Lessons from Moroccan Matriarchs (part 2)

vignettes of reticulation: couscous, chaos & community

This is the second of a two-part essay, adapted from a research paper of mine in Arabic language and cultural studies written during my time living with a host family in Morocco. Read Part 1 here, for the conceptual background of the below vignettes.

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In Part 1 of this essay, I sketched the framework of reticulation — a structure resembling a web or net — and showed how it represents a fundamentally feminine morphology of conceiving of the self and its interrelations to space and society. Here, I will sketch authentic scenarios or vignettes of how this feminine structure of selfhood and spatiality plays out in real-time in Moroccan society. I was lucky enough to inhabit and thoroughly immerse myself in the day-to-day life of a Moroccan family that is still largely ‘traditional’ in its structure — both in terms of the activities of its members and their interrelations, and in terms of the locale of their residence in the “old Madina” (old city) of Rabat. The vignettes below are direct reflections of my immersion.

Alleyways in the “old cities” of Chefchaouen and Fez

Interior courtyard of a traditional Moroccan home in the “old city” of Rabat, Morocco

But first, a note on the setting. Today, the old Madina of Rabat is what remains of the pre-industrial fortified Arabo-Islamic city of serpentine alleyways and inward-looking residences, many of which enclose around an uncovered atrium or courtyard rather than opening out to the street (see above). This urban structure has a long history which has been abundantly covered and is not the place of this essay.¹ However, the structure is relevant insofar as what endures of it in Morocco today still best expresses and accommodates the flourishing of a “reticulated” and feminine spatial practice — where the latter means the manner of relation between self and environment. This is because, despite the seeming anonymity of the residential facades, the structure is in fact remarkably well-disposed for a high level of inter-relation and interdependence amongst its residents, and remarkably flexible in its negotiation of the binaries of inward-outward, private-public, self-other.

In the newer and flashier quarters of Rabat, the so-called villes nouvelle (new cities) first developed under French occupation and ever-expanding under the pulse of globalisation, we see instead an urban structure reflective of atomised, materialistic and liberalist conceptions of self and society: clearly demarcated individual entities, rights and identities that minimally overlap — and when they do, only in a measured, explicitly controlled way. These are structures that, while apparently more exposed to the public and indeed easier for the eye to “capture”, can diminish embodied, inter-relational patterns of knowing and being. In other words, these structures manifest a rather more masculine mode of relating to the world that sidelines the more feminine approach to perception and practice.

A poignant point of contrast between the old and new urban sectors of Rabat is that, in the former, navigation and orientation does not rely on numbers, street-names or map coordinates, as it does in the latter. In all of the old cities of Morocco, particularly in that of Fez (which is notorious for its labyrinthine layout, quite deranging to foreigners), navigation depends on locals whose guidance is essential to get you where you want to go. Google Maps utterly fails here (I’m speaking from experience). This is a thoroughly embodied way of navigating space that cannot be outsourced to cartographic abstractions.²

The “new city” in Rabat, Morocco. Credit: PureMoroccoTours

This contrast between the old and new urban structures of Rabat has interesting parallels in the feminine-masculine binary. Archetypally and with broad brushstrokes, the masculine is the “eye” and the “mind” or the mental functions that reduce phenomena to what can be easily visualised, named, measured and compartmentalised (abstract knowledge). The feminine, on the other hand, is the “body” and the illegible knowing inherent in embodiment of self and space. When you are embodied, it is easy to feel that the self is hitched to, dependent on and accountable to everything around it, because your experience, through the body, becomes a lived continuum of self-and-other or self-and-nature. This is a feminine morphology not exclusive to, but best incarnated by women, because it is essential to processes of pregnancy and child-rearing, among others. When you are disembodied, and rather inhabiting the conceptual mind, you can convince yourself that you are a totally autonomous self, independent of relationship to others and the environment, and you see the “things” around you this way too: as things-in-themselves, self-positing and self-maintaining, rather than dependent on their relations to each other. The latter is a masculine morphology because it aids the (often necessary and desirable) functions of individuation, capture, possession, as well as protection, security and stability, which the human male is best-placed to ensure.³ (As outlined in Part 1, these juxtaposing modes of perception and being can be practiced by both men and women alike, and can characterize entire cultures. They are also both essential and their healthy reconciliation is the condition for life itself).

