Remembering Casablanca in Syracuse

Today snow fell in large clumps and it was strange. I am well used to snow by now, but still I ran and exclaimed jubilantly at the blemishes I made in what was smooth and white. We spun with our tongues out and roared when we caught some wayward snowflakes.


It is very late, so likely there will be less sense and more truth in what I am saying. I opened this document with the vague notion that I ought write about my experiences on my home campus, and also that I wanted to explain my little poem a little. It is not my intention to say anything against Casablanca, or Morocco, or Africa. My poem, however flawed, captures honestly how I felt in the moments after it all happened.

I did cry, and I did hate those men. I never thought of the difficulty of their situations, how the economic disparity created desperation that forced crime rates to rise. The iPhones they stole could buy groceries for months. I had 400 durham in the bag one man tore from my shoulder, but that is nothing. Forty euros, maybe. Funnily enough, I remember adding that little bag and its contents to my list of grievances. It cost me 9 euros, a not-quite-impulse buy from an H&M in Place Kleber. It was black, and the perfect size for going out. I still can't understand why its loss bothered me so much. It was as if the fact of taking it from me was stripping me of an externally imposed femininity that I held to nonetheless.

The man was small and nondescript. I never even saw his face, although he took little care to hide it from me. He hit me across the ribs with his crowbar- hard enough to bruise, but I knew immediately that they weren't broken. When he saw that I wasn't fighting back, he grabbed the bag, gave a jerk, and took off, the cheap strap flapping absurdly behind him. I watched him go. I don't know why I didn't try to run. I turned and watched another crowbar descend on my friend. I heard the thud as it hit her between her shoulder blades. Michelle screamed.

It seems almost ridiculous now, as I sit in my dorm, miles and months removed from that day. I feel safe here, and already the room begins to take on the familiarity of home. I have never dreamt of that night in this bed. It is too comfortable, that bed.

Morocco was a funny trip, because Fez and Chefchauen don't seem to belong with Casablanca. I will write more about them later, when I am more capable, and again, when I return to Morocco. But Casablanca was so strange because I never saw anything of the city. Only the train station, the walk to the Airbnb, and the little streets around it. We bought wine in a corner shop, and bread that we were thankful for later. We had come by train from Fez that afternoon.

I remember that it was 10 when we finally left for dinner. I wore my friend Anna's green sweater. She wore it just the other day, and I could not stop looking at her in it, remembering and not remembering. We went to some Italian restaurant, because it was not too far. Still, we had to take taxis. When we left, some five men followed us back in a car. I suppose you can guess all that happened next.

To add insult to injury, we were all immediately and violently ill afterwards. Food poisoning. So we never saw the beautiful mosque in Casablanca, nor the beaches, nor the markets. Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter most mosques, but this one in Casablanca was an exception. However, we were sick. Terrible stuff. Police swarming the apartment, asking me questions in Arabic and then French, about our passports, and to recount again and again what happened.

I remember waking up the next morning unable to move, sweating profusely. My head hurt so badly that it took all my energy to turn it away from the light streaming in from the window.

I am leaving out many, many details. I do not want to paint a bad picture, and one day I will write a post that presents Morocco glowingly. It is a wondrous place. It is hard for me to remember it all here and now. It is also hard to keep from submitting to MENA stereotyping. You know, the lurid descriptions of the mysticism of the Orient, the enigma, the seductive, beguiling sands.

Sometimes I am afraid to walk alone, or at night. During those few days in San Diego, I saw a man in my driveway and I was afraid. I had bad dreams for a long time, but that's life. We were not seriously hurt, and it was a good lesson to learn.

Go to Morocco. Go safely, and do not carry too many valuables. Let the mint in the tea soothe in the heat of midday. Let the Berber talk you into buying their wares- they are beautiful and stoutly made. I bought a rug as a gift. Dyed saffron and poppy.

I can hear the snow. Isn't that odd? It shouldn't be possible.

