Morocco: lie in the wind

The light. Photographer light from morning to evening. A light streaming through a velvet blue, immaculately woven screen. The blue. Never before have we seen such a blue – a blue that flatters the world and even praises it as if it were a well-off world. What kind of blue is that? We don’t really find it on the relevant color palettes. Slate blue? There is no added sound. Perhaps most likely a mixture of periwinkle and lilac blue. Or just sky blue?

And the white of the seagulls, whose lower primaries are set off in black at the tips and whose coats and arm covers are in concrete gray. Painted Kaventsmen, every line and surface of their garments is in the right place. They nest on the roofs of the Medina and steal parts of their catch from the fishermen. Once we watched as a man who was gutting sea eels and other sea creatures threw a lobster at the shameless Nassauers.

They are probably Mediterranean gulls, which are very similar to our herring gulls, which also winter on the North African coast. At night they circle above the light-emitting old town of Essaouira and look like gigantic fireflies. In the bright hours they float tirelessly and effortlessly through the ether, they swim in it, suddenly tipping this way and that, they rise and let themselves fall, fall down like stones, they rock back and forth, tare currents, arrow along, circle the element intended for them and describe steep curves. Their squeaky, squashed call seems to express joy and effort at the same time, accompanied by the endless announcements of the sparrows, which sing on the Moroccan Atlantic coast in a much more varied and colorful way than their simple Central European counterparts.

During the approximately four-hour drive from Agadir to Essaouira, heading north on the N 1, which partly winds its way through the mountains tanned by the eternal sun, a kite sails over the foothills of the High Atlas. It’s called Kite in English. To the left and right, arganiums are scattered over the ocher-colored slopes and plains; they thrive exclusively in the southwest of Morocco – bushy, sprawling, gnarled, evergreen plants adapted to the arid climate, which provide the famous oil and, however, the long-lasting drought, apparently despite the ability to grow into one In many places you can no longer cope with a kind of dry sleep. In some areas, every second ironwood tree is ash-gray – an oppressive sight – and in addition there is the unstoppable deforestation, this cross-cultural “human mischief” (Alexander von Humboldt).

Everywhere there are building ruins waiting for a future, the fields are littered with plastic waste and littered with piles of rubble, emaciated goats, donkeys and dogs roam around, old women sit in the shade. What do people live on here? Just what?

“Essaouira is the windy city of Africa,” says our incredibly friendly taxi driver Said. The onshore trade wind always blows over the beach and the city from the northeast; you can lie down in it while standing by the water and not fall over. It is impossible to keep a cap on, but a motorcycle helmet might be practical. On the terrace of the “Beach & Friends” bar, the beer glass is even nailed down. After two days one is inclined to either scrub down a treatise against the wind or to train as a wind scientist in order to cope with the wild waves, the celestial whip: where to squat? Which corner to drink in?

The light brown sandy beach lies in front of us like a rolled out strudel dough and the emerald green-lead gray Atlantic, a long chain of hills humps on the horizon. The travel guide “Morocco – The Rough Guide” (London 1998) praises the so-called destination as an “immense wind-swept beach”, a paradise for kite surfers who hang on to their lines and colorful kites and drift along like helpless insects caught in a vortex . We hear that the matter is not “riskless” (Karl-Heinz Rummenigge). Recently, our hosts say, a kite surfer crashed onto the beach right next to them and tore off his ear with a line in the fall. His girlfriend was screaming so hysterically until the ambulance arrived that they wanted to slap her in the face.

Essaouira was a hippie mecca. The annals record stays by the Stones, Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison, especially Jimi Hendrix. In 1969 he spent eleven days here and is said to have composed the somnambulistic song “Castles Made Of Sand”, this feverish piece about the painful fragility and catastrophic contingency of life, love, all bonds, into which he planted a shimmering, enigmatic reverse solo . “And so castles made of sand/ Fall in(to) the sea eventually.” That can’t be true. “Castles Made Of Sand” had already been released in 1967. But myths have their own right, and they fill the streets of the Medina, the old town, where they coexisted for more than two centuries: the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians.

The expanse outside, the narrowness inside. We are privileged. We live in a classic riad, a Moorish courtyard house, near the Bab Marrakech city gate. Many of these accommodations are now in the hands of Europeans and have been luxuriously renovated. Voices can be heard that fear that soon no locals will be able to live here anymore.

The riad is nested in a tangle of stone cubes that are tilted together. Unlike in Western architecture, no window faces the street. The shaft-like patio never has a roof. Balustrades made of delicate columns adorn the terraces, and the three floors are accessible via narrow, steep stairs. When you step in front of the obligatory blue door – the blue, they say, drives away evil spirits – you are surrounded by towering white walls that ward off the heat and from which the plaster is peeling off. Until a few years ago, sewage still flowed through the alleys, where sometimes no two people were next to each other and wooden handcarts could barely fit through. They are “alleyways,” writes Tahar Ben Jelloun in his great novel “Son of Her Father” (Reinbek 1989), “in which animals and crazy people get caught as if in a trap,” especially cats, cats, cats, scrawny cats dozing in baskets, on ledges, on thresholds and on the pavement. The car-free medina is a world heritage site. Four axes drawn with a ruler – a rarity in the Orient – divide it.

Essaouira, which has been called Mogador since the Portuguese occupation in the early 16th century, was once the gateway to Timbuktu, the largest port in North Africa. Despite booming tourism, fishing still contributes 40 percent of the income of the largely poor population. In the port, near which Orson Welles tormented himself with the film adaptation of “Othello” – a charmless place is a reminder of this – loads of blue boats are moored, and a cloud of maritime smells wafts under the sky, into which the wind is constantly blowing.

Essaouira: “the trapped one”. In the 18th century, Sultan Sidi Mohamed ben Abdallah had the fortifications further expanded. In the northwest, the medina is bordered by a massive defensive tower, the facade of which has been gnawed by the trade winds. The cannons, cast in Spain, lens between the battlements of the city wall, the Sqala de la Kasbah, over darkly shaded rugged rocks. Some episodes of “Game Of Thrones” were filmed here.

We stroll – the streets are gradually emptying – to the “Caravane Café” on Rue du Qadi Ayad. A trio performs Gnawa or, in French, Gnaoua music, which descendants of West African black slaves cultivated in Morocco. The room steams, vibrates, pulsates, the young woman on the gimbri, a three-stringed long-necked lute, conjures up beguiling syncopated bass lines, and two boys in sky-blue costumes accompany her with metal bells – the qaraqib -, dancing to it as if in a mystical transport and whirling through the air Air equals weightless beings.

You can hear it with your ears: Now it’s clear where the origins of jazz lie. And where Frank Zappa got his fabulous stuff. The geniuses are among us, in the Global South. She just doesn’t know anyone.