After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

Screening of Leïla Kilani film ʿAla hafa/Sur la planche [On the edge] at the 7ème Art in Rabat, November 2012. The look of the film is tight, dark, oppressive—more than anything it captures and creates the sense of enclosure in a life, in a class, in misery. To me, the look is a form in circulation, and the format is familiar (starting with the end, then an extended flashback)…. But the language takes it off the circulatory path. It’s in [Moroccan] darija of course but filled with slang, Tanjawi [Tangier] dialect, language of the street. Sadik told me he was often reading the French subtitles to understand. The character Badia speaks so fast…. I found it compelling. Others apparently did too: it won the grand prize at the National Film Festival and is featured in this month’s Cinemag. But the audience at 7ème Art seemed not to agree. Maybe twenty to twenty-five people were at the screening—so dark, hard to say—in groups of two to five. Three different cell phone conversations took place during the film; not short ones either, with no effort to whisper—in one case the guy kept raising his voice to be heard over the film. People complained the first time but then just waited. And when the film was over, a young man shouted, “Jabouna an-nassu”: “They brought us here to sleep.”

IN THE LAST WEEKS OF 2012, a new film sparked a vibrant public debate in Morocco—certainly not the first time a movie had commanded such attention and surely not the last in this dynamic nation of 30 million people. The discussion was reminiscent of other similar disputes from the past decade: the debate over Laïla Marrakchi’s film Marock in 2006, the public coming out of novelist Abdellah Taïa in the same year, the airing on YouTube of a video of an alleged “gay wedding” at a private home in Ksar el Kebir in November 2007, and the open picnicking of a group of activists during Ramadan in 2009. ¹ In all these cases, sides were drawn between those defending putatively traditional values and those who—their opponents suggested—had been seduced by foreign corrupting forces and who were now introducing those “foreign” elements into Morocco. This time the debate was provoked by a film by Lahcen Zinoun, a director in his late sixties better known as a dancer and choreographer. The film, Mawchouma (translated for the Francophone market as Femme écrite [A written woman]), was showing in selected cinemas in Morocco’s major cities. The problem was basically that Zinoun included shots of a naked woman.

At first blush, the controversy seemed ready made for a cultural critic trying to understand and explain the latest incarnation of social attitudes about gender, sexuality, and Moroccan identity in the early twenty-first century as well as the ways in which the transnational flows of images and ideas about modesty and the body from East and West come together in a land long considered a crossroads. Focusing on conflicts in the realm of cultural production has long been a preferred approach to untangling sociocultural complexity and one I have leveraged earlier in this book.² Indeed, in November and December 2012, I was trying to finish my research from the previous summer when I had gathered a substantial amount of material on young Casablancan authors and artists, around whom I had planned to write this chapter. But I sensed that I needed an anchor on which to build the chapter, and I considered whether the debate over Mawchouma would work. I stopped by Mohammed V University and gave the talk that led to the discussion about Innocence of Muslims I describe in chapter 1.

As I began to follow the controversy around Zinoun’s film, I decided that the more interesting story—the more important critical angle—was elsewhere, heated as the discussion was. After all, the positions taken in the debate about Mawchouma were somewhat predictable, from those who championed the director’s artistry and his right to express himself to those who thought he had offended Moroccan and Muslim values with “pornographic” themes. All interesting and revealing but not surprising.

Further, as is often the case in Morocco, the most extended discussion of Zinoun’s film was limited to the cultural and financial capital Casablanca and to a lesser extent the political capital Rabat in large part because almost all Moroccan publishing and media are centered in the Casa–Rabat metropolitan area. Within that space, the debate was restricted to a particularly small subset of those who pay attention to contemporary culture and contribute to the discussion of it. I don’t mean to say that no one elsewhere in Morocco was aware of the controversy, but it was not something that people were debating or discussing in the cafés and classrooms in Fes, from which I had just traveled, or in Marrakech, where the film had not been included among the Moroccan selections at the annual Festival International du Film de Marrakech. Mawchouma was showing in only one cinema in the country at that moment and only briefly.

In other words, what was more interesting than the particulars of the discussion about this particular film was Moroccans’ ability to have the discussion and the means of access to that discussion, both of which had changed notably with the massive arrival of social networking software in Morocco. Access to the Internet itself has a history in Morocco, of course, and implicates class and gender differently from how it does in the United States. Since the late 1990s, cybercafés have been ubiquitous in Morocco and widely used. When they arrived on the scene, they were soon socially acceptable places for young Moroccan women to patronize and use, in notable contrast to cafés (i.e., shops serving coffee and tea) and cinemas, except perhaps in the more privileged neighborhoods of Casablanca and Rabat. By the early 2000s, Internet access was inexpensive, even for children of the lower middle class (sometimes even free during late-night hours). Although the rapidly improving level of access to the Internet was also changing in Egypt and Iran, all three countries are particular in the way and manner that their young people access the Internet—when, where, how—which leads in part to the particularities and real differences in how Moroccans and Egyptians used the same social networking software. Young Moroccans I spoke to about Egyptian use of social media were mystified that Egyptians liked Twitter and claimed that Moroccans were much more interested in Facebook. They had theories about why this was so (for instance, they emphasized Moroccan notions of community, which Facebook seems to emphasize more than Twitter). Also, cybercafés have never seemed as prevalent in Egyptian cities as they are in Moroccan cities. The increasing presence of smart phones in the second decade of the 2000s may obviate the need for the cybercafé. Either way, we must not forget the first decade of access to this software in Morocco. (Smart phones are still expensive in Morocco at the time this book goes to press, and many Moroccans, especially those of the lower-middle, working, and lower classes, use cell phones for texting and speaking to friends but go to computer screens to access the Internet and Facebook.)

One need not restrict the issue of Internet access and use to North Africa. In the United States, public and semiprivate discussions about literature and film are arguably more democratic because of social networking. Media scholars have argued that the ability to interact with and comment on works of literature, television, and film has made creators and innovators out of consumers of culture. Alex Galloway, one of the most innovative of such theorists, has drawn our attention to what he calls the “interface effect” and pointed to a striking rearrangement of how individuals engage not only with technology but also with each other.³

Can the same be said of Moroccans? Do the insights derived from observing American users of new digital technologies apply in such a different socioeconomic and political context? What does the use of social networking media in Morocco mean when we juxtapose it against low literacy rates in the country, and what do the energies to be found in such discussions mean when we compare them to low cinema-going and book-buying rates in Morocco? Does the way that Moroccans engage in such debates help answer the question that many were asking in late 2012 and still ask as this book goes to press: Why had the so-called Arab Spring bypassed Morocco?

It is tempting to pursue such questions. In the years since September 11, 2001, and with renewed energy in the wake of the Arab uprisings a decade later, many have been looking not only for predictions about the future of places such as Morocco but also for a more rigorous attention to youth culture in the region. The sense that the world is transforming around us because of the rapid changes in technology and related software that connect individuals allows for a fresh look at a region that for too long has been assumed to be outside of the forward progress of time. Morocco has undergone important social changes in the past decade or two as a result of a combination of transformations from within and the impact of events and developments from without. From the transition to the rule of young King Mohammed VI (known locally by the hip moniker “M6,” with the number pronounced in French) in 1999 after nearly four decades of reign by his father, King Hassan II, to the arrival and massive acceptance of digital technologies across the country, the past decade and a half have apparently ushered in a new Morocco.⁴

Americans should not assume, though, that greater access to public dialogue through digital technologies and a younger monarch taking the reins of the kingdom necessarily have led to a Morocco in which Western values or a pro-American position is ascendant. During much of the same period, U.S. policies have been especially unpopular in Morocco and, from many Moroccans’ perspective, have fractured a historic friendship on all but the official level. During George W. Bush’s administration, the global crackdown on terrorist networks had a powerful effect on Morocco as the kingdom partnered with the United States, frequently using the premise of routing out terrorists to settle domestic political scores. The U.S. military invasion of Iraq was criticized in Morocco, as it was elsewhere in the Arab world, even though many Moroccans considered Saddam Hussein to be a murderous despot. Arab and Muslim solidarity with Iraqi victims of the U.S. invasion encouraged Moroccans to sympathize with Iraqis and against Americans, especially as media coverage of the invasion by Arab news outlets depicted hostile attitudes toward Muslims and Islam among Americans. Satellite dishes, called parabols in Morocco, are ubiquitous and inexpensive, and television viewership is high, with transnational Arabic-language news sources such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya watched widely.

Nonetheless, American cultural products, cultural forms, and formulas have been extremely popular in Morocco and would seem to have had a significant effect on Moroccan cultural production itself. Moroccan cinema, both popular and art cinema, has visibly adapted Hollywood formulas and “look.” Hip-hop has also become popular, and a generation of Moroccan rappers have used the form with a combination of highly local language and referents.⁵ Moroccan discussions of sexuality and women’s rights have often taken up Western models for talking about identity, even while disputing the ways in which Americans understand Moroccan identity and sexuality. In the realm of consumer culture, the famous Moroccan souk (suq) has been increasingly displaced by shopping malls and public spaces not only in the cosmopolitan capital cities of Casablanca and Rabat but even in the imperial cities of Fes, Marrakech, and Meknes. Higher education on the university level has been struggling with government-imposed reforms (themselves under pressure from International Monetary Fund directives), and American-style models for organizing curricula and degree programs have steadily been unseating long-held French models.⁶

What does the apparent contradiction between a Moroccan embrace of American educational and cultural forms and an increasing rejection of U.S. politics mean?

I argue that even though Moroccans identify many of these forms in circulation with the United States (even when the forms may not be explicitly American), they dissociate them from their putative culture of origin and do with them what they will. In other words, tempting as it might be to see films such as Mawchouma and Marock as taking up Western concepts of liberation and using them to open up Moroccan society to questions of “freedom” or equality, we should be aware that something else is going on.

In Morocco, as elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, outside cultural forms are taken up by local artists and authors, but they are recalibrated or reconfigured in ways that render them unfamiliar or incomprehensible to observers from the outside culture. This reconfiguration is not simply a question of a different language or local meaning that detaches the form in circulation from its own content. Rather, the Moroccan use of the Western form in circulation scrambles our sense of what those forms mean in their original context. It produces a version of what the late Miriam Hansen called a “global vernacular.”⁷

Moroccans so often make everything from Arabic language to popular culture their own with a creativity at once local and vivid. It is well known among Moroccans that their own work does not travel particularly well on its own. Moroccan Arabic is not understood by Arabs beyond the Maghreb and the North African diaspora. The phrase “ends of circulation” has a final and particular meaning in this country at the edge of the Arab world, the land of the farthest west.

