*This is a draft I’m working out that revisits a travel memory from summer 2016. I wrote this to help my students understand the elements of personal narrative that we’re discussing in class.
As we sat at the table, peering into the faces of strangers with whom we did not share a language or a home, I wondered at the thought of their invitation. They had, after all, invited us—complete strangers—to share a meal with them. I also wondered why my fiancé, an unreserved social extrovert, was so quick to oblige. We were in a foreign country, after all. We were in a country wholly unfamiliar and unlike anywhere we’d ever been, eating foods we’d never seen with people we’d never met. Ironically, it was in experiencing the unfamiliar that I gained a sense of belonging in a place where I did not belong. Through the simple act of sharing a meal with strangers, I felt welcome in a culture that, at least in my home country, is often associated with hostility, not hospitality.
How did we get to this moment, Todd and me? We’d been in Morocco only hours, exhausted after a chaotic bustle from our apartment in Madrid to the airport, where we were within minutes of missing our flight. After a two-hour train ride from the Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca, we arrived in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, which sits nestled between the shores of the Bouregreg River and the Atlantic Ocean. The culture shock was immediate. We tried asking for directions to the Riad Sidi Fatah, a small hostel where we had reservations, but no one understood us, nor did we understand them. Locals, picking up on our dark features, brown skin, and black hair, mistook us for Moroccans and immediately started speaking to us in Arabic. When they realized we didn’t understand what they were saying, they tried French. When we tried replying in Spanish, and then in English, and neither worked, our hopes for having any intelligible conversation faded. By the time we found someone who understood enough English to help us into the taxi that walked us through the crowded medina and dropped us off at the doorstep of our hostel, we were spent. We walked into our room, lay down, and slept for four hours.
As we slept, I dreamed I was walking through the crowded streets, lost and trying to find my way home. A loud voice sang out, deep, distant, distinct. It chanted to me, guiding me through the crowds as I walked toward it, trusting it to help me out of the maze of masses.
When we awoke, the euphonious chanting from my dream flooded through the open windows of our room and fell upon us like a curtain. We looked at each other uncertainly and then remembered that we were in a Muslim country and that it must be evening. We were hearing the adhan, a call to prayer broadcast from mosques to the rest of the city. For us, the sound signaled an alarm, prompting us out of bed in pursuit of dinner.
We hadn’t eaten all day because our trip to Morocco coincided with Ramadan, an Islamic religious holiday that requires followers to fast from sunrise to sunset. Because we got to Morocco at midday, we did not eat, not because food wasn’t available to us and not because we are Muslim, but because we are the kind of travelers who try to be mindful and respectful of local customs and practices. We did not eat because we felt it would be rude to eat in front of an entire city of people who were fasting for the entire day.
We walked toward the beach, only about a mile from our hostel, figuring we would enjoy the evening sunset before settling in to a café for some tajin and mint tea. As we approached the beach, we noticed a waiter setting out plastic tables and chairs, arranging them spaciously. He moved toward us, motioning for us to sit. We smiled, declined, and continued walking toward the pier that would lead us to generous views of the sunset.
Once there, we rested on a large breakwater and looked out into the same immense and boundless ocean that eventually touches the eastern seaboard of the United States. The same ocean I’d looked out into from the Newark Airport in our home country, which felt so far away now.
We watched fisherman cast their lines into the deep, and we watched couples walking together with easy smiles on their faces. We watched small waves tumble into the shoreline, and we watched the sun recede slowly into the horizon. The longer we sat, the more people came, and the more people we watched.
People began occupying the tables that were carefully laid out all across the beach, setting out bowls and plates of food. Some went so far as to dig underground tables in the sand, laying cloth over the top so as to create an impermeable layer between sand and food. Within minutes, the entire beach was filled with family and friends gathered along the oceanfront preparing the evening’s meal. Together, they formed a burst of colors filling nearly every foot of beach, the smells of their cuisine wafting into the air to tempt us back toward the city. As we returned, I watched groups of people gathered in anticipation: Children played in the sand near adults, men and women engaged in conversation as they arranged the table, and teens took selfies with their friends. At that moment, looking out into the crowd, I thought, They’re really not different from the people back home. It took me a trip to the other side of the world to really understand that we, the foreigners from the U.S. and the locals from Morocco, are more alike than I would have ever imagined. I was caught up in this thought when the scents and the sounds and the sight of the disappearing sun became enough to make us realize that we were starving. We still had to walk back to the city to find a restaurant where we could eat, and here we were, tortuously arousing our appetites. As we walked, another chant came over the loud speaker, at almost the exact moment when the sun sank beneath the skyline. The people on the beach paused, quieted, and when the chanting ceased, everyone expressed sounds of cheer as they broke their day’s fast and began to eat.
