Christine Kosonen

Moroccan Street Gambling: Tales of a Ghost Player, by Christine Kosonen

I've come to gamble on my public reception here like a game of roulette. Will I be called a respectable, "madam," or a slurred, "slut"? What kind of wager do I dare to set for the social role that will be spun my way? I had heard all the warnings as I planned for my trip to study in Morocco. It will be difficult for you, I mean for you as a woman, chimed my globe-trotting colleagues. Male and female alike, they reacted to my traveling to North Africa with worried faces and dire glances. Now nearly ten weeks into my stay in the city of Fez, I could publish an encyclopedia to support every pessimistic prediction and dismal expectation. But what my advisers did not prepare me for was how the commentary would gamble on the moral nature of my womanhood.

Take one morning's activity as an example. On my daily walk from the bus stop down the main boulevard that runs the length of the French-built section of the city, a man slides up to me from behind. I hear his voice before his shoulder brushes my side. "Hello, hello?" he calls "Áa va? Zwina gazelle," he taunts with coinment on my pretty appearance. But in any combination of languages he stares; he leans in closer to touch my hand. I keep walking: nothing noteworthy.

My walk takes me into the Central Market where I spot my morning's breakfast. "Sabahul khaer a lalla" the fruit-seller welcomes me with a handshake and "good morning. 1He refers to me with the polite term, "lalla" or madarn, as we engage in the familiar formal greetings. Here again: nothing out of the ordinary. But how is that I have come to expect to be approached only as a woman of no moral value or as one of high integrity? I am taken for a prostitute or a potential mother figure daily, but never in a verbal encounter am I addressed as a person without gender and moral implications. The two manners of reception indicate a previous judgment of MY social status as a woman. Why this dual identity?

Needless to say, the contrast between the two approaches has led to a great deal of surprise, cursing, defensive avoidance, and, at the least, utter incomprehension. After one exceptionally trying incident where I was propositioned with cash for sex, I brought up the matter with my host brother, Fayqal. The eighteen-year-old shook his head and apologized. "Please try to ignore what they say," he advised, "and please don't think it has anything to do with you." In fact Fayqal explained that the same kinds of' things happen to both of his own Moroccan sisters. "It has nothing to do with you as a foreigner," lie told me, "and everything to do with you as a woman in Fez."

With this kind of ethnographic lure, how could I dare ignore the public commentary! Instead I decided to become a student of the game. By chance I have come to know two Fessi women who have offered me their identities with which to play. Fatima and Fatiha may epitomize the polar extreme images of women that the two kinds of Fessi male reception were devised to address. Fatinia could be called none other than a lalla. I first met her in the kitchen of my host family home, singing over a steaming pot of tagine. She is a wife and a mother of four school-age children. Fatilia, on the other hand, I met on the pretext of learning Moroccan women's dance. She is a divorced, childless female entertainer, and by default and most social conclusions, no different than a prostitute. If I could learn how these two very different women of the same age could coexist, perhaps, I thought, I could cast more winning bets when predicting my own social treatment in Fez.

As a dutiful wife and mother, Fatima rarely leaves the household domain. In her maintenance of the family home, she is the first to wake and the last to sleep. Fatima is responsible for the family's health: its clean environment, its emotional and nutritional needs. She is the maker of wellness and of norms as she orders and marks the day with her habitual activities.

My image of Fatima exists in the motion of domestic activity. In the morning she prepares the breakfast and lunch, bakes the day's bread, soaks the laundry, beats out the bedding, and washes the floors. During the afternoon she may stitch, dry pomegranates on the roof to make a powder to improve digestion, or sort wheat grain before sending it to the miller's to be ground into her baking flour. Her voice, always soft with hospitalities, is the first to greet an entrance to the house and the last to wish safety on departure.

