THE GREAT TRIP TO THE GLORIOUS AMERICA

Part 3 - En Route to Portland - Dallas and Salt Lake City

by BRAHIM EL GUABLI, special guest writer
Ouazazate, Morocco

It is always sad to leave a place when you get used to it. It was easy for me to understand that on this hot Sunday of June, when I had to pack again and be ready to fly to Portland, Oregon. The fact that I would have to move stirred inside me all kinds of emotions and a very sad mood. It dulls your appetite, saddens your heart and makes you wonder why you have to move out and leave everything behind.

I understand the attachment of people to their land, to their old houses, to their old friends and also to places they visit. Living somewhere creates an exchange between the person and the place. There is a bond that develops between the human being and the place as a physical space. It is not necessarily the place that we love, but rather it is the people, the memories; the beauty of being able to adopt a silent space and make it resonate with life. It is we, human beings, who give life and give meaning to everything. When I travel around Morocco and I see all these small houses in very remote areas on the feet of very snowy mountains, places that take you long hours to get to, I just think of the reasons that made these people choose these places to live. There is no scientific explanation, instead it is their love for their origins, for their traditions, and for the souls of their ancestors that creates an attachment to their space. I could not believe that having to leave New Orleans had made me sad and provoked these thoughts.

The night before traveling, I did my laundry on the 18th floor of our hotel. I bought some `Tide` from the reception store and I was doing my laundry alone. While sitting there waiting for the washing machine to finish washing my clothes, I was again thinking about the importance of movement, and I was convincing myself that despite liking this wounded city, I should be very happy to be able to discover Portland. Yet, the sadness of leaving is always there. You think of people whose ways crossed yours, and of the nice food that you have shared; you think of all the horrors of Katrina, of reconstruction efforts, and also of what this city will become in a few years. I was also thinking about whether or not I would ever be able to visit New Orleans again. Only the droning of the washing machine was breaking the silence of my night and the loneliness of my reveries.

The first time that I learned about the state of Oregon was in 1996 when I was reading a book about American geography. Being a zealous, serious student, I have always read a lot of books that the Information and Resource Center (sponsored by the American Embassy in Rabat) at my high school was offering. There were many books available, ranging from beginners` literature to history, sociology, and linguistics. We used to call it the English Center, and later a pan-Arabist Director called it a “small America.” The center was such a great opportunity for my generation to learn English and to meet people from different cultures. We always received people from American and British universities through this center. This fact helped us later on to be open-minded, and to see other people as equals whom we should deal with in mutual respect. My discovery of Oregon began, then, through reading at the IRC. I read about how green it is, how cold the weather is, and also that a lot of people living there are from Asian origins.

The second contact I had with Oregon was in April 1999. I was making a meal of beans in my room in a very remote village called Tizgui, where I used to teach. It was one of those cold days when you feel like eating something hot and just going under your blankets to snuggle. The food smelled really delicious. Right before serving it, my friend Hakim knocked on my door and asked me if I could possibly talk to some people in English. I said, “Of course, I would.”

This is how I met Pauline and Christophe. Both of them are from Oregon. Fresh out of undergraduate studies, they decided to come to Morocco. We shared the beans and I served them oranges for dessert. We exchanged a very nice discussion and they continued on their way to the historical site of Telouet. Pauline got married to a Moroccan a year later, and Chrsitophe just moved to Canada.

As I began my own journey to Portland, I had a very beautiful exchange on the plane. All the way from New Orleans to Dallas, I was talking to a woman named Shelly about her business, and she was asking me questions about Morocco. I found her to be interesting to talk to, especially since she was representative of a free-speaking America. She was confident expressing herself freely without any kind of fear or reserve. She told me the story behind her name, the story of starting her business, and also told me about her husband loving socialism and being intrigued by the Russian model. When we arrived in Dallas, she left and I left. What remained was a very nice chat with someone who loved learning about another country far away in a lost continent, whose mere name is synonymous with underdevelopment, malnutrition, and civil war between neighbors. This is a sad continent whose wounds need to be balmed.

The first thing that surprised me in Dallas is the enormous size of its airport, and the greatness if its infrastructure. I have always heard that the Dallas Airport is huge, and that it is one of the most congested veins of the American economy. Millions of passengers start their trips here each year. To symbolize the vast size of this airport, you need to take the air train to go from one terminal to another. You would never be able to walk the length of it.

Every thirty seconds, there is a plane that lands or takes off from this airport. Planes here are like taxis of the air. It is hard to imagine that there is an American who has never used a plane to go from one point to another in this country. Not just Dallas nor New York, Reagan International nor Chicago; in every place I visited in the US, I noticed that air traffic was very busy.

