If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public: Prostitution in Morocco
If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public: Prostitution in Morocco
3 minute read
Khadija sat on her bed mat, peering into her tiny mirror. She rubbed in a moisturizer with sunscreen, then applied eyeliner, then eyeshadow, then mascara, then powder, then lip gloss. She moved the mirror closer to her face so as to see that all of the applications had been done right. She brushed her long, glossy hair with a small plastic brush. She clipped the hair at the nape of her neck. She changed out of a floral pajama into a yellow pajama. She put her black djellaba over the yellow pajama, the djellaba's silver appliqué muted in her dark, windowless room. She kicked off her plastic shoes and slipped into her sandals. She looked again into the mirror, checking that her hair was still all right. All of this to pass from the inside to the outside, from her private concrete room to the public streets flooded with wolves.Tiana Markova-Gold
They approached the project with the express intent to “dismantle preconceived notions of the prostitute as sexual deviant,” an idea that Markova-Gold has explored in earlier projects on her own in the Bronx and Macedonia. Dohrmann had previously lived in Morocco, where she learned Moroccan Arabic and had begun writing about her interactions with female Moroccan sex workers. Their method is collaborative and unconventional, pairing Markova-Gold’s impressionistic and occasionally inscrutable photographs with Dohrmann’s narrative and very personal literary style. With time and space, the pair was able to cultivate deep and nuanced relationships with several women, resulting in a complex and holistic story. Working in a developing Islamic country during the Arab Spring allowed the pair to explore how other issues affected the subjects of their project, such as globalization, religion, politics and migration.
A wide-ranging and challenging subject deserves such a patient and extensive approach, and the pair has recently begun to work with their material in earnest. Typically the work for the Lange-Taylor prize is not revealed until the project is finished, but Dohrmann and Markova-Gold agreed to share some of the ideas they are working on exclusively with LightBox.
Markova-Gold shot primarily with film, but also used her iPhone to provide more instant feedback and evidence of the situations she was shooting. The photographs in the series above consist of iPhone photos, processed with the ShakeItPhoto app, which she found to be the closest approximation to her film work. As the project progressed, she found the images resonated beyond their immediate use and ultimately are relevant to the final project. They are paired with some of Dohrmann’s preliminary writing, which was written in a daily log of their time together, and focuses on one of their subjects, Khadija. The final project, slated for completion by the end of the year, will feature film and digital photography from Markova-Gold, and a long-form essay by Dohrmann.
Editor’s note: All of the Moroccan women’s names published here have been changed in the interest of protecting their safety.
Tiana Markova-Gold is a freelance documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. More of her work can be seen on her web site and her blog.
Sarah Dohrmann is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her work has appeared in Bad Idea: The Anthology, Teachers & Writers Magazine, and The Iowa Review. You can read more of her work on her blog,Und You Vill Like It.
This gallery is an exclusive sneak peek into the 20th Lange-Taylor Prize project, with photographs by Tiana Markova-Gold and writing by Sarah Dohrmann.
More than one person we talked to said that becoming a prostitute was a matter of choice. One woman said no Moroccan woman would ever be left to live on the street — everyone has a family in Morocco. She said it’s custom that women, no matter how old they become, live with their families. But what if there is no father to support her? I asked. What if the girl's father is abusive, sexually or otherwise? Or what if she just wants to live on her own? She said that didn’t happen in Morocco. Only women of the elite class live on their own, and if a poor girl leaves her family and goes into prostitution, that's her choice.Tiana Markova-GoldIt was Taha, a Moroccan friend, who introduced me to Meriem. I told him I was looking for a woman to tutor me in Moroccan Arabic. She's a prostitute, but she's very smart, Taha said. I said I didn't care what Meriem did to make her money outside of tutoring me. And anyway, it was her language I wanted to learn most — the kind not found in books.
During our first session Meriem told me she became a prostitute because she lost her virginity. She was telling me her life story in Arabic. I stopped her occasionally in order to be sure I wasn't hearing her wrong. Your childhood boyfriend raped you? I asked. I repeated her use of the word that I realized I was only assuming meant “rape”. She nodded yes while I looked the word up in my Moroccan Arabic-English dictionary. But "rape" wasn't in the dictionary.
