the Citicorp Tower: “It was not hard to guess what was going through her head,” Wafa comments. “The sacrificed teenager, married against her will at a tender age in a medieval time and place, was witnessing something she could not, in her wildest dreams, have ever imagined. The frightened little girl whose hand she once held to school, some three-and-a-half decades earlier had turned into a successful Wall Street advisor managing million-dollar portfolios and reaching the pinnacle of American society in a transformation that baffled her mind.”
Wafa buys back her apartment and the one adjacent to it for herself at the Versailles and buys another one for her mother. She co-signs a loan for her sister Nezha. In the high times of speculation and financial bubbles of the 1990s, everyone, it seems, is carried away in the euphoria of easy riches. Lonely, Wafa answers a personal ad at New York magazine, only to find herself, weeks later, dating an obsessive compulsive and impotent Hungarian-born conservative bigot. During a summer trip to Morocco in 1997, she seduces Najib, a distant relative. But when he follows her to New York, she knows she wants nothing more to do with him. She meets Carlos, an Argentine diplomat, at a nightclub, and enjoys the passion of lovemaking for a while. The younger man, however, turns out to be too needy for the forty-four year old Wafa. By 2000, they call it quits.
Saadia’s health continues to deteriorate. At the age of sixty-four, she becomes practically disabled. Then the terrorist attacks of 9/11 hit. Stress mounts. Wafa starts getting back pains and anxiety attacks. She loses clients; in fact, she startsfiring the obnoxious ones. She takes a leave of absence and starts going to talk therapy. She remembers her father and confronts her identity issues now that war has been declared on Iraq. In the process, she sends her mother with Nezha to Morocco, decides to resign from her lucrative job, sell all her apartments at the Versailles, and return with Sophia to live in Morocco.
By early 2004, Saadia, her live-in maid, Nezha and her husband Sami, Wafa and Sophia, as well as a general helper, all move into a big villa by the ocean in Harhoura, just south of Rabat. She learns that her father, the eighty-two old man she has supported all these decades, including sending him on pilgrimage to Mecca, has not changed much, and so decides not to have him join them, as he requests. She also undergoes a hysterectomy following painful episodes of hemorrhaging. In March, her sixty-five-year-old mother finally gives up and dies. More than three hundred people attend her funeral, leaving the reader to wonder what might have happened had she died in a New Jersey hospital.
Wafa tries to start businesses with Nezha in Morocco and enrolls Sophia at the Rabat American School. But money keeps running low, what with the apartments at the Versailles not selling and the un-American work habits of Moroccans and rampant corruption throughout the system. Wafa quickly realizes that the limited freedom she enjoyed in Morocco as a teenager in the 1960s and '70s has been further curtailed by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. She can’t stand social inequalities and the poverty. Thus, in June 2005, she and her daughter make the trip back to the United States. With no jobs lined up, she tries to finish her doctoral work and trade stock options to no avail.
In March 2008, Wafa gets a phone call that would change her life. Naziha, a Moroccan friend who once lived in Saadia’s apartment at the Versailles, recommends Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, a book that would ignite Wafa’s “voracious appetite” for all matters of the spirit. Soon, through her daughter’s friend Elisa, she discovers a group of women known as the “Sisters of Light” who help her slow down and unplug from the source of the stresses that have bedeviled her all her life. Being in the nowbecomes the optimal state, and Wafa could only do that through overcoming fear.
For the first time in her life, in the midst of a collapsing economy, Wafa comes to terms with her financial insecurities and places a higher premium on the intangibles of mere being. The process of healing starts and she awakens to a new self. She vacates her place at the Versailles, puts her daughter in a small apartment in Manhattan, and moves to the village of Sag Harbor in Long Island, to work for Annette, an old friend of Nezha’s, in an upscale retail store with a social mission called Urban Zen.
At long last, Wafa feels free from the anxieties that have bedeviled her since childhood and opens up to the joys of life. This is, one recalls, the path her father takes when Saadia forces him out of the marriage, but one gets the feeling that Wafa will avoid the pitfalls of habit and keep seeking newer heights. She is unlikely to turn into a Willy Loman, the salesman in Arthur Miller’s play she sees while learning English in London. Wafa remains an irrepressible saleswoman, to be sure, but one who is advocating a new philosophy, not selling books or apartments, desperately waitressing in New York restaurants, advising pampered rich men, or trying to peddle stock options. She may still go back to any of those professions, but she won’t be the same person doing it.