However, and this is important: I would argue that Moroccans still largely maintain a reticulated sense-of-self — self-as-web, rather than self-as-atom — even where and when they inhabit or use the post-industrial “atomised” areas and structures of their broader urban fabric, as in the villes nouvelles (new cities). These structures are mostly an inheritance from European occupation or a borrowing from a globalised world order in which Moroccan leaders are compelled to participate; and though the liberalist values that fuel these structures are ever-encroaching, Moroccans have, at least for now, largely checked their influence and input by persisting in practices that implicate the self in webs of relationship rather than insist on the self’s distinction and isolation from those webs.

The following vignettes will focus on the less concrete but everywhere discernible scenes of daily life that fill the urban quarters of Rabat, old and new alike, but whose essence is made materially manifest by the urban structure unique to the old Madina. In other words, the old Madina presents a physical, architectural expression of reticulated selfhood, but the latter, in Morocco today, is not limited to its walls.

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PART 2: VIGNETTES OF RETICULATION

1. Couscous & rituals of consumption

Communal eating habits in Morocco are some of the most palpable expressions of reticulated selfhood. Most meals, in sufficiently ‘traditional’ Moroccan households, are shared from one large circular dish, often with the hands or khubz (bread) as cutlery. Friday couscous rituals are exemplary, as are the staple tagine variations. One dish is for multiple mouths. What this means, naturally, is that there are no strict demarcations of the individual’s ‘own’ portion: while each person gets his feed, and ample feed at that, the limits of his section of the couscous are not fixed or visually identifiable, as they would be if served on a smaller plate dedicated to him. The cook will make sure to arrange the different types of vegetables evenly around the couscous, so that each person gets his quarter of pumpkin and two to three halves of carrot, but the rest is negotiated tacitly by the hands themselves — one might pinch a neglected carrot from his neighbour, or ascend the couscous mound to tear some meat off the opposite slope. Ultimately this arrangement is more versatile than a 1:1 ratio of mouth to plate. A greater degree of play and freedom is enabled in the negotiation of portions. One will not hesitate so much to take a morsel from a neighbour, as he usually would in the case of dedicated plates, because the plate is by default communally ‘owned’. And even if he does hesitate, the hesitation is regulated by unspoken individual and social considerations, rather than outsourced to visual demarcations (this distinction between implicit and explicit ‘rules’ will emerge as a motif as we consider other manifestations of reticulated selfhood).

Credit: greenolivearts.com

We can take this image of communal consumption to a higher level of reflection: imagine that each hand is circled, creating a chain of imbricated spheres. Each circle connotes a portion, identity, ‘individual’ or ‘thing’. The circular distinctions enable greater flexibility and movement than a grid would. Not only are the circles overlapped (reticulated), but they are responsive: they shift in relation to eachother’s movements. If Circle A moves upwards, so does Circle B, because the space freed by the former’s movement becomes the accrued (if temporary) space of the latter. Such shifts are happening constantly in real-time instances of communal consumption: indeed, they are inherent to the arrangement. The circle is simply demonstrative here: it is not that each hand literally claims a circular portion, to fixed circular dimensions. But the circle best visualises the flexibility of the arrangement and of the ‘territory’ or ‘identity’ of each individual involved.

Couscous consumption in Morocco represents a dynamic understanding of ‘self’ defined by reticulation with the many ‘selves’ surrounding it. Each ‘thing’ is constantly defining each other ‘thing’ — none are posited on their own fixed, exclusive properties. Again, this does not mean that the value of each individual thing is reduced; indeed, it is rather augmented by its inter-relational participation in the sum total, or ‘whole’, of many things.

