Space

            A friend came over the other night to cook dinner and catch up on Downton Abbey.  While we talked, the subject of space (as in the space around us, not the one above us) came up.  As women in a foreign country, space is an element of life that has a great deal of importance for us-we deal with it in everything from how much “personal bubble” space we get in a taxi with six other people to what spaces we are and are not allowed to occupy.

            It has become clear over my time here that space is very much a cultural creation.  I think many people in the States come to expect a certain amount of personal space.  That space ranges from the literal space around us to the space we can demand from others in the form of privacy or alone time to the space to make our own decisions and choices about things we want to do and who we want to be.  For many people, I am also certain that they feel that they do not have as much space as they wish and that expectations, demands and merely the existence of others affect their space in various ways.  So the short and long of it is that even within my own culture, the ideas and expectations that surround space can be problematic.  In many ways however, it is easier to navigate these than it is to navigate the expectations that surround space within a culture very different from my own.

            In the US, at least in my experience, public space is just that: public.  It is for everyone and as such, people’s behaviors within that space are meant to follow certain mores and norms.  In Morocco, this is not necessarily the case and is certainly not the case in the small town in which I reside.  In this place, public space is male space.  Any space outside of the home is the space that belongs to and is governed by men and by their behaviors and expectations.  Here I must credit my friend because she suggested that one of the reasons we (as female volunteers and as women) experience so much harassment is that men react every time we encroach upon their space, otherwise known as leaving the house (unaccompanied by a male to help us navigate this space). They notice this non-compliance with cultural norms and they acknowledge it. The reactions range from everything from a prolonged stare to a verbal assault.  While I hesitate to reduce harassment to such a simple level (I think it also relates to a certain powerlessness that men feel as a result of economic and societal factors), it does help to explain some of the possible motivation behind what we experience.

            I want to make it clear at this point that I do not experience a great deal of harassment in my site.  The men here tend to be courteous to me and the only time I generally experience problems with harassment are during the weekly market when there are many men from out of town.  But the fact remains that I do reside and work in a place in which the outside world is for the men.  Women’s work is regulated primarily to the home or to what we would describe as traditionally “female” trades such as teaching and nursing.  In my community, there are no women that work for the local association.  There are no women in leadership positions.  There isn’t even a space for women to gather outside of their own homes.  If one were to walk through town in the middle of the day, one might imagine the place to be inhabited only by men and school-aged children.  And then that weird foreign lady on the bike.

            The effects of the male/public space are not limited to me being the only woman amongst 500 men at the local souq.  It influences my work, my free time and how people think of me.  Before I talk about work, I do want to point out that I think these different ideas of space affect us as female volunteers because we are female but also because we are foreigners.  I, of course, am not a male volunteer so I cannot write about space from their perspective, though I believe that different ideas of space still affect them, just in different ways.  As a female volunteer, I can speak about my experience as such.  Since arriving in my site, I have felt that a male volunteer would have been more successful in terms of work.  This is not a community where women play much of, if any role in the public sphere.  I have often felt that the men with whom I have tried to work were amused by me but didn’t necessarily take me seriously.  That of course may be related to the fact that I am younger than them, but I also felt that it was because I was a woman.  Because I cannot not take part in the social lives of these men, our relationship remains purely worked based.  While I feel that that is appropriate, I don’t think I was able to build trust and a strong relationship with these men as a result.  They tolerate my encroachment upon their space, but they do not enjoy it.  In Peace Corps trainings we were often told that we got to play the role of the third gender.  I think this is true in many respects.  Although they do not necessarily enjoy working with me, the men here still do it.  I am allowed to exist in their space which I am not sure would be necessarily true for a Moroccan woman.  My status as a foreigner gives me some leeway to break out of assigned gender roles and spaces.  And Hamduallah for that.  But I have still struggled to work with these men and to have them see me as an equal player in that work.

            Over the last year and a half, I feel that I have learned to navigate these different expectations of space and place. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people in my community still think I’m a crazy French lady with short hair who rides her bike all over.  But I’m ok with that.  I get work done.  I meet people. I have friends and people are really nice to me.  And I think it’s good for people to realize that ideas of space and place are not universal.  Privacy and enjoying alone time are very much Western concepts.   It’s been good for me to realize these things and I hope I have helped at least a few people here realized that their own concepts and ideas about things do not exist everywhere.  I hope at some point more women in this community can begin to feel that the public space, or at least parts of the public space, belongs to them too.  Maybe they’ll build a women’s association or a cooperative so that women’s space gets to be expand past the four walls of their concrete homes.  Inshallah.  And now I’m going to go enjoy my giant personal bubble that is my house.  And I’m going to do it alone.  And it’s going to be great.