After long negotiations via phone with Med-Ex, and talks with our inter-port lecturers, I began to pursue several dentists in Casablanca. Hassan (now Hassan the Munificent to me) became my dentist. He was fluent in Arabic, French and English (having studied and gotten his degree at Georgetown).
There were long, often dangerous petite taxi rides across the city to the burbs, with Buster Rhymes remixed with a Moroccan hip-hop choir blasting, and the cabby bouncing off cars, bicycles and pedestrians. One driver was Mr. Magoo on meth, and he stopped the car to have a fight with a copper who had taken away his ID card, and was waiting, presumably, for a bigger bribe. After this petite stop du pit, the driving was even more erratic, as if we've climbed inside Grand Theft Auto on a computer. Another older Turkish cabby, who was utterly fair about the fare, had a wooden Tear of Allah hanging from his mirror, and complained about the smoggy gridlock, constantly pointing ahead at "le situation" (some accident or bottleneck we could never quite see).
Carried a ginormous wad of cash in my shoe to pay for my new crown, which is now—thank the gods, including Allah—working well. Went alone that late night, and got into trouble with a driver who was taking me where I didn't want to go. But, in spite of the lidocaine, or whatever had made my mouth numb enough to speak bad French like Elmer Fudd, I got safely back to the ship, but had to surrender the last of my mula to do it. I think what saved me was seeming to be—forgive the slight to downs syndrome folks everywhere—retarded.
The population of Morocco has doubled since I was last there in 1970, to 33 million. The thick smog from buses and taxis turns many of the more traditional city center apartments, with their mix of European and African architecture, a sooty off-white:
The newer hotels or most boring skyscrapers still have doors that harken back to all the beautiful, traditional wooden ones (I got a poster with doors from all over the country), as well as wrought iron: Open sesame, baby!:
For me, the best of this city, and the country in general, is the central market or bazaar. I walked around the inside and outside covered boardwalk, admiring the color of the vegetables and flowers, and listened to heated discussions over strong mint tea and coffee of men reading the paper or arguing politics and philosophy. This brought alive the book my students read by Naguib Mafouz, Midaq Alley, which I read at their age, set in Old Cairo. Even though our itinerary changed and we didn't go to Egypt, we weren't able to change books we had ordered.
But this text—about a young woman whose only and eventual choice for escaping the tenth-century world of the old city into the 20th century of the post-colonial burbs is prostitution— works well enough for all of northern Africa. Like those beautiful, delicate, intricate orchids that produce a smell of rotting meat to attract insects as food, the old quarter of most of these cities can't re-locate the dirt that follows the poor, whose lives are bartered in their wares in the souks in the Medina, which is about a mile away from the central market. Its tower marks the gate:
The winter rain that is condensed up against the Atlas Mountains washes the grime off the cars, waters the thirsty palms, and makes mud:
All my life I've loved hands, and what they can do. Not just the opposable thumb that has allowed a few chimps to break nuts open with a stick, but those left-hand power-runs on flamenco guitar, or the graceful hands of belly-dancers. The ten fingers tie knots, haul in fishing lines, cut diamonds, apply sunscreen, hold a sextant or perform a card trick. One student is doing his multiwriting project on hands, and the student doc film podcast teams are at work on a solely visual pod on hands. In a bookstore specializing in Islamic art and music, I took this picture in a book of the henna-dying:
Many of the female students on the ship got less intricate henna-tats in the Medina, and I asked a few to display them:
The Hand(s) of Fatima is a symbol worn for protection around the Middle East from the evil eye (which many cultures have). Ye Olde Wikipedia isn't too far off with info on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsa
I took a picture of some versions/tributes to this in an art book:
The ship was moored in the heart of a very industrial port, which involved walking several miles through muddy streets, past truckers sleeping in their seats, while dodging fork-lift drivers loading platforms that cranes would host onto the cruise and other ships, like ours:
I've read that 95% of the cranes in the world are in China, and imagine many of these were being used in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and the buildings for the Olympics. I love to watch them buzz and swing, especially in the evening, when they mimic enormous insects. Most of the time the stand still, like herons waiting for fish.
Steaming out the harbor, past the breakwater of Casablanca was our most dangerous passage, with waves up to six meters, hit sideways. Twelve TVs, bolted down, flew off their racks and smashed. All drawers flew open, and I had maybe a thousand sheets of paper flying around the cabin. One new arrival fell and cut his head open, and there were two broken legs and a broken wrist, as things came loose and flew around. I sat with the lights out, watching the enormous waves just below my cabin window, as my bed slid back and forth. The emergency scotch was well protected in a suitcase, but I had forgotten to secure my metal wastebasket, which kept flying at me, until I could get ahold of it and jam it below a bed with a pillow. I couldn't decide which of the Three Stooges I resembled most, but felt most like Larry.
A day or so later, after steaming along on one of the fastest ships for its size on earth, at 30 knots, we needed to anchor in the harbor in Dakar, Senegal, for more bunk fuel. The city loomed up slowly:
I thought of you, Spenser, studying here—knowing this place. And even though I know many of the slaves were loaded up north and south of here, plenty were lost just in the harbor, on their way to Goree Island just out of the harbor. I've waited a long time to see this, and I let the emotion and sadness rise up in me, humming some Sweet Honey and the Rock spirituals and remembering all I've learned about the Middle Passage:
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