Читать книгу Channeling Moroccanness - Becky L. Schulthies - Страница 10

Moroccanness connection laments were not always a complaint, an argument, a political position, or a critique—though they could be. In the following episode, concern about the failures of a state television channel as a medium designed to connect Moroccans overlapped with ideologies about the linguistic medium through which that relationality should occur. It illustrates the focus on channels as sociality mediums foregrounded in Moroccanness expectations and practices.

الحلقة ٢: كنگولها حنا ماشي دولة عربية

Episode 2: “I’ll Say It: We Are Not an Arab Country”

I awoke one morning in March 2016 to find a firestorm in the Moroccan press and social media about comments on Moroccan identity made by Samira Sitail.⁹ She was the Information Director for 2M, Morocco’s quasi-public second television station located in Casablanca, and a vocal opponent of the current government, headed by a self-proclaimed pro-monarchy Muslim political party. She had been invited to appear on a video-recorded Radio Aswat live radio interview with well-known host Rachid al-Idrissi on International Women’s Day. 2M, and Samira as one of the channel directors, had been attacked in previous months for programming practices, such as promoting Moroccan Arabic-dubbed foreign dramatic serials, which critics claimed were part of a campaign to distract and deaden the intellectual life of Moroccans. She had also publicly supported the Amazigh movement’s demands for greater government recognition and presence of the indigenous languages and customs in parliament, public media, and law. These and other comments had drawn the attention of public intellectuals concerned about what they viewed as attacks on Morocco’s Arab and Islamic identity.

Samira was a controversial figure among some of my Fassi interlocutors, though most knew little about her professional history. They knew her as a director of 2M and a key Moroccan media producer for three decades. She was born and educated in France to Moroccan parents, returning in the late 1980s to Morocco when offered a journalism position at the Moroccan National Radio and Television Company, RTM. At the time, Morocco only had one television station. She moved to 2M when the state took over majority share in the struggling private cable venture in 1996. Throughout the 2000s, she was vocal in her opposition to what she viewed as troubling “Islamist government policies” that she saw as a threat to Moroccan media and universal human rights efforts. While serving as 2M’s news director, Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane accused Samira of actively erasing mentions of him from broadcasts as a protest against his government’s policies and political orientations. ¹⁰

One of the popular innovations of Moroccan radio stations around 2012 was to post video recordings of radio interviews on YouTube, extending their audience access and medium durability. Invited guests and the interviewers sat with headphones and large recording microphones around a table in a radio sound booth. Video cameras from different angles captured the “unscripted” interview as it aired on the radio. Viewers could see the facial expressions, gestures, and bodily comportment of the interviewer and interviewee once links to clips of this interview were embedded in online news articles, circulated through Facebook links, and posted on Whatsapp group messaging. ¹¹

Samira Satail was asked to respond to critics of 2M’s programming choices, especially the channel’s investment in Moroccan Arabic (الدريجة [darīja])¹² dubbed Turkish, Mexican, and Indian dramatic serials. Despite constitutional assertions of formal Arabic (الفصحى [fuṣḥā])¹³ as the language of the state, television and radio broadcasts had long been a mix of fuṣḥā for news and darīja in entertainment and talk shows (Ennaji 1995; C. Miller 2012; Zaid 2013). In the 1990s, Moroccan television produced plays and serials in darīja, purchased Mexican television serials dubbed into fuṣḥā from other Arab countries, Japanese anime cartoons dubbed into fuṣḥā, and Bollywood movies with fuṣḥā subtitling, and broadcast Egyptian dramas in Egyptian Arabics.¹⁴ By the mid-2000s, state channels had added Lebanese-dubbed Turkish melodramas, and by 2009, they began producing darīja-dubbed dramatic serials they had purchased from Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and India. As mentioned previously, some Moroccans (called the conservative Arab nationalist or Islamist discourse pole) had published criticisms of this programming trend, while others (a progressive wing) both celebrated Moroccan Arabic dubbing as a mark of cultural diversity and bemoaned the problem of poor cultural production (C. Miller 2012, 171–72).