I tried a different tack: You're saying he forced you to have sex with him? She nodded, sipped her coffee. And then, strangely, she shook her head. No, she said, We were friends. I offered her one of my cigarettes, which she took. She got a phone call. She started arguing with the person on the other end, and then she started crying. She was saying, I want to live in Spain, Mama. I don't want to live in Morocco anymore.Tiana Markova-GoldOne day I asked Khadija: If you could do any other work what would you do? We were walking from the coffee shop where she works, to the hotel where she really works. She was meeting a client at the hotel; he was on an errand to buy condoms. She said she didn't want to be married and stuck at home with some man. But that wasn't my question, I said. I was asking about work. What other job would you do if you could? Like what? she asked. I can't read, Sarah. We walked in silence for a bit. I thought, with a 60% illiteracy rate among women in Morocco, you are not alone. Well, why not be a hairstylist? I asked. No, you have to be able to read for that. You do? Yes, in school you have to be able to write how to do the hairdos. We walked a bit further, by then the hotel was within sight. Well why don't you learn to read? I asked. Yes, you're right. You can, I said, You're young, you can still learn. There are places here, she said, places that teach people like me. You see? I said. Her client walked up to us. He'd gone to one pharmacy, but they didn't have condoms, so he was going to another. I'll be back in five minutes, he said. By then we were standing in front of the hotel. OK, she told him, I'll be right here.Tiana Markova-GoldKhadija works from a café but sometimes she strolls through town to find her friend Ghita. Ghita sometimes works in the café, too, but mostly she walks along a promenade, in part because she is a woman who wears the headscarf. It would be shameful for her to solicit from a café that is known for prostitution while wearing a headscarf. Same for Mouna, who also wears the headscarf — she'd never work in a café or a bar. Instead, Mouna lies in bed and takes calls on her cell phone, then meets her clients in hotels.Tiana Markova-GoldKhadija doesn't wear the headscarf, even though she often wears a djellaba (a traditional Moroccan robe). One day Khadija wanted to show us a great place to hang out, and as we neared the place — which was a square with a fountain in the center — she seemed disappointed to see the fountain wasn't running and the square was fairly empty of people. Just passersby like us. This place is great in the evening, she said. I imagined her sitting there with other people on a park bench, even with her friend Mouna who likes to boss her around; she’d be happily watching the children play and the women gossip and the food hawkers selling snails in snail broth. I imagined Khadija feeling free of her own life and the café where she works and, even, free of her daughter. We stopped for only a few seconds in the square, then continued up a small hill that, at its top, looked over the city — its heart far away, clinging to the coastline.Tiana Markova-GoldIn one of Morocco’s charming seaside towns, it takes only five minutes to exit the European-saturated old medina and find yourself walking, suddenly, through a seaside pile of trash. You have only to want to go beyond the old city's gentrified streets into local territory where everyday Moroccans are struggling to survive — many of whom work as prostitutes.
Like so many things in Morocco, it's impossible to tell if the garbage dump is a government-designated area, or if it's just a spot that locals have chosen to toss their junk.
Piles of the trash, heaping and sprawled, are a compilation of folks' unwanted things let out to rot: orange juice cartons, red tubes, flattened shoes facing down, the ubiquitous plastic sack. There are also rug remnants, soda bottles, water bottles, beer cans, fabric swatches, cardboard boxes, flour sacks, yoghurt containers, red bricks cracked in half, underwear, knit caps, pairs of shorts, and broken tiles. Everywhere there are broken tiles.
Most people turn their backs on trash. They don't want anything to do with what’s already been used. If anyone considers trash at all, they think only of where to put it so it won't contaminate what’s still good. Either way the trash is still there, hardly decomposing outside old city walls.Tiana Markova-GoldKhadija's daughter lives with Khadija's sister. Khadija can't keep Noura because she shares one room with another woman who also works as a prostitute. The room is unfit for a child. To be honest, the room is no more fit for adults.
