The Crash By Bethan Owen

I learned quickly that cafes are a staple of Moroccan culture. Even the smallest mountainside village without indoor plumbing has a cafe, and modest-sized towns seem to have a cafe on every street corner, as well as one in the middle of the block and a few across the street just to be safe. Cafes are where Moroccan men go to socialize and buy tiny cups of black coffee that are never quite empty, no matter how many sips they take throughout the evening and into the night. I can’t speak for the big cities of Casablanca or Rabat, or even Fes, but in the small town where I lived for my Peace Corps service, cafes are also an almost exclusively male domain. 

“People say bad things about me if I go in cafe,” my host sister Fatimazarah explained to me once, in English. When I asked if people would say bad things about me if I went to the cafe, she shrugged.

“Is different,” she said, and she was right. I went to cafes to use their Wi-Fi, and although sometimes men would scrutinize me over their little cups of coffee while I checked my email and hammered away on my oversized laptop, there were no consequences. I was never criticized for going into a cafe, and the service I received was always polite and prompt. Thanks to my pasty complexion and inherent foreignness, I had become one of the guys. 

When I learned how taboo it was for good, respectable Moroccan women to go to cafes, I had expected them to be something like a Wild West saloon. Places where my male Moroccan neighbors could cut shady deals under the table, get into fistfights, or maybe listen to a glamorous female singer wearing lots of ruffles and feathers as she lounged against an old-timey piano.

The reality was much more boring. Without exception, the cafes I went to—even ones with promising names, like Cafe Yes and Dreams Dreams Cafe—consisted of a big room full of tables and chairs with a barista making coffee in the back. The rowdiest a cafe ever got was when a big soccer game was on, and men crowded in to watch and yell at the goals. 

I had given up on ever seeing anything more interesting than someone cheating at cards in one of these cafes when a semi truck rear-ended a smaller car, directly in front of my table. It was a hard hit, and both cars crumpled in towards each other. It took me, and the rest of the cafe, a few seconds to process what had just happened. 

But while my immediate reaction was to stay in my chair and blink a few shocked blinks, every Moroccan in or around the cafe had the opposite response. A hero’s response, really. Each and every man who had been nursing a cup of coffee and silently watching soccer reruns was suddenly on the street, running, shouting, climbing up the sides of the truck, or a combination of all three. 

The door of the car was thrown open, and about four men pried the annoyed-looking driver out, quickly depositing him somewhere on the sidewalk so all attention could be redirected towards the real challenge: the truck.

The driver’s side door had been damaged and refused to open more than a few inches. The men rose to the challenge as though they had all served twenty years in the volunteer fire department. Two men on the hood of the truck began smashing the windshield with bowling-ball-sized rocks that seemed to have materialized out of the air for exactly this occasion. A third man on the roof of the truck managed to wedge his heels into the narrow gap of the partially-opened door and pushed with all his strength, arching his back, bracing his arms, and throwing his face to the sky. He was silhouetted in this dramatic pose against the nearest streetlight like the star of a semitruck-based action movie.

I had never seen such raw heroism. I hadn’t even known it was possible to climb the side of a truck that fast. The expression on his face was so intense that it gave me chills. What drove this champion of the people? Was his infant child behind the wheel of that truck, or the only man on earth with the cure for his wife’s rare disease? I wondered what it would feel like to have so much goodwill towards man that you were ready and willing to wedge your feet into the door of a truck with about five seconds’ notice.

The men on the hood of the truck succeeded in smashing the windshield to pieces and were eager to begin hauling the driver out and over the remaining glass fragments, but it was the lone figure on the roof of the truck who managed to push the door open, through sheer determination and quadricep strength, to expose the dazed-looking driver. 

There was a forest of hands ready and waiting to carry the driver outside, like he was crowd surfing at a concert with an exclusively mustached male audience. The driver himself seemed perfectly fine, if a little frightened that a crowd of strange men that hadn’t existed five minutes earlier was physically carrying him through the air. Wherever they were taking him, they were doing it with purpose.

As I watched the crowd triumphantly carry the man away from the scene and out of the road, I noticed a few police officers in the crowd. Rather than shouting orders or pushing their way through the masses, they were watching solemnly. One had his hands on his hips, and the other was nodding his head. Both radiated a kind of quiet approval, as though they couldn’t have handled things better themselves.

Once the dazed truck driver was seated on the sidewalk, the crowd of heroes began to disperse. Although my Arabic was poor, as they exchanged words back and forth, paired with humble smiles and congratulatory handshakes, it was obvious to me that they were all saying Well, we did it, boys.

I’m not sure what happened to the drivers—although I like to imagine that they sat down in a cafe with their rescuers for a few hours, accepting dozens of tiny cups of coffee from their many saviors—or the cars themselves. I can say that the broken windshield remained in the road for months afterwards. I had been put off by how much litter was in Morocco when I first arrived, but I liked seeing the obliterated blue windshield in its familiar spot in the gutter every time I walked by that cafe. It probably should have been taken out of the street for safety, sure, but I thought it was a good reminder about the indomitable human spirit in the face of apathy, danger, and safety glass.