A Birthday, a Journey, a Reckoning
My youngest is turning 18 in a few days!
It’s a huge milestone, not just for him, but for me too. As a single mother, it’s the kind of threshold you imagine when your children are still tiny, when you’re changing nappies, wiping tears, and whispering prayers late into the night. When my boys were just two and seven, the three of us began a journey together of reclamation, of choice, of agency, and of power. Now, somehow, they’ve grown into men.
To honour this turning point, I wanted to gift my son something meaningful. He didn’t want anything material. Instead, he asked for something closer to our roots, a trip somewhere he could speak Arabic with ease, and feel, perhaps for the first time in a long time, what it’s like to be one of many. Damascus was possible, technically, but he wasn’t ready. For many reasons, some named, some not, it didn’t feel like the right place just yet.
So, from a list of options, he chose Marrakesh.
“It’s going to be boiling hot,” I warned him.
“All the better,” he smiled.
I’ve been to Morocco before, mostly Casablanca and Rabat, so I thought I knew what to expect. I’ve made friends there, facilitated a residential leadership programme, and connected with activists, artists, and organisers who are reimagining a different kind of future. I knew Morocco as a bilingual country, where French and Arabic dance in and out of conversations, signs, and menus. But Marrakesh surprised me.
In Marrakesh, Arabic isn’t in the shadows. It’s front and centre. People speak it fully, confidently, without switching mid-sentence. And outside the city, in the villages of the High Atlas, Amazigh languages hold their ground with pride. This unapologetic presence of language and identity grounded me in ways I didn’t expect.
We took a trip to the High Atlas mountains, just me, Zayd, and a small group of tourists. Our guide, a warm and thoughtful young man, spoke Arabic, Amazigh, and English. Half the group was French. He greeted them kindly, but admitted that French wasn’t a language he was comfortable speaking.
They didn’t listen.
Time and again, after he’d patiently explain something in English, they’d correct him, insisting he repeat it in French, telling him how to say it “properly.” Zayd leaned in at one point and said, “That arrogance… mixed with entitlement and ignorance. What a mixture.”
Exactly that.
If you descend from colonisers, don’t go to the lands your ancestors plundered and force people to speak your language. Don’t erase and correct. Don’t impose. You’ve been out of these lands for decades, at least officially. The least you can do is be humble. Listen. Learn. Honour what was never yours to begin with.
If you must repeat anything, let it be our words, in our languages, on our terms. Let us teach you.
Later, we visited a women’s cooperative where Argan oil is made by hand, slow, ancestral, embodied labour. Ten tourists wandered through. They tasted the food, rubbed the oils into their palms, breathed in the scents, watched the women drum and sing their stories into the room … and then walked away.
Not a single purchase. Not even a token of gratitude. Not one dirham exchanged hands.
Do you really believe that the €15 you paid for this “experience” is enough? That it justifies consuming their labour, their time, their music, their dignity … without giving anything back?
A few coins from your pocket wouldn’t have hurt you. But they could have rippled into something real for these women.
If you want to keep your stinginess, keep it at home. When you come to our part of the world—yes, our—you don’t just consume our landscapes and our warmth. You’re being hosted. So act like a guest. Don’t extract our stories, our time, our labour, and then walk away with your purse zipped shut.
And please, do not haggle. You already haggled for centuries. You got the spices, the gold, the labour, the rituals, for practically free. Don’t come back now and do the same with a smile and a selfie stick.
Oh, and when people sing and drum in front of you, clap your hands. Smile. Honour their art. Join their joy. Don’t stand stiff with superiority or stare like you’re watching a spectacle. Just soften. Trust me, your own body and soul are craving this. Craving the drumbeat that calls us back to what’s sacred. To the memory of togetherness.
When you visit our lands, don’t come to extract. You’ve done that for centuries. Come to honour. Come to give. Come to undo the legacy you inherited … for you, for us … for everyone.
One more thing, when people tell you they’re Muslim, believe them. Don’t argue. Don’t try to box their faith into your framework of what religion is “supposed” to look like. This isn’t curiosity. This is erasure.
If they say you can’t enter a mosque, especially the smaller, intimate places of worship in the villages, don’t act entitled to their sacred spaces. These are not museums for your spectacle. These are places of devotion, not for your camera lens, not for your white colonial gaze.
And when people share their rituals, their values, their lives, don’t offer your unsolicited analysis through the filter of your Eurocentric norms. Don’t frown with dismay when someone tells you they live simply, or communally, or with boundaries that honour their traditions. Don’t ask how they can bear such a life. Just don’t.
It’s not their life that’s the problem; it’s your worldview that demands dominance.
So, dear friends, especially those who descend from colonisers, don’t travel to our lands and dominate. Don’t teach when it’s time to learn. Don’t correct when it’s time to listen. And if you’re not prepared to be humble, to repair, to reckon with history and with your place in it, then please, stay in Europe.
Stay where your entitlement goes unquestioned.
But if you do come, come with reverence. Come to honour. Come to unlearn. Come with curiosity, with humility, with a wallet that’s not clenched in guilt or superiority, but open in solidarity.
We’re not asking for charity. We’re asking for justice.
And justice, like language, like culture, like people, is not yours to define.