like this grevillea, I am far from home
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While I am grateful to live in Australia for many reasons (primarily the remoteness of this enormous island from the many horrific conflicts in the world, its clean air and vast open spaces), there are some aspects of travel that I enjoy very much indeed.
One of them is the sensation of being unremarkable when I find myself in a place where neither my skin colour nor my habit of dressing in flowing layers is anything out of the ordinary. Growing up under the “White Australia Policy” (the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, that effectively banned incomers who were not from Europe and which wasn’t really softened until the early 1970s) was certainly character building.
I’ve written before about various experiences related to my skin colour but am going to bang about them just a little (again) given that lately one or two people have taken it upon themselves to query why I dare to use a honey-coloured folded hands emoji. One like this 🙏🏾. I use it because it’s the closest one to the colour of me, which does not resemble the yellow version at all.
Although all of my DNA is from the north of the equator I have been treated as a person of colour since birth, so have grown to embrace it and to consider myself a woman of colour both personally and professionally, albeit one who enjoys considerable privilege. That said, I have faded somewhat (perhaps it’s just the result of my skin stretching over my expanding body) with time and age. The picture below found recently among my grandmother’s things illustrates why I was asked to leave the school choir in 1970. These days PLC has a splendidly multicultural student body…back then I think there were about three of us (out of about 900 students) who were brown, and my face stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of rosy-cheeked and largely fair-haired angels. My inability to hit high notes may have played a part too, but you’d think it might be useful to extend the harmonic range of a choral group. Ah well. It stopped me singing for a long time, but the synaptic pruning that has come with age now has me breaking into song at the drop of a hat. Stick your fingers in your ears if it bothers you.
That’s my Ma on the left, and my grandmother (paternal) on the right. My feet are not really as enormous as the angle of the camera might suggest, and I think that must have been an eyelash on the negative rather than a curved scar on my leg. It’s no great shakes as a photo, but you can see why I might consider myself a person of colour. That is not a tan.
So it is with great pleasure that I have arrived here in Morocco, where I am splendidly inconspicuous other than my inability to mumble more than two words of Arabic.
A few days before my journey began I had a text message from the airline informing me that my flight had been cancelled and giving a number to ring for a refund. I had been engaged to come and tell stories and accompany a hopeful group of travellers on an adventure, so this was not a welcome message. When I telephoned Qantas they told me that the flight had been cancelled due to “the situation in the Middle East”. I replied that the situation in the Middle East had been going on since 1948 and that I very much needed to honour this particular commitment please, so after a bit of shuffling they accorded me a seat that had me flying east to Melbourne, west (over my initial departure port) to Perth, then north to Singapore and west again to London Heathrow. Unless I am stopping over in Singapore in order to spend a day in the Botanic Garden, Changi is an airport I prefer to avoid. The masses of orchids there are not worth the sensory shopping mall overload that the rest of Changi offers or the stress of having to get oneself through security before they shut the gate of the holding pen half an hour before boarding. It is not a place for the neuro divergent.
Arrived in Heathrow I waited anxiously for my luggage (for some reason almost the last to be expelled from the aircraft) and then found a bus to Gatwick. Sadly I was not quick enough to photograph the large yellow road sign that read
which somehow struck me as enormously funny, though that may simply have been a consequence of having been on the move for more than thirty hours at that point. Happily the bus was not caught in one. The bus driver, though diminutive in stature and with a chirpy face-to-face voice, practiced the use of Bogartesque baritones when making announcements over the intercom, which seemed incongruous and made me giggle. I guess I’m not the only one who likes to do a bit of theatre.
I lurked at Gatwick for five hours before boarding my next flight, and then once we were all seated and the doors closed, the plane sat on the tarmac another hour or so while a set of surly baggage handlers sulkily hurled the entire contents of the hold out in search of an article belonging to someone who had failed to board the flight. The area around the plane looked for all the world like a garage sale for suitcases, or some kind of art installation. I found myself pondering whether it would be more interesting to sort them into groups of colours or to attempt to make some kind of pattern. Eventually they were all flung back into the aircraft, the hold door clanged shut with an almighty bang (thankfully nothing fell off the fuselage even though it sounded as though it could have) and we pushed back, only to wait yet another half hour queuing for take-off because we had lost our slot. My face must have been a study because as the charming cabin attendant was fulfilling my request for a gin and tonic, she said “why don’t I just make that two, eh?”. The flight had hardly begun and already my legs were screaming with restless jiggles and nowhere to properly move. Such are the problems that beset the privileged. I’m going to have to plant a lot of trees when I return home in an attempt to mitigate my carbon footprint.
Approaching the airport at Marrakech, the land below resembled an earth-coloured Boucharouite carpet tufted with rows of exquisitely shaped orange trees, fields of indeterminate vegetables and a lot of new housing. Perhaps we were on a different approach than last time, but the older form of housing that was there last time and looked like an illustration from Bernard Rudofsky’s beautiful book “Architecture without Architects” wasn’t visible. Whether they were lost to the earthquake or devoured by development is debatable. I hope the answer is simply that our approach was from a different direction than I remembered from 2019, and that those lovely old dwellings still stand.
I’ve been here a couple of days now, accustoming my soft farm feet to hard city pavements, wandering about marvelling at the architecture (much of which proved surprisingly resistant to the terrifying earthquake last year), feeling sorry for the street cats (ours at home live a life of luxury in comparison) and indulging in the sensual delight of being thoroughly scrubbed down in a hammam. Our group has gathered in readiness for our journey south across the Atlas mountains and I’m delighted to report that they are a bunch of sweeties and I feel they’ll be grand travelling companions.
On my first venture into the souks (kindly guided by someone who could probably find their way through that maze in a blindfold, speaks at least four languages and knows a good story about everything we encountered) I purchased a beautiful handmade lock from an artisan working from the pavement across from where his workshop used to be, before the quake. Perhaps I will be able to charm a house around it one day (sorry if that sounds greedy, but as a former architecture student it has been a longtime dream to design a space for living in).
The size of the orange trees here never fails to amaze me. Though the climate where I live is quite similar, the citrus I planted twenty years ago are still no taller than I am. The architecture is so sensible, too. Imagine if, instead of building horrible hot houses with black tin roofs and air conditioners stuck on the outside like tenacious parasites, houses in South Australia were designed around their gardens, and faced inward to them. It would eliminate the need for all those six foot high fences that keep the neighbours out anyway, and save veritable buckets of dosh on having to cool the interiors.
There are cats everywhere, not always in the best state of health, but seemingly reasonably nourished by the bowls of kibble that concerned citizens strategically place for them. A neutering program would not go astray though, given the heartbreaking numbers of tiny kittens tottering about under the feet of passersby and the wheels of the motorbikes that roar through the alleyways. The marmalade beauty below is one of the healthier examples.
The textures and colours are breathtakingly beautiful. There will be more to come.
If you’ve managed to read this far, then
PS dear potential burglars. Don’t bother going to explore my house, someone will be there all the time that I am away (and it is protected by trained drop-bears anyway).
Travelling through with your words..!!!! Wishing you aand the gathered treasures a wonderful time Looking forward to the door you find for the lock.
India, your piece is wonderful I feel like I am along on your wonderful journey. I love the textures and colors. The lock is magnificent. I must say it angers me what you have had to experience growing up and even today. I will not go on but suffice it to say I think you are beautiful and gift to all of us who follow you. Sending light and love on your journey.