The Moroccan case matters to this book for two reasons. First, with it we have yet another model for understanding and employing circulation to add to the repertoire of critical rubrics necessary for the new comparative literature and new approaches in sociocultural anthropology. And second, we understand some aspects of contemporary Morocco more fully if we recognize this era’s engagement with the outside form and distinguish it from the ways in which Moroccan cultural producers engaged French language and culture during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Postcolonial criticism, strictly understood, is limited in helping us to understand the richness of these new situations. Moroccan filmmakers and writers since at least the 1980s have leveraged American works against French models because the American model is considered freer from the political oppressiveness of the former colonizer.

In my earlier work, I have asked whether circulation allows us to appreciate the strategies of contemporary North African cultural production with more nuance than does postcolonial theory, which seems generally to be better suited to the concerns of works from the 1950s through 1980s. For example, I followed Casablanca the movie (Michael Curtiz, 1942) to Casablanca the city and found that Moroccan director Abdelkader Lagtaa disoriented the meanings of the Hollywood film for his own purposes while making the film al-Hubb fi Dar al-Baida (Love in Casablanca) in 1991.⁸ At that point, the Warner Bros. film Casablanca, despite its stereotypes and Orientalism, might seem to a Moroccan director less noxious than French representations of Morocco because of the less fraught political relationship between the United States and Morocco in the early 1990s.

In the twenty-first century, however, as Moroccan attitudes toward the United States have become increasingly negative, the presence and popularity of American cultural forms do not necessarily implicate collaboration.

And so, rather than deconstruct the rich debate around Mawchouma in the winter of 2012–2013, I want to step back a few years to examine three turning points in the twenty-first-century Moroccan encounter with American forms and cultural products. Each of these turning points occasioned public discussion and significant debate and helps us to understand the most recent occasions for renewing that debate. And we must continually insist on attending not only to the meanings of these films, fictions, and other Moroccan cultural products but also to the social spaces in which they operate and make meaning. Doing so may mean thinking about Moroccan cinema in the spaces where it is viewed, from the illegally reproduced DVDs and VCDs to the mostly empty cinema houses where phone conversations compete with the soundtrack (as in my experience of watching ʿAla hafa in Rabat). And it means understanding that private encounters with novels by Abdellah Taïa or with films seen on laptops take place within a vibrant public debate that surrounds those private moments.

This chapter focuses on three episodes that advance this claim and that congregate around questions of gender and sexuality. First, I discuss the peculiar case of a Casablanca video pirate named Hamada and some of his work from 2003 to 2005. Then, I provide an extended discussion of Leila Marrakchi’s film Marock and the debate around it. Finally, I discuss the work of openly gay Moroccan writer of fiction Abdellah Taïa. Any of these works and other newer works of Moroccan literature and cinema can be read and interpreted outside the framework I am proposing, but what I think makes them all especially worthy of attention is how they index—usually silently but in ways that resonate with local Moroccan audiences—foreign, recognizably American forms and formulas for representing identity yet do so in ways that detach them fully from their source.

I succeeded in locating the disk without too much trouble. Video CDs were then a popular format in Morocco; with only 700-megabyte storage on a CD-ROM, however, the quality was notably poor, and the video jumpy and often pixelated. When I inserted the CD into my laptop, I encountered a curious work by a video pirate-artist who identified himself as “Hamada.” (His name, email address, and a cell phone number appear on a banner that runs across some of the video tracks.) Hamada and his collaborators had reproduced digital video clips from familiar American films using CGI and sitcoms and had dubbed them with Moroccan popular music and in some cases Moroccan dialogue. “Albums” of a dozen or so such tracks had been compiled, put on VCDs, duplicated, and sold for about $1 each (figure 4.1).

In 2004, Hamada’s work was popular among young, urban Moroccans, selling thousands of copies and sometimes playing on screens in cafés. His most popular work, the one he came to be identified with, paired a clip from DreamWorks animated film Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001) with a chaabi song that begins “Wa haid al Miloudi wa haid ah.” The video is of a dance number in Shrek with the familiar character Donkey singing into a microphone while other characters dance (figure 4.2). The music paired with this visual was a song by the Moroccan pop star Adil al Miloudi, here performing an exuberant piece in which he continually names himself and calls attention to his own drug and alcohol use. The song was already well known, but the juxtaposition of song and video, apparently perfectly synced but obviously not made for one another, endlessly entertained Moroccans in on the joke.

Although Hamada includes on his CD the banner with his name and cell phone number and makes the claim “All Rights Reserved,” the success of this particular piece was such that most of his future compilations were referred to as “Miloudi” (one that I bought on a subsequent trip back to Morocco later the same year demonstrates that they were released as a series). But others referred to them as “Cheb Hemar,” using the word cheb for rai or other pop stars in North Africa and the word for “donkey,” apparently referring to the donkey in Shrek featured in the dubbed video “Wa haid al Miloudi.”

Hamada’s creative work—or, more accurately, the Hamada phenomenon—deserves our attention here because of the original way this artist took up a foreign text—an American text at that, none other than Shrek—and shaped it into a work of Moroccan art. Hamada was surely not the first to do this, and over the years that I have spoken about his works, I have been sent links or video clips of Shrek paired with songs from multiple national contexts. (Despite my discussion of Shrek in Iran in the previous chapter and a great deal of searching, I have never found an Iranian parallel.) Hamada’s version has always seemed the best to me, and it sparked an unusually popular phenomenon in Morocco. But Hamada’s originality is not, after all, my primary concern here.

How should we make sense of his work? One option emerges from a short discussion of it in a prominent Moroccan culture magazine, the weekly TelQuel, whose reporter tracked down Hamada in May 2004, at the height of his fame. Maria Daïf interviewed Hamada, then about twenty years old, and one of his collaborators (identified as “Majd”) in the coastal city of Kenitra. The interview is useful in particular because Hamada, understandably wary of the press, left little trace before he disappeared from view. In the brief TelQuel interview, Hamada explained how the project had begun six years earlier, in 1998, when to amuse himself he dubbed a scene from Disney’s animated film The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) with chaabi music. In that clip, included on the Miloudi VCDs, Mowgli and his animal friends from the jungle dance to a Moroccan popular beat. Hamada’s friends loved the work, and he put it on the Internet, which had been introduced in Morocco just a few years earlier, in 1995, and in limited fashion. TelQuel does not go over the technological aspects of Hamada’s limited circulation except to say, “It was not until the VCD boom that ‘his clips’ could make the tour of the country.” Hamada explained: “I understood then that I didn’t have to put everything up on the web. Others downloaded the clips and sold them. I earned nothing.”⁹

Daïf herself focuses less on the ways the changing technology impacts Hamada’s work itself or its circulation within Morocco and more on extrapolating a traditional sense of the work’s meaning. Writing while Hamada’s works were still new and fresh, she concludes that they are best understood as the expression of youth who don’t see themselves reflected in Moroccan cinema and films: “What do young people do when they don’t recognize themselves in television dramas, Moroccan films, or Moroccan TV? They appropriate images from elsewhere and adapt them to their daily life and their language.”¹⁰

In some ways, this statement could describe the editorial mission of TelQuel magazine in the first decade of the 2000s, whose motto was “Morocco as it is” and which was consistently courting trouble with the kingdom for pushing at the boundaries of what could be said and for defending cultural renegades. So it is little surprise to find this conclusion in the article on Hamada or indeed that the magazine thought to profile him. Here the understanding is that what Hamada is doing is finding a form to express Moroccan reality via the work of appropriation and adaptation. Fair enough, except that the concept of appropriation the article mobilizes runs against the journalist’s own sense of the work’s underlying realism.

Daïf writes: “You won’t hear [the dialogues and songs Hamada used] on Moroccan TV because they are too politically incorrect (they swear, speak of girls, hashish, money, and unemployment, the life of youth in the neighborhoods, to summarize). That’s why these dubbings are successful, in addition to the fact that the ‘décalage’ (Matrix speaking Marrakech dialect, for example) is hilarious.”¹¹ (This is my translation from the French. Daïf uses English to express the idea of political incorrectness; in the original she writes, “parce que trop politically not correct.”)

Without analyzing Daïf’s own reading of Hamada any further, we can note that she hits on a key aspect of Moroccan appreciation of his work: the humor or hilarity of what she calls the work’s “décalage.” What she means by the term décalage is the awkward or jarring juxtaposition of Moroccan dialect and Moroccan popular music with visuals from global media, in particular films with Hollywood high production values, which Hamada favored, such as Shrek, The Mask, any Disney film, and The Matrix. Of course, the high resolution and high production values of these film clips would be mostly lost in the transfer to VCD, where they would pixelate and jump. But they could still summon up a feeling of décalage, as Daïf put it.

Décalage is a notoriously difficult term to render into English with precision because it has multiple meanings. Brent Hayes Edwards has given us the most brilliant and extended discussion of its signification and the ways in which diasporic artists communicate via or across experiences of décalage. In his essay “The Uses of Diaspora,” Edwards writes:

The so-called décalage—let us also call it the “disjuncture”—in Hamada’s tracks work against the realism that TelQuel otherwise attributed to it. In other words, if the magazine saw Hamada’s appropriation of Hollywood film clips as the result of his inability to find himself and his peers reflected in contemporary Moroccan cinema, there was also a greater and not so literal disjuncture. That which we could call the disjuncture, both temporal and geographic, between the soundtrack and the visual is the active space of possibility. It is that which is difficult to translate. But that space of disjuncture or experience of décalage is what makes Hamada crucial. Huge numbers of Moroccans got it. My colleagues at the party in Rabat were not confident that I ever could.

Playing with Brent Edwards’s use of Guha, we might be tempted to say that there was a structural discrepancy between what Hamada was doing in the Moroccan cybercafés in the Global South and what the high-paid CGI mavens in the DreamWorks studios were doing in the West when they created Shrek, a sort of appropriation in a postcolonial sense. The risk that the West would recognize Hamada’s work as resistance (i.e., piracy) was always there, which is why Hamada had to stay incognito when the TelQuel journalist tracked him down. But we should insist on not losing or forgetting the more exuberant aspects of the project—its hilarity. Many Moroccans expressed to me a sense of joy in the juxtapositions Hamada staged. When I pressed them further, they rarely stated that Hamada stole from the West and made an American product “Moroccan” but rather commented that the unexpected juxtaposition of the global and the local provoked an immediate and visceral reaction. That’s an important distinction.

