Street performers in every city, great and small, charm the penniless and the penny-plenty, the foreign and the familiar, the old and the young alike, in a shameless effort to earn a few dollars. I have marveled at the fiddlers and tin-men of New York City and at the mimes and stilt-walkers of Paris. When I was eight, I watched wide-eyed as a dancing mongoose and an equally rhythmic real-life Abu hopped to the beat of a drum, outfitted in embroidered vests and fez caps in the congested streets of Karachi.
But it is only in the Djma el Fna Square, a few square feet of the city of Marrakesh, that I have truly lost my soul to the art of the street. It is here that each body in the spinning, colliding throng of people is a part of the chaotic act. It is here that boys on motorcycles fall in love with girls in veils; that girls fall in love with the elaborate henna designs old ladies paint onto the flesh of palms; that stray dollops of henna fall onto the dirt ground, dry and crust there, until a wandering rubber sole scrapes them loose.
It is here that I have ambled as an empty body, skipping in and out of every other body, borrowing a bit of a soul, before departing to take up residence in another a few steps away but, perhaps, many worlds apart. While the performers themselves are creatures of familiar territory, returning to the same spot each night, adventurers like myself drift as sinuously as the rising smoke and the penetrating aroma of the open food stalls. During my adventures, I am a lithe little girl who slips between the cracks in the crowd, below waists, like an alley cat whose tail tickles unsuspecting feet as it passes. During my journeys, I have become the stationary, shriveled man, cross-legged on a carpet, telling tales of distant empires and vanished dynasties. I have tapped his striated wooden cane to the intonations of his slow, grating voice. I have beheld the world through his murky eyes, and then through the eyes of those who do not speak his native Arabic, but who listen to the language in the back and forth sway of his body, in the melody of his voice, in the mirth and rumble of those around them.
I have even become the man selling freshly squeezed orange juice around the corner who speaks scatterings of every language and none in their entirety, the snake charmer wrapping a writhing coil of slippery skin around a petrified young boy’s neck, the diminutive French lady, perched on a doll-sized chair, waiting and watching as her husband gets a shoe-shine. I have become the shoe-shine man, and have wondered where those shoes have been, where they came from, where they will go. I have grasped for a few words of broken French, and have settled for a nod and a smile.
But I have become most fully that solitary but sociable black bird that cruises, lost against the night sky—the surveyor. Perhaps the shoe-shine man never really wondered anything about the couple and never wished to speak a word, but he was what I made him, and what I took from him. He was what I, the surveyor, projected onto his soul, the instrument and mediator of my imagination. Every person whom we perceive without knowing is just that, a canvas waiting to be filled with a creation of our own—a creation apart from what truly is. And from each person who, even as we hurry past, catches our eye, each person whose image burrows into our minds, this is what we carry with us—the place where two souls intersect, albeit briefly.
My soul, when it felt its journey done for the evening, returned to me more complete and more vibrant than when it first left. And wherever it ventures, it now carries with it these splinters of people, impressions, half-real and half-imagined.