During the interview, Samira stated in a mix of darīja, fuṣḥā, and French that Morocco was not an Arab country, but Maghribi. “Maghrib” is the Arabic name for Morocco, meaning the place where the sun sets, the west, and often elaborated as the Arab West (المغرب العربي [al-maghrib al-‘arabī]) or المغاربية (al-maghāribīya), the region including Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. The French word for Morocco is Maroc, and maghébines has come to mean North African immigrant populations in France (Rouighi 2012, 110–12). In Samira’s response to a question about 2M’s promotion of Moroccan-dubbed foreign serials and the linguistic bases for national identity, she chose to foreground the Maghrib aspect of the historical name. She did so to highlight the non-Arab contributors to the country’s political and social life. “We are not an Arab country. I’ll say it and I’ll say it, I assume we are a Maghribi country, we are a Maghribi country. Historically, we look at our origins, in terms of our Berber origins, and we see all the confluences, the influences we have received. We are a Maghribi country, and we ought to see [this diversity] as a tool of power and pride, not an object of totally useless debates” (see Appendix 1 for transcript).

For Sitail, Moroccans should consider being Maghribi, a historically multilingual and multicultural mix, as a source of pride. She started with a firm negation of Arab nationalism, putting stress on the darīja negation form (ماشي [mashī]) in the declarative statement, “We are not an Arab country.” Rachid, the interviewer, interjected with an elongated “haaa,” as though she had finally come to the main point. His wordless utterance was a metapragmatic sign, conveying his evaluation of her utterance, but also his stance toward what her statement was doing. He had been waiting for her to say something that would allow him to position her in the debate about Moroccan national identity. Sitail went on in darīja, كنگولها (.) وكنگولها (kangūlhā (.) kangūlhā, “I’ll say it (.) and I’ll say it,”) and then switched to French: et je l’assume nous somme un pays maghrébin (.) nous somme un pays maghrébin, “and I assume we are a Maghribi country (.) we are a Maghribi country.” Rachid co-constructed this utterance with her but in darīja, as she was speaking French: حنا دولة مغاربية (ḥnā dūla maghāribīya, “We are a country of Maghribis”). Sitail responded with reduplicated darīja (agreement vocables) to sediment the force of the two statements: إييه إييه (īyeh īyeh, “yes, yes”). Another person in the sound booth jumped in with a formal Arabic statement to clarify her claim: تاريخا مغاريبية (tārikhīyān maghāribīya, “historically Maghribis”),¹⁵ which Sitail echoed, تاريخا (tārikhīyān). She then switched to French again: en vois nos origins sur le, nos origines berbères on voit toutes les confluences les influences nous avons reçu, nous somme un pays maghrébin, et il faut que nous assume encore une fois, il faut que se soit l’objet d’une force d’une fierté et non pas l’objet des débats qui sont totalement inutiles aujourd’hui (translated in the previous paragraph). As she spoke, Rachid responded with mmm and the French oui, “yes,” to encourage her talk and perhaps as an agreement with the inclusionary public discussion she was advocating.

In this interaction, Samira Sitail used declarative statements to affirm what kind of country Morocco is, was, and should be socially. For her, Morocco had always been a multilingual and multicultural mix of influences. She embodied that ideology in the mixing of languages she used (French, darīja, and formal Arabic) as they emerged through the interaction. She did not include any Amazigh linguistic forms despite her mention of Amazigh cultural influence on Moroccans. She could have employed the widely known تامغربيت (tmaghribīt),¹⁶ a Tamazight-encased Arabic word incorporated into darīja celebrating Moroccan cultural and linguistic pluralism. In addition, she didn’t explicitly mention French colonial influence as a positive force, despite its obvious traces on the discussion. Even though she argued that Moroccan national identity had always been pluralist, her assertion that Moroccans should cease debating their identity and accept diversity as a strength affirmed what she disavowed—that Morocco wasn’t quite as pluralist for others as it was for her.

