Fez, the Spiritual Capital of Morocco

Ever since I saw a documentary on the Sacred Music Festival of Fez, I have wanted to travel here. From a distance, Fez seemed vibrant, colorful, exotic and full of spiritual promise

So, about two years ago, after living and working in the Bay Area for 30 years and facing an increasing amount of struggle both economically and interpersonally, I sold my car, closed my business and put the best and most favored of my belongings into storage and headed off to Morocco. I wanted a change. I wanted a place where it didn't cost so much to survive. I wanted something more fundamental and surprising. With an ESL teaching certificate in hand and a receipt for my enrollment in an intensive course in Arabic, I planned to spend a few weeks in the "spiritual capital" of Morocco before continuing on to Istanbul to a teaching job I had secured over the phone. I had a vague plan to work for a while and then continue my travels with my teaching jobs funding the way around the world.

But I never made it to Istanbul and I have been living and working in Fez since January of 2007. I even bought a house in the old Medina and, to my great surprise and that of my friends and family, I married a Moroccan twenty-four years my junior. This last decision convinced my circle of friends and my increasingly estranged family that I had descended into the bowels of a delayed middle-aged crisis and everyone phoned, emailed and otherwise tried to console one another about my safety and sanity.

Looking back now, I can say life in Fez is nothing like I imagined it to be. It has been full of surprises and lessons and, at times, complete and utter aggravation.

The biggest surprise should have been no surprise at all --- the cultural differences. For years I have been enamored with Middle Eastern culture. I have studied and performed Oriental dance (aka belly dance) for a long time and my music collection contained nothing but classical and pop Egyptian, Persian, Turkish and African rhythms. I dated Middle Eastern men (I was even engaged to one) and I read books, made friends with people from Iran, Morocco, Afghanistan, India and Lebanon and like to sprinkle my conversation with Arabic and Farsi phrases. I had traveled internationally. I had lived in Paris! I felt I knew something about cultural differences. But I knew nothing really, and nothing prepared me for the actuality of living and working in North Africa.

For one thing, I stupidly glossed over the fact that Morocco is an African country. How did that happen? My romanticized version had flavored Morocco with more than a dash of Middle-Eastern-ness. But the music, the people and, indeed, the poverty, are decidedly African. I can't believe how naive I was about what I was heading into. But here I am, in Africa, surrounded by people who can be gracious, hospitable and accepting one moment and jealous, grasping and disdainful the next. I believe the negative side of what I have experienced is highlighted by the poverty that exists here and I never anticipated it. Living in the midst of poverty  has been a real eye-opener.

Some days I feel so lost. Like one day last summer, when it was brutally hot and my husband and I were looking for some relief. We ended up on the ground floor of his family home in the section of the Medina known as the Kasbah. His family is rather poor (better off than many in this area, but still struggling on a day-to-day basis to make ends meet). We tried to sleep on the floor of the coolest room in the house. I remember looking up at the walls decorated with tacky posters and children's toys hanging from the rafters. I saw the peeling walls, the old refrigerator in the corner and smelled the camphor filled cushions surrounding me. Tears streamed down my face. "I don't want to be poor" I screamed inside my head. I couldn't believe I had traveled all this way to find myself in a hole in the wall room, miserably hot and completely dejected. It was a terrible moment for me. My husband was appalled by my tears. How could I feel this way? After all, this room was good enough for his family ... why did I find it so unacceptable?

Indeed he might ask 'why' because he has absolutely no knowledge of my frame of reference. It is very difficult for Moroccans to leave Morocco and some never leave the city they grew up in. Living amongst people who meet foreigners from all over the world but never experience life in another culture is like trying to explain what snow feels like to someone who has only seen pictures. The knowledge is one-dimensional. You can't truly understand until you have first-hand experience. And while I am experiencing life in Morocco first-hand, it's so very difficult to explain what I find challenging or maddening or frankly incomprehensible when my audience doesn't have the language skills or the travel experience to comprehend the complexities of my visceral or emotional reactions.

But then ...

I have learned so much about myself on this journey. I've learned how my unspoken fears limit me. I've learned how often I subjugate my own needs to satisfy the needs of others, I've seen how materialistic I had become. And I've learned how resilient, how generous and how adventurous I am.

Just like the people I have encountered here, whose positive traits and negative traits I see with such clarity, I fully understand that my own makeup is a mix of wonderful and not so wonderful characteristics. It's just that my bitter-sweet personality looks and acts differently from the Moroccan's I meet. But the basic ingredients are the same.