Selling Snails in Morocco

Selling Snails in Morocco


We all know that Morocco is a great touristic place because of its colorful, ancient and rich history. Today I wanted to write about this photo I took while visiting Morocco in early 2011, it shows another side….

I called the photo "The Woman Selling Snails". My point is that there are so many different ways to look at this photo, depending if you are Moroccan, a tourist or just a computer onlooker.

Tourists will just adore the scene and will see it with only one eye and certainly take so many pictures, as I did.

But, there is much more to this picture than just the beauty of the picture. This picture reflects for me sadness and sorrow as well as profound courage.

Indeed, you can weep for the woman at the same time admiring her courage. You can weep for the social injustice. For what life can throw at you in this Land and it all depends on which side of the fence you are.

In Morocco you can be doing it so hard just to survive just as easily as you can be driven around every day doing nothing by a chauffeur in a luxurious car.

It was morning in the old market of Casablanca. It was pouring with rain and the footpaths were muddy. It smelled of the chicken and rabbit excrement all around her. This old woman was sitting in the middle of the footpath and didn't even try to escape the rain. The snails, on the other hand, were trying to do just that, escape the rain and the boxes. The woman was confronting the rain, the mud and the smells because she had to sell snails so she can make ends meet.

As I have been living in the West for thirty years, I know that if the Woman Selling Snails was  living in a Western country, she would be sitting at home in the warmth, with probably her grandchildren and close friends, enjoying life, as you do when you are old. Here, she has to work to feed her family at home to survive...


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