Marock, Marrakchi’s first feature, builds on a theme she explored in her first film, a twelve-minute short called L’Horizon perdu (Lost horizon, 2000), about a young man broken by life in the Tangier medina who leaves Morocco for Spain in clandestine fashion. In the case of Marock, however, the protagonist’s departure from the homeland is deferred for a full ninety minutes and comes at the conclusion of a coming-of-age tale. Though the protagonist in Marock is no less broken by her milieu than the protagonist in the short, her elite socioeconomic status is never in jeopardy, and the emigration is legal and transparent (the last spoken word of the film is the passport control officer’s demand, “Passport,” which causes no anxiety). Nearly everything that precedes this final word justifies the departure, which comes both as a relief and as the tearful leave taking from adolescence and Morocco alike. The seventeen-year-old female protagonist’s departure from Morocco was not, however, what made Marock controversial, even though the film associates Morocco itself with adolescence and departure from Morocco with the process of maturing. (To be sure, the film’s detractors repeated the fact that the director herself had emigrated from Morocco to France.)¹⁶ Rather, the provocations were the director’s frank portrayal of premarital sexuality among elite Casablancans and her flaunting of religious and cultural conventions.

Three plot strands in particular stood out: the open refusal of the protagonist, Rita (Morjana Alaoui), to fast during the month of Ramadan, when the film is set; Rita’s mockery of her brother, Mao (Assad El Bouab), at prayer; and her open affair with a Jewish teenager, Youri (Matthieu Boujenah), an affair that is apparently consummated sexually. As the last plot element suggests, the frank treatment of teenage Moroccan sexuality and a disregard for the sanctities of religious tradition are in Marock deeply intertwined. Across the board, the moment in the film that most disturbed commentators was an intimate scene between Youri and Rita, the two entangled in each other’s arms, kissing in an isolated seaside shed. Youri, following Rita’s eyes to the silver Star of David he wears around his neck, removes the chain and places it around the Muslim girl’s neck. “This way,” he says, “you won’t have to think about it.”¹⁷ The film’s defenders, such as the liberal cultural magazines TelQuel and Le Journal Hebdomadaire, both of which featured it on their covers and dedicated long articles to it, found this scene the most difficult aspect to watch in its disregard for religious decorum.¹⁸

Its detractors used the moment as evidence that the film was part of a Zionist plot and were quick to discredit the director. Strong criticism was delivered to Marrakchi in person in Tangier, where the film was screened at the national film festival in December 2005, and online, where an active discussion about the film took place among the Moroccan diaspora in France on its French release in February 2006, taking Marrakchi to task for claiming to speak on behalf of the young generation of Moroccans.¹⁹

In the public debate that ensued upon the film’s general release in Morocco, Marock and Marrakchi herself quickly came to stand for multiple positions—freedom of speech, the young “rock” generation, intellectual and artistic honesty, and humanism, on the one hand, but disrespect for Moroccan tradition, diasporic elitism cut off from the homeland, neocolonialist pandering to Europe’s Islamophobic preoccupations, and savvy selfpublicity/provocation, on the other. These positions are not mutually exclusive, but the debate needs to be understood first.

The anxieties that Marock provoked were intense across the cultural and political spectrum. Whatever the validity of the critiques of the film’s aesthetic quality²⁰ or whatever the anachronism of the film’s attempt to offer a national allegory of twenty-first-century Morocco via a tale of departure (which recalled mid-twentieth-century modes of the late-colonial and early-postcolonial period), Marock struck a nerve. And if Marrakchi herself predicted that it would do so in a statement made in France before the film even got to Moroccan screens—a comment that in itself of course antagonized—her success in making this prediction is no less important to understand.

Marock makes vivid a variety of intertwined features of urban Morocco at a key turning point in the decade. It was one of the first feature films in Morocco to operate within diverse Moroccan media worlds, which I argue it both anticipated and helped to create. It was a film designed for the big screen in traditional cinema houses, of course, but it was more often viewed on pirated DVDs, shared via YouTube uploads, and discussed and debated online by a young public in Morocco and in the diaspora in France. This wide debate was an effect not only of its controversial and contemporary theme but of its addressing a public that has deep ties to Morocco as well as either transnational experience (the Moroccan diaspora in Europe) or transnational aspirations (urban Moroccan youth). If Laïla Marrakchi hit a nerve with her film, it was not simply because of the film’s explosive subject matter. Rather, she located and created a public whose nerve was ready to be struck. Marock was thus a harbinger of the new pressures on the Moroccan nation of the digital age.

Shana Cohen and Larabi Jaidi’s description of the Moroccan encounter with globalization, published in the same year as Marock’s release, 2006, is useful in recalling the moment in which Marrakchi was intervening. In Morocco: Globalization and Its Consequences, Cohen and Jaidi give an account of the interplay of economic and political pressures from outside and the protean forms that the Moroccan kingdom assumed in responding to the pulls and pressures of development.²¹ They argue that Moroccan youth have retrenched into apathy and apoliticism, despite an environment that seems poised toward political inclusion. For Cohen and Jaidi, Moroccan youth can be seen in terms of what Susan Ossman has called the “lightness” of bodies in her own important study of the transnational circulation of forms of beauty between Casablanca, Paris, and Cairo, published at the beginning of the new millennium.²² And though Cohen and Jaidi focus on economic and political processes, they suggest some of the forms of cultural production that may be implicated by attention to Morocco’s complex relationship to globalization when they pay brief attention to an anonymous Moroccan rapper in the diaspora who challenges from afar the cultural contradictions of Moroccan national culture. Marrakchi’s film depicts a segment of Moroccan youth who are apathetic and locates an outside form or look to tell their story. It was both aspects of Marock that were provocative.

Marock was one of several Moroccan films that in the first half of the 2000s engaged the state of the Moroccan nation under a new set of arrangements that were no longer burdened by postcolonial anxieties.²³ Films as varied in their themes and artistic ambitions as Baidaoua (Casablancans; Abdelkader Lagtaa, 1999), Ali Zaoua (Nabil Ayouch, 2000), Khahit errouh (Threads; Hakim Belabbes, 2003), and Le Grand voyage (Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004), all of which commanded attention in different Moroccan and diaspora publics, were concerned with what place Morocco and Moroccan culture might have in a global setting in which ideas, products and commodities, lifestyles, and technologies had complicated what was once, perhaps, a more simple binary (France–Morocco). I say this without meaning to reduce colonial (and postcolonial) Morocco to a binary, either internally with respect to French division of Arab and Tamazight cultures, languages, and populations or globally with respect to the changing position of the United States toward Morocco (and that of Morocco toward the United States) in the late-colonial period and the first two decades of the postcolonial period. As I have argued elsewhere, from the arrival of American troops in Morocco in November 1942 and certainly after Franklin Roosevelt’s participation in the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, a vivid and visible triangulation of paradigms became available in Morocco, within which the American position might offer liberty from the French; the promise/threat of American commodities was the harbinger of this new paradigm.²⁴ To say so is not to confuse the American “alternative” as liberating, though that was the frame within which Roosevelt spoke to Mohammed V, but rather to identify it as an arrangement that would threaten to place Morocco in the time lag of American neoliberalism avant la lettre. But even if we agree that the postcolonial period itself be reconsidered outside these binarisms, we must still note the shift by the end of the 1990s into a new set of concerns and ways of engaging with social collectivities in Morocco.

Marock was made in 2005 but set in 1997; it is thus sensitive to the moment before cell phones and the Internet pervaded daily life in Morocco but no less attentive to the new circulation of cultural objects in that setting, and Marrakchi and the film’s producers were acutely aware of the use of new technologies to market the film. In 1997, the opposition came to power in Morocco—the so-called government of alternance, a solution to the series of large and sometimes violent demonstrations against the legislative government in the 1980s and early 1990s. But after the death of King Hassan II in 1999, the stability of the monarchy was achieved in part by addressing the worst repression of the preceding years—through a truth-and-reconciliation process, the release of political prisoners, and the opening of press freedoms. These actions were not only necessary but also perhaps served to distract the Moroccan public from the opening to the world outside that new technologies of the digital age were forcing (from the fax machine and satellite television in the first half of the 1990s to the Internet and cell phones in the last years of the 1990s and in the early 2000s).

Other films seized on the intervention of technologies in altering the nation’s spatial and temporal bases, which would soon be apparent when cell phones became massively available in Morocco. Ismael Ferroukhi’s film Le Grand voyage, a road movie from Paris to Mecca, portrays the cell phone as a technology that challenges the authority of face-to-face contact and symbolizes the generational gap. Hakim Belabbes’s film Khahit errouh (Threads), an experimental, avant-garde film, associates the ruptures of generational and diasporic change, of its shift in setting from Chicago to Boujjad, and perhaps of its own avant-garde fragmented technique with the interruption of the telephone, a technology that both connects and ruptures. And Ali Zaoua, a greatly successful film both locally in Morocco and internationally, demonstrates in two ways a sense that the world of young street children may be seen in relationship to the technologies and economic forces of globalization. Nabil Ayouch’s framing device for his tale of Casablanca street children is to show Moroccan media depicting these marginalized youth to the larger nation, suggesting both the social stratification to be found in Casablanca and the media worlds located there. But Ali Zaoua is notable among Moroccan films of the decade in its use of digitally generated animation to depict what these children imagine. The street children of Ali Zaoua are caught in social and economic stasis, but their imaginations allow them to circulate outside their immediate circumstances. Ayouch thus seizes on a metaphor that Moroccan sociologist Said Graiouid would pick up on in his own research on social exile and virtual escape in Morocco. Graiouid’s ethnographic research in Moroccan cybercafés found that otherwise hopeless youth were chatting with Moroccans living in diaspora and engaging in “virtual h’rig” (referring to the illegal form of emigrating—literally, “burning”).²⁵

With these descriptions, I do not mean to imply that the question of the nation is not central to many of these films. Yet even narratives that are centered around the nation or a critique of the nation must be considered in the changed framework within which the nation operates, globalization.²⁶ For Marock, sensitive to the global movement of ideas, images, bodies, and commodities (to say nothing of politics and technologies), awareness of this framework is crucial to judging the film and whether Marrakchi’s national critique is anachronistic or daring or both. In Baidaoua, awareness of this context allows us to see how the film is concerned primarily with circulation, whether one can move socially, across borders, within a city or not. In Ali Zaoua, taking this in another direction, social immobility is contrasted with the mobilities represented by media and digital animation. To shift the conversation to “circulation” is in part to register frustration with a logic that insists that all Moroccan cultural production forever after 1956 is in reference to France and to insist that other concerns and other networks have in fact taken center stage in recent years.²⁷ Marock’s intertwined set of concerns include questions of circulation, diaspora, cultural clash, friction with (or rupture from) Moroccan traditions, which together suggest that the analytics of postcolonialism do not apply here even though postcolonialism may be the register within which Marrakchi imagines the narrative resolution of her film via Rita’s departure from Morocco to France.

