Research Diary @ethnobotanix - Tumblr Blog

German map of Morocco from 1844

Hajiba AitLamati - 8 years old We had a lot of fun together

#morocco #high atlas mountains #imazighen

A love poem for the mountains

#morocco #high atlas mountains #hiking #environmental anthropology

Intermission

(June 26) Yesterday I bid farewell to the mountains. I packed up all my stuff and put it on my back and took a taxi from Imlil to Asni. From Asni I walked three km on the side of the road with all my stuff on my back, looking for an agricultural co-op named 'La Sodia' I had been told about last week. I asked a sleepy young guy at a roadside boutique where to find it, and he informed me that all the surrounding land was collectively known as 'La Sodia', and that it was owned by the state. I was super confused and asked if there was some kind of French guy who maybe ran a business or an association nearby. Luckily he understood and sent me another km down the road to a set of buildings with a sign out front: "Les Fermes Soldives". There were tractors in the parking lot. I walked in to what I thought was the office, all sweaty and confused, and asked to speak to the director. At first, the reception was cold - they thought I was a student looking for an internship. I was invited to sit down and wait. I explained my project, that I'm interested in Morocco's growing fruit arboriculture industry, and that I wanted to ask some questions about the co-op. Eventually the director arrived and clarified things for both sides: 1) It's not a co-op, it's a massive private enterprise. They have rented over 100 hectares from the government, and turned the land into a highly productive, European-style apple, peach, nectarine, plum and cherry farm. They employ local labourers but they do not do much 'profit-sharing' or training. There is no education or outreach element to the business. 2) I'm not looking for an internship Once we cleared all that up, I was treated to a fascinating perspective on the state of fruit production in Morocco, the obstacles to small-holder improvement (especially in the mountains, the major problems stem from the fact that farmers are unfamiliar with fruit cultivation methods; so for example, they flood the fields instead of installing drip irrigation, they don't know much about insect pollination, they don't always rotate/fallow co-planted crops, and they use animal fertiliser when it might be better not to), and the 'responsiblity' of foreign industrial investors to employ, inform and establish partnerships with local people. There was also a long rant about the poorly structured relationships between smallholder farmers and the merchants who buy fruit locally. Evidently Les Fermes Soldives had tried in the past to buy fruit from neighbouring smallholders, in order to connect with bigger national markets, sell for the right price and pass some profit on. But the local farmers, who are accustomed to selling their entire crop to exploitative middlemen in one exchange, weren't willing to hand over their produce without getting something in return right away. Which is to say, they would rather take 1000dh up front than risk it and wait for a month or two for 3000dh. This seemed to be a cause for serious frustration at the Soldives office. Mr. Director said that he has stopped trying to get involved with other local producers due to these differences in business approaches. But he does think it would benefit the smallholders to form collectives/unions/business co-ops, in order to circumvent the cheapass middlemen. I asked him about the sprays that I saw people in Amslane using. This prompted another little rant about people not knowing how much treatment to use. He explained that while they do use some 'phytosanitary' products, they have managed to drastically reduce the amount used in the past decade. This was mainly due to consultations with soil and insect experts. He said that a little bit is necessary, but large amounts of sprays can be avoided with the right knowledge. ____________ (July 1) I got back on the road afterward, caught a cab and headed to Marrakech. As the mountains diminished slowly over the course of thirty minutes, the road got flatter and wider, and I felt myself getting that familiar old nervous city feeling in my stomach. After only two awful depressing expensive days in Marrakech, I decided to change the date of my return flight. By coincidence, I left the first day of Ramadan (leaving my colleagues in Morocco a little confused and put out, I'm afraid to say) I'm writing this from the computer lab in Canterbury, UK, where I've been now for a few days. It feels so good to breathe the humid air here, and eat raw green vegetables again. Going to the grocery store was an overwhelming psychedelic experience!! Everything is so clean! Everyone is such a neurotic wimp! What perspective is granted by a voyage such as this. http://www.soldive-producteur.com/articles-2/8-4-soldive-histoire-entreprise/

