Category: all things moroccan

Driss C. Jaydane will present his debut novel, Le Jour venu, at the Carrefour des Livres here in Casablanca. Set in the 1980s, Le Jour venu is described as the coming of age story of a young bourgeois from Casablanca. Having the reading in a Maarif bookstore is quite à propos, then.

Write-ups in the local press have been quite favorable. See, for instance, the article by Driss Ksikes in Tel Quel or the review by Kenza Sefrioui in Le Journal. Details:

Driss C. Jaydane
Le Jour venu
Thursday, December 7
7 pm
Carrefour des Livres
Angle des Landes et rue Vignemale
Casablanca
022 23 46 65

Be there!

The Marrakech International Film Festival takes place this week, and needless to say there is much coverage of the events by star-struck journalists on radio, television, and in print, here in Casablanca. The jury this year is composed of the irrepressible Jamel Debbouze, actors Sandrine Bonnaire and Paz Vega, and directors Yousry Nasrallah and Pan Nalin, among others. The president is Roman Polanski. The festival opened with a tribute to national treasure Mohammed Majd (The Messenger, Ali Zaoua, Syriana, Le Grand Voyage, etc.). He received a standing ovation, and appeared emotional as he gave the customary acceptance speech. Majd is, with Amina Rachid and Amidou, one of only three Moroccans to have been so honored since the festival started in 2001. (The other honorees include Omar Sharif, Claude Lelouch, John Boorman, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Claudia Cardinale, Sean Connery, Youssef Chahine, Abbas Kiarostami, and a whole bunch of others.) In any case, the interesting bit is that Mohammed Majd was quoted in the 22 November issue of the newspaper Assahifa as saying, “It would be a mess if the organizers of the Marrakech film festival were Moroccans.” The quote was reprinted by a couple of magazines, but without anyone really disagreeing or taking offense. Although the festival staff is largely Moroccan, the director and several of the top organizers are French–part of the continuing attitude in this country to leave the direction of larger projects to foreigners. Pretty sad.

At the prospect of living in Morocco again after fourteen years abroad, I felt a whole range of emotions–happiness, excitement, worry –but I couldn’t really sort through these feelings because I was exhausted all the time. I did a lot of traveling in the fall, for readings and lectures and conferences, and whenever I was not on the road, I was packing a bag, or moving a box, or disconnecting a service, or canceling a subscription. It wasn’t until the plane landed at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca that the move here began to seem real.

Several of my friends expected me to have reverse culture shock, but I haven’t found that to be true at all. My sense of disorientation, if you can even call it that, is more subtle. I was born and raised in Rabat, and living in Casablanca has already brought a few surprises–dialectal, to begin with. I asked our doorman for directions, and it took me three tries to figure out the name of a street based on his pronunciation. And then the driving here is so much worse than in Rabat–if that is even possible. If you’ve ever been curious as to how one can accomplish a left-hand turn from a right-hand lane, this is the city for you.

The other thing that strikes me every time I come back to Morocco is the light. It’s different here, and I’m not sure I can explain how. It seems to hit trees and plants and buildings and even people at a different angle, bringing out more contrast in colors. Our apartment has large windows, so I spend a lot of time holding things up to the light to see how new they look.

There’s a certain kindness in the way that people speak to each other here–the many polite rejoinders, the jokes, the helpfulness. I missed all of this so much, and it’s of course wonderful to witness it again. And yet at the same time there is also a hardness that comes from living in a large, overcrowded, dense, polluted city. I was on my way to Ittissalaat Al-Maghrib (Maroc Telecom) to get a phone line set up, and the cab driver who took me grumbled about a change in the law that made him ultimately responsible, in case of accident, for any pedestrian injuries. “Were it not for this law, I would just have hit that guy,” he said, pointing to a kid who was crossing without looking, “and teach him a good lesson. Once he’s in a wheelchair, he’ll learn to look before crossing.” Given the driver’s anger, I thought it best not to point out that he was speeding–and that he was on the wrong lane. I was just happy to arrive at the phone company in one piece. When my turn finally came up at the counter, the clerk spent more than half an hour with me, walking me through the process, and waiting very patiently for me to make up my mind about all the services. And then he sent me home with good wishes for my health. (I only wish it meant our DSL worked properly. It doesn’t. But more on this long, tortuous odyssey in a later post.)

The picture above shows the King Hassan mosque in all its artistic glory, at sunset. (Credit: Henk Meijer.) The photo below shows what the mosque looks like from my bedroom window, during the daytime, with the smog above, the apartment buildings below, and the sea of satellite dishes around.

<

There’s a great profile of Dutch-Moroccan writer Abdelkader Benali in the Daily Star. The article covers his work as a novelist and playwright–as well as his more recent foray in literary reportage. (Benali was living in Beirut during the Israeli bombing, and wrote about it for Dutch audiences.) One tidbit that resonated with me:

Benali views his job as being to creatively undermine his assigned role.

“In Holland it’s all about belonging to clubs – a running club or a sewing club. I don’t belong to any club,” he says. “People expect me to speak as a Muslim or a Moroccan yet I’m giving you my own opinion. I use my tricks, my language skills, to undermine the role they’ve assigned me.

“The problem is that everything’s connected to Islam. It never really becomes an intellectual discussion because that would invite argument and people don’t want that. Whenever journalists want the ‘Muslim Dutch perspective,’ they never go to an intellectual. They find some old man at a mosque.

This doesn’t surprise me one bit. I was invited to a panel recently, with the express purpose to give “the Muslim perspective.” I said there is no such thing. I can only give my perspective. That didn’t go over so well.

The October 16 issue of the New Yorker has a profile by Jane Kramer of Aboubakr Jamaï, founder, publisher, and editor of the Casablanca-based weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdo. The article is unfortunately not available online, so I can’t link to it. You should check it out, though. It’s generally well researched and quite readable, and gives a good background on Jamaï (or Boubker, as he is known.) Boubker’s magazine has created waves in Morocco for its daring reporting on the three taboos of the press (the king’s private life, Western Sahara, and separation of church and state). His work has cost him several trips to the courthouse, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The quote in the title of this post is from an unnamed source in Kramer’s article who says, “I tell Boubker, ‘Your editorials about the King are like Mercurochrome on a wooden leg.'”

Although I enjoyed the article, I had a couple of problems with it. For starters, the title is “The Crusader.” (I mean, seriously, what was the editor thinking?) And then Kramer adds occasional orientalist comments like: “The King at forty-three is not a statesman, despite a French education.” (Excuse me? So in order to be a statesman one needs a French education?) And when she mentions the women’s rights reform that took place in 2004, she states that Islamists staged a huge demonstration against it in Casablanca, but neglects to add that there was a demonstration in Rabat in favor of the reform. The effect is that one gets the impression that the only political actors on the scene are the king and the Islamists, which is not quite the case.

The Moroccan Human Rights Association is asking the government to come clean about rendition in the kingdom. The BBC reports:

Abdelhamid Amine, who is their chairman, said both the Moroccan government and Washington had to come clean.

“The United States, which declares itself a democratic country, must recognise that these so-called black sites exist and that torture goes on there,” he said.

“The United States justifies all this in the name of its war against terrorism. But we, as the defenders of human rights in Morocco, cannot accept that in the name of the war on terror you can also violate human rights or practice the terrorism of torture.”

Predictably, the Minister of Justice denies the existence of any CIA prisons, etc.