In this highly publicized moment, Samira Sitail employed a claim of cultural and linguistic pluralism in arguing that Moroccan national connectedness was not Arab but Maghribi, its own unique brand. The way she did so implied Moroccans had once been more pluralist than they were now, and the medium of that pluralism was a fluid multilingualism of nonstandard (darīja), indigenous (Tamazight), colonial (French), and globally circulating standard (fuṣḥā) language forms. She framed her media production policies at 2M, as well as her personal interventions in public debates, as motivated by this longing for a Moroccanness that once was and should be. In her argument, 2M, as a national television channel, had expanded its programming to include more kinds of Moroccanness (darīja-dubbed Indian serials, fuṣḥā and French news and political talk shows, French-dubbed American movies, documentaries and social talk shows in darīja, and Tamazight-subtitled Moroccan movies) in order to reflect Moroccans’ core pluralist identity. She wasn’t trying to change something but to connect Moroccan viewers to their plurilingual past in order to build a more inclusive future. Her nostalgia was future-facing even as it evoked a moral critique of present Moroccan social connections via an idealized and elitest past.¹⁷

Wilce has argued that lament, in the sense of ritual mourning, has been a metaphor for modernity (2009, 158). In this view, modernity is not a new era, but rather a set of political projects seeking to mark something as distinct from tradition. As part of that process, talk about the present can index what had been lost to progress (traditional lament), and iconically mimic lament. Yet lament, in the sense of metadiscursive calibrations I explore here, can include a longing for what has not yet come. In this case, I saw Sitail insisting on an equivalence between a plurilingual historical Maghrib and a social pluralism she sought to promote. Even so there were Moroccan challenges to her commensurability lament. As viewed through the wide circulation of this video online and in everyday discussions, her comments incensed those concerned about neocolonial European forms of cultural and linguistic encroachment on Moroccan social relations. This was not because they didn’t recognize the cultural pluralism she advocated, but because they saw her statement—largely in French and darīja without any use of the Tamazight languages—as a medium for a project to import and impose European values into Moroccan relationality (see Campaiola 2014). Importantly, this critique was not just from “Islamist”-inclined writers (those advocating a greater role of Islam in governance), but also those involved in liberalizing projects. In his commentary response to Samira Sitail’s interview, Taoufik Bouachrine criticized her simplistic reduction of Moroccan identity to geography (Maghrib was a geographical adjective rather than an ethnic identity) and the Amazigh movement seeking to extend the role of Tamazight peoples and language in Morocco. Yet another “progressive” publication criticized Sitail’s advancement of a neocolonial French ethnic terrorism-informed Islamophobia, one that sought to curtail “troubling” religious-political relationalities, indexed by fuṣḥā and Islam, in public life.¹⁸ Each of these public respondents calibrated Moroccanness by responding to Sitail’s characterization-turned-lament.

Other ethnographies have beautifully explored the role of nostalgia talk, celebratory or mournful, in the formation of Moroccan social life and collectivities (Boum 2013; Crawford 2014; Eickelman 1985; Glasser 2016; Hoffman 2006; Kapchan 1996; Levy 2015; MacPhee 2004; McMurray 2001; Newcomb 2009; Pandolfo 1997; Shannon 2015; Spadola 2014). I focus, in this ethnography, on the various responses and social action that emerged from a specific kind of nostalgia, an ideal of connectedness not just about past sociality, but also Fassi futures. I do so by tracking laments about medium failures: communicative channels and language codes that were supposed to connect Moroccans, both my interlocutors’ embodied neighbors and imagined co-citizens. Channels I analyzed include mediums such as oral languages of civic instruction and news broadcasts, writing orthographies in online interactions, heritage speech genres employed in television dramatic serials, and multimodal bundles mediating orientations to Islam. I saw these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing relationality of Moroccan public life, even when my Fassi interlocutors differed considerably in their expressions of how and over what Moroccans should connect.

