That is what co-owner Miranda Innes calls women who show up in at her Moroccan B&B alone.
Yet I would not recommend it for the feminine faint of heart. A woman alone in a souk with her own pocketbook in tow throws Moroccan male concepts of where a woman should be into high disarray and makes the politically incorrect American male construction workers look like priests. “Luscious Lips!” “Hello Money!” “Thank you; no thank you; damn you!” And the one epithet which I took as a compliment, though I do not fully understand it: “Berber woman!”
These sassy souk-sayers are no more representative of all Moroccan men than were those tee-shirted hard-hatted lascivious whistling workers on American streets of their US counterparts. Colorful, yes; memorable, certainly. But not the voice of all Moroccan men, thank goodness. And just like in America, if you are walking on their souk streets with a man, or with someone they know, you are far less likely to receive the comments.
Hosts Miranda Innes and her husband Dan Pearce introduced me to Jamal, who has a shop in the souks. When I met Jamal, he shook my hand, then touched it to his heart—a gesture I would see repeated over and over. Lovely that gesture, acknowledging taking this stranger into your heart. Then, after asking where I was from, Jamal offered me a “Big welcome” looking straight and deeply into my eyes. I felt very welcomed indeed.
The other sound on the streets which took some getting used to was the Call to Prayer five times a day, with a warm-up call before the first one—sort of a snooze alarm system. I had looked forward to experiencing the days’ cycles of prayer, and planned to participate with my own silent prayers in my own eclectic fashion.
The Call to Prayer is amplified from all of the mosques’ loudspeakers. Mosques are Marrakesh’s anchors which pin the streets down, keeping them from getting hopelessly tangled up. You can always look up and locate yourself relative to a mosque, towering benevolently and gently over the ancient camel-wide streets—until Call to Prayers. Then the mosques all come audibly alive simultaneously—and loudly, with multi-decibel amplification.
The Call to Prayer is primal and deep, like a wild animal’s visceral longing, yearning for its mate, or like a warning, a human air raid sound: “Take cover! Take cover! Go find the protection of the Divine now, save yourself. Hurry!” I wanted to duck under my desk the way we were taught in elementary school, in case of an attack, during the Cold War.
And then silence. Prayer. Stillness. Or so I thought. Sitting in a restaurant in Djemaa el Fna when a Call to Prayer came, I was surprised to see people still bustling around on their errands. I had expected people to stop in their tracks wherever they were, for at least a moment of silence.
So I asked Jamal about this. He explained that one cannot just start praying. Preparation, absolution, must be offered first before praying. There are two types: full absolution includes washing most all of the body in ritual preparation for prayer, and the abridged version includes a smaller body geography to wash. If absolution has not been accomplished, then you may not properly offer prayer. So the people in the square kept going about their life. And, he told me rather sadly, not everyone, just like in America, observes their faith.
I confessed to Jamal that I was using the Calls to Prayer to offer my own up, in my way. I felt suddenly very sullied, not having ritually prepared, just blurting out my prayers wherever I was. The idea of preparing to pray I quite like, and I wished there were some easy-to-pack version.
Jamal explained that they observe two kinds of prayer: the kind I was doing, which was between a person and their god, and the kind that people were observing in the mosques, praying together. In the private prayers, between person and the divine, this is when one “surprises God,” Jamal said. I love this concept—to surprise an all-knowing deity. Kind of like showing up unannounced, or maybe throwing a surprise party. I wondered how I could surprise God—perhaps by praying without an appointment? I know that I have often been surprised by God—and delighted. It is intriguing to hope that perhaps the favor could be returned.
Jamal went on. The prayers in the mosque are the second kind of prayer, stronger, different. Usually these prayers are led, and the people listen prayerfully, adding Amen’s where needed. Yes, I agreed that many religions also have this kind of prayer. And when more people are gathered, it is stronger prayer, different prayer. I thought of the scene in the movie Avatar where the natives of Pandora, the Na’vi, prayed together, joining their focus and wills to a single purpose. That’s this second kind of prayer.
This experience reminded me of growing up with daily prayer in our US schools, and I was sad that my children’s generation grew up without either daily method, silently alone or led together. The Pledge of Allegiance is long gone from US school mornings, also, because it contained “one nation under God,” which is still good enough for printing on our money, but not for the protection of freedom of speech and worship in the schools.
Yet, here in this Moroccan country whose traditions are so laced with worship, the airwaves five times a day are filled with that primal call to prayer: “Take cover, take shelter, get safe and square with your divine—now!” I envied the Moroccans this ritual.
There was one other cycle-of-the-day ritual, which happened at Riad Maizie where I was staying ( www.riadmaizie.eu ). A riad is a traditional Moroccan house with an interior garden; the term comes from the Arab word “ryad” which means garden. The house has two entrances: one for people, to enter from the street. And one for the divine, open to the sky, in the garden.
Riad Maizie is a beautiful 200 year-old building which Miranda Innes and Dan Pearce had completely restored in traditional Marakchi decoration. Both Miranda and Dan are artists: Dan is an artist working in oils and comics, Miranda is a author, having published many books on decorating, and one on their adventure of restoring Maizie: Cinnamon City (Black Swan, 2006). So the colors and beauty of Maizie are quite spectacular. Each of the guests felt vaguely guilty since we each believed we had the best room in the house; all are so special.
At Riad Maizie, every morning and every evening, there is a ritual in the courtyard at precisely sunrise and exactly sunset. Approximately 87 small dark birds with humongous lungs come to the upper north east corner of the courtyard, which was right outside my window, nesting in a specific tree, and they tempestuously sing the sun up into the city, then in the evening tumultuously sing the sun back down into the earth. It is a loud cacophonous raucous noise, primal like the Call to Prayers, but in a high-pitched bird way—as primal as these little birds can be. They make a glorious racquet. And when the birds are sure that the sun’s passage is complete, they disappear as quickly as they showed up.
This reminded me of Carl Jung’s encounter with Chief Mountain Lake. Mountain Lake was an American Indian medicine man, and every morning Mountain Lake awoke before the sun, and went to sing the day into being. He had done this almost all his life. It was his job. Carl Jung wrote of Mountain Lake, “I envied him the certainty of his purpose.”
Not everything works on time or in proper cycles, however. The day of my departure, the taxi which had been ordered the night before did not show up. So Abdul, an achingly handsome young Islam boy who is indispensable to Miranda and Dan at Riad Maizie, turned to me and said, “We must go find another taxi now,” and he gestured to his motorcycle. I remember thinking, “But I’m 62. It has been at least 20 years since I’ve been on a motorcycle.”
Abdul gestured again, with the look of, “Let’s get on with this, the flight may leave.” I thought, “Fortunately I’m wearing slacks.” He got on his motorcyle, swinging my carry-on luggage up onto his lap. I hopped on the back of the cycle behind Abdul, and held on to my luggage (with my arms around him of course). Then we flew thru the streets of the souks at 7 in the morning, passing hooded men and horses and carts, with inches to go on either side. Amazing. Wish I had pulled out my video camera. Must get a repeat…
Abdul found me a taxi, which drove me through the city as it was waking up. Very beautiful in the early morning fog. A timelessness and ancient feeling, in the center of Marrakesh. It has been there for centuries, with i
ts cycles of calling in the day, the divine, the shoppers. The mountains witnessed the day begin, and the calls started up once more.
Mountain Lake had told Carl Jung that he thought that white people were a bit crazy, because they think with their heads. When Jung asked Mountain Lake how he thought, the chief touched his heart with his hand, the same way Jamal had done when he gave me a “Big welcome,” and said, “We think here.”
GALLERY:
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