But Marock is notable, too, for the way in which American objects, songs, and a “Hollywood look” run through it when the film otherwise is not geographically or politically concerned with the United States. Here we have a vivid example of how Moroccan cultural production in what I call the “digital age” or, alternatively, the “age of circulation” is animated by a different set of concerns than the concerns that were dominant during the postcolonial period. Maghribi cultural production during the first three decades of the postcolonial period, which commenced in Morocco with independence from the French protectorate in 1956, frequently exhibited an anxious relationship to French history, culture, and language—major examples include Abdelkebir Khatibi’s novels La Mémoire tatouée (Tattooed memory, 1971) and Amour bilingue (1983; Love in Two Languages [1990]) as well as Abdellah Laroui’s work of revisionist history L’ histoire du Maghreb (The history of Morocco, 1970). By the 1990s, however, the concerns of younger Moroccan writers and filmmakers seem to have moved beyond the classic postcolonial concerns and taken up a new set of themes I associate with circulation, both literal (migration, travel, expatriation, etc.) and formal. We see an engagement with circulation earlier in cinema (for example, in Abdelkader Lagtaa’s film al-Hubb fi Dar al-Baida) than in Moroccan literature, perhaps because influential American cinematic representations of Morocco (such as Casablanca) were an early harbinger of the later geopolitical order that would follow the colonial era. The interest in circulation as a theme can be traced through Moroccan literature beginning in the second half of the 1990s (e.g., Aicha Ech-Chana’s socially committed documentary text Miseria [1996] and Soumya Zahy’s novel On ne rentrera peut-être plus jamais chez nous [We will perhaps never return to our homes, 2001]). Writers of the various Moroccan diasporas—such as Abdelkader Benali, writing in Dutch in Holland; Laila Lalami, writing in English in the United States; and Tahar Ben Jelloun, writing in French in France—were sensitive to the theme of migration and return, as might be expected. Benali’s novel Bruiloft aan zee (1996; Wedding by the Sea [2000]), Lalami’s first book of fiction Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), and Ben Jelloun’s book Partir (2006; Leaving Tangier [2009]) all narrate tales of Moroccans in motion to and from Europe.

In its coverage of the debate over Marock, the maverick weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire staged a debate between Bilal Talidi, a representative of the Islamist Parti de la justice et du développement (PJD), which had called for banning the film, and Abdellah Zaazaa, the leader of a network of Casablanca neighborhood associations, Réseau des Associations de Quartier du Grand Casablanca, and representative of a liberal, secular position. In the debate, printed in the pages of Le Journal, the question of aesthetics became a screen against which to argue larger questions about Moroccan society. Talidi, who had published an editorial against Marock in the paper Attajdid, claimed in the pages of Le Journal that “one should not judge a film without watching it.” His indictment of the film was, in this venue, pitched in terms of aesthetics: a “maladroit” use of French and Arabic, an “extreme lightness of plot,” and a lack of “dynamism, drama or life”; for him, Marock was closer to a documentary than to a “true film.” Zaazaa, in contrast, resisted the analysis of the film’s language or aesthetic quality and launched his own defense of it on political grounds. The film’s ability to “trace Moroccan realities,” in particular, justified its screening in Morocco, and he called attention to the ways in which its opposition was manipulating the film for its ulterior motives of creating a “state of law” (état de droit). But he, too, made recourse to aesthetic judgment. He noted: “I saw the film in the company of my wife. We left struck [boulversés] by how well it had traced Moroccan social realities. The story pleased me in every way.” ²⁸

The point that Zaazaa had seen the film in the company of his wife was clearly part of his implied defense. If Marock posed a challenge to “traditions of the country,” “religious values,” and the “fundamentals of Islam” (as religious politicians had suggested, including those who did not call for its censorship, but rather for a national boycott of it),²⁹ Zaazaa claimed that the film could educate the Moroccan conjugal couple on the new realities of Moroccan society. But Talidi called Zaazaa on the latter’s expression of “pleasure” on seeing the film, which Talidi said was not an “objective response” and therefore to be discarded. He claimed such objectivity for his own analysis of the film; Zaazaa’s pleasure was subjective.

Marock, the viewing of Marock, the response one had to the viewing of Marock, and what the nation’s appropriate response to Marock should be in 2006 became fraught places to debate the status of national culture itself. Talidi’s comment about Zaazaa’s pleasure begs the question of an “objective” reading. How do we read this film? Can an “objective” reading of the film by a representative of a political party stand in for that of a citizenry?

Talidi and Zaazaa notably agreed that Marock offered a representation of Moroccan reality, though they did not call attention to their agreement on this question. For Talidi, Marock was more documentary than film; for Zaazaa, it was a shocking representation of a reality he recognized but about which he knew nothing. Their implied disagreement was over what role the elite and westward-looking Moroccan youth of Marock might have in the society at large. It is the teen look of the picture, inscribed within a style deeply redolent of American cinema, that was perhaps the most upsetting, though these terms were not used in the debate. PJD’s call for the film to be banned drew on the law’s defense of “sacred values and good morals.” Therefore, the question of whether the film was Moroccan or not could be linked to whether it should be banned under Moroccan law. Marrakchi’s Moroccanness or her Frenchness was itself a cipher for a question of style and what I call the film’s “look.”

On the level of style, Marock itself exhibits the circulation of an American look, which is doubled by the film’s interest (both visually and in the narrative) in American commodities. This interest is the threat that is harder to speak of, but the one that made the PJD position ultimately anachronistic, as other commentators realized. Mohamed Ameskane, representative of the Union pour un mouvement populaire (known best by its abbreviation, UMP), stated in the same pages that the film could be boycotted “if it were judged contrary to our principles. [But] one must sign up for this new world, the world of the Internet and of globalization.”³⁰ Seen in this light, many Moroccan commentators’ resistance to Marock should be regarded as aligned with an anxiety about globalization, and the championing of it on grounds of free speech can be viewed as a celebration of the open borders (of both information and trade in commodities) associated with globalization. My point is not to take a side but to show that Marock heralds but does not initiate a new stage in Moroccan cinema. From Marock, we can look backward to see this interest in circulation in a number of places and forward to the works that would come, such as those with which I began this chapter. But first we must describe how a “look” circulates.

The story Marock tells is familiar enough to those who have watched Hollywood teen romances, and on the level of plot it borrows from a number of Hollywood films and TV serials. To say so is not to denigrate it per se—nor is it a compliment on artistic grounds—but rather to note why the familiarity of the formula might itself be so bothersome to some Moroccan critics such as Talidi and also why for others it immediately raised the question of protection on the grounds of free speech. The circulation of this look operates on both the level of plot/scenario (which allowed politicians to target the film) and the level of the film’s visual and aural registers (which politicians did not invoke). Marock borrows what we can call, following Miriam Hansen again, a vernacular familiar from Hollywood cinema, in this case the teen romance, and brings it into Moroccan circulation. That combination of a familiar look and the familiarity of a Hollywood formula, the problem-picture-cum-teen-romance, emerges as the most interesting form of global culture in circulation in this film. But we can also note the many explicit indications of global circulation in the film: the music, apparel, food, products, and commodities that animate the world of these Casablancan youth. If these youth look to Europe for their futures after the baccalaureate (“bac”) exam, the commodities, products, and culture that they consume are for the most part American. More accurately, these objects of consumption are global and are generally rendered in global English, both of which are associated with the United States irrespective of the national origin of the cultural product or artist.

Marock is a teen pic, which seems at once a comfortable and uncomfortable way to describe it, given that the phrase implies an American relationship to the family and society that was and is not the norm in Morocco. In other words, without the particular identity of “teens” that we know in the United States, which is not universal, you can’t have a “teen pic.” However, as Marock itself demonstrates, not only does “teen pic” sound appropriate as a way to describe the film, but the film so successfully mobilizes this style to describe a social milieu that it effaces for its non-Moroccan audiences much of the particularity of Moroccan adolescence. Such particularity is swept away by Marock’s depiction of a world of discos, parties, romance, and preparation for a life after high school that will be spent in France. Whatever the accuracy of this representation of the young elite of Casablanca, it is clearly not the life enjoyed by most Moroccans. (Juxtaposing Ali Zaoua, with its representation of the poor homeless children of Casablanca, and Marock, the two Moroccan films of the first decade of the twenty-first century with the largest international success, would be provocative.) With poverty and social class for the most part dispensed with by Marock’s fascination with the elite, the problems that remain in the social problem aspects of the film are those presented by Moroccan society itself. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the solutions to those problems are also brought in from abroad (American music, for example, and the characters’ choice to depart from Morocco). The way the Hollywood “look” functions, therefore, is to naturalize the import of foreign solutions to domestic problems and to make domestic recalcitrance to them seem itself foreign or anachronistic. That is, the film’s adoption of an American vernacular, within which the social problem of a romance between a Jewish young man and a Muslim young woman may be overcome naturally by the power of love (and romantic comedy as a genre), was a solution that made most Moroccans’ difficulty in imagining it seem irrelevant or retrograde. Indeed, the film ends in tragedy with respect to the love story, not the comedy it has suggested, which we may see as the translation of the vernacular to local realities. This relationship to the Hollywood vernacular is the deep level on which Marrakchi’s outsider perspective functions, and, though unnamed by its opponents, it produced the relationship to Morocco that many found bothersome about the film—and that titillated others. Without the language to discuss this vernacular as that which was foreign to the Moroccan film, however, the debate revolved instead around the question of Marrakchi’s roots as a Moroccan and the route she took to France as ways to prove that she and therefore her film were not after all “Moroccan.” This approach, it should be clear, was a dead end.