Books and beer

Asking for it

Asking for it: A common response I got on the household surveys is that “I never ask for seed, I always buy it if I need it.” To understand why, we have to understand that one of the 5 points of the Moroccan star, and thus one of the 5 principles of being a Moroccan, is that you must always give to the poor and needy. Helping beggars is a tenet of Islam and a crucial aspect of Moroccan culture. To ask for seed would thus be to oblige the other person to give, and in poor mountain communities there is a strong sense of solidarity that both prevents one from leaning too heavily on anyone else, and ensures that one often doesn’t even have to ask!! In fact, my experiences in Morocco suggest that most seed exchanges are ‘gifts’, which, like many other gifts such as food, music, transportation, hot water or guidance, are forced upon the recipient with such aggressive hospitality that to refuse would be impossible. I believe that buying seed at souk is a rare last resort for most people who are relatively well-connected* in the village. Working in the fields with Ibrahim I saw how often people passed by, greeting each other and inquiring about today’s activities. In general I was (sometimes uncomfortably) aware that there are no secrets in these small villages. Everyone’s fields are so close together that there’s no way to hide how many tomato seedlings you have, or whether you’ve sown corn or not. If your seed crops fail, or you have limited means for production, everyone already knows about it; if you so much as pause in front of someone else's field during harvest season, your pockets will get stuffed with grain. In these villages, the agricultural side of life, just like the domestic and the religious, is unavoidably public. * Defining this term will probably take up a whole chapter of my dissertation.

Parking lot at Tiletnia Yakkoub souk Seed merchant at souk Shelling almonds Goat shed (Tarrardin)

Aggert Threshing barley the traditional way (anrarr) in Aggert Walking back to Imidil from Aggert through chalky, bone-dry river vallley. Our bags and the plant press are on a donkey ahead. Good morning from 2400m up (Tarrardin)

#high atlas mountains #traditional agriculture #morocco #amazigh

Field Notes excerpt June 14

I have been putting off writing my notes today. I'm chronically dehydrated and constipated from eating so much bread and unpasteurized dairy. I feel a great foggy burden but it’s difficult to remember all the things I want to say. I tried to take some time to think and process everything before writing so that it wouldn’t be as emotional, but I wonder if that hasn’t just resulted in me forgetting stuff...

This morning we went with Zenib to get water near the mosque. Women were sitting and standing around (first come, first served) with their 30L jugs ready to go, lined up in order so they wouldn’t forget who’s next. It takes a long time to fill up a 30l jug with just a trickle of water so we sat for almost an hour, gossiping and complaining and asking about why I have pimples and why I haven’t brought my ‘husband’ with me to Morocco.

A large group of women and children sitting around the door when we got home from collecting water. Fadma talked with them about why there isn’t running water in the homes, who was in the co-op, and stuff about the relations (or lack thereof) with nearby villages. The local politics are apparently complicated, and it’s clear that these internal divisions are the reason why there isn’t a good rapport with external groups – and hence why neither running water, a good road, transport, a finished mosque, consistent education nor, indeed, fruit trees have been acquired. But the nuances of these politics remain a mystery to me because Fadma was under pressure to respond to these women’s pleas, and couldn’t translate for me. But more than that, when she did translate, it was always to say, “I’m trying to explain to them….”. They asked about my involvement and she tried to be ambiguous, agreeing that yes it would be great if we could start an association to help them, that yes we would like to help them get water in the homes (and, I added, shoes and coats!), but that at the moment I am just a student and she is just doing her job. There was a lot of talking and strong gestures. We were invited to one woman’s house to do a survey later – her husband works in the hills 20 days a month so she’s running her household alone.

