In Cádiz, we took a bus to Tarifa, Spain, where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet, and a ferry to Tangier, Morocco. In Tarifa, we could see Africa across the water. There was a small police presence guarding the coast, and some public protest art depicting children’s shoes. The Spanish/Moroccan water border was not as militarized as the Rio Grande region, but the similarities were obvious. During the ferry crossing, we saw massive container ships leaving the Mediterranean and entering the Atlantic Ocean.
In Tangier, we left behind Christmas, beer, and ham, and entered a world of covered women, mint tea, and calls to prayer that rang out five times a day from every mosque, in a beautiful cacophony. Yet there was so much that was similar to the Andalusian region of Spain. When we returned to the European coast, I could no longer listen to Flamenco music, admire tiles and castle architecture, or enjoy “authentic” Spanish dishes, without hearing, seeing, and tasting Moroccan echoes. Southern Spain was controlled by North African Muslims from 711 to 1492, and European powers have fought each other for control of Morocco since Portugal conquered the region in 1415. Spain had a “protectorate” (a word meant to mask conquest, occupation, and exploitation) until 1956. Today, they still hold Ceuta and Melilla, like the US still holds Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Southern Morocco was a French colony until 1947. Remember that scene in Casablanca when they stood up to the Nazis by singing La Marseillaise? Tangier’s Old Town walls were built under Portuguese rule. Moroccan Arabic today is infused with Spanish in the north and French in the south. We used our Spanish to communicate with vendors selling bread hot off the griddle, dates, walnuts, and pomegranates.
I was struck by the communal aspects of life in Tangier’s Old Town. There were cats everywhere. Nobody owned them, but everybody fed them. We saw a small kitten with a meal of chicken twice its size. On the little paths too small to be called roads, people strung yarn for making rugs, using hooks they placed on the side of the cramped public space. Each block had a Mosque, a water cistern, and a Turkish bath for communal use. Many residents did not have running water in their homes. There were also communal ovens for baking Moroccan flat bread.
I know Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; however, when I watched people abandon work to pause and kneel, I wondered if this communal fealty drove local capitalists crazy, like it did the Amazon factory in Minnesota, which fought the Muslim workforce demand for prayer breaks.
On the second day, a guide took us up the mountainside to a neighborhood of billionaire mansions. They sit empty until July, when the cool air of Tangier attracts the uber-rich set. On top of the mountain, I did not hear the call to prayer. Our guide pointed out the palace where Ivanka Trump stayed on her last visit. The King of Morocco was touting his ability to lure these billionaires as an accomplishment of his reign, and our guide was sure their wealth would trickle down. I asked about schools. The guide chastised me for not remembering we are in Africa, but then said he was sure that in six years, they would have a robust school and healthcare system.
Because I am Jewish, we were treated to a tour of the Jewish Cemetery and one of the two remaining synagogues in Tangier. I have spent a lot of time visiting Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Here, the population was not massacred, so the tour was not morbid. In the 1990s, the bulk of the Jewish population migrated to Israel, the US, and Canada. They come back once a year to celebrate a holiday in their homeland. I listened to a podcast about Jewish Moroccan radicals in the 20th century. Most Jews in Morocco supported the French during the struggle for independence, but a few notable leftists supported the struggle to overthrow the colonial power.
It was activism that gave me a concept of the divine I could believe in. The power we have as a collective is more than the sum of our parts. That kind of math invites faith. I recognized the abuse of religion as a tool of the warmakers, hungry for territory, natural resources, and control of labor. But I also saw how religion gives people the strength and the ideology to fight militarism and the oppression of working people. In Tangier, I wondered what it would be like to live where your religion and cultural practices are dominant. I was curious, even though I know a pluralist society is what I prefer. Curious, but not enough to want to obliterate people who don’t have my background or practices. Never.
The King of Morocco was engaging in rapprochement with the US and Israel. Together, they paid for wooden doors in some, but not all, parts of Old Town as COVID protection. Window dressing is what it looked like to me, but I was supposed to be impressed. What did impress me was that the movie theater, despite all this pro-Israeli propaganda, proclaimed solidarity with Palestine in large letters on its marquee.
Walking with our guide along the tiny, winding, dark corridors of the historic city, a young boy, maybe 10 or 11, hit us with a metal bar. His aim was perfect, getting me in the back and leaving a gash on David’s forehead. Dave fell to the ground, his glasses bounced off, and his head was bleeding. We acted as though it was an accident, though we knew it wasn’t. Fearing a concussion, David asked our guide to find some ice. He went into a restaurant, but they had none to offer. We stopped at an herbologist next, and they put iodine and a band-aid on Dave’s head and dismissed his fears. “It’s just a small cut.”
The feeling of being hated, especially by a child, for what we represented rather than who we were, was, of course, painful. We thought about the images this child might be seeing of children in Palestine. Or perhaps he is focused instead on our relative wealth and our freedom of movement. We could afford the $70 ferry ticket, and our passports allowed us to visit places he could only dream about. His assault also made me think about children caught up in the gravest injustices and then asked to forget, no matter what kind of peace pact adults come up with.
There were expectations for us in Tangiers, as tourists from the US, that we could not fulfill. We could not buy souvenirs. We had no home to put a gorgeous home-woven rug, and no room in our backpacks for much else, even an herbal cream that the seller promised would remove my wrinkles.
This essay about a visit to Tangier, Morocco, in December 2023 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