The story is a simple problem tale set during the month of Ramadan. Rita is a high school senior; it is the year of the baccalaureate exam, a year that in her circles is spent studying, partying, listening to music, and thinking about the next stage of life. For Rita and most of her friends at the privileged Lycée Lyautey, the next stage of life often means leaving Morocco for Europe (though not in all cases); the present is generally met with abandon. Drinking alcohol, smoking hashish, flirting, and being sexually active are the norm for weekend nights, which are spent racing around in sports cars between nightclubs and homes without parents, where prostitutes may be called in for quick fixes for the boys. Rita’s brother, Mao, has returned home from London for Ramadan, and from the start we can see that he does not approve of Rita’s milieu. We see Mao praying, to his sister’s surprise, and wearing a close-cropped beard; he is clearly disturbed by the frivolities of his old circle of friends. He rarely comments directly, except to Rita, who he says looks like a “whore” because of the makeup she wears. At a party, Rita falls for a young man she has observed at a nightclub. She learns his name (Youri) through a mutual friend and bets her friends that she’ll have him by the end of Ramadan. The problem, though, is not whether she can or will have him—there are meaningful glances between them from the start that make this clear—but what it will mean if she does.

The plot is fast and efficient. The film is visually sensuous; its world is socially vapid. Rita, played by a newcomer to the cinema whom Marrakchi plucked from Paris and who admitted in interviews to being from the same elevated Casablanca class that is depicted in the film, is attractive and starry-eyed. (Morjana Alaoui was in fact a student at the American University in Paris when Marrakchi cast her in her first film role; after passing her bac in Morocco, she had lived in Florida. Her own pathways neatly demonstrate the triangulation of the colonial, postcolonial, and global that I have discussed.) She is also barely clad much of the time, in-close fitting tank tops and boxer shorts, in a string bikini another time, or faded Levis, costuming choices that are both part of the film’s verisimilitude in representing the young Casa elite—from press photos and in film festival appearances, it was striking how much Marrakchi herself looked and dressed like her own characters³¹—and part of Marrakchi’s juxtaposition of the visual appearances of the libertine Casablancan youth and the more traditional members of the community.

The most famous example of this juxtaposition appears in the film still that was circulated as part of the film’s publicity and featured on the cover of TelQuel. In the still, Rita wears skin-tight shorts and a cotton camisole, hand on hip, navel exposed, and stands over her brother bowing in prayer. In the film’s scene, she provokes him: “Are you sick or what? What are you doing? Did you fall on your head?” Then, more aggressively: “Do you think you’re in Algeria? Are you going to become a fundamentalist [barbu]?’” The pose, reproduced on the cover of TelQuel next to the words “the film of all the taboos,” presents a vivid example of the changing look of young women in Casablanca not only in terms of clothing and brands but in terms of body size and type itself (figure 4.3).

During the period in which Marock is set, the late 1990s, sociologist Fatima Mernissi was writing columns in the Casablanca-based women’s magazine Femmes du Maroc that remarked on the generational shift of young Moroccan women increasingly toward Western body types as models of beauty; Mernissi lamented this shift as she called for Moroccan women to resist the emaciated “waif” look of then prominent models such as Kate Moss.³²

Mernissi’s comments on the ways in which Moroccan women’s body types could represent a form of cultural circulation and Susan Ossman’s subsequent ethnographic work that charted the transnational circulation of Western models of beauty and body type open up the ways in which we can discuss the Western look of Marock, both in terms of the individual actors, their bodies, and their clothing and in terms of the cinematic vernacular that Marrakchi mobilizes. It is, after all, the look thus conceived that is the most immediate presence of America in a film that only once invokes the United States as a geopolitical entity (and then quickly dispenses with it as a place where the characters know “no one”). Nevertheless, America plays a major, if imagined and silent, presence in the film. Marock thus presents itself to us not as a film that is postcolonial but rather as one that inhabits the era of circulation in an interrelated series of ways. Before we come back to the literal markers of this presence of global culture, we need to return to the more slippery question of what I have referred to as the film’s Hollywood “teen pic” vernacular.

In several essays, the late Miriam Hansen presented a powerful argument that broadens our understanding of what she calls the “vexed issue of Americanism” for transnational cinema studies—namely, the ways in which “an aesthetic idiom developed in one country could achieve transnational and global currency.”³³ Her focus was on the circulation of the classical style of Hollywood cinema produced during the dominance of the studio system, roughly from 1917 to 1960), and on the ways in which that style has been translated and differently understood in a variety of other national cinemas—most notably Shanghai cinema. There are at least two lessons from Hansen’s rich work that I want to apply here. First is her analysis of the way in which classical narrative Hollywood cinema masks the “anachronistic tension” of its “combination of neoclassicist style and Fordist mass culture” (66). The anachronism of classical cinema is that it took on neoclassicist aesthetics (it is readerly and transparent and has linear narratives, coherent subjects, and so on) even while it was an art associated with the new and the modern, both as a new technology and with respect to the Fordist mass (cultural) production perfected by the studio system. By naturalizing its own form of narrative, Hansen argues, classical Hollywood cinema developed a rhetoric that could in fact articulate “something radically new and different under the guise of a continuity with tradition” (67). Part of what is articulated is the very messiness of Fordism and modernity itself, with its various forms of structural and literal violence and how (certain) individuals could find a place in that system. Hansen’s second lesson, then, follows from the first and is related to my discussion of circulation: that Hollywood cinema traveled so well and so much better than other national cinemas because of the way it “forg[ed] a mass market out of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous society, if often at the expense of racial others” (68). This “first global vernacular” worked because classical Hollywood cinema mobilized “biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates”; mediated competing discourses on modernity and modernization; and “articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience” (68). Hollywood cinema found its way influentially into other national cinemas not because classical cinema universalized the American experience but rather because it was translatable. “It meant different things to different publics, both at home and abroad,” Hansen writes (68). On the level of reception, the Hollywood films and that which might be taken from them (their rhetoric) could be changed, localized, and adapted.

What I want borrow from Hansen’s work is her discussion of the contradictions that the classical style masks and allows as well as her sense of how that particular conjunction itself is particularly well suited for global circulation. With these notions, we can revisit the discussion of “cultures of circulation” that Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma advance and balance the temptation to read for meaning with attention to what Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli call the “circulatory matrix.”³⁴ Marock’s engagement with a Hollywood vernacular—no longer the classical vernacular, pure and simple, though at most times borrowing from it—allows it to smooth over some of the more troubling aspects of economic globalization that affect the world behind that which is represented in the film. The film does repeatedly attend to class and economic differences, even while too comfortably keeping them at the margins. But this smoothing over of the crises of economic globalization happens naturally, as it were, in the fluid way in which Marock adopts the cultural style or look of the Hollywood teen pic. In other words, the ways in which the film may be seen in terms of “globalization” are multiple and reinforce one another: the circulation of the Hollywood vernacular and the fascination with American cultural products and commodities serve both to double the elite characters’ ability to circulate across national borders and to efface the ways in which the Moroccan underclass may not. When Rita’s friend Asmaa (Razika Simozrag) tells Mao that she will not be relocating to Europe after the bac because her parents don’t have the means, he does not know what to say. Mao’s surprise—“je [ne] savais pas,” he mutters and looks down—is echoed, as it were, by the film’s inability to dwell on those who do not circulate. Though the film notes these individuals who represent dead ends, it cannot itself resist always remaining in motion.

Marock, to be clear, is most fascinated by upper-middle-class teenagers in Casablanca, a group whose own ability to circulate is strikingly more capacious than that of other Moroccans. This is a point the film does suggest, most vividly in a climactic scene when Rita denounces her parents for paying off the family of a young poor child whom Mao apparently struck with his car and killed at some time in the past. Although the film does offer sympathetic portraits of working-class Moroccans as minor figures (most often as servants, by which it offers an additional critique of upper-middleclass Moroccan family values), its portrait of Morocco is clearly delimited to a small portion of the population. That it did apparently speak to a much larger public than it represents, though, should not be doubted, in part perhaps because of its own subtle critique of class dynamics, but otherwise because of the apparent translatability of some of its characters’ aspirations to other social classes among Moroccan youth. Nevertheless, the visual pleasure the film takes in depicting the sumptuous residences, cars, parties, and bodies of Casablanca’s elite allies it with the Hollywood teen pic and not with class critique. To be sure, Marock is not a critique of globalization, either economic or cultural.

The immediacy and power of the Moroccan debate around Marock with which I began this discussion, then, can be seen as the resistance from Moroccans left behind by those very processes of globalization, both cultural and economic, that Marrakchi’s film represents and enacts. Hansen’s crucial point that the classical style was anachronistic because it was neoclassical and modern—which I would recast as “preposterous,” meaning simultaneously “before” and “after”³⁵—may be applied to Marrakchi’s translation of the Hollywood teen pic. In this sense, Marock is a film that struck many Moroccan viewers as new (Zaazaa’s comments given earlier), and yet it is a film that is clearly nostalgic for a different form of looking at and being in the world, a world before the advent of digital technologies. Marock offers the newness of a modern Morocco, engaging the putatively taboo topics of teen sexuality and interreligious relationships while playing a reassuringly retro soundtrack—some of the songs featured most prominently are “The Power” by Snap! (1990); “Rock’n’ Roll Suicide” by David Bowie (1972); “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches and Herb (1978); “Sad Soul” by Ronnie Bird (1969); and “Junk Shop Clothes” by the Auteurs (1993). This retro soundtrack hints at the retrograde anachronism of Marrakchi’s resolution of her tale. The nostalgia for a world before digital technologies overwhelmed daily practice substitutes for or overlays smoothly, as I have suggested, an allegory of the Moroccan nation for the more complex situation of contemporary Morocco in the age of circulation. That is, the way in which Marock proposes itself as something radically new on the Moroccan cultural scene and then delivers in multiple ways something more comfortably nostalgic is the way in which its look and soundtrack betray the trap that the film slips into: the idea that national allegory provides an adequate mode within which to comprehend twenty-first-century Moroccan reality.

