Essaouira Blue

by Hsin Jou Chou (Germany)

Making a local connection Morocco

We were picking J up from his riad at 9 am on a weekday morning. The dirt streets were still crowded even though we weren’t in Marrakech anymore and the insane bustle of the medina was now 191 km away. But aside from the busy alleyways, Essaouira was a very different sort of place; every other building was faded in white and blue, as if the North Atlantic had once reached out and washed them with salt and water colours and left them on the walls there to dry. The air even smelled blue and a little saline. As we walked up to J’s door, a blue book flashed the morning sun at me from across the street. I sent C up to get J while I investigated the little coffee shop where the book lay. I had only come two steps forward when a cat came around a corner to welcome me, followed by a man in his mid-twenties, with a rounded face and wool beret on his short hair. He quietly introduced himself as Mohammed and the owner of the shop with a tentative smile, and invited me to pet the cat and to drink some mint tea while I browsed the four walls of bookshelves that made up his little cafe in the shade. As C came back down with J two steps behind him, the four of us fell into polite conversation as tourists do in a new place with a local: citing where we’re from, why we’re here, how we’re feeling. After the hectic souks of Marrakech where every vendor viewed us as dollar signs (something all the travel guides had avoided mentioning), Mohammed was the first Moroccan so far who spoke to us without an apparent ulterior motive. In fact, his preoccupation seemed to lie with our perception of his home country. He asked whether we liked the big city, how we found the crowds, the vendors, the haggling for prices in the souks, the attitude of the people, the energy, the difference between all of that and our own North American and European homes. He seemed to be internally praying that we would only have positive things to say. I was piqued by his hopeful queries, the self-conscious and shy embarrassment he showed about his stilted English. His mannerisms betrayed an undeserved and self-inflicted shame that some Moroccans we met seemed to have: that they’re trapped under the label of a ‘developing-country’, ruled by a stifling monarchy whose portraits hang on every wall despite the pain they cause their people. Mohammed did not directly ask if we knew about the large expats community living in the French Quarter and the hypocrisy of the anti-Moroccan immigrant protests in France, the levels of poverty and income disparity Moroccans face in their everyday lives; that in a country where citizens are barely allowed and cannot afford to leave its borders, all they all have to fight for is the attention of tourists coming inside their one-way walls. He did not ask directly, but as I flipped through the blue book in my hand, the pages displayed the history of colonization and war that still lives here alongside the beautiful cultural legacies, and they spoke between the lines of Mohammed’s words. And as a tourist, his hunger to belong to the carefree ‘first-world’ lives that we so easily embodied, put a pair of blue-tinted glasses over my eyes. We spent two more days in Essaouira hanging around the overcast beaches, where families and teens built sand castles and swam despite the clouds and the cold. I wondered if the knowledge that they would probably never have the choice to vacation in any other country’s shores made their beach days here more enjoyable or more bitter – or whether it made any difference at all. They certainly seemed as happy as C and J were, building their own castles in the sand. Blue-tinted glasses may not be as warm or comforting as rose-tinted ones, but they make everything in Essaouira look just as complete and beautiful.