Engaged at sixteen and with her first child by age twenty, Fatima is also a child-bearer, the source of family and its hopes for the future. For this privilege, her purity, virginity, and work ethic become symbols of family name and honor. For her abilities to maintain the family home and for tier body as precious commodity, she is the jewel at the center of most respect. She is the reason to circle the wagons; she is the precious object to be protected. Her reputation for ensuring continuity of tradition demands no less than ultimate deference.

In contrast, my first impression of Fatilia framed a woman alone, with a much harder voice and a more public persona than Fatima. Neither timid nor accompanied by family, Fatilia entered our dance site un-chaperoned and directly addressed the men who dominated the room. She was there to represent herself in the bargaining process for our class price. A shikha, or popular female performer, Fatiha makes her living by singing, and dancing at parties celebrating marriage and childbirth. However while she is present at social occasions central to the continuation of tradition, her profession assigns her immediately to a marginalized social reputation. She is a woman completely detached from family responsibility who manages her own money and uses her womanhood to support herself.

In fact, my meeting with Fatiha presented political difficulty with the music center where we were to work. After our first lesson, I received word that the administration disapproved of her presence within their facility. Though the cultural association offered classes in many forms of Moroccan music and performance, from popular to high classic, it required careful politeness before proceeding with permission to learn about the shikha's dance. Even then my association with Fatiha drew a great deal of attention from the staff at the center, especially from the male teachers with whom I had become acquainted. Before we began each lesson, Fatiha carefully closed every door and window shade, and then she periodically checked to make sure that no one was watching. One male teacher often boldly opened the door and entered our sessions to ask me to dance with him. Word of my work with Fatiha apparently got around the center, for even when I ran into men in the complex to whom I had never been introduced, I was greeted as the girl learning about Moroccan dance. "Does that kind of dance please you?" the guard at the gate sneered to me in French one afternoon before class.

Inside our lesson space, Fatiha would dress us in identical kaftans and lead our hour together with loud music and loose-bodied dance. She demonstrated what I was to imitate, never shy to share a laugh when I failed to mirror her postures or rhythmic steps. Fatilia's dancing focused on the accentuation of her uniquely female aspects. She initiated her movements from the pelvis. She was an expert in its rotation, the rhythmic rolling of the hips and the undulation of the belly. To complement this, she asserted the slight shimmying of her breasts. In one daily exercise, we squatted with bent knees nearly chest to chest. This movement accompanies the celebration of pregnancy and birth, she explained, as our hands gestured before our wavering bellies, the wrists circling a down-and- outward motion.

Barren and outside all possibility of social reproduction, Fatilia ironically styles her dance on the theme of motherhood, the very biological and social role which she is completely denied. Her first words to ask me were two questions: do you have a husband? Do you have children? No, I responded in great surprise as she smiled. Did she have a husband or children?, I inquired in response. The smile vanished as she looked away. "C'est fini." It's over, she told me. Then as she laid her hand over her lower abdomen, she told me she had no children and had had a hysterectomy.

Most intriguing, as I came to know Fatima and Fatiha simultaneously, the more I learned about one, the more I felt I learned about the other. Commonly assumed to work as prostitutes as well as musical entertainers, shikhat invert the image of lalla from one of reproductive continuity to that of sexualized rupture. Their roles, while completely opposite, derive from all identical notion of female pelvic power: for procreation in one and for pleasure in the other. Moreover, the traditional celebrations of the hilla provide both financial support and symbolic content for the shikhat's dance, and thus the identities of the two categories of women seem intertwined in a kind of symbiotic existence in which they counterbalance the extremes of female power in the Fessi social realm.

The two ideals of femininity represented by Fatima and Fatiha may correlate with polar opposite kinds of public reception, but neither offers -in explanation of why any of the attention is offered in the first place. To answer this question, I introduce a third and lesser known category of Fessi woman: the working, married mother, exemplified by a woman named Latifa. With one child and a profession as an English teacher, Latifa represents a new generation of Moroccan woman pioneering the territory between the domestic and the public realms. She cannot completely commit herself to family duty because of her employment outside the home; however her married identity guarantees that she will not be cast into the marginalized camp of the shikhat.