Credit Left: Leah Hoffman

2. Chaos in the streets

The streets and roads in Rabat are barely traceable. Those demarcated in gravel belie thousands more hidden from sight. They are created by pedestrians and drivers themselves — trajectories of movement drawn by bodies, not lines, and recreated every moment. The old Madina (old city) is, again, exemplary of this truth, but it spills out into the villes nouvelles (new cities) too. One consequence of reticulated selfhood is a more intuitive maneuvering of the body, and a more embodied negotiation of safety in movement. Whether roaming the alleyways of the old Madina, or at the wheel on the boulevard, Moroccans tend to move with greater flexibility, and greater risk. The latter is, of course, enabled by the former. The more embodied we are, the less rigid, the more in tune with our environment, the greater our capacity to negotiate danger. The corollary of this is a kind of ordered chaos that bewilders many foreigners. Pedestrians pour forth across main roads, oblivious to traffic lights (where they exist), slipping around boots and bonnets, often within inches of quickly approaching headlights. I will not forget the image of a man crossing in front of an oncoming car: he turned his head slowly, without the slightest adjustment to his pace, and proceeded with full composure while the car stopped merely a finger-length from his body. Such a scenario is not an exception, and is possible only if the interaction is less between machine-and-man, and more between man-and-man. And, indeed, cars take on the characters of their drivers in Morocco, like ruddy sweat-lined bodies zigzagging through an obstacle course. The machines are humanised, rather than the humans mechanised. Responsibility for movement and safety is not outsourced as much to white lines and road signs.

The system works because most Moroccans participate in it, seeing themselves and their movements as part of an overlapping whole in which the individual (driver or pedestrian) has a deep sense of how he shares the boundaries of his ‘self’ with the individuals moving around him, and is thus necessarily responsive to their shifts in space. Recall the imbricated circles of the couscous consumers: the same applies on the streets and roads. Foreigners who stay for long enough likely cannot count the times they were almost clipped on Avenue Mohammed 5^th, or almost knocked off their feet by a jellaba-drapped torso in the old Madina, or almost had their toes run over by a bread-cart at Bouqroune Souq. The emphasis here is on almost — the fact the collision comes close seems to be cancelled out by the frequency of it coming close, so that it is simply the norm of movement and not necessarily less safe than the more rigid sign-, line- and law-abiding practices on Australian roads (where movement is comprehensively outsourced to visual cues and abstract rules rather than negotiated by the body).

The heightened sense of embodiment on the streets seems to be reflected in the common way of expressing warning in Darija: ˓indik, literally translating to “at you” or “at your person”. In Arabic the adverb of place “at” is attached to the possessive pronoun “you”, with the thing which is “at you” left implicit. This is the same phrase used to express possession in Arabic, and is typically translated into English as “you have”, reversing the order of emphasis to the subject (you) as being the ‘owner’ of an object. In the Arabic, that object is in fact the subject which is “at you” — and you are, so to speak, its object. The point to be made here is that awareness of obstacles and risks is expressed in bodily terms, as a bilateral relationship between you/your body and the partner in potential collision, whereas in English the equivalent phrase “Look out” or “Watch out” emphasises the vision of one party, as though the eyes and not the body were fully responsible for avoiding this collision (of course, in reality, both work in unison). The English phrase is more unilateral, because the subject (you) and its verb (to look, to watch) are not grammatically implicated with the other party in the collision — to achieve this one would have to expand to “Look out for the…”, with great detachment between subject and indirect object. Conversely, ˓indik is not a verbal but a nominal sentence; the subject and object are not defined by unilateral directionality of force (i.e., a car hitting a pedestrian), but by an adverb of place implicating both parties, with the grammatical affixation of ‘you’ and ‘at’, an adverbial predicate which is in turn grammatically dependent on the implied second party by virtue of him being the subject of the nominal sentence (the thing which is “at you”). The subject of the indirect verbal sentence “Look out” in English, on the other hand, does not depend on an object for its completion.

