I almost always take the qahwa bldiya (traditional café) as my observation point when I travel. Not out of exoticism, and not to “watch people” the way one watches an object, but because the qahwa bldiya is a small theatre at the right scale: everything is public and yet discreet; everything is close and yet regulated. The cup, the glass, the fire, the sugar, the payment, the habit — a grammar of gestures where you can see, in slow motion, what a city allows and what it forbids.
One day, after three days of returning to the same café, I was starting to feel familiar with the old man who ran it. A man in his seventies, a steady smile, exceptional dexterity — shaped by the patient repetition of qahwa. It wasn’t just “skill”: it was a way of holding the world — through the economy of the gesture, and the economy of the mouth. He sat down next to me the way one sits beside a witness, and he began without preface:
The force of silence is harsh: it neither makes you live nor kills you.
Then he told a scene that, for him, was nothing extraordinary…
(Read the full article at the Moroccan Epistemologies Substack)
