What fuels the love of Moroccans for cafés instead of libraries?
By Hassan Bendouz
Morocco News Tribune
-Feature Story-
Agadir, Morocco—It has become part of the daily life scenes in the Moroccan cafés to find herds of common people from all ages gathering around tables of tea and coffee, debating football issues, arguing cheap politics and killing their life boredom with exchanging dirty jokes and non-stop gossip.
Few among them hold a newspaper for the sake of getting enlightened. Once opening a local newspaper, their eyes race to find any news story or article dealing with crimes of rapes, drug trafficking, or prostitution.
Café newspapers readers have a tremendous hunger to feed their greedy curiosity by digging in other people’s private lives. Indeed, they’re in a dire need to stuff their starving minds with the trivial details of soccer games, who killed who, who robbed who in the marginalized ghettos of the kingdom.
Some of these cafes’ regular attendees are middle aged men who spent 100 percent of their non-working time drinking lots of tea and switching seats in café terraces.
In Morocco, there are cafe terraces lining main squares and decorating backstreets. It just looks as if the people in cafes outnumber those at work. I found it extremely abnormal that some of them come very early in mornings even before the café owners themselves. There is another category of people who sit around café tables the whole day simply by ordering a small tea pot or a tiny cup of black coffee.
This scene made me reflect on this issue and dared to ask a friend of mine who works as a waiter in a café around where I live. I asked him why these people spend the whole day in your café. He laughed and replied “Most of these men colonizing our terraces for long hours don’t feel at ease with their wives and kids at home. They just escape their marital life and take shelters in people’s pains and sorrows while reading newspapers”.
It’s obvious that nature does not stand emptiness and void. Cafés are not made to kill one’s precious lifetime. Cafés are not psychological hospitals where people alleviate their inner tribulations and cure their mental sicknesses.
In fact, there are few libraries in our neighborhoods, but most of them stay empty the whole time. People could cross hundreds of kilometers in order to seek healing miracles via sleeping in a shrine, but they cannot cross their front doors or go beyond the borders of their homes to have a couple of minutes reading in their neighborhood library.
Most of the Moroccan families decorate parts of their living rooms with some common and scary religious books that they hardly read. These books turned to be safe havens for spiders and landing places for dusts since they are rarely opened.
We invest lots of money beautifying our bedrooms, widening our living rooms and stocking food in our fridges, but very few among us include a library in the house construction plans.
What really aches in the heart is that when some people find you still reading after graduating and having a job, they just warn you to stop doing it, so as not to get nuts in the trip of seeking the unknown.
In our society, all concepts have been distorted. People cherish being ignorant and defend it to death while knowledge is viewed as a journey of wasting time and energy.
In our society, the majority of families merely send their kids to schools and universities for the sake of getting a job, not for the love of knowledge itself.
People need to understand that books help us understand who we are and how we should behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
Some people claim that excess reading will undoubtedly lead you to inevitable craziness, where you risk walking naked, barefooted and throw stones at people. It is strange but true.
It’s true that you don’t have to burn books in order to destroy any nation’s culture and civilization. All it takes to do so is preventing its people from stop reading. And the question now is: what does prevent us from reading?