Latifa, with her own income, presents a challenge to male economic power in the household. During a visit to her apartment one evening, I watched her pour tea at the nod of her husband and then argue with him over their aspirations for their daughter's education. Influenced by her public interactions, Latifa demands a reordering of domestic expectations. Instead of wearing the traditional djellaba of both Fatima and Fatiha, Latifa most often dresses in Western- inspired fashions. She is a new kind of woman who fits neither the traditionally defined lalla or shikha position, and as she straddles these two identities, Latifa ruptures the social status quo.

In her studies of contemporary Moroccan women, Deborah Kapchan, an American anthropologist, focuses on the inversion inherent in the lalla-shikha relation. "Shikhat are presented as everything respectable women are not," she writes in a chapter of her book, Gender on the Mai-ket, entitled "Catering to the Sexual Market: Female Performers Defining the Social Body." However, the two categories Kapchan contrasts seem to have more in common with one another when both are compared to the third category I have proposed, namely that of working women like Latifa. Fatima and Fatiha both act within an existing tradition of Fessi female character. Whether exemplifying positive or negative qualities of womanhood, neither lalla or shikha ruptures the bounds anticipated by tradition. As Kapchan puts it, shikhat set the traits of Fessi femininity in high relief with their love theme songs and provocative movements. Where Fatima is silent and humble, Fatiha is loud and excessive. By representing the undesirable, shikhlat reinforce images of the ideal at the life-passage celebrations where they perform.

However, what Kapchan does not consider is the effect of the new generation of working women on their more traditional counterparts. The shikha's behavior may place her beyond the limits of respectability, but she, like the lalla, represents a version of femininity agreed upon by all society: a female social identity centered on the female body. Though a working woman of sorts, the shiklia inverts and capitalizes on the very qualities that define the lalla. Where the lalla's sex is servant to her husband, the shikha's is servant to her economy.

It is Latifa, who has entered the classroom and the office, who provides the real challenge to the Fessi female image. She is not marginalized from family, but she desires to limit her childbearing privileges. She speaks out publicly, but her words do not carry the prescribed messages of female gender cries. Outside of the obvious domains of the household, she cannot be Fatima. Apart from the activities of performance, she cannot be Fatiha.

But in order to move from traditional environments to contemporary work spaces, Latifa must pass through the streets. Her transportation brings the discontinuity of female identity into the once exclusively male domain of public city space. And to this arena Latifa has brought along her mother and her sister. As more and more women of all kinds walk in public ways, the social role that any one of them plays becomes nearly impossible to distinguish by the glance of the passerby.

Latifa's trespass of the public realm ruptures social reliabilities: what does it mean now for a woman to be out of her home? This disruption in the clear cultural categories available to women has, in Moroccan terms, fitua or feminine chaos written all over it. The identity of public womanhood has been put into question by transformations motivated by modernization, and as a result the slew of attempts to address a woman indicate the contemporary attempts to assess her female identity. When there is no sure form of address, any woman becomes a threat to all norms and the recipient of any manner of treatment. Like the aberration of the foreign female student, today's Fessi woman is the unknown future, the ghost player before the spinning roulette wheel, awaiting the next bet.

References

Kapchan, Deborah A. "Catering to the Sexual Market: Female Performers Defining the Social Body." Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 181-209.

Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Feniale Dynainics in klodcrli Muslini Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Revised Edition, 1987.

Ibid. "Introduction. The Gulf War: Fear and its Boundaries." IS117111 (111Democracy: Fall of the Modern World. Reading: Addison-Welsey, 1992. 1-10.

Siddiqi, Fatima. Lecture: "A Feminist Analysis of the Medina." The American Language Center, Fez. October 13, 1997.

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