In Marock, the interplay of the new and the nostalgic is associated throughout with the Hollywood look. The camera savors the streets, the exteriors and interiors of the wealthy Anfa neighborhood of Casablanca, to a slow sensual rock-and-roll soundtrack. Even to those who have been to privileged neighborhoods of Casablanca and Rabat, the scenes depict an almost impossibly wealthy milieu. Marock includes several scenes that do nothing to advance the plot but that are nonetheless crucial to comprehending its meaning: a car chase through the streets of Anfa; young people sitting around swimming pools, nightclubs, and outdoor cafés. They curse, they drink alcohol, the young men harass the female maids. The film’s global audience and its Moroccan audience alike are in a familiar world, but one not familiar from film images of Morocco in general or of Casablanca in particular. It is instead a world familiar from TV and Hollywood images of Beverly Hills. The language of the film is for the most part French (only the servants speak in Moroccan Arabic), a choice that Marrakchi defended on the grounds of realism.³⁶ If this is a more accurate representation of the bourgeoisie, the verisimilitude also comes packaged within the look of a foreign film, and that is precisely the point. Patrick Antona, a French interviewer, asked if the (limited) amount of Arabic used in the film would limit the film’s accessibility, presumably to French audiences.³⁷ If to some younger Moroccan audiences, the film brought together a Hollywood look with Moroccan actors and backgrounds, to the French interviewer the global circulation worked in a different direction—the occurrence of Moroccan Arabic stood out.

What the exchange between Antona and Marrakchi reveals, almost painfully, is how Marrakchi’s choice to write out Moroccan Arabic and with it the bulk of the Moroccan population (save the elite of Casablanca) follows the directives of globalization as a form of economic distribution. This silent translation of Moroccan Arabic is the flattening of language so that it might circulate more easily; it is the reduction of local/national particularity to global “value.”³⁸ By claiming that her choice to render so much of her film in French was based on realism, Marrakchi not only reveals the partial nature of her regard of contemporary Morocco but also demonstrates her intention that her film stand in for the Moroccan nation. The moments in Marock that gesture toward those who are left out of its perspective are thereby deleted (or put in parentheses) as illegible and thereby irrelevant.

That the film imagines itself as an allegory of the nation is clear from its title, which plays on the French name for Morocco, “Maroc,” but with an added k to suggest contemporaneity via the reference to rock music. Organizing its narrative around its protagonist’s coming of age as she butts up against the recalcitrance of her own society invokes a well-worn formula. But if Marock claims contemporaneity, it is unable to offer more than a repetition of that oldest of postcolonial narrative resolutions: the protagonist’s departure from a nation that cannot contain her enlightened consciousness. This resolution, however, exceeds the cultural conditions of the moment being represented in that departure and travel itself do not have the status they once did—particularly not for Rita’s class. Departure from Morocco, therefore, cannot equal renunciation or enlightenment without eliminating the very contemporaneity that the film wants to claim. The import of what I consider an anachronistic formula to resolve the film narrative suggests how important nostalgia is for Marrakchi in the attempt to efface that anachronism (or the audience’s awareness of it). Further, it suggests why the category of circulation, the film’s obsession, is a contested one. Not surprisingly, circulation operates or signifies multiply within the film.

1. There are no cars on the streets of Anfa, presumably cleared by Marrakchi and her crew; as an audience, we never fear that a car will appear out of nowhere. We are in a pure space of cinema. The racing cars can circulate on a road without traffic.

Indeed, in its very familiarity from Hollywood films, Marock’s car race scene evokes an earlier scene in the film in which the fact that the free circulation of automobiles is inhibited allows for romance. If the car race seems to invoke Hollywood, the earlier scene invokes Morocco in its attention to social details or at least to the Morocco of the haute bourgeoisie. What happens is this: Rita is being driven home from school by the family chauffeur when they come across Youri’s car and his family’s driver, broken down at the side of the road. Rita (or rather her driver) offers Youri a ride home, which allows the couple to make eyes at one another and begin their romance. This scene works within the teen-pic vernacular, but it also localizes it to its own particular class and national location. That Youri’s car is not in circulation, suffering a moment of Moroccan technological breakdown, should be juxtaposed with the rapid and easy circulation in the car race scene and highlights the way a global vernacular (Hollywood via the car race) can be used alongside a local one (the details of the breakdown).³⁹ The fact that this scene allows Rita and Youri to enjoy the later car scene (the race) in which their love is symbolically consummated (as it will be sexually consummated later) will in turn produce a second Moroccan response that forces a temporary end to circulation: when Rita’s parents discover that she has been seeing Youri, they confine her to their enormous house. Her own social circulation is cut off, at least until she passes her bac exam, when she may continue her circulatory trajectory toward Europe. The car chase, banal and not visually compelling, thus can be understood as the key to the ways in which circulation operates multiply in Marock.

If driving around in cars—racing, being driven to and from school, drinking and driving—is an important component of the film’s grammar, Marock’s obsession with the circulation of commodities provides the conjunctions in those sentences. The technology of the automobile, which allows the characters to circulate physically, is paired with the commodities that allow for virtual movement. In the world of Marock, pirated Hollywood films get delivered to your driveway by video rental agents with their inventory in the trunk of their cars, and friends from Miami send you authentic New York Yankee caps. These products not only lubricate the social relations of the characters’ interactions but also sometimes provide the film with spoken or visual words that echo the cinematic vernacular I have discussed. Words, products, and phrases on T-shirts offer further verisimilitude in Marrakchi’s representation of her milieu. But they eventually jump right off the screen. My eye is drawn to the American T-shirts paraded through Marock. “Hopper for State Senate,” reads one that Youri wears; “Where in the Hell Is Slippery Rock?” reads another. Why have the characters wear shirts with these particular phrases? Are they markers of distinction, like Driss’s (Rachid Benhaissan) cherished New York Yankees cap, tossed around the swimming pool away from its owner’s grasp? Our eyes are drawn to English-language phrases on the characters’ clothing, clothing that may or may not be authentic imports, just as the detached signifier of American phrases (often with spelling or grammatical errors) appears on clothing for sale throughout Moroccan cities today.

For the bulk of the film, these phrases and the commodities they decorate serve merely to echo and solidify the theme of circulation I have identified. But in one of the final scenes, there is a twist. Youri’s death in a car crash, though apparently accidental, occurs shortly after Rita and he have discussed their society’s unwillingness to sanction an affair between a Moroccan Jew and Moroccan Muslim. Mao is the character who most assumes the guilt of this societal intractability because it is he who seems most disturbed by the affair and informs his parents about it (Mao also assumes this guilt symbolically because he struck and killed a boy with his car before the film narrative begins, and the compensation for this killing has not been yet satisfied). After Youri’s death, we are forced to watch the impossibly painful melodrama of a high school girl mourning the death of her boyfriend. There is nothing that can be said, and the film is silent—without words. That is, until Mao comes up to Rita’s rooftop perch and reconciles with her. When he arrives, he is wearing a T-shirt printed with the word America, a small heart dotting the i. There is no justification in the plot for his wearing of such a shirt (Mao supposedly lives in London), and it is unlike anything he has worn before. In fact, it seems impossible to imagine the character Mao wearing this particular shirt. But his shirt, which speaks before he does, suggests something about the depth of the apology he is making and underlines his implied renunciation of the intolerance he showed earlier toward Youri’s religion.

The appearance of the startling T-shirt here demonstrates how Marrakchi associates the circulation of commodities with her own national allegory. “America” on the T-shirt signifies the tolerance that the film argues Morocco does not have but should learn to have. The T-shirt—the last of the global commodities to make a cameo appearance—also suggests how Marrakchi anachronistically combines the national allegory form and the resolution she arrives at for her allegory (departure) to grapple with a Morocco already within the grip of globalization. The Morocco that she represents in Marock, that is to say, is already within what I have called the “age of circulation,” in which national allegory must be insufficient. Thus, despite the fact that Rita is in tears when Mao (wearing “America”) embraces her, that her friends are in tears as she leaves Morocco for France, and that the price for both scenes is the death of Youri, the film makes it possible to see Rita’s departure for France and reconciliation with her brother as a particular form of comic resolution. This resolution should be disturbing. Indeed, TelQuel called it a “happy end,” using the American English expression (missing the gerund ending), and claimed that this reconciliation between siblings without religious conversion is the final “taboo” the film breaks.⁴⁰ TelQuel was one of Marock’s greatest champions precisely on the basis of the film’s willingness to challenge Moroccan taboos, so the ease with which the magazine’s editors slipped into the epistemological trap of falling for Marrakchi’s national allegory may be explained, yet again, by the peculiar seduction of the film’s vernacular.

As Marock circulated from Paris to Cannes and from Tangier to Casablanca and the streets of Fes, where I bought a pirated copy on the sidewalks of the ville nouvelle, it was following yet another trajectory than the one it depicts. (I later bought a legal copy of the film when it began to be distributed in Canada and France.) The trajectory of the film’s circulation in 2006 was much more complex than the representation of a young woman taking an airplane from a Casablanca that has disappointed her to a Paris that offers her escape. Discussions of the film raged on the Internet and in blogs and chatrooms from Bladi.net to Islamist sites (where Marrakchi’s alleged support of Danish newspapers publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet was marshaled against her in one strand of discussion). The space in time from 1997, the fictional world of Marock, to 2005, when the film was made, is immense. And to imagine a social world of elite young Moroccans that does not involve mobile telephones, text messaging, and Internet-enabled video chatting seems as nostalgic as the classic rock and disco sounds that fill the film. To be sure, Marrakchi chose this time period in part because it approximated the time of her own adolescence in Casablanca, as she stated in interviews, but also because she knew that these dominating technologies would soon alter the social environment within which an individual’s relationship to the collective takes shape. This brings the lessons of cultures of circulation back together with the debate that Marrakchi’s film engendered in 2006. If Marrakchi’s and Marock’s Moroccanness was up for discussion, the location of the Morocco in which that debate might take place was no longer immediately clear or perfectly bound. In the coming years, with the increasing impact of digital technologies and software, such as YouTube, in Morocco, it would become yet more unbound. The case of Abdellah Taïa, which I turn to now, would bring together aspects of the debate over Marock and the ways in which Hamada played with a set of American cultural products and made them his own.

