Marhaba men Al-Maghrib!  (Hello from Morocco!)

After a long, arduous journey including several pit stops in Spain, the relinquishment of my soul and several hundred dollars to pay for my luggage on a less than generous airline (coughcough Vueling), and a twelve hour layover in Madrid where I was offered marijuana by a Spanish-speaking Russian man (don’t worry, I politely declined the invitation), I arrived in Morocco.  This summer, I’m interning at the Center for Cross Cultural Learning, an educational institute in Rabat that offers a variety of programs, services, and events that collectively seek to promote cross-cultural engagement and immersion.  Besides work, I live with a lovely Moroccan family in the heart of the Old Medina, an illustrious maze of ancient streets and stunning homes that beautifully preserves classic Moroccan architecture despite a long and icky c-word by the French (for those of you who don’t know what the c word is, it’s colonization.  I plan on devoting a blog post to North African and Middle Eastern colonization in the future, but, until then, just know it’s the incomprehensible demon that keeps me awake at night).  After this summer, I’ll head to Cairo, Egypt where I plan to study Arabic at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo.  Egypt has been my dream for the past couple of years, and now it’s quite close to emerging as a tangible reality.  Wild, absolutely fucking wild.  But, alas, it’s only June.  I’ve been in Rabat for just over a week; Morocco, that nebulous and stunning North African gem, deserves the spotlight for the next couple of months on this blog.

For those of you who know me well, you know my deep interest in all things Arabic began in high school and has continued to flourish throughout college.  Once upon a time in an ICU hospital room during a medical internship my senior year of high school, I heard Arabic for the first time.  That afternoon, in a sort of dubious entrancement, I spent hours listening to Arabic on flimsy YouTube videos.  Later that year, while walking outside in the midst of a thick, thick Houston summer where the humidity becomes your persistently sweaty and suffocating companion, goose bumps trickled down my arm at the thought of traveling to the Arab region.

Studying Arabic and the Arab world has given my tongue and heart the ride of a lifetime, but a true education necessitates a thorough, visceral experience outside the confines of a classroom.  And my oh my have I been beautifully educated within the past week and a half.  What a precious, excruciatingly difficult, marvelously astounding experience it is to have arrived two Sundays ago at the Casablanca airport where I was immediately engulfed in Arabic, to wake up and go to sleep to the sound of my host family speaking their Moroccan dialect, to work in a library surrounded by books and books and books of Arabic, to cluelessly maneuver my way through streets where strangers boom with a language that, until now, I’ve only seen in a textbook and heard from my Arabic professor at Wellesley.  Having never left North America before this, the experience can culminate in unnerving moments of overwhelming paranoia.  Sometimes I have to plop myself down and have a good cry to release the immensity that is this place.  Not to fret, though, loved ones!  This ain’t easy, but Jillian Seymour doesn’t do easy.  Easy is for Jillian at 67; easy is for Jillian retired with two divorces under her belt and a timeshare in Orlando.

This blog is for my loved ones and for myself.  I will share with you the adventures, the people, and the love I encounter in this beautiful region.  American media too often portrays the Arab world as violent and terrorized, while Western historical discourse has molded for its consumers a feminized, eroticized, and demoralized Orient.  Born and indoctrinated in Texas and fully addicted to Diet Coke (or Coca Cola Light as it’s termed on this side of the Atlantic), I cannot pretend to be insulated from these Westernized inclinations, but I can say with the utmost sincerity that these places require a reconsideration, a closer look.  Through this blog, I hope your perceptions will change along with mine, and that you’ll feel a little (or a lot) of the love that already envelops me here in Al-Maghrib. 

Yours,

Jillian