One day we ate lunch with Khadija and Noura. There didn't seem to be much attachment between the two of them at the restaurant, which was a sad observation to make because it reminded me they don't live together, and then I had to think, again, that they don't live together because Khadija is a sex worker. But later, after lunch, when Khadija was holding Noura and walking down the street with her, she put Noura down and hid behind a tree. Noura cried terribly. So there was attachment. I don't know why Khadija put Noura down and then hid from her. It was the kind of joke grownups like to play on their children — hide-and-seek. But so rarely do children really get a kick out of the game. They only wail pitifully, and then they're relieved when they see their mother again. It's not just relief. It's something more, something more powerful than relief. Pure need. I think this is why grownups play the game: to be reminded their children need them.Tiana Markova-GoldIn Morocco, if you smoke cigarettes in public, you are prostitute. That's what I was told. I was shocked to hear it, so I took to asking all kinds of Moroccan people again and again: What do you think of women who smoke in public? I was, after all, a woman who smoked in public. Well, you're a foreigner, some said, so you don’t count — and if a Moroccan woman is smoking in public, then she’s of a certain class. But lots of young women are smoking in public, I’d say — university women, middle-class women, all kinds of women. Some would say, Of course! and others would say, I know, it’s too bad, and yet others would say, That doesn't mean they're not prostitutes! I learned that the word “prostitute” could also mean, for some Moroccans, any woman who had sex out of marriage: a girl who’d been raped, a single mother, a divorcée, a widow — droves of women forced to society’s margins. People also said: Women with dyed black hair are prostitutes. Women with their eyebrows overly-waxed are prostitutes, women who chew gum in a solicitous manner, women who go to nightclubs, women who go to cafés alone.Tiana Markova-GoldKhadija sat on her bed mat, peering into her tiny mirror. She rubbed in a moisturizer with sunscreen, then applied eyeliner, then eyeshadow, then mascara, then powder, then lip gloss. She moved the mirror closer to her face so as to see that all of the applications had been done right. She brushed her long, glossy hair with a small plastic brush. She clipped the hair at the nape of her neck. She changed out of a floral pajama into a yellow pajama. She put her black djellaba over the yellow pajama, the djellaba's silver appliqué muted in her dark, windowless room. She kicked off her plastic shoes and slipped into her sandals. She looked again into the mirror, checking that her hair was still all right. All of this to pass from the inside to the outside, from her private concrete room to the public streets flooded with wolves.Tiana Markova-GoldEach time I see Khadija I look for bruises. I think, Yes, there are dark circles around her eyes; she's been hit in the face. I am sure that between the time since we've last seen her — at the café, in her home, on the street waving goodbye — that she'd walked off into the night, slept with the wrong man, and then she was beaten. It takes me several minutes upon seeing her again to convince myself that she has not been beaten, and that she is all right, that she is all right.Tiana Markova-GoldKhadija said she was pregnant. Again? It just came out like that — I didn't mean it to. What are you going to do? I asked. Khorat. That's what she said, that's what the words sounded like: Gha nkhorat. Leaving? Emptying something? I didn’t understand. Then she made a motion with her hands, low by her belly, moving her hands further down so that they were pulling an invisible something from her. If I didn't get the words perfect, I got the message loud and clear: she wanted to have an abortion.
I've already got a daughter, she said. As we walked to the short wall that borders the promenade from the ocean, she said she needed money in order to have an abortion. We sat on the ledge that borders cement and sand. Is it legal? No, but ... she said she knew a girl who knew a doctor. She needed to go to that doctor, and depending on the price, she'd go to another clinic if she had to. Only the trouble with the cheaper one is they don't use painkillers. But I've already got a baby, she said again.Tiana Markova-GoldTwo women who work with Khadija said the thing that was wrong with her was she was always falling in love; she's always giving away her things. I remembered seeing Khadija at the beach one day with one of her new boyfriends, how he was wearing her "N" pendant on his necklace — the "N" was the first letter of her daughter's name. How quickly she'd given her "N" to the new man. Did he know what it meant? Did he know she had a daughter at all? Khadija had been married once before to the man who'd raped her when she was 14. Her father had died when she was young, so her family was left without negotiators. They felt it was the right thing to do — Khadija marrying her rapist. It legitimized the fact that he'd made Khadija damaged goods. But Khadija's daughter was not a product of that marriage. After her divorce (for the marriage didn't last long), Khadija was left with few choices in her life. She was not only poor and no longer a virgin, but she was fatherless, a divorcée, and illiterate to boot. This is when she moved from her village and started into prostitution, at 15 years old. Even so, even years after the rape and the divorce and the man who was her daughter's father had beaten her and locked her away in a room for days until a friend of hers had to come to rescue her, Khadija still believed in the possibility of love. She still gave her "N" away.Tiana Markova-Gold
