[LifeStyle] Figuig Could Still Be Morocco’s Coolest City

[The GodFather]

 

 

In his poem “The Rolling English Road,” the 20th-century English writer G. K. Chesterton spoke of “a reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire.” I have no idea which road Chesterton meant, nor did I even know who Chesterton was until I googled him while writing this article. But he might as well have been describing the road to Figuig, a vibrant but arid town in the eastern reaches of Morocco.

The bus carrying me and my travel companion, Yassmine Bouattane, lurched back and forth as the highway from Oujda to Figuig alternated between asphalt and dirt, a plume of dust trailing our one-vehicle convoy.

I looked at Yassmine to see how she was coping. She had fallen asleep, apparently far less captivated by reeling, rambling roads than Chesterton and I were.

My journey with Yassmine had begun in Rabat, but my fascination with Figuig started much earlier. It was the first week of September 2021, and, as was to be expected during a Moroccan summer, I was quite sweaty. I had arrived for my first day of classes at the Qalam wa Lawh Center for Arabic Studies in Rabat.

“How are you?” I asked my new teacher in Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic.

“I’m ‘above Figuig,’ as they say,” he replied.

If you haven’t heard this expression before, that’s because it sounds ridiculous in English. But my teacher claimed that the Darija term—best rendered as “fouq Figuig” in the Latin script—had been all the rage among an older generation of Moroccans.

“Figuig used to be the coolest town in Morocco,” my teacher explained. “If you were ‘above Figuig,’ you were basically on top of the world.”

“When exactly was Figuig the coolest town in Morocco?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe the ’70s.”

I wasn’t even sure if my teacher had been alive in the 1970s, but who was I to question the wisdom of a man I had met five minutes earlier?

And so it happened that, whenever a Moroccan friend asked me how I was in Darija, I would answer, “I’m above Figuig.” However, many Moroccans my age didn’t recognize this term, and a number of them thought that I was speaking gibberish. I couldn’t really blame them, of course, as my Darija accent was and remains awful.

It was only at the tail end of 2021, when I met Yassmine’s sister Loubna through a mutual, vegan friend, that my ceaseless, almost-religious repetition of being “above Figuig” was rewarded.

“My family’s from Figuig!” Loubna told me.

“You should take me there,” I joked.

Morocco’s coolest town

But this summer, I was presented with the chance to turn my awkward, dated Darija catchphrase into reality: Loubna invited me to join her family on their annual trip to Figuig. Finally, I would get to see what had been and might still be the coolest town in Morocco.

I’d be lying if I said that many of my Moroccan friends weren’t a bit puzzled by my enthusiasm for a town largely known nowadays for being extremely far from everything else. By car, Figuig is nine hours from Rabat and five from Oujda, the closest city.

Wikipedia’s assessment of Figuig also didn’t inspire confidence: “Modernization has somewhat raised the standard of living, and drawn much of the town's po[CENSORED]tion away, so that it is now struggling to reach stability.”

Unfortunately, we’ll never know what the godlike editors of Wikipedia meant by “stability,” because they didn’t cite their source.

Loubna and Yassmine assured me that, Wikipedia’s unfounded hostility to Figuig notwithstanding, I would love my time there. Embarking on a journey to a Moroccan town that Americans rarely visit also aligned with the spirit of cultural diplomacy behind the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which had brought me to Morocco in the first place.

But I was most intrigued by the possibility of turning my Figuig experience into an article for Morocco World News, then becoming a celebrity among English-speaking Moroccans and parlaying my newfound fame into a lucrative career as an Instagram influencer.

“I’m in,” I told Loubna.

On August 3, Loubna informed me that I would be departing with Yassmine from Mega Mall, Rabat’s third-nicest mall (Rabat has three malls); Loubna headed off in her cousins’ car.

Except for a short stop at Yassmine’s home in Salé, I spent the next five hours in a car with her, her mom, her uncle, and her grandmother, who seemed deeply concerned that I would get sunburned from sitting next to the car window. I thought she was being excessively grandmotherly, until I indeed got sunburned from sitting next to the car window.

 

 

https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2022/09/351506/figuig-could-still-be-moroccos-coolest-city