Morocco: talking 'bout a revolution?

I started this blog to stop myself putting off a few things, including sorting through the thousand-plus pictures I took on a recent trip to Morocco, so I thought I'd post a few, along with some thoughts about what I found there.

 

The conventional wisdom on Morocco is that, while rising living standards and levels of education in Tunisia and Egypt created a generation of savvy, web-connected university graduates clued-up enough to realise the freedoms they were missing out on, and able to use social networks and the media to spread their message, learn from other protest movements and create a grassroots revolution, Morocco doesn't have enough of an educated middle class to make that happen. It certainly has high youth unemployment, but without high literacy and Internet connectivity, those young people don't articulate their frustration - not towards calls for democracy, anyway. Also, ingrained respect for the king is such that Moroccans never think to criticise him, I had been told - they might attack small targets like corrupt local officials, but it's utterly taboo to criticise the monarchy. 

That didn't quite tally with what I found when I got there: almost everyone I spoke to, from multilingual university graduates to the Berber guide who took us trekking in the mountains, seemed hugely inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian examples, thought Morocco needed similar changes, and were pretty clear on what they wanted their society to look like; a free press, parliamentary democracy, more jobs for young people and, above all, the removal of a class of highly privileged civil servants, many close to the royal family, who are seen as squirrelling away most of the country's wealth for themselves (echoes of the Trabelsis). 

There didn't seem to be a great taboo over criticism of the monarchy either - plenty of people felt they'd been betrayed by the king, who came to power promising reforms, and thought he should hand over powers to elected politicians. I got a sense of a growing momentum; of a country on the cusp of change.

Halfway though my trip, a bomb ripped through Marrakesh's Cafe Argana (aftermath pics below) killing 15 people, including 11 foreign tourists. The following day, the city was on police lockdown and everyone was talking about the fear the regime could use the excuse of terrorism to stifle calls for change.

Two months later, a referendum has been passed with 98% yes votes (although there were plenty of Moroccans on Twitter labelling the poll a masquerade and calling for a boycott) that virtually enshrines the status quo in law, and despite the passage of a few powers to Parliament, the king has pointedly stopped talking about the plans for a constitutional monarchy he announced to much fanfare in March.

Has Morocco just missed out on the Arab spring, then, or will protesters mount another challenge? I'd love to go back to find out.

Amina, a literature graduate who runs cookery workshops for tourists, and works with the February 20th protest movement.

Food shopping

The dyers' market

Abdul, our Berber mountain guide

 Essaouira

 The cafe Argana, the day after

Leviathan

Now for something completely different - the most astounding artwork I've seen this year. Anish Kapoor's Leviathan has now closed at the Grand Palais in Paris, but I was so intrigued by it I went back three times to take pictures from different angles, so while I'm digging out some of my better photos of recent months for web immortality, I thought these had to go in.

It's impossible to capture how monumental the work was, but I hope these give some kind of sense! I was lucky enough to see Kapoor give a lecture on opening night, in which he talked about the opposition he was trying to create between the feeling suffocated inside the hot, red space, and feeling protected by its womb-like quality; I must say I definitely found the inside much more oppressive, but it's the sense of the work being alive that most appealed to me, especially from outside where the movement of the rubber felt like animal breathing and the leviathan seemed to be on the verge of waking from its slumber and bursting through the glass ceiling of the Grand Palais at any moment. Kapoor hopes his work evokes something universal in all of us - I'm usually the first to get cynical about that and call on context and cultural conditioning as an explanation for all our responses - but this work made little overawed me feel very tiny and insignificant indeed, and I suppose there's something pretty fundamental about that.

Français(e) d'origine incontrolable

For the first post in this new blog, which I am hoping to use to share photos, writing (as in fiction), news related musings and hopefully the odd bit of proper journalism (I'm setting it up as much as anything to stop myself procrastinating and get to work on some ideas I've had kicking around for a while), I thought I'd start with something that makes my blood boil more than almost anything else we come across in French public discourse - what makes one French, and can anyone not born here, with four French grandparents, ever attain this hallowed state? It's back in this morning's papers, after a woman born in Norway dared to be chosen as the Europe Ecologie presidential candidate (after nearly 4 decades living in France), and then had the temerity to suggest the traditional Bastille Day parade might be a little militaristic for the 21st century - Prime Minister Francois Fillon has been one of the keenest to say she doesn't understand French traditions (see today's le Figaro).


A few lone voices, like this excellent Rue89 piece, have pointed out France's Republic hasn't always had the healthiest relations with its army, and it might perhaps be Fillon who needs a history lesson, but the idea that those of dual nationality can't be truly French seems to be leaking from the extreme right across the political spectrum - the idea of forcing dual-nationality citizens to choose has already moved from Marine le Pen to interior minister Claude Gueant. I understand that France, like the US, but very unlike mongrel Britain, is a nation that created a founding myth out of Enlightenment principles; France as a bastion of the equality of all citizens and the brotherhood of man; but after several years here, I still don't understand how that idea became so warped socialist-voting friends are horrified, for example, by schools teaching second-generation Algerian children Arabic, saying it's 'fundamentalist' to embrace any non-standard cultural identity.


Where I live, in the majority-ethnic Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement, where many white Parisians fear to tread, national identity is much more than a philosophical debate - it's discrimination they face every day, from bureaucratic struggles to prove their citizenship if they can't provide French birth certificates for all four grandparents, to the endless studies showing job applicants with 'Arab' or 'African' names are up to 80% less likely to get a job interview. They're not taking it lying down though - an organised movement against decades of marginalisation is springing up, and pushing forward despite a near total lack of media attention. Here's some of the excellent slogans I spotted at the recent 'D'ailleurs, nous sommes d'ici' (We're from here, anyway) demonstration here.

As you can see, the protest attracted all sizes and shapes of people - local undocumented migrants, students, middle class professionals, older people - and even though every time I find myself having to talk about the national identity debate, I want to scream, at least this shows there is some hope!