I was in a bad mood when we got inside and sat down to help shell a massive basket of almonds brought out by Ibrahim (two stones used, one big for the base, one small and long for cracking), It was the same frustration I’ve had with Fadma before about not translating the many interesting little social interactions we have in groups before. She thinks that if I’m not asking questions, then I’m not interested in what’s being said.

Frustration mounted as the shelling of the almonds progressed and I realized they just fucking leave the shells and almonds together in a pile beside the large stone, obviously intending to separate the nuts out afterward instead of simply extracting the nuts at the moment of cracking! The pile grew and I imagined how many hours of work it would take to complete that tedious and unnecessary second separation. What a terrible method! I was so angry watching this inefficient process unfold that all my nasty guilty thoughts about Morocco started to come forward. I was thinking in a compressed cloud when Fadma explained something she had learned in the earlier conversation: that the water project had already been approved by the local representative and money had changed hands (about 50 000dh). The work was done (!!!!!), and outlets near every four houses had been installed. Then, at the last minute, the mainline was cut in several spots, and the canal collapsed. From her understanding, it was a division in local political affiliations that resulted in the sabotage, where only one group got the project funding. She started to explain the different political parties to me and I cut her off rudely saying “that’s not important.” I was in total bitch mode. I started thinking about the sabotage, and how it would be near impossible to get approval and funding a second time without explaining the internal conflicts to a council somewhere, and how that council would definitely not want to give money to such a community situation a second time. Perhaps due to the bitch mode, I concluded that the sabotage was actually a cover-up for a job cheaply done – and that someone, or more likely some small group of men, had taken the money for themselves. This, I thought, would be the true Moroccan way. Corruption, short-sightedness and an inability to follow-through – that was my vision of Moroccan culture at that moment. The almond shelling continued slowly while a repetitive conversation about water, borrowing donkeys, Mohamed’s lack of education, the expense of living in cities and other shit flowed along. I had to get up several times to settle my nerves. With furious zeal I helped Zenib turn the hand mill to grind the corn for lunch (tagoula – a sort of corn mash/porridge served with fermented butter and goat’s milk yogurt that is highly prized and desired by all the women present, who complained that they haven’t eaten tagoula in a long time due to the water shortages that make maize cultivation increasingly difficult) and returned in time to hear Fadma explain the current subject of conversation – water shortages.

There are four different sources for water for the five different sets of fields around the village. The longest water cycle is 18 days, and the shortest is 14 days. Some families get two days per cycle (Father Ibrahim is evidently one of these lucky ones, as he is growing maize when no one else can) but most are constantly worried about their potatoes drying up. My sadness at their problems and my impotence in the face of what I knew was going to be a lethal problem in the next 50 years combined with my tangle of more immediate frustrations and I went silent after that. I sat there, feebly sorting nuts from shells, waiting for the urge to shit to finally arrive.

We got invited to that woman’s house for a survey, so I grabbed my papers and we headed out. It was soon apparent that we wouldn’t be able to do a survey, as the foyer and main room were already full of women and children. They were gathered there to have a meeting - a meeting with us. What followed has already been described to some degree by David Crawford in his book; the communication problems, the lack of efficient or democratic planning, the chaos, the fundamental gulf between the villagers and the outsiders etc. This meeting was a bit different from the one he witnessed, in the following ways:

All women

Fadma and I were at the center of things

Only tachelhit was spoken, except when I spoke

Basically what happened was that more than half the women in the village – about 30 (and their children – because where the hell else are the kids supposed to be?) got together with the intention of making us get them their running water. Their current plan was to go all together into Tahanout (where be the administrative centre for the El Haouz region) to lodge a request/complaint re: running water in the homes. Fadma did a lot of explaining (and my desire to get translations diminished the longer she talked). They started to chaotically gather names of those present in a list, and together we decided to write a petition for the local government. The ethical problem of writing a petition on behalf of/ in a room full of illiterate women did not escape me, but I had moved beyond bitch mode at this point into, like, post-trauma mode; I was blank and empty, just watching and listening and waiting.