Good Night.

Casablanca

They came in the night.
They'd lain in wait,
planning and brooding
on angry stomachs

as not even rats can.

Men.
two, three, five,
(or so we heard)
who grabbed for us
and brandished rusted crowbars
and a knife meant
for chubby, childish fingers.

We fled?
We must have. 
We fled into brick and mortar
that welcomed us 
like the board welcomes a steak.

Like a dream, it was.
Yet it was not a dream,
for Casablanca is warm in my dreams.

And I cried.
Not as a child,
not as a woman,
not as an American,
not as the daughter of a fortunate man,

But, my God, I cried.
Inshallah, a cry I knew and didn't know.

I cried because they took my phone and my money.
I cried because strange men grabbed me
and groped for more things
they could take from me.

I cried because I was small.
They made me little again,
a child wailing for her mama
because men bruised her
and flung her aside.

I cried because I was scared
and never thought to fight back.

I cried because I couldn't stop 
once I'd started.

And an evil part of me
wished their mothers could see
how
low 
their
sons
fell
so that they would cry too.

The terrible weight of mortality,
I remember,
balanced on the point
they held against
Anna's green sweater.

I cried 
because I didn't want to play 
at being grown up anymore.

But now I do not cry.
Maybe the cameras will catch them.
Maybe even the police will help us then.
But maybe not.
Maybe there's no one we can trust.
Not even the doorman
who asked me kindly to sit,
and offered me Café au lait.

We will leave Casablanca tomorrow.

Home Again

February is fast approaching, and I haven't posted anything for nearly two months. I not only didn't post, I didn't write. Not once. I think not doing something is as habit-forming as doing it. Entertaining the idea is always much more strenuous than the act, and I think it must be like that for everyone. I was also afraid that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to, but that's never the point anyway. Words will come like rivers, jumbled and bold and unrepentant. I am finding that they aren't the ones I look for, but they'll serve all the better for it.



I often think of Strasbourg now that I'm newly settled into my dorm in Syracuse. The last 2 things I'd posted were about the terrorist attacks in Paris. The remainder of my term was shadowed by them. I did not go to Berlin the following weekend, and people were afraid. Stunned, but life went on. Strasbourg had its Christmas Market, and it was greatly reduced by cautionary measures.



I can't help but feel that somehow I didn't appreciate my last days as well as I should have. They say you fall in love with the first city that loves you back- not your family, but you. I miss Strasbourg so much that it must be true. I miss my friends, I miss hearing the guttural elegance of Alsatian French, I miss the serpentine curls of smoke from Claire's cigarettes and the way the smell lingered for hours by her chair.

Quais Rouget de Lisle

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I whisper the tramlines to the darkened room. F, Place d'Islande and Elsau. B, Hohenheim Gare. C, Gare Central. D, Poteries. And so on. I trace my path to my university building, lingering over the tram lines and stops, and the streets I walked on. We always met at Gallia. There was a bar near there, just along the river, that we went to every weekend in the beginning. Jimmy's, it was called. I never figured out who Jimmy was.

I'm not such a child that I don't see that I miss Strasbourg because it was the site of that terrible and beautiful uncertainty,when you are more adult than child for the first time. I'm not such a grown-up that I let this fact make me sensible. Frankly, I don't have a single sensible bone in my body.

Half Timber in San Diego

San Diego is the home I knew as a child, Strasbourg the one I knew as a changeling. There will be others, of course. But these nights, these are the two that make me lay awake and think and think and think.

In my little gray-blue room in San Diego I have a box stuffed full with train tickets and the set list from the Hozier concert in Amsterdam and maps. Brown paper from the markets of Nice all the way to Fez, holding figs and oranges with fleeting ideas scribbled on them.Even a coaster I stole in a drunken stupor from Oktoberfest. When I come home in March I will put them in order. You will hear then how Rue des Cordonniers looked those fine December evenings. But some things I have in this orange sketchpad, like the angry poem I wrote after being mugged in Morocco.

