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THE AL-ANDALUS QUARTET: PART FOUR
ALMERÍA / UMM AL-MARIYA   2007 AD / 1427 AH 

The traveler who journeys to the City of Almería
arrives at a port where the routes of the ferries,
the whitecaps and waves, the salt-leaden gusts in
the searing white heat, the sculptures of dolphins
manifested at play on the boulevard perpendicular
to the sterns of great ships, reveal windows and 
mirrors in which every reflection is a perplexing
distortion, generating questions impossible to 
answer with the images at hand

Ciudad Almería is Umm Al-Mariya,
A city with barrios named Al-Musalá, Al-Medina,
Al-Haud, where visionary souls at the College of
Architects draw invisible lines from the markets of Fez
the minarets of Essaouira to the courtyards and gardens
of an Andalusia making paradise landscapes of red tiles
and roses, wrought-iron and jasmine, and burbling
fountains as seductive as the curvature of Arabic script;
where every dark eye under every headscarf, under
every skull cap, beneath flat-brimmed sombreros and 
every dark curl blowing free in the breezes between 
mountains and sea, sees only itself colored café con
leche, burned walnut by sunlight, yet never identical to the 
likenesses imagined when they think of themselves;
and where luminous women with irresistible smiles
think in African tongues and laugh loudly in public, look 
you straight in the eye and in their accented Spanish
offer no explanation for the browning of Spain

The intelligent observer see ships every day
link Morocco and Algeria with Al-Andalus, their
sleek silhouettes mimic seabirds and dolphins,
their windows and lights and the curves of their hulls
a mosaic of facets which, distorted by water, make city
and the sea seem a shimmering collage taunting resident
and visitor with fragmented images of who he once was
and who she might become, but never an inkling of
who they are now!


Emanuel Carter
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