[mashī]) in the declarative statement, “We are not an Arab country.” Rachid, the interviewer, interjected with an elongated “haaa,” as though she had finally come to the main point. His wordless utterance was a metapragmatic sign, conveying his evaluation of her utterance, but also his stance toward what her statement was doing. He had been waiting for her to say something that would allow him to position her in the debate about Moroccan national identity. Sitail went on in darīja, كنگولها (.) وكنگولها (kangūlhā (.) kangūlhā, “I’ll say it (.) and I’ll say it,”) and then switched to French: et je l’assume nous somme un pays maghrébin (.) nous somme un pays maghrébin, “and I assume we are a Maghribi country (.) we are a Maghribi country.” Rachid co-constructed this utterance with her but in darīja, as she was speaking French: حنا دولة مغاربية (ḥnā dūla maghāribīya, “We are a country of Maghribis”). Sitail responded with reduplicated darīja (agreement vocables) to sediment the force of the two statements: إييه إييه (īyeh īyeh, “yes, yes”). Another person in the sound booth jumped in with a formal Arabic statement to clarify her claim: تاريخا مغاريبية (tārikhīyān maghāribīya, “historically Maghribis”),15 which Sitail echoed, تاريخا (tārikhīyān). She then switched to French again: en vois nos origins sur le, nos origines berbères on voit toutes les confluences les influences nous avons reçu, nous somme un pays maghrébin, et il faut que nous assume encore une fois, il faut que se soit l’objet d’une force d’une fierté et non pas l’objet des débats qui sont totalement inutiles aujourd’hui (translated in the previous paragraph). As she spoke, Rachid responded with mmm and the French oui, “yes,” to encourage her talk and perhaps as an agreement with the inclusionary public discussion she was advocating.
In this interaction, Samira Sitail used declarative statements to affirm what kind of country Morocco is, was, and should be socially. For her, Morocco had always been a multilingual and multicultural mix of influences. She embodied that ideology in the mixing of languages she used (French, darīja, and formal Arabic) as they emerged through the interaction. She did not include any Amazigh linguistic forms despite her mention of Amazigh cultural influence on Moroccans. She could have employed the widely known تامغربيت (tmaghribīt),16 a Tamazight-encased Arabic word incorporated into darīja celebrating Moroccan cultural and linguistic pluralism. In addition, she didn’t explicitly mention French colonial influence as a positive force, despite its obvious traces on the discussion. Even though she argued that Moroccan national identity had always been pluralist, her assertion that Moroccans should cease debating their identity and accept diversity as a strength affirmed what she disavowed—that Morocco wasn’t quite as pluralist for others as it was for her.
In this highly publicized moment, Samira Sitail employed a claim of cultural and linguistic pluralism in arguing that Moroccan national connectedness was not Arab but Maghribi, its own unique brand. The way she did so implied Moroccans had once been more pluralist than they were now, and the medium of that pluralism was a fluid multilingualism of nonstandard (darīja), indigenous (Tamazight), colonial (French), and globally circulating standard (fuṣḥā) language forms. She framed her media production policies at 2M, as well as her personal interventions in public debates, as motivated by this longing for a Moroccanness that once was and should be. In her argument, 2M, as a national television channel, had expanded its programming to include more kinds of Moroccanness (darīja-dubbed Indian serials, fuṣḥā and French news and political talk shows, French-dubbed American movies, documentaries and social talk shows in darīja, and Tamazight-subtitled Moroccan movies) in order to reflect Moroccans’ core pluralist identity. She wasn’t trying to change something but to connect Moroccan viewers to their plurilingual past in order to build a more inclusive future. Her nostalgia was future-facing even as it evoked a moral critique of present Moroccan social connections via an idealized and elitest past.17
Wilce has argued that lament, in the sense of ritual mourning, has been a metaphor for modernity (2009, 158). In this view, modernity is not a new era, but rather a set of political projects seeking to mark something as distinct from tradition. As part of that process, talk about the present can index what had been lost to progress (traditional lament), and iconically mimic lament. Yet lament, in the sense of metadiscursive calibrations I explore here, can include a longing for what has not yet come. In this case, I saw Sitail insisting on an equivalence between a plurilingual historical Maghrib and a social pluralism she sought to promote. Even so there were Moroccan challenges to her commensurability lament. As viewed through the wide circulation of this video online and in everyday discussions, her comments incensed those concerned about neocolonial European forms of cultural and linguistic encroachment on Moroccan social relations. This was not because they didn’t recognize the cultural pluralism she advocated, but because they saw her statement—largely in French and darīja without any use of the Tamazight languages—as a medium for a project to import and impose European values into Moroccan relationality (see Campaiola 2014). Importantly, this critique was not just from “Islamist”-inclined writers (those advocating a greater role of Islam in governance), but also those involved in liberalizing projects. In his commentary response to Samira Sitail’s interview, Taoufik Bouachrine criticized her simplistic reduction of Moroccan identity to geography (Maghrib was a geographical adjective rather than an ethnic identity) and the Amazigh movement seeking to extend the role of Tamazight peoples and language in Morocco. Yet another “progressive” publication criticized Sitail’s advancement of a neocolonial French ethnic terrorism-informed Islamophobia, one that sought to curtail “troubling” religious-political relationalities, indexed by fuṣḥā and Islam, in public life.18 Each of these public respondents calibrated Moroccanness by responding to Sitail’s characterization-turned-lament.
Other ethnographies have beautifully explored the role of nostalgia talk, celebratory or mournful, in the formation of Moroccan social life and collectivities (Boum 2013; Crawford 2014; Eickelman 1985; Glasser 2016; Hoffman 2006; Kapchan 1996; Levy 2015; MacPhee 2004; McMurray 2001; Newcomb 2009; Pandolfo 1997; Shannon 2015; Spadola 2014). I focus, in this ethnography, on the various responses and social action that emerged from a specific kind of nostalgia, an ideal of connectedness not just about past sociality, but also Fassi futures. I do so by tracking laments about medium failures: communicative channels and language codes that were supposed to connect Moroccans, both my interlocutors’ embodied neighbors and imagined co-citizens. Channels I analyzed include mediums such as oral languages of civic instruction and news broadcasts, writing orthographies in online interactions, heritage speech genres employed in television dramatic serials, and multimodal bundles mediating orientations to Islam. I saw these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing relationality of Moroccan public life, even when my Fassi interlocutors differed considerably in their expressions of how and over what Moroccans should connect.
So how did I see this working? I understood these laments about medium failure as generating Moroccanness in Fez through commensurability of indexical feeling rather than shared genre lament forms or content. Indexicality is the way in which an utterance points to something about the context or the way participants view the utterances as relating to other contexts (Silverstein 1976; Wortham and Reyes 2015, 11–12). When I asked some of my Fassi contacts about both the previous episodes, they viewed them as indexing failures in ways that Moroccans relate, either in the home or nationally. In their comments, they talked about the wider contexts that these accounts were connected to, and in doing so they confirmed the indexical feel of longing and concern with forms of interactional contact, different kinds of channels, mediums, and sign codes; what scholars have identified as expressions of phaticity (Elyachar 2010; Hymes 1962; Jakobson 1960; Kockelman 2010; Lemon 2017; Malinowski 1936 [1923]; Nozawa 2015). My analysis throughout this book will not just focus on the ways Fassis I worked among described their relationality concerns, but also how they responded to them; how their expectations about how Moroccans could or should connect shaped their responses; and the sociality forms that emerged from
