Rachel Newcomb - Everyday Life in Global Morocco

PUBLIC CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors

RACHEL NEWCOMB

EVERYDAY LIFE IN GLOBAL MOROCCO

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

2017 by Rachel Newcomb

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-02952-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-03123-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-03130-3 (ebook)

1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17

appeared in an altered version as Modern Citizens, Modern Food: Taste and the Rise of the Moroccan Citizen-Consumer in Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life, editors Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park, published by Routledge in 2013. It has been reprinted here with permission of the publisher.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Moroccan dialectical Arabic (darija) varies from region to region and does not have a standardized written form, unlike Modern Standard Arabic. For words from Modern Standard Arabic, I have relied on the International Journal for Middle East Studies. For darija, I refer to Heath 1987 and Harrell 1962 for transliteration. Where there are standard spellings for words that occur in English texts, such as tagine or Alaoui, I use the Anglicized versions. I have followed those guidelines. Diacritics that do not occur in English have been simplified to make them accessible to readers.

INTRODUCTION

What is past is gone, what is hoped for is absent, for you is the hour in which you are.

Moroccan proverb

Ordinary lives do not confront the global as such. They face more immediate issues.

Friedman and Ekholm Friedman 2013, 249

If a man told you that a dog had run off with your ear, would you go after the dog or search first for your ear? The year is 2011. All around Morocco, the so-called Arab Spring is making its presence felt, with frequent Sunday demonstrations in major cities organized by the February 20th Movement. So far, the movements demands have been modest: more accountability in government, an independent judiciary, jobs, and other reforms. When a few demonstrations turned violent, some of the attacks were directed at businesses, including a French company in Tangier that had begun privatizing water and charging higher prices than the municipality.

The city of Fes has also seen its share of demonstrations, but Khaled has little interest in joining them. Although he is unemployed, the movements concerns do not seem to resonate with him, and he generally dismisses its rhetoric. What truly inflames him, and the project to which he devotes his summer, is getting his neighborhood together to protest the addition of a bakery on their street. He has organized petitions, visited city government officials, and canvassed among friends, acquaintances, and nearby businesses. He does not know the businessman, an outsider, who wants to open the bakery, and that, to Khaled, is a major part of the problem. What was once, during his childhood, a small city of old French buildings with neighbors who all knew one another has become a place overrun by gleaming, unaffordable new high-rises owned by strangers. What he knows is that the city in which he grew up is changing, and soon, he worries, rising costs will force everyone he knows to relocate.

He who eats when he is full digs his grave with his teeth. 2013. In the morning, Ilham rises first, straightening the kitchen from the previous nights meal and putting a pot of coffee and milk on the stove. She unwraps yesterdays baguettes and places them on a plastic tray with jam, small silver packets of La Vache Qui Rit cheese, and glasses, then rouses her family from sleep: her husband, Brahim, and her two children, Sara and Samir, ages ten and fifteen. They snatch bites of breakfast between taking turns in the familys small bathroom, then everyone is off to work and school. At lunch, Brahim returns home for the tagine Ilham has prepared, which they eat together. An hour later Samir arrives; he eats a pressed panini sandwich and fries Ilham bought from the frozen food section of the Marjane supermarket, then returns to school. Sara, who eats lunch at school, does not come home until three in the afternoon, when a bus brings her back to the house. She nibbles on cookies and Danone yogurt while doing her homework. When Samir arrives a little later, he downs a soda and a bag of chips before going back out again to meet his friends. For tea at around seven that evening, Sara helps Ilham fry up some fresh malawi, a multilayered pancake with large quantities of oil and butter between each layer. Samir returns to do his homework, and his mother makes him a sandwich with cacher (processed meat) and cheese, along with a Fanta orange soda. After returning from having coffee with his friends, Brahim also has a piece of malawi before drinking a glass of hot chamomile tea to help him sleep.

For the sake of a single rose, the gardener becomes servant to a thousand thorns. 2009. Hanane wants a baby. She has been married twice. She has no children and has had one miscarriage. She has visited doctors, healers, and herbalists, taking careful note of their prescriptions, even if there are some she will not be able to follow. She does not place the medical doctors expertise higher than that of anyone else. If I could afford it, Id do the expensive treatments, she says, referring to in vitro fertilization (IVF). But one cycle of IVF costs more than she makes all year as a teacher in a primary school. And she is skeptical about the success rates of any one treatment over others: all the doctors and herbalists she has visited claim similar success rates and exude expertise. In fact, the health practitioners, both traditional and modern, all offer advice and counseling to their patients, and from them all she hears a common message: Our treatments offer your best chances for success, but if they dont work, stay together. A marriage doesnt need children to be happy. In her mothers day, she says, her condition would have been devastating: her husband would have left her or taken another wife. If I cant have children, of course I will be sad, but he says its not important to him, and if it doesnt work out, he wont leave me, she says with certainty.