This memoir starts with an arresting line:
The year was 1402, and the summer air in the city of Fez was warm and dusty. I walked through the alley that led from the vizier’s palace to the market overflowing with the day’s offerings.
1402? ! One has to read on for an explanation of the timeframe:
The old city of Fez was founded in the ninth century. My first steps into this old world came over a thousand years later, in the Islamic year 1402 — the year 1981 in the Gregorian calendar.
The author’s name, too, is unusual, and might catch a reader’s attention with its Middle-Eastern first name and Caucasian last name, but it’s 40 pages into the book before he mentions that his father is a “Boston Irish meat-and-potatoes man”, that he himself identifies as Muslim, and another dozen pages before he reveals that he is in the Peace Corps, teaching English in a Fez school. Readers who expect immediate background explanations will need to be patient, but the opening chapter is amusing and interesting enough to keep them reading on.
So, in 1981 Azzedine Downes is 23 years old, living in the crumbling vizier’s palace in Fez, Morocco, walking at night through streets that were no more than six feet wide, between walls of gravel-filled stucco. During the day, donkeys with wide wicker panniers fill the narrow walkways, but at night, getting lost or being robbed is a real possibility. He is new to all this, but you can sense his determination to become part of the background, and not stand out like a tourist.
Downes’ fascination with language and accents is evident early in the book:
You could tell someone was from Fez when they could not say the letter ‘Q’. [..] I noticed similarities to the Arabic accent heard in Jerusalem and Damascus.
but like much else in the book, is just a little perplexing. The people of Fez speak Arabic, so the ‘Q’ he refers to must mean the guttural throaty ‘kh’-like sound? It seems simplistic to reduce it to an English ‘Q’.
I learned early on that the way you sound either opens or closes doors in society.[…] In Fez, souding like a native speaker in the market means you get a fair price. […] I could pronounce my “Q” and roll my “R”, but I chose not to.
Over the course of the book, it emerges that Downs speaks French as well as several Arabic dialects. It also becomes clear that far beyond the grammar and vocabulary of a new language, there are cultural threads in conversation which are almost like another whole language to learn.
“What’s the donkey’s name?”
“Why does he have to have a name? It’s a donkey.[…] Do you think he has a name because he is a male and I am a male?”
“No! Your wife told me the kids ask if he is a boy or girl but …”
“Are you insulting my wife?”
“What?! No, of course not. I’m just asking what the donkey’s name is.”
“So you are insulting me. You don’t think I am a real man capable of producing another child? I go to the hammam, the public baths, every single day.”
The Fez chapter goes on into a detailed description of the leather slippers (‘babouche’) commonly worn in Fez, and the cobblers who spend their days in small rooms breathing glue, barely able to make a living. Another section describes the “foundation of all life”, couscous, and the protocols of eating from a huge shared dish while trying to get to the meat in the middle. The next vignettes are the art of the carpet seller and the psychological manipulation to get the best prices off the tourists, a few more attempts to trap Downes into matrimony, and a visit to the mountains where he is introduced to kif (cannabis).
At first, the book has a distinctly male point of view. In Fez, he describes a neighbour who is eighty, with an eighteen-year-old wife and many children. The local men congratulate the old man on his virility, and the unmarried Downes “looks forward to the future, when I would be congratulated”. There is no hint of sympathy for the wife, married to a man almost 70 years older, and bearing children at the age of fourteen or even younger.
This changes when two female friends visit him in Casablanca, and he realizes that
The reality was that women were constantly harassed in Morocco. Foreign women travelling alone faced unwanted advances and many instant marriage proposals. Men travelling through the country, on the other hand, lived in a different world [..]. Men could pretty much do whatever they wanted, without consequences.
There is a sense of curiosity, adventure, and learning in the first third of the book, which diminishes in the middle third, making that section less interesting. Downes joins a doctoral program at Harvard and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then in Washington DC. In these sections of the book, he is the hero of every anecdote. There are hapless Arabic-speaking students in Boston, where Downes is the only competent or brave person able to deal with their problem. In Mauritania, his presentation so impresses the Ministry of Education that it becomes the English curriculum for the country. He becomes the guardian angel for a group of teenage break-dancers from Brooklyn. The IT guy he sends to Russia is hopelessly impractical, in contrast to Downes himself who has to provide common-sense advice via long-distance phone call.
Meanwhile, he enters into an arranged marriage with a Moroccan woman called Nadia, and the telling of this tale left me with lots of questions. Of course, it left the US bureaucracy with lots of questions too.
“What is Nadia’s birth date?” asked the administrative officer.
“Nadia, when is your birthday?” I asked my wife.
“Wait a minute, don’t you know her birthday?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we just met.”
“You just met your wife?”
“Yes.”
The Downes family is assigned to Yemen, Bulgaria and Romania, but the most interesting section of the book, to me, was the last third, where he is assigned to Jerusalem in 1994. In his mid-thirties now, and a father of three, he describes the city’s ‘pulsating history’.
Millenia of memories and countless grudges over past injustices linger, just like the enduring cobblestoned streets. Every conversation [..] somehow linked to a moment in time, some recent and some ancient. […] Neutrality was an illusion.
On such a fraught subject, readers may criticize the author as being too sympathetic to one side or another, but I thought it was a balanced description of his experiences there as well as the history. And of course, incredibly topical today.
Each person’s journey is their own, but Azzedine Downes has written a fascinating memoir which gives a feel for his immersive travels with the Peace Corps.
[Oddly enough, there is another Peace Corps memoir also called The Couscous Chronicles, this one by Richard Waller. Also oddly, Downes does not seem to be particularly sympathetic to animals in this memoir, but is now the CEO of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.]
It sounds like a really interesting book and account. But after reading the review, I somehow came away feeling I don’t much like Downes. I am left with a feeling that he is a bit too smug, or pleased with himself. Is that inaccurate? Unfair? Normally it does not matter if a character, even a protagonist, is unlikeable, some books indeed are premised on that successfully. But this is a memoir, and if I am not in sympathy with the author, the memoir may well be a lot less enjoyable…
I think he is a bit smug in the early chapters, which perhaps reflects his youth at the time. He seems less so in the later chapters. I did like it that the writing reflects the age of the protagonist at the time — that’s hard to pull off in a memoir. I found the book very interesting, despite the times when I was less in sympathy with Downes.