Wafa’s journey provides valuable lessons on a number of topics. It upends the notion that women from Arab and Muslim backgrounds are helplessly trapped in male-dominated structures. Inspired by French and European traditions of openness, Wafa roams across the globe seemingly unimpeded, traveling from country to country, not on her daddy’s largesse (although her maternal uncles help a great deal), but selling books to make a living. Sure, there were few visa restrictions in the decades preceding the mid-to-late 1980s, but Wafa’s peregrinations are unusual in any time period. It’s almost as if she and her family on her mother’s side were genetically engineered to rebel against restrictive social traditions. Like a true Horatio Alger, Wafa has always made a living and reached for more, and like a typical Moroccan or Arab woman, she never ceases to look after her mother and relatives. She insists on being free, but she is not callous or indifferent, even though a few of the men she lets go might think differently.
Wafa forges her own destiny and is amply rewarded for it. She takes risks every step of her journey. She abandons herself to passion unapologetically. When she finds a man attractive, she tries to get him in bed—and then, if she really likes him after that, fall in love with him. When she needs money she goes to work, whether such work entails waitressing, selling homes, managing people’s fortunes, or working at a store in a village. When a family member needs help, she often comes through, and provides real, tangible assistance. She works out regularly to stay fit and doesn’t hesitate to seek medical or psychological help in times of need. She knows she is prone to wild mood swings and depression, but she never feels sorry for herself or complains about her condition. Wafa, in case there is still any doubt about it, is a natural-born leader.
Like many immigrants, she fudges her identity because of potential discrimination against Arabs in the United States. It would be a tragic misfortune for a woman who has never been bound by any Islamic tradition to be unfairly treated because of her father’s Muslim background. Following 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she reconsiders her stance and reflects on the ways she has erased her Arab and Muslim identity. But, to be honest, she never really had one. She is a universal woman and citizen of the wide-open world from the get-go. She sends her father on pilgrimage to Mecca and leaves all the praying to him—a man who is incapable of helping himself, let alone others. Wafa is beyond narrow national categories. She is what we like to call a “free spirit”--the genuine article. She falls in love and has the courage to admit romantic failures. That so many relationships grow stale is a well-known fact, but Wafa is not one to stay in them. She expects only truth—of the moment, maybe—but truth, nonetheless. She is a gypsy of sorts, allergic to pretence and dissimulation.
Yet Wafa is also vulnerable when out of sight. She cries when she lets her lovers go or when she is mean to her sister. She worries to death about her mother and drives herself insane fretting about money. Yet these are indispensable traits for a full, wholesome portrait of the woman. These are not, as Wafa might think, flaws to be remedied or weakness to be straightened out. What would she do if she were to discover that mental illness is, indeed, a genetic trait in the family? Eliminating it though mood-adjusting drugs would simply turn her into an empty shell, as Saadia, her mother, well knows.
Wafa, like any human being who is alive, has her own moods and quirks, but overcoming them through medicine or Zen meditation is not going to help. At best, she could pretend to be a middle-aged American woman seeking spiritual elevation. No one at the “Sisters of Light” group, I am ready to bet, has had her life experiences. When it comes to family, Wafa is anything but typically American. She takes care of a whole family, across continents, because that is what people do. Wafa is not a suburban type, either. She is more like the pioneers who made the United States, the daring men and women who opened the country to new possibilities. To think of Wafa at her meditation sessions in Sag Harbor is to imagine America’s robber barons checking into a monastery and walking away from the world-changing events they have unleashed. Manic people make history and civilization with their larger-than-life appetites and visions. We, readers, are mere passive consumers of their gifts.
There are few people, Wafa, who have the golden opportunity—call it dharma, if you will—to have a full life like the one that has brought you to the brink of despair and even holy madness. Seek spiritual self-fulfillment to recover and recoup, but honor the spirit of your rebellious teenage years. Without that spirit, I wouldn’t be writing this, and the world would know little about you.
I am, of course, glad you took the time to attend writing workshops—the style does justice to the message. But please protect the voice that has guided you until now with all your might. This is your ultimate gift to us and to your mother (whose voice survives in yours, even though it may have been erased from the voice recorder).