There are many things I never wrote down. The Lennon Wall, the towering irony of it all, and the first Cat Cafe I ever went to was in Prague. The Tower of London, paling to the wild Irish beauty of Glendalough. Some things I will never remember, and some have become part of me, mingling with blood and bone, like San Diego during a rare storm.



I think I will go back to France next year.

Mourning Paris

(14 November 2015)
There is a candlelit vigil in Place Kleber tonight. The statue of Jean Baptiste Kléber is very stern in the flickering light, and the heavy shadows. A woman is crying as she lights her candle. Her hand is shaking a lot; it's making her entire body tremble. She is being rocked back and forth by a woman I assume is her mother. They are the spitting image of each other.

It's very strange here this evening. There are the mourners and there are the people who are always hanging around the statue. They are being very loud, laughing and swearing. They have made the vigil into an absurdity. How funny it sounds to hear French people (very drunk French people, mind you) sing along to Fetty Wap when even babies do not make a sound.

It is not drizzling, because although few, the drops that fall are fat and heavy. For weeks Strasbourg was unseasonably mild, but today it is cold. It may rain. It will rain as children cry, with tears falling to the tune of Trap Queen, which blares irreverently from a battered boom box.

Some of the candles have gone out. Some people relight the ones that have enough wick left, the ones that were blown out by wind, or upset by stomping feet. I burn my finger because the wind blew the flame onto my thumb. I hand the lighter to Anna and set the little tea candle down carefully, pushing it to an open space. 

Still it does not rain. 

It feels wrong to fall back into life's normal patterns; it feels like we ought to stop everything and be quiet and serious, and light candles. But that is not how the world is. The world would have us listen to American rappers insult women and go home, and forget after a while that 129 people died. 

Some people will never forget. We are lucky to forget.

Reflections From the Day After

Paris bleeds again. It was not so long ago that "Je Suis Charlie" posters papered every wall, every light post, every Facebook profile picture. In fact, I saw it from the tram just now, hanging faded in a store window, just past Langstross Grande Rue.

My mother told me to come home. Now. I told her that Hollande had declared "un Etats d'urgence"and closed the borders. And my mother cried. I don't think she misunderstood me, but that she knew my returning home was impossible.

We had heard about the Paris attacks last night at my friend's apartment. We were safe, warm, and happily buzzed. All of a sudden:

"Merde!" Romain said.

We did not pay much attention at first. He repeated himself and said something very quickly in French. I heard only "Paris" "terreur" and "18 morts". That was how we found out about the bombs at the friendly German-French soccer match, a game between two Western giants. The president was there, and we heard first that he was safely evacuated, and then that everyone else was. If they could be evacuated, that is.

We kept refreshing open pages on our devices. We learned that hostages were taken at the Bataclan. Nobody knew exactly how many, then 12, maybe, and then 100s. The death tolls jumped. Shootings, more than one.

"Merde!"

And contained in the word we heard the shock, the anger, and the horror- it was too early yet for fear to permeate his voice. The word had lost its original meaning, floating in the air as some audible representation of not Romain's sentiments, but of all of France. And it became vulgar for a different reason.

We left. The death toll doubled by the time I left my friends and descended onto Gare Central, climbed the escalator, and went home. Everywhere in the streets I heard:

"Paris! Paris!" There were other words too, but they blended together until they became fuzzy, and melted into the background.

There was also echoes of Romain's expletive:

"Merde!" Especially the men smoking by the tram stop.

When I arrived at my door, I shut it behind me like I was afraid to wake up the building. It was not yet 11.

"Here it is different,"Claire told me when she came home. Everyone knows someone in Paris." That is true, even for us; some Syracuse students had gone to the soccer game, and my roommate had gone to see Versailles.

I stayed up very late with Claire, watching the news. Listening to big, important men in expensive suits give speeches. Listening to the silence outside her window.