This meeting was forced upon us and I think Fadma did a good enough job given the circumstances, although as I pointed out to her, the women did not appear to get a fair share of the floor. I think each person should have been given an opportunity to speak – “HOW SCANDINAVIAN OF ME” – of course that would not have worked, for the following reasons:

1) They all have the same problem, so in their minds it doesn’t matter who’s speaking for them so long as they say “we want running water in our homes”. Consensus has already been reached.

2) When they do have a chance to speak they don’t respect order or priority, and end up all speaking over each other so we can’t understand anything anyway

3) They talk because they just need a chance to vent, not because they have a contribution to make to the solution

4) Talking doesn’t change the problem of the internal conflicts, and there’s nothing Fadma or I can do about that either

5) These women really don’t know how the government works very well, so Fadma had to spend a lot of time explaining what a petition is, what a delegate is, how some money might appear but they will probably still have to do all the work, etc.

We made our silly list of names, came up with some ideas for what to do with it, and left the room after I insisted that she ask “are there any questions?” – but of course there were only more rants and strong gestures and repetitive pleas for running water in the homes. It was super disheartening and weird. It has taken me four hours to recover and write this. I’m not sure how to continue.

Back to the mountains

I have to run to catch my transport but I just wanted to make a note that, even though Marrakech is an insane pisshole full of garbage cats and hucksters, I will be returning here before Ramadan starts on June 28th to do a final week of meetings and tying up loose ends, and probably some meditation and fasting in solidarity with my Muslim sisters. Might have internet before then, mais on ne sait jamais! Sending love and desert sun energy to whoever reads this.

Field notes excerpt June 3

Barley isn’t just a grain, it’s a lifestyle, man. It’s my last day in Amslane and I’m spending most of it cleaning up the apartment, getting rid of extra stuff and pressing/labeling/sorting my specimens. This latter activity has me thinking about seed banks and the project of agrobiodiversity studies that I’m currently (indirectly) contributing to. Like many others, I’m not satisfied with the idea of biodiversity preservation as the preservation of ‘the largest gene pool possible’. If we define biodiversity as genetic diversity, we’ve missed the boat. In agrobiodiversity, it must be understood that plants are constructed, maintained, bred and distributed by humans. Especially clear to me now that I’ve lived in Amslane is that agriculture is the byproduct and structuring principle of lifestyles. In these cases, crop diversity results from ways of life, ways of thought, history, tradition etc. For the women here especially I see that ‘agriculture’ is an extension of the motherly duties of feeding the living and keeping the homefire burning. The boundary of ‘home’ is well beyond the wall of the house. So, Agrobiodiversity has to be defined in a cultural context in order to really capture the richly intertwined bio-cultural phenomena of subsistence farming. Rather than reduce it to its genetic aspect, or deny that genes have anything to do with it, we should aim for an understanding of agrobiodiversity that is situated in cultural practices, life-ways, and complexly human-implicated systems of reproduction. Farming is a system of reproduction – reproducing ‘ideal’ terrain and conditions (through irrigation, fertilization etc.), reproducing animals, reproducing plants (seeds, cuttings), reproducing people (by feeding them) and reproducing culture, (traditions, specialized practices). When I collect barley from different fields, label it and put it in an envelope, what am I doing? At worst, it could be said that I’m isolating the germplasm of a single individual, decontextualizing it and re-rhetoricizing it as a “specimen” – a scientific object; Something to study. (Hopefully in order to sequence its genes and store all this in a data bank, to be kept in parallel with a herbarium or seed library, maintaining the ‘life’ of the barley in indefinite suspension - if and only if it is scientifically interesting or useful to do so.)

