Morocco was simply splendid. Since my arrival on campus in 1985, I have been reading L’étranger by Camus in my French 320 classes. I had never been to Northern Africa, and while we were headed to Morocco rather than Algeria, I was eager to understand more about the countryside and the culture of a former French colony. Camus was passionate about Algeria, and his character Meursault reflects many of the inner struggles the author perceived in a country he loved as simultaneously foreign and homeland. As the bus rolled through the hills littered with ramshackle dwellings, I saw farmers under the blazing heat working in the fields with their donkeys.
In my mind’s eye, I reread the scene where Meursault walks from the nursing home to the cemetery to bury his mother: grass on the hills turning from green to brown under the dry heat; Cypress trees (a symbol of death) looming on the horizon; the sun growing hotter by the second as it rises in the sky; red soil contrasting with white roots as shovels of dirt cover the casket. The constant struggle between life and death is everywhere in the harsh Moroccan environment where the poor eke out their existence in an unforgiving land. Serving as borders between fields and tiny homesteads are thick irregular lines of prickly pear cactus whose fruit amidst the thorns is a metaphor for life.
After our visit to the vestiges of a lost culture in the Roman ruins at Volubilis, we took turns waiting in the rest area. There was neither toilet paper nor running water, but a wizened attendant waited nonetheless for his tip. Change in our pockets was not always a guarantee, and Linda offered to pay this round. As I waited for her, I explained in French she would pay for us both. He suddenly asked me in broken French if I had a pen, and with gestures interspersed with the words for pen and girl, he pleaded he would take instead a pen for his daughter. I handed him the only pen in my bag, and his face beamed with delight as he thanked me profusely. I will never again take for granted the power of a pen.
I enjoy teaching a number of West African texts and films. In my French 220 class we routinely work on a film and children’s book called Kirikou et la Sorcière written by Michel Ocelot, a French citizen who spent his childhood in Guinea. Ferdinand Oyono wrote Une vie de boy about a young man who, lured by a “better” life among the white Europeans, first embraces and then ultimately rejects servitude in colonial Cameroon. Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir documents his experience as a child in colonial Guinea where he straddles the traditions of his village and the colonial French educational system, which ultimately leads him to France. Mariama Bâ in Une si longue lettre describes the conditions of women living in polygamous Sénégal. In French 341 Francophone Short Stories my students read a collection of indigenous African myths and legends. Ghana provided an opportunity for me to internalize otherwise remote cultural references, including the practice of polygamy and the irony of “négritude” in francophone literature that celebrates African identity within the context of colonial rule. The highlight of the trip, however, came in Cape Coast when I had the opportunity to speak to a class of high school students taking French. At the end of the conversation, I told them I taught a film/book called Kirikou et la Sorcière. One boy looked at me with incredulity in his big eyes. “Kirikou?” he repeated until we firmly established it was in fact the same Kirikou, and he told me he had seen the movie. I could not resist asking if the movie was an accurate representation of Africa, and he resolutely affirmed it was. I continued, “I will be able to tell my students they are not wasting their time?” “Not at all,” he insisted, and I will be certain to tell them.
Pictures below: A termite mound (“une grande termitière rouge”) and Kapok tree roots (“arbre fromager” – not to be mistaken for a cheese tree!) as seen in Kirikou et la Sorcière.
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