How does an American intellectual approach Moroccan civilization? Professor of English and thus certainly well acquainted with Anglo-Saxon civilization, the author is also a professor of humanities. In other words, she possesses the necessary tools to make some pertinent observations.
The reader‛s surprise is that her approach to Moroccan civilization is through small social realities, behaviors, artistic productions...and not through a political system or through the products of elites or through the feudal social system. It‛s through bits of actual things and gestures that Melbourne poses questions about what fundamentally makes Morocco and Moroccans.
For example, what do moucharabieh panels have to say about the ways in which the Moroccan art de vivre perceives relationships to the other and to the outside? Indeed, the author has chosen a half-closed window (as is Morocco, at once simple and complex) to illustrate the book cover: on one side, the surplus of light that prevents vision, on the other, the shadow that prevents one from being seen.
After all, isn‛t this somewhat the way savoir-vivre marks social relationships?
The astonishments don‛t arise just in one sense.
The author‛s surprises also speak to her own culture, to her own received ideas. Lucy Lauretta Melbourne realizes quite well that American assumptions post 9/11 are errors of undertanding. But concerning Ramadan, for example, she cannot accept that a law should enter the intimacy of citizens, their very bodies, to establish prohibition.
Through the critique of her astonishment one can guess how American political culture places individuals, their desires and their restraints, at the center of American legal and political structure.
Some readers, it seems, are revolted when faced with such incomprehension. This means that they have by-passed half the interest of the book. The first, certainly, is reading a description of Morocco, but the second interest of the book is in reading a description of American culture.
And then, for those who want to perfect their English, this is the ideal work: pages on the left are in English, those on the right are in French. Which facilitates realizing that Larbi Touaf‛s translation is extremely well done.
Exerpts from "An American In Morocco"
Veiled Allusions
"I usually stride briskly down Rue Ibn Hajar. And always with eyes averted. But, today, as I scan the solidly male clientele lolling outside La Bonne Galette café, my eyes inadvertently catch those of a young man: contact. Immediately, I look down, focus on his feet in striped soccer shoes. Addidas. Notice his jeans, saggy at the knees. Coffee glass poised in midair, he imperceptibly tenses his shoulders. I increase my pace but risk one more quick upward survey. Too late.
"Ca va?" he croons. "Ah!" he murmurs, "gazelle,"and places his right hand over his heart.
Resisting an impulse to flip this guy a real bird, I train my eyes myopically toward the middle distance and stalk past...
At the corner of Avenue de la Victoire, a red light.
A chic, middle-class woman clicks by in stiletto boots, briefcase swinging, her Muslim headscarf, the hijab, neatly pinned with a jeweled brooch.
His eyes continue to bore holes through my thin skin.
A uniformed policewoman blows her shrill traffic whistle. Giggling schoolgirls, arms locked in protective phalanx, sway suggestively across the street in stovepipe jeans and bare midriffs above buttocks hard and round as Persian melons, sunlight reflecting the red-gold strands in their sinuous, long black hair. He turns, grins appreciatively, quickly shaking his hand down from the wrist: hot.
"Fitna,"he exclaims.
Chaos.
* * * * *
My would-be swain checking out the action from his sidewalk perch at La Bonne Galette represents over a thousand years of social conditioning in a culture where Muslim males controlled all public spaces from cafés and corner stores to realms of commerce and councils of state. Women inhabited a domestic sphere where they reigned supreme in the sequestered household. For a woman to trespass into male territory, she had to literally tie her body to a flag of truce: the hijab."
The author, Lucy Lauretta Melbourne, taught English for two years at Mohammed V University in Rabat and at Ibn Tofaïl University in Kénitra. Day after day she describes her astonishments, which are equally as much reflections on Moroccan as on American society since out of these cultural differences gush new riches...Even if they are irritating. Une Américaine au Maroc: An American in Morocco, Lucy Lauretta Melbourne, Editions Marsam, 60Dh. In the US: quailridgebooks.com $14.
Morocco Newsline | How does an American see us? | American, Their, His, Her, Morocco 
How does an American see us? 
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