Flying in America is a very different experience from flying in other countries. There is nothing free here. They sell food on the planes, they sell you headphones if you want to watch a movie, and if you need something other than coffee and juices, you have to pay for it. A fellow colleague, Abdul, was mad on our way to Portland, and he called what the companies were doing blackmail. I have never seen him angry except in that instant when he could not watch a movie. It was shocking for me at first to find out that no matter how long the distances are, you have no right to food, and instead you must buy it in order to be able to eat in the plane. Later I understood that we were in America and not in Morocco. We were in the mother country of capitalism where everything is about making money.

Apart from Abdul’s anger about not being able to watch the movie, the trip went smoothly and was full of fun. The flight attendants were two middle-aged women whose physical appearance demonstrated a lot of experience and long years in the job. One of them came to me, as she heard us speaking Arabic, and asked me to tell my Moroccan colleague that she was beautiful. Nabila was proud of such a nice comment coming to her from an American woman. I bet she could survive on that all her life. It is not a cheap comment to give a woman. If it is normal to hear such comments from men, it was not at all normal to hear it from an American woman high in the sky. It must have elevated the soul of my colleague, and it must have swollen her heart with deep, inner-felt happiness.

These flight attendants were exceptionally nice and they loved talking. Maybe it was because we had a three-hour flight; or maybe it was because they have been in their jobs for so long, and they can spot people who represent an opportunity to learn about the world through their chats; or maybe it was a way to remember some of their pastimes abroad. I could feel that they were not just any women. They have surely traveled a lot, and they have surely met thousands of people during their work. They have surely exchanged with a lot of people, and broken the taboo of being reserved and introverted. I could easily see the magic of traveling and of long years spent in a job in which there are no borders that separate people from each other. A job like that is a very important key to the world. It does not just open your mind; it also opens your soul. It does not just open your heart, but it also unbridles your tongue and frees your mind, cleansing your heart of all sorts of phobias. It normalizes your relationship with others, and helps your eyes to see the world around you the way it should be seen, rather than the way other people want you to see it.

I began to wish that all people, all over the world, were flight attendants. The world would be a better place. The world would be less violent and people’s minds would be more constructive. I wished I were a pilot so that I could bridge all the cultural and linguistic gaps that were separating people from seeing the truth of each other. But I was also realistic, and as I looked down to earth, I saw that we had reached Salt Lake City. I was surprised by what a desert looks like from above. There was nothing around except an arid desert, inside which a very beautiful city sprang up like a wild tree growing in the driest of weather, defying the heat and the drought. This city is famous for the Winter Olympic Games that were organized here in 2002. For weeks, the whole world was watching this city on television and enjoying its beautiful fields and its busy streets. It was the destination of the most famous men and women of sports from all over the world. When I compared what I had seen on TV with what I was witnessing from the plane, I just felt that this city deserved all the glory it got from these games. Just the mere fact of seeing the beautiful lake, looking like a bride clad in blue with a crown embroidered in white silk, made me think of all the beautiful brides back home. They are all beautiful; all clad in the colors of the universe with crowns made of rubies, crystals, gold, and silver. They are still waiting for a bridegroom to make them into other Salt Lake Cities. I know it takes will and courage.

Utah must be proud that this small desert city brought it all the attention of the world in 2002. Salt Lake City looked like this spot of light in a very dark sea of sand. It looked like a center of business and administration. It looked as if the whole spirit of America was hovering around its sky, and giving it all the energy and support it needs to grow and thrive. Salt Lake City symbolizes the American will somehow: the will of gold prospectors, these women and men who moved across the frontier looking for gold mines and fur. It symbolizes the will of these people who worked hard to be rich. They wanted to be their own masters, and they challenged all of the hurdles of their times to be able to discover this part of America and what it had to offer. I could only imagine how many people died in this impossible mission. I could imagine that this salty lake must symbolize the power of endurance and resistance to the changing moods of nature. Before visiting America, I would not believe that Utah was as desert-like as I discovered it to be.

Utah is always associated with its Mormon community. A lot of people think that it is a strange religion, with precepts that tend to be different from the norm, especially when it comes to polygamy. I have never met a Mormon, and crossing the Mormon state in the U.S. gave me such a beautiful feeling, knowing that I was flying over a state I knew something about. The Mormons are famous for having a lot of kids and for being polygamous. What a lot of people ignore is the fact that they are Christians with their own belief system, even though it is not necessarily the same as what everyone else in this country believes. In the same way, it is a lie to talk about the Shi’a and the Druze being separate factions of Islam. Through history, people’s interpretations give an impetus to new religions and new ways of worshiping the same God. The ways of all the believers cross at some focal point, where the almighty God unites all of them. This illustrates the futility of people’s fights about who is righteous and who holds the truth. We are all truth holders, we just differ in the ways we interpret our truth. It also depends on the degree to which politics infiltrates our truth and subdues it to the will of men and women who see political interests overshadowing truth.