Seek newer heights, apply for jobs, fall in love again, and again, and let yourself be bruised a little. Your unquenchable faith in a better future will guide you. Let the dead rest in peace and the younger ones shape their destinies. Your smitten readers don’t want you to retire and abandon your gypsy ways. Don’t let the temptation of preaching get the better of you. You—your being—is a work of the spirit. Just live—and that, dear Wafa, is grace enough.
Author: Anouar Majid is Director of the Center for Global Humanities and Associate Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of New England. He is the author of We Are All Moors, A Call for Heresy, Freedom and Orthodoxy, Unveiling Traditions, and the novel Si Yussef. He founded TingisRedux, a magazine of ideas and culture. Professor Majid has lectured and given keynote addresses at major universities and cultural institutions in the United States and around the world; he also contributed opinion pieces to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, and other publications. He maintains the blog Tingitana.
History’s Hands
By RANDY KENNEDY Published: March 17, 2011
WHEN the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes a big curatorial decision, it tends to do so with the kind of grave deliberation that goes into a papal bull. Gut feeling is not a prized consideration. But in the spring of 2009, in a dust-covered basement workshop in Fez, Morocco, a young curator in the museum’s Islamic department sat among a group of artisans — workers in traditional North African tile, plaster and wood ornament whose roots stretched back seven generations in the trade — and asked the company’s chief executive yet again why the museum should enlist them for an unusual mission.
The executive, a boyish-looking man named Adil Naji, reached over and took hold of the wrist of one of his younger brothers, Hisham. He hoisted the brother’s rough, callused fingers in front of the curator, Navina Haidar, and, with a climactic intensity that wouldn’t have been out of place in “Lawrence of Arabia,” exclaimed, “Look, this is my brother’s hand!”
As Ms. Haidar recalled recently, back in the much less cinematic confines of a museum construction site: “It was a very powerful moment. It made up our minds because we could see how close he was to the tradition. And we wanted to see that hand on our walls.”
She and her colleagues had gone to Morocco in search of help for a kind of project that the Metropolitan, which generally concerns itself with the work of dead artists, has rarely undertaken in its 140 years: to install a group of living artists inside the museum for the purposes of creating a permanent new part of its collection.
The last time such a thing happened was in 1980, when Brooke Astor underwrote the re-creation of a Ming dynasty garden courtyard, made by more than two dozen master builders from Suzhou, China, who spent four months on the job within the museum’s Chinese painting galleries, working with hand tools unchanged for generations.
Almost 30 years later the museum was embarking on the most ambitious rethinking and rebuilding of its Islamic art galleries in its history, a $50 million endeavor. At the heart of those galleries, which will open in the fall after being closed six years, it dreamed of showcasing the defining feature of Moroccan and southern Spanish Islamic architecture: a medieval Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard, which would function in much the same way such courtyards still do in the traditional houses and mosques of Marrakesh or Casablanca, as their physical and spiritual center.
The problem was that, while the museum owns entire blocks’ worth of historic architecture, it did not happen to have a medieval Islamic courtyard sitting around in storage anywhere. And so after months of debate about whether it could pull off such a feat in a way that would meet the Met’s standards, it essentially decided to order a courtyard up.
Which is how a group of highly regarded Moroccan craftsmen, many of whom had never set foot in New York, came essentially to take up residence at the Met beginning last December, working some days in their jabador tunics and crimson fezzes (known as tarbooshes in Morocco), to build a 14th-century Islamic fantasia in seclusion high above the Greek and Roman galleries as unknowing museum goers passed below.
With world attention focused on the Middle East, the courtyard has taken on an unforeseen importance for the museum; for the Kingdom of Morocco itself, which has followed the project closely; and for a constituency of Muslim scholars and supporters of the Met. They hope it will function not only as a placid chronological way station for people moving through more than a millennium of Islamic history, but also as a symbol, amid potent anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States and Europe, that aesthetic and intellectual commerce remains alive between Islam and the West.
“Every one of these guys here knows what this means, what’s riding on this,” said Mr. Naji, 35, the president and chief executive of Arabesque, a company of craftsmen founded in Fez in 1928 by his great-grandfather, now run by Mr. Naji and three of his brothers.
