There was a bit of confusion about the time of my arrival, so I spent the morning gently sipping coffee, warding off drunks at the cafe at the bus station, and eating sandwiches. My friend Abdelhak (Abdou) finally found me (after I made a phone call) sleeping, my head on the table.
Abdou's family is all here this time, so I have had the chance to meet his mother, his grandmother, cousins and family friends, which is great. What is also great is his mother's cooking, and today I ate the most delicious sardines I have ever had. His mother is also an artisan, and works out of a space connected to the house, weaving blankets on an (to many) old-fashioned loom.
It is hot as Hades here, and dusty and dry, but it is a nice and peaceful place, seemingly without much of the drama that I began to experience in my final days at the Cascades d'Ouzoud.
I am sure that I do not have the time or the environment to write all that needs to be said as a primer to understanding the politics of a small town driven by the tourist trade. I will, however, attempt to give a quick rundown of my own experiences in Ouzoud, and hopefully later I will have the chance to contribute more to the subject.
Basically, in the one week that I spent in Ouzoud, I crossed the line that separates tourist from inhabitant. I do not mean to say that I was accepted completely as one "of them", but in a way the time that I spent there did give me the chance to see much that most tourists would never see.
Imagine this--I spoke with some Italians that had been to the falls about 20 years ago. They tell me that the area was empty...not the surrounding area, which is filled with quiet farming camps and the like, but the area immediately around the falls, which is today packed with restaurants, cafes and bazaar-type shops. And so, the area around the falls is basically a frontier town, populated quickly and rather haphazardly by people looking to cash in on a rising tourist invasion.
Tourists, especially Western female tourists, are the gold of this community, and are therefore jealously guarded. Any seeming attempt to "steal" somebody else's "merchandise" is considered an extreme fault. Thus, as I noted and learned rather quickly in my last few days, there are certain subtle rules, norms, etc that must be followed.
I discovered this one day while swimming with a friend, a local, at a nearby "swimmin' hole' (god it feels good to say that). We saw, nearby, some English girls swimming, while their guide tried to impress them with his (honestly quite impressive) feats. He jumped off the tops of trees into the water, made dangerous dives and flips look easy, and the like. Anyway, I began to talk to them, as one tourist often does with another tourist. We had a bit of a conversation, my friend and I left, and that was that.
Later that day, walking up to the top of the falls, another friend of mine and I saw the same girls sitting at a cafe. We stopped and joined them, ordered a tea, and chatted with them for a while. At some point, their guide from earlier that day passed by and the girls said hello, as did I.
By this point, I had been told by various people something about the rules about talking to other people's "girls" but I honestly figured that I did not figure into this equation, as I too was a tourist....
Anyway, point is that I was wrong. I had passed the line between tourist and local; to some extent, and was therefore expected to follow the rules like other locals. I ran into the guide that evening. He was an ugly man, strong and toothless and brutish looking. He called me into his cafe, breathing on me the fumes of the mehhya (an illegal fig moonshine) that he had been drinking all day. In words that I could barely understand, in a mixture of French and English and Arabic, he made his point very clear:
Stay the f--k away from my girls or I will hurt you.
I assured him that I would do exactly that, and had no intention of talking to his ladies in the near future.
Problems like this, I soon discovered, are inherent to a place like Ouzoud. Locals work hard to disguise this from tourists, obviously aware that the more that they preserve their image as a peaceful haven for hippies and potheads, the more business they will all have. This does not mean, however, that beneath the pacific surface of the town does not lie a bubbling, alcohol stinking, possibly dangerous, and ultimately fascinating mess.
It was with this new knowledge in hand, as well as my new status as enough a local that these things need not be hidden from me (although who knows how much more still remains hidden) that I witnessed an argument over a pair of sunglasses nearly end in fisticuffs. I also saw money thrown angrily to the ground twice in one day.
This is not a side of the town that one sees in a day, or even two or three, and it made it very clear to me the ways in which appearances can be very deceiving. It also made it very clear to me that the work of an anthropologist must be extremely complicated and filled with constant pitfalls. Learning the rules, and learning to avoid making enemies while making friends and contacts, must be a truly difficult position to hold.
Anyway, I have written much more on this subject, which I find fascinating, but I must leave now to go off with my Errachidia friends. I hope that all are well. More to come soon, to be sure.
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