I never caught the name of the restaurant, but you couldn't see into the windows and there were rope/Christmas lights on the outside as well as an old drawing of Santa Claus on one window. It was like walking into a cave, the walls were some murky purple/gray color and there appeared to be some loose oceanic theme, with a few erratically placed anchors and a sad looking empty aquarium with fake coral. It oozed tacky.
But we sat and ordered anyway. They poured my Diet Coke into a wine glass. A woman near us was smoking a hookah looking jaded. It began to dawn on us.... the blackened windows, the seediness of the joint, the female to male ratio and the illicit behavior between the two sexes... we must have inadvertently stumbled into prostitution territory. But it was too late to leave and too dark and too loud for conversation, so I turned away from the table to watch a man on a keyboard playing some amazing Arab pop music.
And that's when I noticed them.
Seated at the table directly behind us were two men and one woman. She was in the corner with one man sitting on her side and another man sitting across from her, and I noticed her because the man on her side had his hands around her throat and was shaking her. I whipped my head around to my friend to say,
“Oh my god did you see that?”
I couldn't believe my own eyes so I looked again. Maybe it was a trick of the light, maybe it hadn't registered right. It was hard to make it all out and to do so discreetly, but she was visibly distraught (possibly drunk) and judging by the way the choking man would occasionally dab at her eyes with a napkin, crying. One moment he would be grabbing her violently, and another she'd be crying on his shoulder or he would aggressively kiss her until she kissed back. At one point I saw him raise his hand to strike her and I couldn't bear to watch so I shamefully looked away and almost started crying. The whole situation elicited a strong and instantaneous physical reaction from me (I can only recall one other time when witnessing another person's pain made me want to cry).
My friend asked the waiter if on second thought we could please have our pizzas to go. Then he gently said to me that maybe I shouldn't watch. I didn't want to watch though, not in a morbid human fascination where you can't tear your eyes away from the things that horrify you, but because I had some irrational feeling that I had to look out for this woman. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I wanted to somehow bear testament to this marginalized woman's grief, and somehow protect her. But what could I honestly do? Shout “stop” in three languages? Physically intervene? The men she was with could have easily overpowered me, us. I don't know the police number in Morocco but overall the system is so corrupted and the gender gap is still so big that calling only would have resulted in a few bribes and nothing more. I wouldn't even know how to help get her out of prostitution since the job market is so stagnant here, job possibilities are limited even for men, but the odds for an uneducated and illiterate woman to find self sustaining work outside of prostitution are desperately slim.
They had resumed aggressive kissing so I tried to look anywhere else. I took a sip of my Diet Coke and then heard the distinct sound of flesh being hit as he struck her again and I cringed so hard I almost dropped the glass I was holding.
At one point I saw one of the men working the restaurant walk purposefully towards their table and I thought to myself “thank god he's going to tell him to stop” but instead all he did was push in the fourth chair and straighten a cup. My thoughts were an indignant “What the f***” but my friend later pointed out that it had been a subtle way of telling the man to lay off the woman and that it had worked for a little while. My friend also said that the waiters and people working there had noticed me notice what was going on at the table and that was probably why the waiter had intervened at all; and in all likelihood the man choking and hitting her was her “manager” and that's why she was putting up with it and the restaurant workers probably had some deal with the managers/prostitutes so that they could use their restaurant as a meeting place if they received a cut from the profit.
We've discussed prostitution and domestic abuse in classes here, most certainly in classes in the past, I'm aware of the very real problem it is. And in spite of such rampant and casual use of violence in the media and pop culture, it still doesn't prepare you to see the real thing (and all things considered, this was tame). And as a global studies major focusing on human rights and Africa, I'm more than aware of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on one another, but this stands out to me as one of the worst ways I've seen a human being treat another human being (I have seen worse in footage but never physically present for). The synthesis between sexuality and violence and power was really unsettling. And for one split, shameful moment the thought popped in my head “I've had enough, I can't continue to deal with this much misogyny. I'm not as strong as I thought I was, it weighs too heavily on my conscience. I want to go back to the States.” but then it occurred to me that this is happening everywhere. Domestic abuse still occurs in the States, and people selling their bodies for sex is a wide spread epidemic. And I ultimately want to do international humanitarian work (most likely focusing on women issues/rights) and here was my first raw experience with how callous the world can be and it was all I could do not to cry.
I wish I could say I found the courage to somehow intervene, but I didn't. I wish I could say someone else found that courage for me and did something, but they didn't. I wish I could say that the man came to his senses and stopped, or that she somehow got out of that corner she was in. I wish I could say that the man sitting across from her finally put his hand on his friend's arm and said “Enough.” I wish that I had an uplifting conclusion or some revelation to share now, but I don't. After all was said and done, all I really took out of it was a penetrating sense of sorrow that left me feeling both heavy and tired.
Our pizzas came and we left and I don't know what happened to her.
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