Images and impressions on a Moroccan train from Casablanca to Rabat teach me not to point out the mote in another’s eye while ignoring the log in my own.
In the Casablanca Train Station
There’s something about the collision of old and new, of tradition and progress, that makes the bizarre wreckage of Casablanca utterly irresistible. A gleaming new train station with flat-screen monitors, none of which work because nobody knows how to operate them. Luxurious first-class coaches where the air conditioner has probably never been switched on. State-of-the-art train platforms covered with blowing trash, apparently because nobody thinks it’s a problem. Internet-connected ticket machines that will instantly debit my bank in America, next to a bathroom with a filthy squat toilet attended by a smiling old lady in a burka.
The waiting room is filled with running and laughing children, two of which violently and repeatedly crash a plastic car into the walls. Mothers with full-coverage Islamic gear sit next to their daughters who wear sheer, low-cut blouses and designer Italian sunglasses. A coffee bar is attended by a fit young man who greets a slick-haired, goateed older man sporting faux-gold aviator sunglasses and a swagger like a Mafia don. The new and the old, and the uneasy discord of a traditional Islamic country into which Western progress is being forced-fed.
There are magazines and books in French and English. A few books in Arabic, but no magazines. What does this mean–do Arabs not read magazines? The newspapers are almost all in Arabic–they do apparently read the news.
A young, kind-eyed station attendant keeps watch over us clueless tourists, ensuring that we don’t miss our train. Truth be told, he’s mostly keeping watch on my 19-year-old daughter who has received seven marriage proposals since coming to Morocco a month ago, three of them very serious indeed. “How many camels?” is the joke. The record offer for her hand in marriage is seven thousand camels, from a Marrakech taxi driver who probably didn’t even own one camel. My wife and I have quickly learned that it is a great idea to travel Morocco with a tall, beautiful dark-haired nineteen-year-old who is fluent in French. The special attention you get from service staff, waiters, tour guides, and yes, taxi drivers, is extraordinary. I imagine this is what traveling with a movie star would be like in California. My daughter, who is here as a volunteer English teacher, takes it all with a good nature, though she seethes at the underlying implication that women are the chattel property of men.
Looking out the Window, Heading North to Rabat
Casablanca quickly recedes behind us. We pass tin-and-tar-paper shacks and kids playing soccer in dirt fields. A cultivated garden of ten thousand satellite dishes all face the exact same direction like a field of sunflowers, soaking not in the sun, but in TV shows carefully censored by the government.
Piles of trash are everywhere. There’s a perverse beauty in the poverty and filth. Splashes of color, mostly faded, on concrete walls. Clothes hanging from empty windows. More trash beneath beautiful palms trees. Laughing kids clustered in the shade, throwing stones at already-broken bottles. More satellite dishes and a chemical factory spewing yellow smoke into the hazy air. Glimpses of the ocean.
Suddenly we are in a city. Google Maps–yes, my iPhone works here–identifies it as Mohammedia. Glass condos next to cinder-block warehouses. Half-finished homes awaiting the next infusion of capitol in this credit-starved economy. A family living in a tent. More trash. A beautiful field of yellow flowers. It wouldn’t take much to clean this country up, make it beautiful. A national weekend of trash pickup would do it. But nobody seems to care. Maybe they don’t realize the potential for what they could have. Maybe they are just too busy surviving.
Passing through Bouznika
Images like a silent television continue to flash past the smudged train window–this is real reality TV. Three old men sitting in the shade of a gas tank, playing chess on a three-legged table. More laundry and satellite dishes sprouting from the buildings. The bright blue of the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Hundreds of carpets hung over balconies to face the sun, to fade, to accelerate their aging, because the older they look, the more they will fetch on the carpet market.
It’s very hot and sweaty on the air-conditioned first-class coach car. We pass a field of almond trees, then olive trees in orange and red soil that reminds me of my home in rural Georgia. A grove of eucalyptus trees. The square minaret of a mosque, the only well-maintained structure in a village. Unfinished high-rise apartments with empty window openings gaping in geometric impatience. Cell phone towers sprouting like weeds.
Construction debris from projects started and long abandoned, half finished, is everywhere. No pride of ownership is evident anywhere in the general populace. The land is beautiful, but like many places on Earth it has been deeply scarred by its inhabitants who are exploiting it without any sense of stewardship. These people are despoiling their home. How primitive, how sad. For a moment I think of how lucky I am to be an American.
Then with a jolt I imagine a privileged foreigner riding a train through my home in the rural American South, seeing the trailer parks, the fields of junkyard cars, the once-beautiful forests clear-cut for timber and pulp, leaving huge swaths of ugly eroded landscape. He would pass an endless array of small towns, largely abandoned and in ruins along rutted old highways forgotten since the coming of the Interstate, and long after Wal-Mart destroyed the local economies. He would see kids smiling and laughing in the shade of a tree, throwing rocks at broken bottles, and he would see cell towers sprouting like weeds. He would see old men and overweight women and wonder why they didn’t take more pride in their hometowns. Maybe they just don’t care, he would speculate. Or maybe they are just too busy surviving.
Suddenly I find that I cannot judge the Moroccan people and their culture. These people claw an existence out of one of the Earth’s harshest environments, while my own kin are equally busy destroying one of Earth’s most lush and friendly terrains.
We are, I realize, no different, each of us, Moroccan, American, or otherwise. We are all victims of our parents and grandparents and the generations that grew up inside a worldview that our Earth could forever provide the limitless resources we would need to survive and prosper. A worldview that set us apart from the cultures of other nations, and divides us into tribes of religion and politics. I can only hope that the kids playing in the shades of the trees, both at home in America and in here in Northern Africa, are growing up in a new world with a new attitude.
Entering Rabat
The influx of money is staggering. The outskirts of Rabat gleam with beautiful new landscaping, terraces of freshly-planted palm trees, some of which are already starting to die from inattention. The seaport is being renovated, with huge new piers under construction. Cranes tower over the skyline. A local told me that the oil-rich princes of Dubai and Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are investing heavily in Morocco. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but somebody is spending a lot of money. Here in Rabat, the first world is scrabbling for a hold on the ramparts of the third.
A huge square tower of stone dominates the skyline. The famous Unfinished Mosque, says another tourist, a Brit, as he leans past me and points. The Hassan Tower, he informs me, was supposed to have been the biggest mosque in the world, but when the sultan died in 1199 the work stopped. Now, a thousand years later, highrise building are springing up like daisies in the desert to challenge its dominance.
The train slows and the locals crowd toward the doors at either end of the car. It is sweltering and I hope the train station has air conditioning. It does, but of course it isn’t working. There is however, an ice cream shop, attended by a lovely teenaged girl with a bright smile and a headscarf and a Samsung mobile phone with a New York Yankees phone case. I order a vanilla cup, with chocolate sprinkles. It is delicious.