At best, we could think of the collected samples as ‘representatives’ – the individuals elected to go forth and speak truth to power, where the truth spoken is first of all a history of the voyage to that point, the nutrient composition of soils past and present etc. and, but, IMPORTANTLY: The full truth cannot be told through genetic analysis alone. As it is essentially an agricultural truth, the elected representatives convey facts about the people who have made it possible – they need to employ cultural tools to get their point across. They thus require the help of the cultural organisms who constructed them in the first place; That is why we must always include an ethnography with our crop specimens. To be faithful to the full and accurate truth of the plant, we must also be faithful to the people, lifestyles and traditions that made its reproduction possible. This afternoon I ventured out for a final hello and goodbye to the fields and the people I’ve gotten to know here. I found out that they’ll be planting corn in the better irrigated fields next week (inshaallah).I ended up helping Fadma IdAli (a loud young one who was always beckoning me to join her) and her two friends for a bit of milky coffee and bread in the field. We made each other laugh, sharing words in French and T achelhit, singing and dancing, and piling up the harvested barley as the sun set behind the mountains. These three women – Fadma, Aicha and Hadouj – were probably my age or younger, but they were – and are! so motherly towards me. They have been working for a long time already. In reply to an earlier entry: this is how they have fun. Picnics in the fields at sunset after a long day of temmara, laughing hysterically at idiotic things. Pushing each other around. Beating the donkey. They asked if I would come back for the walnut harvest, and truth be told I would love to. I said, “inshaallah” and we all clapped. Note: the garbage just gets thrown down into the valleys, and collects near streams, meaning all the fields are fed by garbage water. You can learn a lot about people by looking through their garbage, and the residents of amslane made it very easy for me. One thing I found is that several women are taking birth control pills – presumably supplied by the government at the hospital in imegdal. Brandname: minidril. Empty blister packs with 21 days worth of pills were scattered everywhere around town.

Field Notes excerpt - May 25

Woke up sick this morning, all achy and cold and hot. I was very worried that it would get worse and I’d be trapped up in the hills with a fatal case of mutated Moroccan avian flu. We went for a walk, talked with some farmers spraying their apples. Arranged three interviews that never happened. Met with Alhaj by chance, a 78 yr old man who is considered by his neighbours to be an expert on farming. He told us about how it used to be in the old days, demonstrated how he dries turnips and showed us an old donkey-till. He was extremely helpful and fun to be around. He gave me two ears of the local corn. It’s white and about as long as my middle finger. The plant grows to about 1.5 meters. I took more notes at the time – mostly about the ‘wild’ oats that used to grow on the surrounding hills but now only grow in the barley fields. He says the grains were put on the fields in the shit of the animals who pulled the tills during sowing season. I suspect also that, as the women used to gather the oats as tooga, they were all dried together in stock rooms/sheds with barley, and the seeds got mixed in that way. In a fabulous twist, the oats no longer grow in the hills because there isn’t enough water there anymore, but they still grow in the irrigated barley fields, where they are selectively picked out (i.e. weeded) around this time of year (Mid-May) to be dried and stored for winter fodder. Storage areas include rafters in cow/goat sheds, small rooms in the backs of houses, and lean-tos on top of houses. The oats return each year in the fields through a combination of less-than-rigourous weeding, spilled/dropped seeds, and the mixing of loose grains in storage areas, which are then used to re-seed next season. Most people that I’ve spoken to so far report leaving some unharvested barley in the fields to seed itself, which suggests that there is not a great deal of attention paid to which/whose seed ends up where – the wind blows things around, and the proportion of oats mixed in with the barley is always unknown. Then we came back home and I crashed for a bit. We went out again and sat in someone’s reception room for a while, expecting the husband who never came. Her name is Fadma too and she’s been harassing me about milking her cows (and other stuff related to the cows – she sometimes just yells “tamogeit!” at me as I walk past. This is because the first time we met, I munched on some alfalfa and she reprimanded me that this is only a food for cows. I jokingly mooed loudly, startling the other gathered women, making everyone laugh. She then jokingly grabbed my breasts and pretended to milk me. I laughed so hard I almost cried. Or maybe I just almost cried.) She made me a great pot of coffee with thyme. It helped with my sick feeling. I also tasted her homemade tamodit (cheese/butter churned in the hollowed-out skin of a goat) and we talked to her pregnant daughter about childbirth, going to the hospital in Imegdal, and medicinal plants. Apparently mother Fadma gave birth to 7 children at home – and her daughter will do the same. The hospital is very far and the road is dangerous and transport unreliable. It’s better to do it at home. Interestingly, besides the thyme, mint, timijaa (a kind of fuzzy lamiale that they put in tea and coffee) ____ and_____, they use lavender for soothing pain and regulating breathing during childbirth. But they cannot get it around here – it doesn’t grow in this particular part of the mountains. It does, however, grow in imegdal near the hospital, so when they go for check-ups or vaccinations, they pick a big load of it for home!! We went back home again and I crashed again, this time for three hours. We left the house at 8pm to start the surveys, ended up finding one guy on his roof, started to talk to him, and then waited in the reception room again for an hour. I was barely holding on to consciousness and keeping my face doing things was very difficult. Eventually we took the long, shaky, breathless walk back home, and I fell asleep in a fever. The next morning I woke up feeling better but still shaky and a bit nauseous. I had a glorious dream about being in a clean suburban Calgary house, taking a long, hot shower with lots of lovely vanilla and patchouli soapy bubbles, dressing in a pretty sundress, and riding my bike to get a coffee at the hip café. Instead when I left the sweaty sleeping bag, there was a bucket of cold water in the piss-scented water closet to wash my face with, and it’s going to be very unpleasant changing my clothes in the chilly air here. No coffee either – although Fadma made me a cup of ‘Lipton’ (black tea).