This most interesting of young Moroccan writers—he was born in 1973—makes vivid the circulation of Western models and ideas about sexuality inside Morocco as well as the limits of those models. Taïa’s career is intertwined with TelQuel, where he has been championed and which he has himself used to further his literary career, and the way both have leveraged Western models of sexual identity in the effort to open up Moroccan discussions of personal freedom is crucial. Further, Taïa’s case offers a useful way to engage and move beyond Joseph Massad’s much debated argument about the way the “Gay International” framed sexuality in the Arab world. In brief, Massad argued that Western proponents of gay rights in Arab countries had adopted a “missionary role” in the way they advocated for and understood (homo)sexuality outside of the West, tending to universalize their own experience. Massad critiqued the “orientalist impulse” in their particular focus on Arab Muslim countries: “The[ir] larger mission…is to liberate Arab and Muslim ‘gays and lesbians’ from the oppression under which they allegedly live by transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay.” Borrowing from Michel Foucault’s notion of the incitement to discourse in The History of Sexuality, Massad asserted that the Gay International “both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology.”⁴¹

Although I will not rehearse the debate that ensued—Massad provoked a firestorm—I want to invoke it here because Taïa is my last example of what I call an “end of circulation.” Here, Western constructs of homosexual identity jump publics as Taïa both participates in this discourse and then refuses it. The way Taïa engages Western models of sexuality ultimately detaches those models from the source, even though some of his most ardent Moroccan champions (and certainly his Western ones) have consistently tried to keep him within the discourse of the homosexual, which he selectively adopts as well. To be sure, many in the West—notably his publishers—have been trying to absorb his work and what it means back into a familiar idiom. For example, the American editions of two of his works translated into English, Salvation Army and An Arab Melancholia, note on their back covers that he is the “the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco,” a characterization that has aided his rising popularity in the United States. (Note the awkward phrasing of this construction, though, which suggests its own breakdown.) The French and Moroccan editions do not use this formulation, though the most recent of Taïa’s books published in France calls him an “icon” in Muslim countries, praised by youth and “modernists.” ⁴²

Taïa’s case may be the most complex of those I have taken up in this book because of the variety of forms and texts in circulation that come together in his work and life and the way he apparently picks up and sheds the identity attributed to him. Unraveling the strands of influence, deciding where one begins and ends, is difficult. For one thing, Taïa’s fiction is notably autobiographical. In Mon Maroc, Le rouge du tarbouche, L’armée du salut, and Une mélancholie arabe, the first-person narrator is called “Abdellah Taïa” or simply “Abdellah”; the narrator’s mother has the first name of Taïa’s own mother, “M’Barka”; the young Abdellah of the books grows up in Salé, as did Taïa himself. Further, Taïa’s public statements and press interviews often replicate or approximate the voice he uses in his first-person fiction. Here we have an author who apparently seamlessly blends his life, his work, and his public. (Even his professional emails affect the signature style of his literary work.) In order to discuss responsibly the literature signed by Abdellah Taïa, therefore, we must engage the context of its circulation. But from the standpoint of literary criticism, Taïa is elusive in part because of the way he moves between text and context. His sentences are open and mobile, and his literary themes are frequently about movement, constrictedness, and circulation.

A short story by Taïa was included in a 1999 collection copublished in France and Morocco, Des Nouvelles du Maroc (Stories from Morocco),⁴³ and the monograph Mon Maroc was published by Séguier in 2000. But it wasn’t until the publication of Le rouge de tarbouche in late 2005 that he started to attract significant attention in Morocco. ⁴⁴ To anyone who was reading his fiction, it was apparent that Taïa had been sexually active with other young men (one of the stories in Mon Maroc, “La poubelle des Américains” [The garbage heap of the Americans] leaves little doubt about what the ten-year-old Abdellah has done with a sixteen-year old neighbor boy, and that it is not the first time the first-person narrator, Abdellah, has done this).⁴⁵ But the number of readers of literary fiction in Morocco, especially fiction written in French, is small, and his first published stories attracted little attention.

A short article in TelQuel in January 2006, however, picked up on the sexual aspects of his work. Discussing Le rouge du tarbouche in the context of the Taïa’s biography, journalist Chadwane Bensalmia wrote: “Two shadows hovered over these small obsessions: his childhood dream to make movies and a deep fear of his family’s reaction when they discovered the secret of his homosexuality.”⁴⁶ There it was, the explosive statement that would be picked up in the Arabic-language press, magnifying its reach, broadening its circulation, and setting the stage for copies to be delivered anonymously to members of Taïa’s family (who did not know about his private sexual activities). Looking back three years later, Taïa commented that this short article changed his “status from ‘the new hip Moroccan writer’ to the ‘new hip gay Moroccan writer.’” He went on: “At first people were talking only about the books and after that they were talking [about] the books and homosexuality.”⁴⁷ Although this is true, it is also the case that there wasn’t substantial discussion of Taïa’s fiction before he was outed in TelQuel. The public discussion of Taïa’s work was thus framed by TelQuel as gay fiction from the start.

In the original TelQuel article, Bensalmia discussed the frank sexuality found in Le rouge du tarbouche and posed the question why the author wrote it: “Is it an act of witnessing, a testament, a therapy? Abdellah Taïa rejects any label: ‘It’s simply the revelation of a reality of Moroccan society that I never came across in any literature.’”⁴⁸ Now, my claims that TelQuel framed Taïa as a gay author from the start of its coverage of his work and that the magazine’s coverage was crucial to his fame are not intended to dismiss Taïa’s own self-portrayal but rather to note how that portrayal is framed. In 2007, in the wake of the Ksar el Kebir affair, which I discuss later, Taïa will say, “I am a homosexual,” but here his statement—“the revelation of a reality of Moroccan society that I never came across in any literature”—diverges from the magazine’s use of him.

Taïa’s comment opens up two aspects of his work that overlap but deserve their own treatment. First, of course, male–male love and physical intimacy between men were real and present in Morocco before he started writing, and in his writing he was revealing something that exists. Second, in authoring his books, he was adding something new to the body of Moroccan literature or literature about Morocco. Let me take these two aspects separately for a moment. In the first, Taïa implies that his fiction has a relationship to social reality and that his writing achieves a sort of realism. Describing his work as social realism would likely come as a surprise to his readers. True, there are scenes in his most autobiographical works that evoke his own youth in a large family in Salé, the harsh realities of the Moroccan street, sexual abuse, and other grittier aspects of urban Morocco. But Taïa’s literary style is not realist, in either tone or the resolution of his scenes or how he transitions between episodes. His writing has evoked comparisons to dreams and cinema. The prominent Moroccan literary critic Abdellah Baïda, for example, has rejected the idea of Taïa’s work as realist, comparing his writing style in Le jour du roi to a dream (“one enters into Le jour du roi the way one enters into a dream, imperceptibly”) and noting that his depiction of themes of ignorance, poverty, superstition, prejudice, injustice, and absurdity is “far from the dry and cold tone of a sociological discourse, opting for fluidity of time and space.” ⁴⁹

When I reviewed the English translation of Une mélancholie arabe for the New York–based magazine Bookforum in 2012, I suggested that Taïa’s interest in cinema played itself out in his fiction: “As Taïa’s life unfolds, the retelling of it is not quite the reordering of a life’s experiences to make sense of it as in therapy. Rather, the way he crafts his stories, layering them, coming back to obsessions, is more like a filmmaker’s montage, with flash-backs, voice-overs, and characters who blend into each other. Indeed, Taïa encourages us to see his novel as a film: The ambition to make cinema is what leads him to Paris and, later in the novel, to Cairo, where he participates in another project in exploring the melancholia he sees all around him.”⁵⁰ Taïa’s cinematic realism—or, rather, the way his writing evokes cinema—brings us back to his comment about what was missing, what he hadn’t encountered, in literature about Morocco. Taïa suggests not that his writing is the expression of an identity—for example, a homosexual or “gay” identity—but that it brings into Moroccan literature and literature set in Morocco something he had not previously encountered. To be sure, expressions of love between men and sometimes of sexual intimacy between them have long been prevalent in French and American literature written and set in Morocco and the greater Maghreb, from André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) to Jean Genet’s and Roland Barthes’s Morocco journals and writings to the fiction of American expatriates such as William Burroughs and Alfred Chester. Taïa has spoken and written positively of the work of Genet and of the American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, who did not represent sexual love between men in his published fiction but was widely reputed in Morocco to have had intimate relationships with Moroccan men (Bowles himself consistently rejected identification as “gay” or “homosexual,” but not, I think, because he was “closeted”).⁵¹ Taïa renders homage to Bowles in one of the pieces in his first book, Mon Maroc, where he calls him “the greatest Moroccan writer of today.”⁵² He has given Jean Genet still more attention, editing an entire collection in his honor and naming him a Moroccan saint. In Le rouge du tarbouche, the young Abdellah pays a visit to Genet’s tomb in Larache (a coastal town in northern Morocco) and plays with the name Moroccans called him by—“Jinih”—which Taïa says sounds more Moroccan, “closer to me.”⁵³ Roland Barthes’s time in Morocco is also memorialized in Le rouge du tarbouche.⁵⁴ And of course writers of Moroccan nationality, including Mohamed Choukri and Rachid O. (the author of a sexually explicit autobiographical trilogy appearing between 1995 and 1998), had depicted male–male intimacy in the first person, and Bahaa Trabelsi had written in the third person about a male couple in her novel Une vie à trois (A life as three, 2000), which begins with a preface in which the female narrator says she met the men in a Casablanca bar.⁵⁵

So what is it that Taïa thinks he was giving to Moroccan literature that hadn’t been there before? There was something about the two aspects he conjoined in his comment: representing a social reality and offering something new to literature of Morocco. (I write “the literature of Morocco” rather than “Moroccan literature” to maintain the ambiguity of the writer’s nationality; Taïa teaches us to see the work of Genet and Bowles, for instance, as a part of Moroccan literature.)⁵⁶ Taïa had championed the work of Mohamed Choukri, in particular—the Tangier writer who first came to prominence when his autobiographical novel al-Khubz al-hafi (Dry bread [i.e., bread with no sauce], 1982) appeared in Paul Bowles’s English translation, with Bowles’s poetic title For Bread Alone (1973), and who later wrote a book about Jean Genet (also translated by Paul Bowles as Jean Genet in Tangier [1974]). In Choukri’s first book, sex acts are portrayed vividly. For Taïa, Choukri described poverty and despair in a way that few others had. He calls For Bread Alone an “extraordinary” book, one that spoke of a “world ignored and scorned by Moroccan intellectuals.” ⁵⁷

So what did Taïa mean by his claim that his work was “the revelation of a reality of Moroccan society that [he] never came across in any literature”? The implication—at least as framed by TelQuel—was that Taïa offered a new identity to Moroccan literature, which is a lazy formulation that assumes no difference or distance between author and narrator, between life and art. I argue that Taïa means something about his particular literary form, neither realist nor closed. The openness of Taïa’s sentences—the space within them so gracefully and evocatively suggested in his grammar, his ellipses, his form—is what he meant.