It was late December, and he was gesturing across a cluttered, unadorned room that didn’t look like much of a symbol, much less a reimagined medieval courtyard, except for high metal armatures suggesting the forms of arches. Mr. Naji’s brother Hisham, 33, of the callused and persuasive hand, stood atop a scaffold covered in plaster dust. Below him, covering a swath of the floor, lay tens of thousands of pieces of clay tile, many not much bigger than grains of rice, fitted together face down in a big rectangle that looked like a shallow sandbox scored with impossibly intricate lines. The tiles had been shipped from Fez, where large pieces had been fired in ovens fueled with olive pits and sawdust and then hand cut into individual shapes by 35 workers over a period of four months.
Inside the Met that morning an Arabesque specialist in this kind of painstaking mosaic work, known as zellij, sat cross-legged, placing some of the final pieces into the arrangement with tweezers as another scattered dry grout between the tiles. Handfuls of water were then sprinkled like ablutions over these areas to begin to cement the pieces in place. And when it was all dried, the dado panel was hoisted up into its place along one of the courtyard walls, filling the room for the first time with the kind of kaleidoscopic color and tessellated patterning meant to transport visitors from Fifth Avenue to Fez. (The tiles’ traditional function is to soften the solidity of the walls. “The surface is seemingly dissolved,” Jonas Lehrman, an architectural scholar, wrote in “Earthly Paradise: Garden and Courtyard in Islam,” a 1980 study. “Yet throughout the entire organization, even the smallest units are related by the overriding discipline of the geometry.”)
Over the course of two months a reporter and photographer were invited to watch as the space began to transform slowly from a 21-by-23-foot drywall box — illuminated by an LED panel in the ceiling cleverly mimicking daylight — to a courtyard with tile patterns based on those in the Alhambra palace in Granada, above which rise walls of fantastically filigreed plaster, leading to a carved cedar molding based on the renowned woodwork in the 14th-century Attarin madrasa, or Islamic school, in Fez.
Occasionally New York still throws a curve ball or two. After a recent breakfast in Queens with the company’s lawyer, the men made their way to the No. 7 train, and the oldest Naji brother, Mohammed, 40 — the family’s most revered craftsman, a maalem, or master carver — was almost arrested after his monthly Metrocard failed to swipe properly, and he simply walked through an open emergency gate. On the subway later, wearing his customary street clothes — pointy-toed cowboy boots, baseball cap, a baby-blue fur-lined jacket — he seemed unperturbed, smiling broadly.
Adil Naji, who went to college in Washington and speaks perfect English, asked his brother how he could be so calm, and then translated the answer: “He said: ‘I had a lawyer, a reporter and a photographer with me. What was going to happen?’ ”
Sheila R. Canby, who was recruited two years ago from the British Museum to lead the Met’s Islamic department and oversee the renovation of the galleries, said that the back and forth between the craftsmen and the curators had sometimes been tumultuous. The Moroccans, who are known for their restoration work on important mosques and other landmarks in the Middle East, are in essence living historians who have carried on patterns and designs preserved in practice for generations. But they have never attempted a job requiring this level of historical attention or artistry, one whose goal is to look as authentic to Moroccan eyes as to those of scholars.
“We have been very difficult clients, sending drawings back over and over again,” Ms. Canby said recently, watching the men work. “We didn’t want any intrusions of modern interpretation.”
Ms. Haidar added, “They’d say to us, ‘But our great grandfathers did it this way,’ and we would tell them, ‘We’re taking you even further back into your history.’ ”
Adil Naji, listening in, shrugged his shoulders diplomatically. “It was fun to go back and forth,” he said.
Ms. Canby laughed out loud: “You say that now.”
Perhaps almost as remarkable as the presence of the craftsmen inside the Met is that the team of scholars and planners who recruited them and have collaborated closely with them is composed mostly of women, one of them Israeli. Besides Ms. Canby and Ms. Haidar, the group includes Nadia Erzini, an art historian and curator at the Museum of Islamic Life in Tétouan, Morocco; Mahan Khajenoori, from the museum’s construction department; and Achva Benzinberg Stein, an expert on Moroccan courts and gardens and a professor of landscape architecture at City College.
On a recent visit to the museum Ms. Stein became emotional surveying the work under way, describing how she had fallen in love with books about Moroccan architecture as a young woman in Tel Aviv but had been unable to travel there until the mid-1970s because she was Israeli. “This is like the culmination of a life’s work for me,” she said, wiping away tears. “To me it means the possibility of so many things, of peace.”