So how did I see this working? I understood these laments about medium failure as generating Moroccanness in Fez through commensurability of indexical feeling rather than shared genre lament forms or content. Indexicality is the way in which an utterance points to something about the context or the way participants view the utterances as relating to other contexts (Silverstein 1976; Wortham and Reyes 2015, 11–12). When I asked some of my Fassi contacts about both the previous episodes, they viewed them as indexing failures in ways that Moroccans relate, either in the home or nationally. In their comments, they talked about the wider contexts that these accounts were connected to, and in doing so they confirmed the indexical feel of longing and concern with forms of interactional contact, different kinds of channels, mediums, and sign codes; what scholars have identified as expressions of phaticity (Elyachar 2010; Hymes 1962; Jakobson 1960; Kockelman 2010; Lemon 2017; Malinowski 1936 [1923]; Nozawa 2015). My analysis throughout this book will not just focus on the ways Fassis I worked among described their relationality concerns, but also how they responded to them; how their expectations about how Moroccans could or should connect shaped their responses; and the sociality forms that emerged from phatic (channel, relationality) attention.

As the previous episodes demonstrated, the stylistic forms and content of lamenting could vary. They could be about opposing projects and yet still affirm the existence of ways of being Moroccan that the speakers disavowed. I heard this longing for more effective communicative mediums expressed by self-identified Moroccan liberals, secularists, leftists, religiously minded, so-called political Islamists (those wanting to organize political life using Islamic principles), and salafis (those seeking to return Muslims to practices of early Islam), Islamic philosophy-inspired intellectuals, and the disillusioned among my Fassi interlocutors. What was as important, I argue, were the different kinds of participant uptake, or responses, that emerged in relation to these longing and loss utterances. In other words, I trace their often-uncoordinated efforts at connective repair or social renewal that were more about the production of moral relationality and intersubjectivity than the failure of communicative channels. Specifically, I explore some of the social actions and medium ideologies that didn’t fit into binary liberal-Islamist framings in Morocco, but rather precipitated what Bayat called nonmovements, a politics of undirected yet socially organizing practice (Bayat 2010). He argued against the force of political ideology in driving change throughout the Middle East. Instead he focused on the everyday efforts of those who felt ambivalent about current political ideologies, yet nonetheless created phenomena that states eventually had to address. His view of ideology was classic political philosophy even if it had new iterative guises: neoliberal capitalism, Marxist socialism, Islamic republicanism, Islamist democracy. Rather than leaving ideology aside, I want to pay attention to more mundane yet pervasive kinds of ideologies. I see these Moroccan social nonmovements of communicative renewal as mediated through communicative ideologies about channels and codes. All Moroccans evoked semiotic ideologies, understandings of what made something language, a channel, or meaningful (Keane 2003). These ideologies could be multiple, partial, positioned, and contested depending on the context (Kroskrity 2000). Language and media ideologies were part of the ongoing formations of Moroccaness that arose in everyday responses to laments about communicative longing and loss. Whether it was the failures of Moroccan education to teach the languages employed in national civic and news media effectively; the problems of formal Arabic as the medium of Moroccan educational instruction; the revitalizing of specific Moroccan heritage speech genres in historical melodramas; the reclaiming of a proper multimodal array for socializing citizens into the Moroccan pattern of Islamic practice; or the lack of standardized ways of writing Arabic in online and social media contexts—Fassis participated in the ongoing practices of making Moroccanness, of relationality, through their responses to these laments. The nonmovements I observed were not named phenomena such as secularist or Islamist; rather, discursive fields materialized as intersubjective personas to which Fassis could calibrate themselves in specific moments: listening critic, educated and aware, morality advocate, reading public, Moroccan Muslim. Paying attention to the interactional, shifting nature of these nonmovements can help understand the unpredictable half-lives of political relationality.