Street usage in Morocco is a powerful example of the kind of feminine spatial practice Michel De Certeau designates as the true but unwritten story of all cities: the practitioners of urban space are

walkers… whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.⁴

3. Community in the salon – the circularity of Moroccan interiors

Moroccan homes exude reticulation. Even those families compelled to inhabit cereal-box houses in satellite cities like Sale Al-Jadida typically find a way to reticulate the space and bring it back to life through ornamental and domestic practices.⁵ Moroccan ‘salons’ and lounges are exemplary instances. These rooms are lined wall-to-wall with multiple day-beds that, contiguous to one another, often appear as a single unit of curvature. Nor are the corners of the room neglected: they are fitted with padded wedges, connecting daybeds on adjacent walls, maximising potential seating space, and creating circularity of perspective. Without a 1:1 ratio of seat to sitter, as offered by the armchair or 3-man sofa, the seating capacity in Moroccan lounges is remarkably flexible (I joined a funeral service in Rabat in which no less than 30 women came together in a disproportionately small salon lined with such daybeds — we managed to fit, and not uncomfortably, but pressed up nice and close to one another). Their functional capacity, too, is versatile: not only for sitting, sipping tea and nibbling ghoriba (Moroccan cookies), but also for sleeping. Indeed, these daybeds are called sarīr or ferāsh, the same word for bedroom mattress. It is very common for a daybed to be fitted with sheets and a pillow to put up a mother-in-law or nephew for the night. This flexibility of usage is, as consistently shown, inherent to reticulated structure, and requisite to communal living. The literal and symbolic circularity of these spaces shows the intensity of the feminine structuring principle in Moroccan society, and is consistent not only with the ontology of the womb but with the Moroccan impulse, prefaced in Part 1 of this essay, to embrace and enclose the foreigner or stray element into the cultural whole. Femininity is tasked with such integrative action; masculinity is tasked with division and demarcation. Both forces, in reconciliation, are indispensable to health and life.⁶

In Najiyya’s salon (blurred for her confidentiality)

4. Worship – tarāwīḥ prayer, Ramadan

I would like to close with a vignette from the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. I often followed my host mum Najiyya to observe the tarāwīḥ prayer after each day’s fast had been broken. Arriving late one night, Najiyya and her mother-in-law found the prayer space packed with women already set up on their mats. I expected her to take her mother-in-law to the very back corner, which had been cordoned off on a public road due to overflow from the mosque. This would have been far from the loud speaker and on unmatted gravel — first in, best dressed, I conceded. Instead, Najiyya darted through the first section towards the front, and positioned her mother-in-law between a young girl and an elderly woman. There was barely a third of a mat of space between them initially, but with some shifting, enough was cleared to lay her mat down. It was still, however, overlapping those on either side, meaning they also shared elbows in sujūd (prostration during prayer). Najiyya found a barely-there gap one row up, but rather than slipping her mat in between, her neighbours simply closed the space with their mats so that she could pray comfortably on the line between them, her forehead in sujūd effectively on the threshold of two mats. There was no complaint nor even surprise from the neighbouring worshippers. It impressed me that even in prayer, where a 1:1 relation between mat and worshipper seems to be designated, reticulated structure reiterated itself. Of course, there is nothing surprising about the communal nature of worship. But the complete lack of hesitation in the sharing of the boundaries of the self was somehow writ large on this occasion. I witnessed this again when Najiyya prayed at home for ˓īd al-fiṭr (final breaking of the fast of Ramadan) and, despite ample space, she overlaid her mat with her niece’s. When her niece shifted her mat to separate them, Najiyya followed her so that they overlapped once again.

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Concluding Thoughts

Flexibility and versatility are among the crowning characteristics of reticulated structure. The capacity to integrate foreign elements; to share one’s space, and lunch plate, with others; to manoeuvre one’s body or vehicle with greater freedom, and greater risk; to bear the nuance of both privacy and communality in domestic space; to embed many potential uses in singular interior and architectural structures — all of this should be vitally palpable to the embodied observer in Morocco. Even taxi routes overlap here: drivers accommodate multiple customers with aligned but distinct destinations, simultaneously, with the win-win result that the driver maximises profit by securing passengers at greater frequency, and the customer has an easier time securing a ride since his pool is not limited to disengaged taxis. This spirit of versatility is likely part of the reason why Morocco feels so lively and chaotic to travellers from the Western world — not unlimited, but sufficient flexibility might even impress itself as a totalising quality to those who are accustomed to greater rigidity in their home cultures.

