A Massive Earthquake Like This Reminds Us That Morocco Isn't Just A Place For Tourists

There Are Real People With Real Lives Unrelated To Our Vacations

I sleep like a log. I’ve often heard, “Did you feel that quake last night?” I hadn’t. I slept through it. But not Saturday. I bolted up and jumped out of bed at around 2AM and ran downstairs to my office. I had no idea why. It had never happened before. When I fired up my desktop, I saw what had just happened in Morocco. I was horrified. A massive earthquake— either a little under 7 magnitude or a little over 7. And I knew the early reports about damage and casualties were just the beginning and sure to keep growing over the next hours and days.

I remember my first trip to Morocco. Martha and I had been enjoying the beach at Barbate de Franco on the Atlantic side of the Gibraltar Strait. We drove back to the Mediterranean side to a seedy port, Algeciras, loaded the VW van onto a ferry for the 3 hour crossing to Ceuta. I’ll never forget the feeling as we approached Africa. We weren’t in the West anymore. It smelled different. It sounded different. I liked the way it felt. It was 1969 and I’ve been back over a dozen times. I always try to take the ferry and I always urge people who are going to Morocco for the first time to read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles and then go by ferry, not plane.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my memories were my memories and how much came from Bowles’ novel, written the year after I was born. Many years later, I was working at Warner Bros and one our artists, a German band called Dissidenten, had introduced me to the czar of Moroccan music, Abdesalam Akaaboun, who lived in Tangier. He became a wonderful friend and after that first meeting, no trip to Morocco was complete without a visit to his palace. One night on that first trip he offered me a choice— either we would go visit Paul Bowles or to go to a gnaoua healing session. Bowles spent most of his life living in Tangier and died in 1999. I never got to meet him. In those days there were no gnaoua concerts or recordings. It was disreputable, primitive outlaw music. Respectable people would never listen to it. I had heard the rumors and I went with Abdesalam to the healing session which lasted the whole night into dawn in which everyone participates in the music. Now, 4 decades, you can hear gnaoua music in (some) Moroccan restaurants and buy albums and there is even an annual music festival featuring gnaoua music, the Gnaoua World Music Festival that draw hundreds of thousands of people!

The gnaoua culture was centered in the south, primarily in Essaouira, once my favorite place in Morocco-- where I spent time with Jimi Hendrix-- now a tourist magnet. Gnaoua is the traditional music African slaves brought with them from Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Guinea… and adapted it to Islam. The earthquake hit the region hard. The quake was centered south of Marrakech, one of the parts of the country I love visiting most, like Taroudant, a small city on the other side of the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech that is today like what Marrakech— now overrun with tourists and very developed— was like in the '60s and before that. You may be hearing about the horrible devastation and the deaths in Marrakech, because it’s a big city and the media knows about Marrakech. Taroudant is a small city that no one knows of. Marrakech has had 15 reported deaths so far. Tragic. Tiny Taroundant has reported over 450 deaths, sure to grow. In the rural area dotted with tiny villages between the two: over 1,300 deaths.

Lives of people are altered forever, fate changes course in thousands of lives

I went back to sleep because on Saturday afternoon I had to make a speech. I decided to talk about Morocco. I thought about how to introduce the topic, talking about the daily role of prayer in my life. And hours later when I was awake again and when I got up in front of the gathering, I talked about the role of prayer and forgot to mention what I had been praying for that day— the people of Morocco. I never mentioned it at all and awkwardly moved on to the next topic, candidates Blue America supports.

One of the reasons I love Morocco so much is because it is a large and diverse country with a resilient and motivated population and with a mind-blowing, living cultural heritage of which gnaoua music is just a tiny fraction. I forgot to mention that on one of my trips, Abdesalam’s wife taught me to make the most amazing harira, a traditional Moroccan soup that every region has its own version of (as does every housewife). I keep forgetting to bring a jar of my vegan version to the folks in my favorite Moroccan restaurant in L.A., Casablanca on Melrose. Now I should; one of the waiters is from the exact epicenter of the quake. Aside from being a waiter, he brings tours of Americans to see that remote region.