I am – try not to be too viciously jealous – writing this to you while sitting on a terrace. It’s 11am, sunny and mild; I can hear motorbikes and the occasional horse-drawn cart going past the flat. Earlier, I popped into the market to buy some msemen and baghrir for breakfast. I am, in short, writing this to you from Marrakech.
I’ve been here for nearly three weeks now, though I am leaving tomorrow. As you may know, if you read the Dilettante column published last month, I felt a bit apprehensive about this trip. I’m half Moroccan but don’t quite look or sound the part; my mother grew up here and I did go with her a lot as a child and teenager, but Morocco felt both familiar and foreign to me. Would I be able to fit in?
The answer is, it turns out, quite complicated. In some ways, no, I did not manage to fit in. My darija – the local Arabic dialect – is patchy at best. I counted one evening, while bored, and estimated that I know between 50 and 60 words in the language. Morocco’s answer to Shakespeare, I am not.
There are also some subtle customs that clearly still escape me, and I look very blatantly French, both because of my genes and my dress sense. No one here has looked at me and thought: ah, here she is, a Marrakchia woman just like us. This is something I assumed would happen, but I worried, before going, that it would make me feel sad and alienated from my roots.
Instead, and to my genuine surprise, it’s something I ended up enjoying. I didn’t quite understand why at first: surely no one wants to feel like a foreigner in a familiar place. That’s the stuff of middle-brow, neurotic 20th-century novels. What was going on? In the end, it hit me quite randomly, as epiphanies often do. I enjoyed not looking the part for once, because I feel like a bit of an alien everywhere, and it usually doesn’t show.
I’ve been living in Britain for over 15 years now, and my accent is good enough that most people who meet me don’t realise I’m an immigrant. I’ve been asked if I studied at an international school a handful of times, but that’s usually it. I’m also integrated enough to understand the subtleties of class, and the bits of etiquette which the rest of the world often finds baffling.
Still, I’m not British. I don’t think I will ever be. I’m a Londoner, but that’s a different thing. When people assume I’m British, as they so often do, it makes me feel as if they’re erasing a crucial part of my identity.
I love the country dearly, and consider it my home, but wish it were acknowledged more often that I am, if anything, a bit like those rich people of old who would live in hotels for months and years at a time. I don’t fully belong, probably never will, and that’s an important part of me.
The flipside of this is that, whenever I go back to France, people don’t think twice about who I am. My name is Marie Le Conte, my French is native, and that’s all there is to it.
Again, that sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable. I moved away at 17 and have only been back around twice a year since. I’ve never been an adult in France. I’ve no idea what’s happened there, culturally, over the past decade and a half. I look and sound the part, but I don’t fully belong there either, and it’s something I wish I could communicate to people, but it would be odd for me to do so.
In short: I have been greedy and decided to spread myself across multiple countries, meaning that not one of them feels fully mine, but it’s a decision I made purposely and happily, and I am at peace with it. Most of the time, however, I feel like an impostor in someone else’s clothes, as no one can see that it’s what I’ve done.
I only realised all this when in Marrakech, and having conversations with people that felt like they were the wrong way round. Cab drivers and chatty market sellers would assume that I was a tourist, then beam with delight when I explained that my mum had grown up here, and that I could babble in darija. They then proceeded to treat me like some sort of friendly neighbourhood stray cat, always welcome inside even if it ends up leaving afterwards and going off to do its own thing.
An international, friendly neighbourhood stray cat is how I feel most of the time, and it’s sweetly ironic that I integrated so well in Britain that people can no longer see me as that. It probably is for the best, as it’s helped my career, life and friendships, but it was unexpectedly lovely to get to truly feel like myself for a few weeks here. Marrakech both is and isn’t home, in the way that Nantes and London both are and aren’t, and that’s a privilege, not a pity.