By late February inside the courtyard the wall tile work had been completed, and the woodwork, as redolent as a cedar closet, had been mostly installed. Still to come before the opening in the fall would be a specially designed self-circulating fountain and benches designed by Ms. Stein.
Mohammed Naji and seven other plaster carvers had just set to work on the most painstaking part of the job, incising interlaced patterns into the still-soft wall, arabesques and other forms so tiny and complex that each man can sometimes complete only a four-inch square over the course of a day.
“This kind of work is really not done anymore in Morocco — it’s too time consuming, too cost prohibitive,” Adil Naji said, watching his eldest brother sitting on a stool, peering over a pair of reading glasses, carving with a thin wood-handled knife and pausing metronomically every few seconds to lean forward and blow the dust from the crevices.
Mr. Naji beamed, but he conceded, as he watched the company’s greatest work taking shape, that one thing worried him.
“Two of my guys told me that they wanted to retire after this, because they couldn’t see a way to top it,” he said. “I wake up at night with this fear that when we’re done, they’re all going to stand back and look at it and hang up their tools for good.”
Occasionally New York still throws a curve ball or two. After a recent breakfast in Queens with the company’s lawyer, the men made their way to the No. 7 train, and the oldest Naji brother, Mohammed, 40 — the family’s most revered craftsman, a maalem, or master carver — was almost arrested after his monthly Metrocard failed to swipe properly, and he simply walked through an open emergency gate. On the subway later, wearing his customary street clothes — pointy-toed cowboy boots, baseball cap, a baby-blue fur-lined jacket — he seemed unperturbed, smiling broadly.
Adil Naji, who went to college in Washington and speaks perfect English, asked his brother how he could be so calm, and then translated the answer: “He said: ‘I had a lawyer, a reporter and a photographer with me. What was going to happen?’ ”
Sheila R. Canby, who was recruited two years ago from the British Museum to lead the Met’s Islamic department and oversee the renovation of the galleries, said that the back and forth between the craftsmen and the curators had sometimes been tumultuous. The Moroccans, who are known for their restoration work on important mosques and other landmarks in the Middle East, are in essence living historians who have carried on patterns and designs preserved in practice for generations. But they have never attempted a job requiring this level of historical attention or artistry, one whose goal is to look as authentic to Moroccan eyes as to those of scholars.
“We have been very difficult clients, sending drawings back over and over again,” Ms. Canby said recently, watching the men work. “We didn’t want any intrusions of modern interpretation.”
Ms. Haidar added, “They’d say to us, ‘But our great grandfathers did it this way,’ and we would tell them, ‘We’re taking you even further back into your history.’ ”
Adil Naji, listening in, shrugged his shoulders diplomatically. “It was fun to go back and forth,” he said.
Ms. Canby laughed out loud: “You say that now.”
Perhaps almost as remarkable as the presence of the craftsmen inside the Met is that the team of scholars and planners who recruited them and have collaborated closely with them is composed mostly of women, one of them Israeli. Besides Ms. Canby and Ms. Haidar, the group includes Nadia Erzini, an art historian and curator at the Museum of Islamic Life in Tétouan, Morocco; Mahan Khajenoori, from the museum’s construction department; and Achva Benzinberg Stein, an expert on Moroccan courts and gardens and a professor of landscape architecture at City College.
On a recent visit to the museum Ms. Stein became emotional surveying the work under way, describing how she had fallen in love with books about Moroccan architecture as a young woman in Tel Aviv but had been unable to travel there until the mid-1970s because she was Israeli. “This is like the culmination of a life’s work for me,” she said, wiping away tears. “To me it means the possibility of so many things, of peace.”
By late February inside the courtyard the wall tile work had been completed, and the woodwork, as redolent as a cedar closet, had been mostly installed. Still to come before the opening in the fall would be a specially designed self-circulating fountain and benches designed by Ms. Stein.
Mohammed Naji and seven other plaster carvers had just set to work on the most painstaking part of the job, incising interlaced patterns into the still-soft wall, arabesques and other forms so tiny and complex that each man can sometimes complete only a four-inch square over the course of a day.
“This kind of work is really not done anymore in Morocco — it’s too time consuming, too cost prohibitive,” Adil Naji said, watching his eldest brother sitting on a stool, peering over a pair of reading glasses, carving with a thin wood-handled knife and pausing metronomically every few seconds to lean forward and blow the dust from the crevices.
