WALKING ON THIN ICE

essaouira day 7, morocco day 40:

received an email about our blogs which made me think, and i love it when someone causes me to re-examine what i’m doing. here’s a selection from their letter:

We have been following the postings on your blog and there is one thing we don’t see much and would like to find there: more about Moroccan culture and its many layers and perspectives. Can one buy culture related magazines and journals on the newsstands there, or any place else? How about libraries and bookstores? What is the position of an intellectual in Morocco of today? Stemming from the best of intentions, fascination with poverty goes beyond the colonial division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ only when reminding the readers that, look, in Cleveland we have poverty too… what about their ‘popular culture’ and its conflict with elitism, what about paintings and music and schools and poetry, no matter if it’s oral or written, educated in the finest schools or beautifully instinct-driven? For us traveling is much less about the ‘personal experience’ and much more about taking responsibility to enhance dialogue between languages, cultures, continents – yes to learn, but also to speak, yes to witness, but also to do, to act

here’s what i answered:

so far we’ve found no intellectuals or art scene or poetry… just people from all walks of life trying to get money. this is the first place we’ve been we can find absolutely no culture. people see us as money machines, not people.

as for the blog, we write what we see, think, feel, experience. need to keep it real, not academic, phony or artsy. hard to write of cultural perspective when all we see is dollar signs in their eyes. the magazine racks we see are in french and the same shallow stuff you see in america, france, england for people with too much money and too little taste.

i’m glad we’re here - find this to be an essential experience, but it is not a place i like or respect.

and the poverty you have in cleveland is literally nothing compared to this… this is naked need, this is a society that feeds off tourists, lines their streets with tourist trinkets… we frequently wander way off the tourist routes, and the folk we see are shocked - they barely return our hellos. on the poverty scale i’d give cleveland a 1 and morocco a 100. people shit in the streets here.

i know there are intellectuals here, but have no idea how to find them or where they are. we even dined with an intelligent upper class european - their cultural activities consisted of tv, movies, and sofa art. don’t know what else to tell you - what you’re asking is foreign to everyone we’ve met. it’s all need and greed and tourist toys so far.
. . .

i had to end there due to being in a cyber cafe, but there’s much more to be said, and it will likely take years of sifting thought to do it justice.

lady k and i have been ambassadors for culture and dialogue since the day we left the states 10 months ago. we interact with anyone, rich to poor. we assure them the people of america are not like our politicians who have stolen power. they teach us there’s an equal discrepancy between their people and government. we’re friendly and open, and most everyone of every nation has been kind and generous in return. no one’s said a good thing about the american government, but no one’s said a bad thing about the american people - although a mentally retarded youth in leeds england did put his thumb down and said “america bad” when he learned where we were from. but he was still nice to us.

we’ve read poetry in a multiplicity of scenes, created reading opportunities on our own. lady’s incorporated poets from each place into her online City Poetry zine. each place we go, we dip into the culture, comment on the yes or no of it.

most importantly, we go into each place with our minds open, try to process what we see on its own terms. we do not have a pre-set philosophy of life or travel through which we filter fact.

what we’ve found in morocco is poverty, need, and greed - a culture devoted to fleecing folk.

the art we’ve seen is souvenir shop slop for tourists, the few book shops little better than magazine racks slick with tricks for the rich. we’ve seen major art galleries with minor work, banks hanging bad jackson pollack imitations - pretty much the same level of quality you’d see in an american motel or mystic seaport connecticut souvenir shop.

we bought a copy of The Casablanca Analyst - the 1st and so far only issue of the sole english language moroccan newspaper. it questions whether there is any modern art here. says there’s a lack of art groups, forums, organizations, brochures, manifestos, periodicals. the only categories of art they mention are folk, naive, decorative, tourist, children - all form, no content.

most of the rest of the paper is devoted to how bad america and israel are, and the crookedness of moroccan politicians - evidently it costs $12 to buy a person’s vote here. the very few cultural affairs they mention are all in casablanca, and the poetry they publish in english is turgidly terrible with lines like “Conflated conniving grievances, / Abjuring the gaucheries of the drooling Don.”

i’ll read the rest of the paper for clues, but it verges on the sophomoric and is wretchedly written - as our only taste of what the intellectuals think, it’s not encouraging. i’ve always found a great gap between intelligence and intellectuals… the intelligent evaluate what is, intellectuals try to make what is conform to theory. albert camus is the perfect example of intelligence, sartre of the intellectual - sartre sacrificed facts to fit philosophy while camus constructed his philosophy from fact, observation, life. sartre spent most of his career attacking camus, while camus spent his time pondering truth - and won a nobel prize for it.

the music is a polyrhythmic symbiosis of appalachian hill fiddle, country & western, and hispanic. as for the literature, i can’t read either language it’s written in, so cannot judge.

but it’s not just not knowing the language - i couldn’t converse in poland, croatia, the netherlands, or france either, yet had no trouble finding a cultural scene. i know there must be more, and we hope to find some of it in the upcoming 5 day music festival here next month. i’m hoping it’s not just more tourist bait.

and finally (since this could go on forever), this for us is a journey of self discovery, an attempt to see how things are done in other cultures, to see how we can rise above what we are. the blog is titled The Adventures of Smith & Lady - we write what we do, what we see, who we interact with, how they change us, how they say we affect them. in england we wrote of the museums. in krakow we wrote of the underground music scene. we get to morocco, and whammo - we find ourselves in filth, shit, poverty and cockroaches, so that is what we write. it would be a sin not to.

i think questions of the elite versus power structures miss the mark - the primary theme is the rich screwing the rest. there’s enough on this earth for all, yet the very few grab all they can, then hire armies to steal more, and make laws and police to keep it. were it not for greed, there’d be no need.

the other factor involved in blogging is sharpening our writing skills and entertaining folk (and for me, getting a few laughs from readers along the way). we are neither travelogue nor essay. i’m less an academic in spite of my college degree than i am a social humorist and cultural commentator - more mark twain than marking time.

we are on a self-financed incredible adventure that cannot be anything but a personal experience, one which by its very scope and nature enhances dialogue between languages, cultures, continents.

we learn, we speak, we witness, we do, we act, we share, we educate, we entertain - so far in more than 30 cities in 10 countries on 3 continents over a 10 month period.

and we’re having a heck of a fine time doing it.