Berkley Center

I was standing in Place Seffarine, Fez’s copper-making square, savoring the open sky after spending the afternoon in the winding, often dark, streets of the medina, when I saw a man gesture at me from across the square. He seemed to be explaining something to his young daughter. As they moved to within a few feet of me and the man’s finger was pointed directly at my face, I could finally discern what he was telling her.

That’s an Indian. That’s what they look like.

There is a preoccupation here with nationality. Men have shouted Bollywood actresses’ names at me as I walk down the street and have attempted to converse with me in Hindi. Sometimes there will be a public interrogation where men follow me and ask, "Espagnol? Hindiya? Francais?" I had a cab driver who asked where I was from before he asked where I was going. At family events, when my sister introduces me as her American host sister, many people look confused. “But you’re Indian,” they insist. An American friend of Korean descent has oftentimes been greeted with a "Konichiwa" and a bow. I heard of another student who said she has met individuals who will only speak in French with her, despite her comfort in Arabic, because they associate her with those who come to Morocco from Sub-Saharan African countries.

While many of these interactions are clearly street harassment, this post is not about street harassment in general. Rather, it is about attempting to understand the reasons for the preoccupation with nationality here. Every person I referenced previously is American—we walk down the streets of the medina with our floppy boho pants, sporting backpacks and often speaking English to each other. Yet, many people see only our facial features, our skin color, and our hair type. Why must I qualify my nationality with my ethnicity, while others—whose parents are immigrants just like my own—are just “American” because they trace their origins to Ireland or France and not to Korea, India, or Ghana?

This question brings to mind Taiye Selasi’s TED Talk titled “Don’t Ask Where I’m From, Ask Where I’m a Local.” She questions how human beings can come from nations, figments of our collective imagination. While the idea that nationality is somehow tied to ethnicity is not a uniquely Moroccan phenomenon, the extremely vocal and public nature of this belief’s practice may have ties to the concept of Moroccan nationality. One of the pillars of the Moroccan monarchy is bay’ah, a pledge of allegiance that all Moroccans, living within or outside its borders, must take to the king. Institutions like the Hassan II Foundation and the Ministry of Moroccans Living Abroad fund Arabic lessons and history classes in various European countries and offer trips for Moroccans residing outside the country so that they can maintain ties with their culture. A Moroccan, in the eyes of the state, is anyone who descended from a Moroccan national.

The problem with this concept of a Moroccan is that it promotes a mutual exclusivity between heritage and nationality. I was in Amsterdam for a few days with my program to study Moroccan migration to the Netherlands (Moroccans make up its second largest minority group) and learned that while the Netherlands allows dual citizenship, Moroccans living there had to fight the Moroccan government for years for permission to obtain Dutch citizenship. Individuals whose grandparents moved to the Netherlands from Morocco are still referred to as “Moroccan,” though they feel few ties to their family’s country of origin.

Following independence in 1956, Morocco consolidated into a nation-state by promoting an idea of Moroccan identity; a practice that relied on exclusion of differences and on the development of a common narrative. Most Moroccans I’ve met have immediately made me feel like family, and any questions they have about my background come from a place of genuine curiosity and compassion. I wonder, however, if the seemingly probing questions about nationality that I get daily on the street are rooted in the reality that ethnicity, nationality, and culture are not yet seen as completely different entities here. On a lighter note, the merger of these three categories makes for a much shorter introduction. It’s much easier to say “I’m American” than it is to explain “I’m an American of Indian ethnicity whose culture is as much drawn from the suburbs of Boston as it is from West Bengal.” But really, where’s the fun in the first one?