Myths, Mosaics, and Memory
By Kaedyn Murphy
We started the day by traveling to Meknes, an Imperial city located about an hour west of Fes. We were greeted by Habiba from the Anassi Cultural Center, a government funded community center that hosts weekly classes on self-growth, language, music, computers/technology, and dance/yoga. It also hosts various other workshops and cultural events throughout the year, and will soon be hosting movies in their newly installed movie room. These centers, located all around the country, have also begun implementing new programs that allow a space for women who primarily stay at home to socialize and take classes on personal growth and child development.
After our tour of the center, we sat down in one of their rooms to begin a lecture by Atki Mustapha on the rich history of Volubilis, a site just north of the community center and home to acres of Roman ruins. He began by giving us an overview of the different groups of people who inhabited Morocco throughout history, spanning from the oldest Homo Sapien 300,000 years ago up to the Amazigh kingdoms and Roman cities. Mustapha explained that all Roman cities were built upon preexisting Mauritania cities and showed us a map of nine major Roman cities that thrived from 40 CE to the 3rd century (as seen above). Volubilis, the most central city on the map, is considered to be the best-preserved Roman remains in Morocco due to it being largely abandoned in the 11th century. However, the city did undergo severe damage from the devastating earthquake of 1755, in addition to being stripped of its marble in the 18th century to build the town of Meknes. Luckily, in 1751, a British man named John Windus found the remains before the earthquake and drew three of its buildings, which was later used to reconstruct the remains to what they look like today.
Mustapha, who worked at the site of Volubilis for eight years, explained how archaeologists and historians discovered through the remains that over five different cultures and religions (Romans, Syrians, Greeks, Arabs, and Jews) lived together at this site, estimated to total to 20,000 people at its peak.
After the incredible lecture, it was time to see the amazing and historic site for ourselves. We met another guide to walk us through the ruined city, pointing out the remains of villas, columns, walls, aquaducts, arches, the basilica, the spa, and most impressively: the intricate stone mosaics of classic Roman narratives.
Once we returned to our hotel, we were able to have a class with Professor Lefkovitz about the Tales of Fez: a series of nine classic Moroccan folktales that the students analyzed and synthesized to reflect on the common themes, archetypes, and motifs that are not just within the Moroccan storytelling tradition, but shared by cultures throughout the world.
Stories everywhere hold immense cultural power- shaping our values, reflecting social hierarchies, and highlighting binaries that structure how we first saw the world. The Tales of Fez and mosaics in Volubilis reflect a shared culture of retelling. Although throughout this trip we have acknowledged the multiple narratives and memories of the past, we focused our class tonight on the opposite: that cultures tell the same story over and over again.
Professor Lefkovitz posed us all a question at the beginning of our class: why do we read literature? Some students answered to entertain ourselves or to learn, but Professor Lefkovitz explained that great books and stories are already inside of us. They reflect the culture that we have experienced through living. Reading is not to digest and acquire new information but to get it out of our system. These stories live in our subconscious and the only way to liberate it from cultural tyranny is to think and talk about it. To repeat my favorite quote of Professor Lefkovitz: “culture does its work best when it masquerades as nature.”
The nine stories in the Tales of Fez constantly repeated themes and archetypes. Some students acknowledged the popularity of love stories with class dynamics- think Cinderella or the Little Mermaid. Others brought up the test motif- a hero has to undergo a series of trials that usually ends in marrying the Sultan’s daughter or another woman. Students shared and analyzed their interpretations of three stories from this book, reflecting on shared archetypes and patterns such as the use of magic, the destabilization of social hierarchies, and the meaning of death versus marriage at a stories’ end. But they also discussed the more troubling patterns within these stories of harmful and problematic archetypes, particularly among women and Jews. Jewish characters are almost always cast as shadowy figures known for wielding dark magic and often end up getting killed- offering a necessary but expendable role in the story. Women, too, are often put into rigid roles. Students identified four types of female characters we saw in these stories: an evil step-mother, a fairy god mother, an innocent young female, or an intelligent and patient character who never speaks up against the injustices against her. As many of these stories often include marriage, the woman is treated as a commodity, a prize to be won, a symbol of purity that is transferred between men.
The persistence of these motifs and the retelling of these stories affirm the deeper values and power structures that reflect society dynamics. Even though these stories often reverse identity, power, and gender, this only happens temporarily, resulting in a conservative effect by reaffirming the binaries that it seemed to subvert. But, as Professor Lefkovitz explains, there is a trace that is left on the reader or listener of an imaginative world- a world where love defies class, where the poor outwit the powerful, and where kindness is rewarded.
Storytelling is deeply integrated in Moroccan culture, shaping moral, religious, and communal identity. Whether in the Atlas mountains, the mosaics of Roman ruins, or the stained glass of Cathedrals, storytelling lives on, not just as entertainment- but as the skeleton of memory and canon of culture and imagination.
