Getting Souked Back In part one

يتم إرجاعه مرة أخرى

الجزء الأول

I’ve wandered too far…

The narrow alleyway becomes narrower still, as five young men surround me. They are sporting flip flops and snazzy buzzcuts, rubbing their stomachs like tired old men, as an excuse to lift their t-shirts—revealing their very chiselled six-packs, which scream out “Beware! We are in fighting condition.”

“Are you lost?” they ask, leaning in close—I smell their morning breath.

“You are lost!” they proclaim, laying their hands intimidatingly onto my shoulders.

Perhaps I ought to have listened to those men in the previous streets, telling me things like “The road is closed there,” “Friend, you cannot go that way,” “Only Muslims can go there now,” and “You are looking for the Medina, follow me.”  

This is a well-rehearsed ritual. The locals here choreograph visitors’ movements like scientists guiding mice through a laboratory maze.

For there is an agreement, perhaps unspoken but deeply understood by all locals: Marrakesh is divided territory—carved into two zones. Where they border, how they are divided and how one crossed over between them, are secrets thoroughly kept from most visitors. No map explicitly or definitively demarcates these zones, yet all current maps of Marrakesh do suggest their existence, more or less. You have the zone in which touristic visitors are welcomed, and you have the zone out of which they must be repelled at all cost.