As Todd and I neared the boardwalk that divided beach from city streets, we were called over to a table shared by a group of young men. At this point, we were the only people on the entire beach not sitting at a table, a point that must’ve marked us as foreigners. One of the men said something to us in Arabic, which he readily saw that we didn’t understand. He tried saying it in French and again saw that we didn’t understand. At the second failed attempt, he got up, brought over two chairs to the table, and motioned for us to sit down. Eat, he said, only it sounded more like Et. Todd and I looked at each other uncertainly, not wanting to be rude but unsure of whether we should sit. The man smiled at us warmly, as if to say, Please, join us. You are welcome here. His expression was enough to convince us that we should sit.
Immediately the other men at the table handed us plates and began passing Tupperware dishes of food, loaves of bread, and even a glass of kefir. They tried talking with us, but we all soon realized that our knowledge of Arabic and French, the languages they spoke, were as limited as their knowledge of English. Gradually, we started using hand gestures and cognates to communicate. Mostly, we wanted to know about the foods we were eating, since many of the dishes were new to us. We used animal sounds to communicate the types of meat that we were presented, which was helpful because Todd is a vegetarian and was doing all he could to avoid eating the meat dishes passed to him without appearing to be an ingrate.
Although I don’t remember all the foods we eat that day, I remember having a salad-like dish made of chickpeas, a variety of breads, hard-boiled eggs, cubed turkey with greens, kefir, sweet cookies, and, believe it or not, beef hot dogs. It turns out that the word for hot dog is the same in their language as it is in ours, a realization that we all laughed at when we said the word in our respective native tongues. As I ate, I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious at the fact that we had not brought anything to contribute, though the bounty of menu items was enough to feed several more people.
Despite the fact that we resorted to almost entirely non-linguistic methods of communication over the course of our dinner, we learned a lot about each other in our time together. For example, they learned that we were from the U.S., not from France as they had assumed, and they wondered what brought us to Rabat—why we had not gone to Marrakech like most tourists do. We learned that they were members of a Moroccan band who were visiting Rabat for a show, and they gave us a business card with their band’s name and booking information on it. We also learned each other’s names, most of which I’ve since forgotten.
And while I may not remember the names of these Moroccan strangers, I will never forget their kindness. I’ll never forget their willingness to make a space for complete strangers, foreigners who did not have a place to sit or a meal to share at the breaking of fast during Ramadan.
In my home country, the United States, I have witnessed a great deal of anti-Muslim sentiment since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In my field, which studies the ways in which language can affect public opinion and reproduce discriminatory stereotypes, I have read published works that explore these tropes, repeated in everyday conversations, in the media, and in popular culture. I have heard from Muslim friends and students who live in the U.S. tell me about how painful it is to live with the fear of being called terrorists just because of their religion. They tell me that their religion teaches love and non-violence, that only extremists hold the views many people associate with Islam, and I believe them. I believe them because I am wise enough to recognize that it is a dangerous move to generalize others; I do not feel comfortable with an ideological stance that marginalizes a whole group of people based on their religious beliefs.
I admit that I, too, felt a pang of uncertainty and perhaps even fear when we were first called over to the table by our Moroccan friends. I know that even though I am not complicit in the disparaging attitudes many in the U.S. have about Muslim people, it is not always easy to escape the influence of these pervasive biases. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to spend time in a Muslim country during Ramadan and got to experience the culture for myself. I got to experience first-hand what many in the U.S. do not: an intimate invitation to dine with people who are different from me in nearly every way, including language, religion, custom, and tradition. Yet in breaking bread with strangers, I gained a greater sense of our shared humanity, and it was a simple meal that built the bridge that helped me over the divide.
Travelin'Round Brown 