It just occured to me that my nostalgia is dying slowly either consciously or unconsciously. I could have made some efforts to go for a visit for a week but I chose not to for some reasons because nothing is the same, and everything is foreign to me in my native country. Somehow, I don't feel safe internally being there all alone...I feel something is missing in me. I am sure I won't survive too long on my own and I will end up booking myself a ticket to come back next day. I don't know if I changed over time or maybe Morocco has changed so much that I lost track of time from where I remember it and I just need to condition myself to get used to it. I know for sure it's an amazing feeling to smell the fresh air of Rabat. It just feels right to be there. It feels home. It brings back a lot of awesome memories. But unfortunately I can't link anything of those memories to my present...NADA...which is normal I guess because that's the course of life.
I just realized that my family is falsly attached to a culture they hardly live. So what is this lie about preserving our culture if we hardly go on visits to Morocco and 90 % of time we speak English instead of Darija excluding my cousins generation who speak it 100 % at all times (some pretend to not know it, others pretend to have hard time twisting their tongue, while other the most blunt one think of themselves as quite not cool to speak a foreign language of country where they were not born.)
How can we be lying to ourselves?! How how we stress out the necessity of having a Moroccan living room area in the house with all the Moroccan traditional decorations, and show off about our ethnic food to the Non-Moroccans, and brag about the beauty of the country, the hospitality of its people, etc., yet we hardly live the Moroccan life.
So what does it take to be a Moroccan? parents' origin? birth place? language speaker? Moroccan salon? collection of tagines in the house? authentic food with the nice aroma of safron and olive oil?
I don't know...I do know; however, something is missing. Just like I know it's a lie to say we are holding tight on our culture or traditions since we hardly speak the language and we pretty much don't have any Moroccan traditions we live by...oh yeah except for the couscous tradition. But wait a second! that's food!!! forgot to mention we cook other ethnic food more than Moroccan one!!! and we still consider ourselves Moroccans!
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Maybe it is not so important whether we consider ourselves "Americans" or "Moroccans," but simply that we be able to enjoy and appreciate the incredible richness of different cultures. Culture is not a zero sum game; assimilating to a new culture does not require that one abandon the old, although perhaps it does mean that one will never again be "purely" one or the other. Is this a gain or a loss?
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