“From Morocco to Melilla, A Reeducation in Normalcy”
by Andrew Farrand
Georgetown University
In which the author, mere months after moving to North Africa, learns that you can take the traveler out of Morocco, but you can’t quite take Morocco out of the traveler.
The Moroccan in me could tell right away that Melilla was not normal.
With the border just a few hundred feet behind us, The Girlfriend and I boarded a local bus to take us into the center of town. A few friends, fellow Arabic students who met at a language center in Morocco’s northern city of Fes, joined us. Strangely enough, on the bus we were not shoved, we received a printed receipt for our bus ticket, and we actually found a seat. This being Europe (of sorts) I was not surprised to hear Spanish or to see Euros exchange hands, but the rest of this was highly unusual.
Melilla is itself an abnormality. One of Spain’s two remaining colonial outposts on the Moroccan mainland, this diverse enclave is an anomaly in the human geography of North Africa. My two-day visit in the sleepy off-season was hardly enough to make sense of it.
* * *
Along with its fellow colony Ceuta (located further west along the Moroccan coast), Melilla is a prime target for African emigrants hoping to sneak into Europe through the back door, and so a well-policed border fence surrounds the city. But despite its officially intolerant view toward immigrants, during our visit Melilla appeared a perfect model of intercultural tolerance.
The Girlfriend and I were surprised to see so many dark-skinned women with their hair covered in hijab – the perfect model of a Moroccan woman – jabbering rapidly to their kids in Spanish.
In Melilla’s elegant downtown, at one moment we found ourselves peering wide-eyed into a storefront overflowing with Christmas kitsch. It was located underneath a second-story synagogue. In the street, a pair of Indian Hindus, local parking attendants, directed traffic. I thought that the contrast with Morocco could not have been drawn any more sharply. That is, until the next afternoon when I saw a man strolling down the street wearing a yarmulke, something so inconceivable across the border just a few kilometers away.
* * *
Melilla’s fortified old town seemed disappointingly sterile in comparison to the characteristic grit and bustle of Morocco’s ancient medinas, but downtown Melilla, a marvel of modernist and Art Nouveau façades, easily compensates. Statues, including some nude busts, decorate Melilla’s crisply landscaped central park. In chic storefronts around town, mannequins model skin-tight jeans and low-cut blouses.
Back in Fes, of course, such displays would constitute extreme hshuma – the Moroccan Arabic word for “shame” and the keystone of the country’s society, in which everyone vigilantly peppers everyone else with the word in order to enforce the rigid, unwritten code of acceptable behavior. When we saw local women sashaying along Melilla’s sidewalks while actually wearing these European fashions, we muttered “hshuma” under our breaths. The Girlfriend and I smiled to each other, surprised to find that, thanks to some unfortunate accident of cultural osmosis, we had said it only half in jest.
* * *
Our be-daypack’d gaggle of Arabic students had traveled from Fes to Melilla simply to renew our Moroccan visas. For me, however, that concern was secondary – I came for the pork.
Though they’re well hidden, we have managed to scrounge out a few spots to buy alcohol in highly conservative Fes. Pork, however, is one vice that has proven practically impossible to find in our corner of the Muslim world. So at breakfast, just a matter of minutes after reaching Melilla, I sunk my teeth into a greasy, grilled bacon-ham-and-cheese sandwich. As it hit my mouth, I briefly wondered if it was normal to feel such ecstasy at the taste of mere grilled pig. Yes, yes it was.
To round out my forbidden meal, I ordered a carajillo, a local breakfast specialty made of espresso spiked with brandy.
Things only picked up at lunchtime. We found a hopping midday hangout, Bar Alhambra, which served up cheap morsels of traditional tapas – mini chorizo sandwiches, bacon-wrapped shrimp, fresh fish filets, and steaming saucers of siesta-inducing paella. That’s what the locals, packed in all around us, ate, anyway. Armed with only a few words of Spanish, we had to test our luck by picking random items from the menu. After ordering manitas de cerdo, The Girlfriend and I found ourselves poking at a gelatinous pile of stewed pig’s feet, and decided to start ordering by pointing toward our neighbor’s plates. Thankfully the sangria and beers were flowing smoothly.
* * *
The following day, we straggled back to Fes, fresh visa stamps in our passports.
Allah, in his infinite justice and wisdom, had already punished us for our hshuma by sending a local Moroccan bus company to screw us out of a few extra bucks and leave us on the side of the highway outside Fes, rather than at the city bus station. There wasn’t a pig for miles, I knew.
How quickly our next reeducation had begun.
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Rudy Maxa and Allan Comport judged the RateYourStudyAbroad.com Fall 2010 Travel Writing & Photography Contest. Rudy Maxa is the host of PBS‘s RudyMaxa’s World, a former Washington Post reporter and the former host of NPR‘s The Savvy Traveler. Allan Comport is a professor of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
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