Not many foreigners, however, would proceed to acknowledge that such elasticity implies the vitality of the feminine impulse and its structuring power. Many are attached to stale cliches of repressed femininity in a culture of repressive masculinity. In the words of Lucy Melbourne:

in a repressive culture… In Morocco, as in much of the Arabo-Muslim world, women’s chastity is the foundation of social order — and female growing, flowing hair is a force that may annihilate a man’s control… in Islam, as in most patriarchal cultures, women are human tokens bartered in the never-ending negotiations of masculine one-upmanship…⁷

Such a merciless reading of women in Morocco betrays the reality of reticulated structure in this society, which this paper has made amply manifest. It inflates male dominance and entrenches the misconceptions it purports to challenge. The implied claim that women are deemed by Moroccan men to be nothing more than ‘tokens of barter’ is insincere as a scholarly judgement, and contradicts my experience of months of immersed and embodied cohabitation among Moroccan men, women and children. Melbourne’s claim also appears to assume that values like female chastity are legislated and enforced in a top-down manner by an elite assemblage of misogynists, rather than them constituting broadly representative social aspirations developed tacitly over time by human communities in service of stable familial and social structure. Disciplined female sexuality is by no means exclusively Arabo-Islamic, and has been a norm in all human communities until the comparatively very recent introduction of the birth control pill, due to the disproportionate reproductive burden women risk in sexual interaction. The ‘liberation’ of female sexuality from social regulation (norms and morals) has become an uncritical barometer for the ‘emancipation’ and betterment of women at large, and constitutes a dangerous formula — one should doubt, for example, whether its replacement by pharmaceutical regulation is indeed preferable.⁸

Melbourne’s statements seem to be informed moreso by the intellectual baggage of Western feminist and postmodernist discourse than by lived, embodied experience. And, yes, it is possible to spend years in an environment without properly inhabiting it. Femininity has been emphasised in this paper to redress these kinds of readings of Moroccan culture by those who have either never stepped foot here, or are insufficiently embodied when they do. That Moroccan society is sufficiently flexible — relation-orientated practices on the roads and prayer-mats, in the couscous dish and living-room — suggests to me that it is sufficiently feminine, as does the preserved esteem of the family structure, communal living, the stature of the mother and matriarch, and the until-now sustained confidence in the binary demarcation of gender roles, spaces and ontology. Of course, femininity preserves a level of distinction from the human female, as already granted; but a society which is structured around feminine input and impulse is, necessarily, more hospitable to the human female.

I would suggest, again, that much of the purported dismantling of “patriarchal structures” in the globalised West has correlated with forces that have masculinised the energetic pull of society. Conversely, in Morocco, where such structures are still firmly in place — men as the head representatives of the family, customs of patrilineal descent, (monarchical) governance largely administered by men, an Abrahamic religious system and code of conduct, men as the prime movers in the public sphere (with women as the prime movers of the domestic spheres) — the energetic pull of femininity is nonetheless ever-present, in the homes but also in society writ large. The women I spent time with expressed a kind of contagious vitality that finds its fullest celebration in all-female spaces and events — the homes, the hammam (communal bath-houses), private gnawa⁹ dance rituals (one of which I was lucky enough to attend) — but is not, as I have shown, limited to these spaces. It is a vitality that spills out from the homes onto the streets and characterises the culture more broadly — on the streets and roads, at the markets, at wedding celebrations, and so on.

