Princess for a Day

This was an exciting week at school. Between field trips, Tuesday off for lunar new year, student council elections, the arrival of the basketball hoop, Poetry Night, and the December Cup intre-high school soccer tournament, there has been little time to settle into our normal school routine. Friday was our bi-monthly half day for staff development, and we celebrated with a school spirit event: Traditional Dress Day for the whole school.

Although ‘traditional’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Moroccan,’ that is the natural standby. Traditional dress days in the past have also yielded cowboy outfits, kimonos, and togas.

Traditional Moroccan casual-wear is a wonderful bathrobe-like creation called the djellabah that goes over any other clothes (usually ones that don’t match or don’t look appropriate for outside) and robes the wearer in a full-length dress of some bright color. They remarkably resemble wizarding cloaks, and it’s all I can do not to shout “You shall not pass!” at anyone walking toward me.

For this traditional dress day, I stepped it up a notch, to a kaftan-taksheta: beautiful formal gowns made for weddings and fancy celebrations!

Moroccan dress clothes are not really what Americans would call comfortable. There are multiple layers of stiff, rustly fabric, the sleeves fall well over your hands, and the skirt well over the feet. Wearing a Moroccan traditional dress is a big enough and complicated enough endeavor to be dubbed ‘and experience.’ But, you know, it’s not really about the dress.

Like so many of my experiences, I was surprised to find that, what I thought was the point, was really not the point at all. It was actually a means to an end. It’s not really about the dress. The dress is not the finish line, and the physical appearance not the aim.

The act of getting dressed couldn’t have been less dignified; I have never donned a taksheta by myself before, and I quickly discovered why Moroccan women put these on in a room all together. The satin has no give to it, the fancy decorative embroidery catches like teeth as it scrapes over my face, and each sleeve has enough fabric to considered an arm-skirt. When I finally have the first layer on, I have to tackle the second layer, still attempting not to drown in the first. The belt is wide like an obi, with lacings up the back. The train of the second skirt tripped me as I tied these up. You know what I did? I fell. I had a fleeting dream of catching myself before the reality of all those skirts and beading caught up with me, and rather than tear the skirt, I just let myself fall straight over like a bowling pin.

Finally I was dressed for school, with Moroccan make-up, which rivals theatre stage pancake, and ten million bobby-pins in my high hairdo.

Then I realized what the Moroccan dress was really about.

I walked into drawing class before the bell to the usual: squirrely students rushing about, chatting, riffling through papers, throwing things, and general manageable chaos. When I opened the door, the room fell silent. Students froze with papers half out of their bags and mouths still open from conversations, and the only sound was my deafeningly rustling skirts. “Miss,” one of them voiced, “You look like a princess!”

I have to confess that, at that moment, I felt like a princess, too.

We started class, with students drawing sketches for ten minutes each before a rotation. After about 5 minutes, one tardy senior opened the door, and I froze mid-attendance. She was beautiful in an untouchable way, like a porcelain doll, needing care, but somehow outside the daily life we shared. The rest of the room, too, had stopped mid-sketch to stare at her. She floated into the room without a trace of sheepishness at being late – and why should she be? Clearly, she was a princess.

Every repetition of this phenomenon was as dramatic, and each as natural. The production undergone in the morning was forgotten. Today, the girls were all princesses and the boys were all kings. The point of Moroccan dress isn’t the clothes, it’s the ceremony, the honor, and the respect that you do yourself and those around you, by stepping regally back from your careless, casual self, into a china figurine, admired, protected, and regal.