Essay: "Hey, how was Morocco? and other difficulties of returning home"

An essay written for the Ron Brown Scholar Program Spring Newsletter... and to help me reflect and process the whirlwind of experiences that are so typically "Study Abroad." However, this process is "shwiya" more easily said than done.

“Hey! How was Morocco?” and other difficulties of returning home

12:15 am, Morocco time.

I’m sitting in the Casablanca airport and shocked and numb to the idea that by this time tomorrow I will be once again in the United States of “Amreekya,” hearing English on the streets, using vaguely familiar green currency bills, and greeting family and friends whose faces and voices have already begun to fade in my memory.

Reading my new copy of “Un Marocain a New York” just to stay awake until my 7am flight, I find my thoughts wandering back over every lingering instant in the past five months, trying to package insights and compartmentalize lessons, and yet retain the vitality and spontaneity with which each moment actually occurred. Trying to not let 6 months of my young adult life be packed stiffly into a box for the corner of my mother’s house, nor even glossified and sorted and titled with glitzy pens into scrapbooks and journals. I want the months I spent living in Rabat, Morocco to remain raw and real, incomplete and imperfect, unromanticized and unsummarized.

Looking back, I was a fairly good study abroad student. I practiced my Arabic letters and French conditional phrases, watched Arabic-dubbed Brazilian soap operas with my host mother, and learned to keep my dignity despite linguistic mistakes that screamingly labeled me “foreigner.” I visited the countryside, the desert, the valleys, the ocean, and reveled in how such natural beauty had been bestowed on the continent of Africa, motherland of civilization. I sat in French-style cafés, cultural leftovers from the Protectorate period, and watched the desert sun set over palm trees.

I walked along the rocky ocean coast and passed billboards and construction equipment announcing the debut of development projects: Major Tourist Complex by 2010. In my white-walled American university courses I remembered being an endless advocate for development in Africa, but at that moment I thought of my host brother Amine, unable to ever again surf freely at this untouched beach. The feeling was bittersweet.

I ate with my host family from one communal plate and rolled bread in my fingertips to scoop up bits of stew, the same way I use fufu at home for Nigerian stew. Yet I was surprised to meet Moroccan after Moroccan who denied being African, and couldn’t even locate Nigeria on a map. As ignorant as many Americans, they thought all “black Africans” lived in poor villages, corrupt countries, and war-torn regions. I said they shouldn’t believe everything they see on television.

I learned how to gracefully respond to the question: What’s wrong with your president? I refused to let anyone in my presence think that America is of one opinion, one set of ethics, one culture, one race, one religion. I am just one person, and America is an entire nation full of differences, contradictions, controversy, right and wrong. Just like Morocco.

I was an eager and open-minded, if not atypical, study abroad student. I studied, traveled, bought souvenirs, made friends, made a home… but by far the severest examination will be my departure and return to the home I had before knowing this place. It will be seeing if Morocco melts into a picture-perfect image in my head: of tourist brochure-worthy beaches, palm trees, exotified Berber carpets, and mint tea-drinking nomads of the Sahara. Or, if I succeed, Morocco will remain for me a real place, with real people, with all the contradictions and hypocrisies and cultural confusions that exist in my own country, and in my own identity.

I refuse to let my study abroad experience be exotified, iconized, or isolated. I am a person who takes full advantage of her opportunities, and wrings them dry for any drop of significance, purpose, and wisdom for tomorrow. Insha’allah, Morocco will never be neatly packaged in my mind, nor will it ever run completely dry of lessons for the way I study, what I study, where I travel, what I value, and how I awake each morning in the United States of “Amreekya.”

It can never be summed up like some camping trip or visit to the zoo: “it was good...”

It is what it is.