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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“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.”

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