Threshing circles (anrarr), Mosque and mountain shots, happy donkey, cycads, weighted ranking matrix for livelihood strategies, my workspace, a vista view, and "OHH, LIO IS OIL SPELLED BACKWARDS!!!"

#morocco #high atlas mountains #cooking oil #donkey #barley harvest #threshing #ethnobotany #fieldwork

some money shots for ya:

"Retro Style" harness for beasts of burden to pull till Local watercress-type thing Fadma (my translator) chilling in a very old goat shed at super high elevation Amslane Amslane Amslane Harvesting barley Mountains Nut case

#morocco #High Atlas #amazigh #tachelhit #high atlas mountains

Field Notes Excerpt: May 30

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I moved to Amslane. It doesn’t sound like much but each day feels like an eternity. I feel like I’ve been living here for two months. All my clothes are dirty and the knees ripped. Tonight I’m going stargazing in the hills. The moon is a delicate sickle. I watched the sun go down from the hill by our apartment, and all the last-minute evening activities: the women slogging back up the hill with their tooga, the shepherds heading the goats back in the direction of their sheds, throwing rocks and yelling at the stragglers. I sat watching for 15 minutes as one black speck high across the valley slowly made its way along the thin path. I watched and counted, imagining the shepherd, tired and hungry, waiting at the door of the shed impatiently. The wind picked up violently as smoke started rising out of the tops of houses – dinner preparations beginning. The sun went down but the sky was still light enough to see as several men bundled themselves up to take their night turn irrigating their fields. One shepherd made his final indignant gesture to the goats for the night, and passed by on the trail beneath mine. As I watched his swift gait and bobbing neck, I wondered: does spending 8hrs/day with goats make you more of a goat? I have run out of tissue paper, so tore up several sheets of lined writing sheaf. Now before going to the toilet I soften the lined paper with a bit of hot water. It still mystifies me how people manage to stay clean and infection-free after taking a shit and only having a bit of cold water to rinse with. Especially in a place where water is scarce, it seems like toilet paper would be better than the ‘turkish bath’ method of ass-wiping. But no toilet paper or tissues to be found at the village stores! I’ve been spending too much time in the house. Every day I intend to get up early and get out into the fields, but it usually takes until noon or 1pm to work up the energy to manage all the greetings and mangled tachelhit conversations with neighbours on the way down the hill. And once I am in the fields, it requires a lot of energy to climb and pick my way through all the narrow, bramble-ridden irrigation canals. The fact that my diet for the past month and a half has been a celiac’s living nightmare of bread, couscous, pasta, peanuts, laughing cow cheese and wafer cookies doesn’t help with energy levels either.* The amount of sugar I’ve consumed in teas, coffees, jam and ‘bimos’ (packaged chocolate cookies and wafers, sold at every store in Morocco for 1dh each) has also contributed to my lethargy. It takes two or three cups of black tea to get me going each day, now. I also blame a chronic mild dehydration that doesn’t help matters. But the water comes out of the tap a little cloudy, so I have been boiling the shit out of it (literally?) for five minutes each time I want to have a drink. Although I’ve been setting some aside in my water bottle, after five hours climbing mountains in the afternoon sun, it’s never enough. I am astounded at the ability of the shepherds to withstand these conditions day-in, day-out. And often they have only a chunk of tanoort to keep them going!

