with specific kinds of persons (registers), and ways to engage the more widely known electronic and print media channels. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate appropriate Moroccan relationality and political consciousness. In these laments of communicative failures, Fassis linked medium deficiencies (whether human or electronic) to specific kinds of connectedness and sociality. Many Moroccans lamented communicative failure as a social problem, as I will describe in episodes throughout this book, but they did not always mean the same things. The sedimentation of these similar though slightly different social acts of connection gave the appearance of a unitary phenomenon: Moroccanness. In practice, it permitted a range of connection work to be recognized as Moroccan and the furthering of conscious yet sometimes unrecognized forms of relationality projects in Fez. My interlocutors didn’t call their comments about communicative failures laments in the sense of a speech genre, but rather a longing for better times, better skills, and better interactions that had been lost or somehow never developed during their lifetime.8 Specifically, I understood these laments as pointing toward Fassi perceptions of communicative channel failures and important ways ideologies about media and language shaped Moroccan relationality projects.
In this book, I explore Moroccan engagements with media channels and phatic labor, the layering of mundane social action designed to strengthen social bonds with earnest critique, affective reasoning, and emergent, negotiated ways of knowing. In each chapter, I introduce laments about communicative channel failures that precipitated Moroccanness projects by the state and several Fassi calibrations of those Moroccanness efforts. I saw these laments as ways of speaking, listening, and being that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan public relationality, even when my Fassi interlocutors differed considerably in their expressions of what connecting as Moroccans was or should have been. Nevertheless, I make the case that in the aggregate, these laments allow a range of connection forms to be recognized as Moroccan, and indeed for a quasi-unitary phenomenon of Moroccanness to cohere.
Moroccanness and Channel Failures
Moroccanness connection laments were not always a complaint, an argument, a political position, or a critique—though they could be. In the following episode, concern about the failures of a state television channel as a medium designed to connect Moroccans overlapped with ideologies about the linguistic medium through which that relationality should occur. It illustrates the focus on channels as sociality mediums foregrounded in Moroccanness expectations and practices.
الحلقة ٢: كنگولها حنا ماشي دولة عربية
Episode 2: “I’ll Say It: We Are Not an Arab Country”
I awoke one morning in March 2016 to find a firestorm in the Moroccan press and social media about comments on Moroccan identity made by Samira Sitail.9 She was the Information Director for 2M, Morocco’s quasi-public second television station located in Casablanca, and a vocal opponent of the current government, headed by a self-proclaimed pro-monarchy Muslim political party. She had been invited to appear on a video-recorded Radio Aswat live radio interview with well-known host Rachid al-Idrissi on International Women’s Day. 2M, and Samira as one of the channel directors, had been attacked in previous months for programming practices, such as promoting Moroccan Arabic-dubbed foreign dramatic serials, which critics claimed were part of a campaign to distract and deaden the intellectual life of Moroccans. She had also publicly supported the Amazigh movement’s demands for greater government recognition and presence of the indigenous languages and customs in parliament, public media, and law. These and other comments had drawn the attention of public intellectuals concerned about what they viewed as attacks on Morocco’s Arab and Islamic identity.
Samira was a controversial figure among some of my Fassi interlocutors, though most knew little about her professional history. They knew her as a director of 2M and a key Moroccan media producer for three decades. She was born and educated in France to Moroccan parents, returning in the late 1980s to Morocco when offered a journalism position at the Moroccan National Radio and Television Company, RTM. At the time, Morocco only had one television station. She moved to 2M when the state took over majority share in the struggling private cable venture in 1996. Throughout the 2000s, she was vocal in her opposition to what she viewed as troubling “Islamist government policies” that she saw as a threat to Moroccan media and universal human rights efforts. While serving as 2M’s news director, Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane accused Samira of actively erasing mentions of him from broadcasts as a protest against his government’s policies and political orientations. 10
One of the popular innovations of Moroccan radio stations around 2012 was to post video recordings of radio interviews on YouTube, extending their audience access and medium durability. Invited guests and the interviewers sat with headphones and large recording microphones around a table in a radio sound booth. Video cameras from different angles captured the “unscripted” interview as it aired on the radio. Viewers could see the facial expressions, gestures, and bodily comportment of the interviewer and interviewee once links to clips of this interview were embedded in online news articles, circulated through Facebook links, and posted on Whatsapp group messaging. 11
Samira Satail was asked to respond to critics of 2M’s programming choices, especially the channel’s investment in Moroccan Arabic (الدريجة [darīja])12 dubbed Turkish, Mexican, and Indian dramatic serials. Despite constitutional assertions of formal Arabic (الفصحى [fuṣḥā])13 as the language of the state, television and radio broadcasts had long been a mix of fuṣḥā for news and darīja in entertainment and talk shows (Ennaji 1995; C. Miller 2012; Zaid 2013). In the 1990s, Moroccan television produced plays and serials in darīja, purchased Mexican television serials dubbed into fuṣḥā from other Arab countries, Japanese anime cartoons dubbed into fuṣḥā, and Bollywood movies with fuṣḥā subtitling, and broadcast Egyptian dramas in Egyptian Arabics.14 By the mid-2000s, state channels had added Lebanese-dubbed Turkish melodramas, and by 2009, they began producing darīja-dubbed dramatic serials they had purchased from Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and India. As mentioned previously, some Moroccans (called the conservative Arab nationalist or Islamist discourse pole) had published criticisms of this programming trend, while others (a progressive wing) both celebrated Moroccan Arabic dubbing as a mark of cultural diversity and bemoaned the problem of poor cultural production (C. Miller 2012, 171–72).
During the interview, Samira stated in a mix of darīja, fuṣḥā, and French that Morocco was not an Arab country, but Maghribi. “Maghrib” is the Arabic name for Morocco, meaning the place where the sun sets, the west, and often elaborated as the Arab West (المغرب العربي [al-maghrib al-‘arabī]) or المغاربية (al-maghāribīya), the region including Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. The French word for Morocco is Maroc, and maghébines has come to mean North African immigrant populations in France (Rouighi 2012, 110–12). In Samira’s response to a question about 2M’s promotion of Moroccan-dubbed foreign serials and the linguistic bases for national identity, she chose to foreground the Maghrib aspect of the historical name. She did so to highlight the non-Arab contributors to the country’s political and social life. “We are not an Arab country. I’ll say it and I’ll say it, I assume we are a Maghribi country, we are a Maghribi country. Historically, we look at our origins, in terms of our Berber origins, and we see all the confluences, the influences we have received. We are a Maghribi country, and we ought to see [this diversity] as a tool of power and pride, not an object of totally useless debates” (see Appendix 1 for transcript).
For Sitail, Moroccans should