Taïa’s public declaration of his homosexuality is, to be sure, courageous in a country where homosexual acts are illegal and homosexual identities are socially condemned. As TelQuel itself had reported in a 2004 cover story that made no mention of Taïa: “Homosexuality in Morocco is hit with a double H: hshuma (shame) and haram (sin). Only a year ago, Mohamed Asseban, member of the Council of Ulama of Rabat-Salé, declared to the press ‘burn gays at the stake.’ Like its religion and its law, Moroccan society is uncontestably homophobic.”⁵⁸

Though Taïa surely wasn’t hiding from identifying his sexuality, neither was he rushing to name it or delimit it. Yet if he rejected labels, TelQuel surely did not. The following summer, June 2007, the magazine depicted him on its cover with the word homosexual in large type above his face (figure 4.4). Framed across top and bottom horizontal axes of the cover by typescript and on the vertical axes by curtains decorated with the familiar eight-point star (or sabniyyah) readily identified as a Moroccan pattern, Taïa was walled in by the graphic design, a metaphor for the text of the article itself. For TelQuel, the story about Taïa was clearly a part of a larger editorial mission to open the discussion of sexuality to the nation and followed not only the earlier interview with him from the previous year but also the cover story from 2004. Both covers were provocative. If in 2004 the men on the cover of TelQuel turned their backs to the camera (figure 4.5), in 2007 Taïa faced directly into the lens. Although Taïa may have been captured by TelQuel’s designers, reporters, and editorial mission, he was gazing directly into the TelQuel’s readers’ eyes—and gaining readers of his own in so doing.

Valérie Orlando has written about TelQuel in the context of a number of magazines founded since the death of King Hassan II in 1999. She argues that from its founding in 2000 TelQuel has been “dedicated to bringing Morocco’s repressed memory and history to the [Moroccan] public’s attention in order to cultivate productive debate in a communicative public space.”⁵⁹ A TelQuel journalist, Nadia Lamlili, told Orlando in January 2007 that the magazine was then focusing on three specific subjects:

Orlando remarks that the “young journalists believe that their abrasive, ‘in your face’ style is necessary in order to shock readers, waking them up to the reality of their country,” ⁶⁰ a point borne out by the magazine’s coverage of Taïa, which of course extended beyond cover design. The 2007 cover story goes so far as to predict or imagine future conflicts for Taïa himself: “The PJD is perfectly capable of posing, tomorrow, an oral question in Parliament to ask for a judgment or prohibition of the writer. The offensive directed, on another plane, by the party of Saad-Eddine El Othmani against the film Marock risks being repeated, this time against a person: Abdellah Taïa.”⁶¹

Diverging from retrospective coverage, the reporting here takes on the future tense—indeed, the future conditional. The PJD might decide to replicate the logic it used in arguing for the censorship of the film Marock and prohibit the writer Taïa himself. Now, I am not suggesting that it was so far-fetched to imagine that the PJD would object to Taïa’s public declaration of his homosexuality but rather pointing out that it was TelQuel itself that was raising the question. In making the link to Marrakchi’s film Marock and the debate about her film from the previous year, TelQuel was pushing the debate. Marrakchi and Taïa, despite the differences of their themes, were linked in TelQuel’s editorial eye. The “scandal” was created by that same editorial vision.

Before attempting to develop the answer, there is one more strand to this story: YouTube. YouTube, the famous video-sharing website, was founded in the United States in 2005 and debuted in November of that year. During the following year, its use grew exponentially, and Google purchased the company in November 2006. In 2007, it quickly became clear that YouTube had the potential to affect Moroccan society. In July 2007, a Moroccan who identified himself only as the “sniper of Targuist,” a town in northern Morocco, posted the first of a series of videos on YouTube that showed Moroccan gendarmes accepting bribes from drivers on the highway (figure 4.6). Police corruption was something that Moroccans knew to be a fact of daily life, even if it was officially denied. The videos posted by the so-called sniper—he shot from a distance and hit his target—quickly gained millions of views (the three primary postings by TarSniper—one has been removed—were viewed approximately 1.7 million times and rebroadcast or reposted by others). The videos shot and posted by the sniper of Targuist shocked Morocco profoundly.⁶²

In the immediate wake of the Targuist sniper’s videos, another video posted to YouTube by a Moroccan would have major repercussions. A gay Moroccan couple living in the northern city of Ksar el Kebir, who were well known locally because one was a reputed smuggler of alcohol, held a private party on November 18 and 19, 2007. During the party, the two men staged a traditional Moroccan wedding for themselves, with one wearing the traditional clothing worn by Moroccan women during marriage. A guest at the party took amateur video of the celebration on his phone, which circulated locally for a day or two until an anonymous individual posted it on YouTube on November 21. Daily newspapers—including the popular Arabic-language papers al Massae, Assabahia, and Attajdid—reported on the event. By November 23, thousands of enraged Moroccans had gathered outside the door of the wealthy couple, threatening violence and reminding observers of a lynch mob. More Moroccan media descended on the small city. A national crisis was at hand.

Among the coverage conducted by socially liberal publications, Le Journal Hebdomadaire and TelQuel dedicated their covers to the Ksar el Kebir affair. TelQuel’s cover headline, “La Chasse aux homos” (Hunting gays), ran across a news photo of the menacing crowds. Le Journal took a different tack with its cover and made reference to Steven Soderbergh’s film Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989): its headline was “Homos, mensonges, et videos” (Gays, lies, and videos) (figure 4.7). Reproducing a still from the notorious YouTube video itself, Le Journal’s cover suggested neatly the ways in which the new technology coming from the West might be allied with the cultural products that earlier stood for a style now identifiable as from the West.

In this case, the video was shot by a Moroccan, and the subject was Moroccan. What the reference to Sex, Lies, and Videotape neatly suggested, however, was that the form of an individually shot and distributed video had come in from the outside and disrupted the social fabric of Morocco. For Le Journal, as for TelQuel, this intrusive upsetting of the Moroccan cultural balance was welcome. And to be sure, the issue was not that the event itself was unknown or unheard of—as noted, the Moroccan couple was well known—but that the “media fury” in response to the posting on YouTube turned the northern city of Ksar el Kebir into a cultural and almost physical battleground.

Taïa took a stand. Le Journal published a brief interview with him, includedhis photo, and described him as follows: “Abdellah Taïa: Écrivain et homosexual assumé” (writer and admitted homosexual). Choosing the most sensational statement from his interview as its pull quote—“je ne suis pas une sale pédé” (I am not a dirty faggot)—Le Journal quoted Taïa as commenting:

It’s still very bizarre, this negative, exaggerated reaction by Moroccan society as soon as one speaks of homosexuality, which has existed everywhere, in all social milieu, in Marrakech just as in Sidi Slimane. Morocco, a paternalistic society, macho, wants to believe and to make people believe that virility is possible only within the framework of heterosexuality. Homosexuality would be, of course, a Western vice. We are the pure, the others are the unbelievers, the sinners, and they will go to hell, while we, of course, will go to heaven…. Morocco is at base and despite its so-called legendary hospitality a closed country. The country is still a gigantic prison for both its homosexual and heterosexual citizens.⁶³

So is there a way out of this apparent contradiction? Earlier I discussed Taïa’s literary form as akin to cinema, distinct from therapy or testimony, on the one hand, and from realism or “gay fiction” on the other. Taïa, of course, had a biographical connection to cinema. It was what he first wanted to do as an artist (although the first chapter of Mon Maroc describes a formative year in the Bibliotheque nationale of Rabat), and he has since directed a film adaptation of his novel Salvation Army, which premiered in 2013. But there is more. In Le rouge du tarbouche, Taïa offers a lesson:

The cinematic aspects of Taïa’s literary writing emerge from the voyeurism he associates with cinema and with Hitchcock in particular. Taïa’s Hitchcock always places a conjugal crime at the center, which is both an interpretation of Hitchcock and (more) a reflection of the way in which Taïa’s life and literary career are oriented around the conjugal crime he describes so powerfully and poignantly in Une mélancholie arabe: his family sleeping together, too intimately, the father in one room, his older brother in another, and Abdellah, his mother, and six other siblings in a third. Once a week, his father appears and lures his mother away from Abdellah and his sisters for sex. An incestuous family from the start. And later, Abdellah sleeps with his older brother, next to him, his hero, the brother who shows him Rear Window in Le rouge du tarbouche.

What makes Taïa so interesting is how he embraces the Hitchcock film and takes it on as his own. He is not struggling with postcolonial anxiety against the literary aura of Jean Genet or Paul Bowles or Alfred Hitchcock, as Tahar Ben Jelloun does with Bowles in Partir (Leaving Tangier).⁶⁶ Hitchcock is Taïa’s to do with what he will, an affair for Moroccans from which Hitchcock is isolated. Taïa gives us example after example in his fiction of ways he can incorporate a foreign author or text into his own work and for his own local (Moroccan) purposes.

In a 2009 interview with Brian Whitaker, Taïa provides yet another example of how American texts circulate into his work and appear there without anxiety—but detached from their U.S. referent. Here we have another remarkable memory about cinema. Discussing the time after he was “outed” by TelQuel, he reflects:

Douglas Sirk is an icon of queer sensibility in the United States. Just at the moment when TelQuel recasts Taïa as a “gay writer,” Taïa takes up Sirk. It is as if he is performing the translation of an unlabeled or unmarked identity into an identity that would resonate as a headline. The digital copy of All That Heaven Allows (the DVD) comes to his rescue, saves him from the social nakedness of his exposure by TelQuel—and by “exposure” I don’t mean his “coming out” but rather the way in which TelQuel reduced his sexuality to a stark and recognizable model of sexual identity (recognizable within the Western framework that TelQuel was adopting), which may have boxed him in as much as it liberated him. Repeated viewings of the Sirk film open up a space and give Taïa a place to go, just as Hitchcock gave him a way to be a voyeur. He can then remake himself in the gaps—in the disjuncture of décalage—that the Sirk DVD permits him. This remaking is in the context of a familiar Western icon (Sirk), but it will lead to a kind of freedom—without tears—that detaches from the source. And these repeated viewings, this cinematic voyeurism, give him a language that is not quite the language of TelQuel—though it will be propelled forward by TelQuel— to bring back to Moroccan literature something that was not there before.