Being a Moroccan self means being intertwined with other selves. It means that the individual is not posited so much on his own merit or quiddities as he is qualified by his participation in a communal whole. Again, this is not the story of Morocco per se; this is indeed the way things are, everywhere. All things depend on neighbouring things, all ‘objects’ on their environment. What makes Morocco distinct is that it is among the modern examples that presents this reality of interdependence explicitly and almost self-consciously; not least through the traditional art and architecture of the region, but also through rituals surrounding food, hospitality, the spatial practices defining street and road usage, urban and interior design, and worship. The practice and display of interdependence is so palpable in Morocco that it often feels unique to this cultural milieu.

As an ‘outsider’, I could not help but be swallowed alive into this throbbing entanglement, because that is precisely its nature: to entangle, entwine, to make the self a shared-self; to pull the individual like a thread into the tapestry of the social whole; to fill his auditory bubble with the echoes of innumerable neighbours; to hitch the boundaries of his freedom to the demands and needs of others so that the kind of complete ‘individual freedom’ many purport to espouse and pursue seems both ludicrous and detrimental to social health.

Reticulated selfhood can be a challenge to certain degrees of individuation. But when properly balanced, it accords the individual greater value than he would have alone. I’m left feeling that tolerating its annoyances are, on the whole, greater than doing away with them and, by necessity, everything they are hitched to. In the same vein, the question can be asked whether risk on the roads is worth embracing for greater human agency over our machines, and whether communicable disease — through shared lunch-plates, for example — is worth welcoming for more robust immunity. I am confident that the 2021 coronavirus ‘pandemic’ answered this question, for those ready to listen.

Sufficient flexibility and tension — the wedding, not conflation, of the feminine and masculine poles — is the clay of creation. There is a reason nets and woven fabrics are flexible and yet remarkably strong, like the womb. Rigid grids are susceptible to fracture, and cannot bear life.

1. I refer readers to the works of Titus Burckhart, Stefano Bianca and Ian Campbell.

2. For more, see Ian Campbell, “Tactile Labyrinths and Sacred Interiors” and “Mapping Moroccan Literature”.

3. If this sounds too simplistic, please see Part 1 for an explanation of the masculine-feminine binary as it relates to this essay. The attributes outlined here are the extremes. Life depends on their reconciliation; their balance. Both are necessary, and that is the crux of my argument that patriarchal structures can actually allow the flourishing of the feminine principle, as it seems to in Morocco; whereas the dismemberment of patriarchy can actually correlate with the diminishment of this principle by the masculinisation of social structure, as it seems to in many parts of the globalised West.

4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1988), 93.

5. Humans tend to do this naturally — it’s the phenomenological function of the dwelling-place (See Bachelard, The Poetics of Space). Some humans are lucky enough to inherit or acquire homes that grew out of a spirit of life; others do the best they can to enliven residential fascimiles grafted onto dead earth from the drawing-board simulations of urban-planning units, structures so vapid they seem more like places of final rather than daily rest.

6. As previously noted, the masculine propensity to see objects as ‘individual things’ severed from their relations is often necessary in service of utility. A basic but relevant visualisation of masculine utility would be the installation of daybeds in the Moroccan salon: functionally-speaking, each daybed needs to be made and transported as a separate, individual ‘thing’. Indeed, each is divided into even smaller parts, assembled once successfully transferred and set down in the room. Reticulated meaning will then take form as the daybeds are lined side-by-side and become a unified whole in practice. Of course, the play between masculine and feminine function continues, as the daybeds will be treated separately when cleaned, or moved, or when one is fitted with linen for sleep; the point is that the ‘parts’ and their ‘whole’ coexist and are, indeed, codependent (before manufacture and sale, too, the daybeds were contingent on a whole host of materials and events in infinite regress, so that their ‘individuality’ could come into being).

7. Lucy L. Melbourne, An American in Morocco (Rabat: Marsam Editions, 2008) 82.

8. See

Mary Harrington

, Feminism against Progress (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2023), and

Louise Perry

, The Case against the Sexual Revolution (New York: Wiley, 2022).

9. West-African/Moroccan mystical music, often used during nighttime rituals of trance, prayer and healing.