Mr. Naji beamed, but he conceded, as he watched the company’s greatest work taking shape, that one thing worried him.
“Two of my guys told me that they wanted to retire after this, because they couldn’t see a way to top it,” he said. “I wake up at night with this fear that when we’re done, they’re all going to stand back and look at it and hang up their tools for good.”
From Morocco Mary & Gerry Murphy March 17, 2011
When we retired several years ago we wanted to try something a little bit different. Retirement to us did not mean not working, it meant working at something different. We followed the lead of our oldest son Joshua (Andover High School Class of '97) who after graduating from Tufts served in Mali, West Africa with the Peace Corps from 2001-04. T
The Peace Corps has given us that opportunity to still work, but with a different view of the world.
Mary and I have been in Morocco serving in the Peace Corps for a year now. We arrived in Morocco March 3, 2010 and spent the first two months of our service in intensive language and cultural training. We have been at our present location since May, we are health educators working in local schools and health clinics. We give health lesson in basic health topics, basic hygiene, and hand washing, dental care and the like.
Most of the volunteers are recent college grads, so there was a slight apprehension as to how we would fit in. The younger volunteers have been very accepting to us. It is great to work with a high-energy group of young people.
We live in a rural farming village of about 200 people. We have a house with electricity and water, but no heat so in the winter the house temperature drops to 55 to 60 degrees. Village transportation is by foot, mule or horse drawn wagon. We usually walk. Our Post Office Box is about 35 miles away. The trip to the mailbox involves a three-mile walk to a paved road followed by cab or bus ride to our province capital where the Post Office is located. Typically it take about two hours just to get to the Post Office. Adding in a little shopping and a round trip of getting the mail and some groceries is a daylong adventure.
So life is definitely not as convenient as in Andover, but it is not without its rewards.
There are gaps in the medical care here. A few weeks ago we learned there was a young child living nearby who had a clef lip. We asked local store owners, local officials anyone who might know where this child lived.
We identified the village and one day with another volunteer we hiked to the isolated village and after about three hours of searching we actually found the child. The parents did not know that "Operation Smile" operated in Morocco. "Operation Smile" provides free surgery to correct clef lip, and other malformation. The child will have corrective surgery in April.
We are assisting the village in construction of a community center, if anyone is interested in donating to the cause please view:
Gerry and Mary Murphy live on High Plain Road and are Peace Corps volunteers. This year marks the 50th year of the Peace Corps.
WOMAN FINDS PEACE CORPS IN RETIREMENT
By Laura Kennedy
Story Published: Jan 8, 2011
BILLINGS - One misconception about the Peace Corps is that it's just for 20-somethings, but hundreds of volunteers join during retirement and play an important role in serving the country.
Connie Genger joined the Peace Corps in 2006. "They offered Morocco and it was just intriguing to me," she said.
She is among the nearly 800 volunteers who join the Peace Corps after retiring, a growing trend. "We welcome and absolutely love when we have mid-career, retired volunteers because they bring so much experience," Peace Corps Representative Melanie Forthun said.
"When I left Morocco at the age of 65, I was the oldest volunteer in the country at that time and within a year there was a person in Morocco that was in her early 80s," Genger said.
Genger spent two years helping a women's association in Morocco develop a business. "As far as I know, two years later, that little store is still open and working, it's pretty exciting," Genger said.
She was able to call on her decades of work experience, which she said was one of the many advantages of being an older volunteer. "Many underdeveloped countries are very patriarchal in nature so women are at a disadvantage naturally especially from the outside, but being an older woman I had a lot of immediate credibility and respect," she said.
Genger encourages anyone with an interest to explore and help the world to look into volunteering for the Peace Corps. "It can be very lonely and living conditions are harsh, but you just kind of accept that as part of the deal. There's enough high moments that offset the low times so it makes it worthwhile," she said.
She said the friendships she developed with other volunteers and local Moroccan people made the experience worthwhile. "After living there for 27 months, you just develop that heart to heart relationship that can't be replaced," Genger said.
Genger said she is proud of the lasting impact she made while in the Peace Corps, and of the lifelong impact the Peace Corps made on her.
The 2011 year is the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, and they are at their highest number of volunteers since the 1970's. If you are interested in more information, click on Connections.
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