NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2010 | Page 11

l Decorative green door of a residence among the alleyways leading to many homes all with different unique doors. The women of Morocco are ?nally making a percentage of the political fabric in the meaningless parliament; meaningless because the king controls the whole government. What the king says, overrides, there is no dialogue, this is the way it is. However, the current king, King Mohammed vi, has an open mind and is innovative. Many advances have been made under his rule, especially for women. They now have a similar divorce procedure as in the United States. Women are free to initiate divorce. Women also make up a large percentage of the professional class as there are lots of women doctors, lawyers and university professors throughout Morocco. Mohammed and I laughed toward a second beer, recognizing the madness and surrealism of our respective countries. We heard the ship’s horn as we arrived in the port city of Tangiers. 10 I had been content with reading the American writer Paul Bowles, his books ?lled with Moroccan peoples and landscapes. Bowles translated the oral stories of the Moroccan story-teller Mohammed Mrabet from the local Meghrebi Arabic dialect into English, turning out handsome little books, published through Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara, California. Of course one has to ask how much of the tempo and styling is the work of Bowles and how much derives from Mrabet, but for his e?orts alone, Paul Bowles should be congratulated for making so much every-day Moroccan life available to English readers. I should also mention, though, that many writers and intellectuals have strong opinions, both in favor of and against his presence. Tahar Ben Joullen, for example, considers Bowles a colonialist. Writers from Arabic countries do not write in native dialects, but almost always in Classic Arabic, which is also the language of the educational system and the newspapers and magazines. The white houses rose up, lined up along the streets, streets are like cli?s in Tangiers. The old medina is elevated and I learned later that some streets have stairs. The city was once divided into French, Italian and Spanish enclaves as it was the domain of several European nations with an international assortment of merchants and eccentrics, busily tra?cking in the port. Here and there you could still see crumbling ladies from Spain and old Italian gentlemen lingering in dusty quarters. There was the Teatro Cervantes, built by the Spanish, where they once performed zarzuelas (Spanish opera), and I saw that it was still in use. BRN-ISSUE-2-3-2010.indd 10 Morocco gained its independence in 1956 and has since slowly gained back most of its territories. Ceuta (Sebta), near the Moroccan city Tetuan and Melilla, near Nador, are the exception as they remain under Spanish rule. Mohammed and I toast our last bottles of Casablanca beer. Morocco is a beer and wine producing country. We feel warm and happy now, dulzon they would say in Puerto Rico. The faces of the o?cers who check our passports after getting o? the ramp look like they wished they were somewhere else. Mohammed wants me to come meet his wife and daughter who are waiting at the entrance gates to the docks. His French wife is a beautiful blond woman, dressed in a beige dress, his nine year old daughter with a smile like a new moon standing next to her mother, wearing jeans, holding a string attached to a blazing red balloon ?oating above her head. He introduces me in French as he puts his arm around my shoulder and tells me to come along to the car with them. Minutes later I am in the car with him insisting that I be their guest for the night, which was ?ne with me for my plans had been to get into a hotel. His wife zigzags through the sea-side boulevard and we watch the Euro Ferry ship as it gets smaller and ?nally vanishes when she turns into a side street. 9/9/10 6:35:16 PM