* The average diet in the mountains is actually quite good, consisting of one or two vegetable tagines per day (carrots, lima beans, courgettes, potatoes, onions, oil, spices, eaten with lots of tanoort), at least one meal with a chunk of meat (goat, chicken, rabbit, cow or sheep), daily cups of milk (often sweetened), occasional cheese, butter, eggs, walnuts, olives (in Amslane these are purchased from other villages) peas, pumpkin, and lots of (very sugary) tea. There’s very little in the way of leafy greens, save for some wild-collected herbs and edible weeds – but these are not particularly valued or considered tasty. More fortunate families sometimes have tomatoes, oranges and bananas purchased at the market. Watermelon also shows up sometimes as a dessert on the tables of the ‘wealthy’. Turnips used to be a major part of the diet, with mills apparently being used to make turnip flour, which was made into soups and porridges that kept people going through the winter. Now the vast majority of the diet consists of bread and couscous made out of flour purchased at market. A typical food day for a farming family of 8 (Grandparents, Parents, Three children, one unmarried Sibling): 5am: Adult women rise, drink tea or coffee, some askif (barley or rice soup/porridge) or eat some leftover tanoort with butter or jam. Prepare today’s tanoort. Collect tooga. 9am: Breakfast with whole family. Tea or coffee, askif, large pieces of tanoort, butter, jam or honey. Sometimes hardboiled eggs. 11am/12pm: Lunch with whole family except working males. Vegetable tagine with small chunk of meat, or couscous. Tanoort. Tea. 4pm: Afternoon meal. Tanoort, oil, olives, butter, jam or honey. Sometimes nuts. Tea or coffee. Milky bread or couscous (eaten like cereal). 10/11pm: Supper. Vegetable Tagine or couscous with chunk of meat. Tanoort. Sometimes just hot sweet/salty rice or askif. Hot sweetened milk.

correction

In an earlier post, I talked about the timidness of women here as if it were a common and uniquely Moroccan thing. It's not. I realize now that my reaction to this, how shall I put it... diminutive? comportment stems from my own inherited neuroses about 'being female' in different cultures. More important is the fact that every single one of the encounters that I described (and, indeed, that I've had here), were premised on a linguistic abyss; i.e. at least one person was speaking a language they aren't fluent in. This makes a huge difference re: confidence, volume, and mannerisms. I realized this correction needed to be made after calling Fadma on the phone and instantly going into paralysis because my telephone French is so shit. The point is, it's not necessarily a fact about these women's personalities or cultures that makes them so hesitant to speak - it's literally their inability to speak (English, French, Arabic etc.) that makes them so hesitant! In a way I feel like this reinforces the original point I was making about resisting one's own stereotypes, and monitoring closely the simplifications one makes about other cultures/people. I was much too quick to ascribe 'female timidness' to 'Islamic patriarchy', when the likelier explanation is 'linguistic ineptitude'!

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