A chance to play it again, ma’am
Morocco a challenge for lone woman
MEKNES, Morocco — “So you travel ... only?” asked the woman sitting next to me in halting but intuitive English as we sat in the packed compartment on a train speeding through Moroccan farmland. We were the sole unveiled, unaccompanied women in the car.
Travelling alone in this North African, Muslim country where public spaces are almost exclusively male, I got that question everywhere, from the frequent flyer lounge in the capital’s airport to the kitchen of a riad — a traditional home with a courtyard — deep in Fez’s medina, the ancient walled section of the city.
With sexual harassment and assault making news from Egypt to India to Brazil, I was keenly aware that as a blond Western tourist, I could not pass unobserved. And observe, glare and leer many Moroccan men do. A journalist told me his sisters living in Casablanca were desperately tired of being “eye-raped.”
In January and June, I spent more than three weeks exploring Morocco, from its imperial cities to the desert oases, mostly alone, but at times accompanying a group of students from a U.S. university where I teach. They were all women but one.
The group, despite modest dress, literally stopped traffic. Alone, I learned to firmly say “la, shukran” — no, thank you — to any invitation or approach, and got to enjoy the country through a woman’s eyes. That meant some pavement-staring to avoid confrontations, but also unexpected glimpses into this mesmerizing land where a wealth of cultures with ancient roots abuts illiteracy and subsistence.
Roman Heritage
As my seatmate on the train and I shared universal girl talk about kohl eyeliner and marrying the loves of our lives, this hairdresser from Casablanca reminded me of the spunky women portrayed in the stunning Roman mosaics in Volubilis, a few kilometres north of our train tracks in north-central Morocco.
The nearly 2,000-year-old city ruins, with a triumphal arch and rows of basilica columns topped by storks, looms in magnificent isolation amid a rolling landscape of olive trees. As donkeys laden with harvested greens plod along its dusty roads, little seems to have changed.
But the colourful floor mosaics of skimpily dressed, frolicking gods and goddesses visualize drastically different mores. A few hours’ drive north through the Rif mountains, on a pebbly Mediterranean beach nearly in sight of Spain, I alone wore a bikini among women sporting veils and anklelength tunics.
Imperial Cities
The modesty equation was suddenly reversed when I prudishly put on that same bikini for a separate visit to a hammam — baths — in Fez, the eighth-century capital of the first Arab, Islamic dynasty to rule Morocco from the same lush farmland as Volubilis.
A muscular, sweaty masseuse nonchalantly pulled it off, leaving me covered only in olive-based black soap and precariously balanced on a marble slab. As she scrubbed roll after giant roll of dead skin cells off me, I overheard a dozen other preening naked women sharing a friendly laugh at the “dirty American,” as one put it.
Rabat and Casablanca
Most trips to Morocco begin or end in the modern political and business capitals, Rabat and Casablanca, where the suffused ocean light and white art-deco districts recall, improbably, the architecture of South Beach. In Casa, I admit my highlight was a fake: Rick’s Cafe, which opened in 2004 to recreate the locale of the 1942 classic movie Casablanca. Channelling Ingrid Bergman, I requested As Time Goes By, but was told it’s only played at night.
Here’s looking at superb shrimp pasta and olive bread, instead.
In Rabat, the historic sites line the Bou Regreg river.
Just outside the city centre is Chellah, a Roman ruin, once a necropolis and later an Islamic religious centre, and now the rare green space without ogling hassles.
In a busy café near the French colonial Ville Nouvelle neighbourhood, I shared chocolate pastries, smoothies and Cokes with female Moroccan students working on a documentary about sexual harassment.
One of them was getting ready to travel alone — to study in China.