My little reveries about Utah and its Mormons stopped as a lady started talking to me when she saw the title of the book I was reading, ‘The Alchemist’ by Paolo Cohelo.
‘I enjoyed reading that book’, she said.
‘I read it twice back home in Morocco, and every time I read it, I discover something new.’
‘Yes, it is a very deep book.’
‘Indeed, very deep. It is a journey within us. I like the idea of the personal quest.’
‘I like it, too.’
‘Did you read Eleven Minutes?’
‘No, I have heard of it, but I did not read it yet.’
‘It is another deep journey within the self. I think you will find it interesting and reflective of a materialistic world where people could do anything and sell everything they have, starting with their dignity, to make money.’

The talk was very deep and passionate. Each of us was trying to give the best they could to make the other feel that we cared about the world and that human dignity should be restored. Literature, through some serious works, makes us feel the pulses of our souls, and the urgency to attract the attention of people to the atrocities of modernity.

Americans love reading and the way they delve into their books and sit so still, you would think that they are dead. They never move their heads and they never make any movement that would give you a sign of their being alive. They sit still like stones and they bury their faces in their novels, newspapers, and magazines. They never stop reading. They never look to see who is walking around, nor what their neighbor is doing. Sometimes, the way Americans read pushed me to think that they just avoid talking to other people, they refuse to make eye contact with others and they just love having their own little private space. When you see an American in a plane, the first thing they do is take out their iPod and then their book. They listen to their iPod to lose any contact with their environment, and in a way it is as if to say to other people that their little province should not be invaded. Then, they take out their books and start reading.

Reading is a very healthy thing. It teaches concentration, it teaches freedom, it broadens the imagination, and it develops the ability to indulge in internal quests. I always try to imagine the stories of everyone sitting in cafés, trains, or planes. I try to imagine what they imagine, what they think, how they conceive characters in their books and how they relate them to reality. Reading is a hard hobby and a very tiring source of freedom. When I saw all these people reading, I was also wondering why people were losing such precious and beautiful moments of their lives being secluded from each other? Why do people refuse to exchange in a beautiful chat with their neighbor and prefer instead to bury their noses in a static book? There is no better book than a lively chat with the person sitting next to you, there is no better book than listening to stories of human beings made of blood and flesh and full of the warmth of life. A book is a very beautiful friend to cherish and spoil, but it should not be too jealous and exclude all other people from one’s life.

The beautiful thing about reading in Morocco is that whenever you take your book in the train and start reading, someone will always come and sit next to you and start a conversation about politics, sports, geography, literature, history; whatever they can imagine. The train becomes a university, a chat room, a school and a free space for freedom of speech and socializing. You end up making new friends, you end up telling your story, and you might even end up meeting the man or the woman of your life. The cultural norms in planes are different back home; people who can afford a plane ticket must be from the middle class or have some successful business. They refuse to start conversations with people belonging to lower classes, such as a person like me. In their heads, the planes should not be polluted by the common people. Instead, they should remain expensive and the ‘populace’ should not be privileged to ride in the sky.

Yes, there is a difference in reading culture between my home country and the U.S. It is normal that people read here in the U.S. more than they do back home. It is normal that people here adopt their books, like their kids, and it is totally normal to hear someone break the peace and the silence of a whole plane with a huge laugh or a deep smile because they were reading a funny thing from a silent book. It is the magic of literacy. There are fewer here that do not know how to write and read.

When I saw all these people excavating the mines of knowledge from their books, I just traveled back in time. My memories took me back to the nineties, when I used to scavenger old newspapers, old papers, and old books from the trash of people who used to study at the university. Each time I found a newspaper or an old magazine, I would just straighten it, fold it in a very beautiful way and take it home like a very precious treasure. I still have a lot of these little items, through which I learned a lot of words and made a fortune from having them in my possession. My fortune from them is the things I learned and the things that they stimulated me to look for.

There was and still is a huge shortage of books in Ouarzazate. You cannot find every book you want nor all of the things that could quench your thirst for knowledge. I scavenged for knowledge in trashcans. I still remember the day I met some French people who were visiting Tifoultoute, my village. After a long talk and a nice afternoon spent at my house, they offered to send me a t-shirt. I asked them to send me a dictionary instead. It was such a huge achievement to have the Robert Dictionary in the home of my family. Nowadays, there is a lot of change; there are more books, more options to read; yet there are no readers. I wish I could steal all the glory of these readers and bring it to Morocco. I wish my people would open their eyes and invest more of their free time in reading and building their lives like I see these people do in America.

Visit next month for the continuation of Brahim's journey!