Sahbti or Sahbi- Just Friends

“My Friend (that is a girl)” or “My Friend (that is a boy-more like a boyfriend)”

When I first got to Morocco I was writing a couple post cards to some friends. I told my family I was writing to a “Sahbi,” a guy friend. “Sahbi?!! Or Sahbti?” my little sister asked me. I said Sahbi because I was writing to a guy friend and that seemed the most logical response. She put her hand over her mouth with a big smile. That was followed by HSHUMA J. Hshuma means shame, shameful, or shame on you.

In Morocco girls DO NOT have guy friends. It is that simple. To say you have a friend that is a boy immediately implies that you are A) in a relationship (which is HSHUMA BZZAF- very very shameful) or B) that you are just having sex (which as you can imagine equally as HSHUMA.) As for men if they refer to you as Sahbti it will be interpreted that you are their prostitute not just their friend that is a girl.

All of that said, every friend I have is now a “girl friend” and not “boy friend,” no matter what his or her gender actually is. This makes it kind of difficult when learning the language. I am trying to correctly use “he” and “she” when telling a story and conjugate the following verb correctly. However I am picturing the guy friend I am talking about, referring to him as a she (because I obviously don’t have boyfriends and am not a prostitute,) and trying to conjugate what he is doing with the feminine form of the verb.

It is kind of like when you take one of those tests where different colors are written out in a color that they aren’t. Blue. Red. Red. Green. Green. Red. Blue. Red. Blue. You have to say the color the word is colored and not the color the word spells. It gets kind of tricky. So my sentences come out completely jumbled and I forget whether I am actually taking about a guy or a girl and my family just strains their ears to figure out who or what the heck I am talking about.

This whole not being “allowed” to have guy friends makes things other than just talking about the non-existent guy friend hard. It makes it difficult to socialize without getting a reputation. It makes it difficult to explain something that happened to a guy friend because people’s minds automatically go to the idea that you must be sleeping together and not what actually happened to that person. Any story you tell or person of the opposite sex you talk about is completely devalued.

I am learning to work around this but for example a friend of mine lost someone very close to him. He cannot share that with any Moroccans because they would never understand that he could have a girl that was a friend and how much pain it has caused him to lose her. They would ask if she was his prostitute, which would cause even more pain than not being able to share with them that he lost someone important to him, in the first place.

As you can see this is quite a phenomenon and one of the things that will be a struggle to work around for the next couple of years. And this is just talking friendships let alone anything else.