In 1956 Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain’s most influential contemporary writers, took a bus to the eastern part of Almería, a province in Andalusia. Under Franco, this was one of the country’s most impoverished regions, exploited by mining companies and neglected by the government. Goytisolo had come to tell the stories of the people who lived in its slums. “I remember clearly the impression of poverty and violence provoked so dramatically by Almería when I first took route 340 into the province a few years ago,” he wrote in Níjar Country, which was published in 1960 and subsequently banned, like many of his books. At the time he was living in Paris; three decades later he moved to Marrakech. He never again lived in his place of birth.

I read his book on a terrace with a view of the Alcazaba Moorish fortress one warm Saturday morning this April. I too had arrived in Almería by bus. I had come from Málaga and traveled along the southern coast, passing through lush fields and stunning scenery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. As green valleys gave way to rocky land, especially dry this year, I could see why locals so often call Almería the “door to the desert.” Spaghetti Westerns were shot here.

As you get closer to Almería, you leave behind the olive and almond trees and enter an expanse of plastic greenhouses. According to governmental data, Almería yields about 54 percent of Andalusia’s fruit and vegetable exports—chiefly tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers—amounting to €3.7 billion in sales last year. They boost the country’s economy and allow Europeans to eat fresh salads year-round. Satellite images show a sea of plastic that extends from the foot of the mountains to the shores of the sea.

You can read the rest of the story on the New York Review of Books site.

Abdelrahman ElGendy envisioned the ending of his book would be inspiring, despite all the horrors he would have to recount.

Starting at age 17, Mr. ElGendy spent six years and three months in squalid prisons in Egypt, and one way he survived, he said, was to imagine the memoir he would publish if he were ever freed.

He knew the harrowing abuses he witnessed and endured during his detention — including guards whipping prisoners and beating them with batons and wooden chair legs — would make for a powerful story, if hard to read and even harder to share. But the thought of the book also gave him an existential purpose at a time when his life was little more than suffering.

He knew he didn’t want his memoir to be about only pain and degradation. The idea that, somehow, it could also be about hope helped ease his despair, letting him dream that all he was going through could have a positive meaning in the end.

KSAR EL KEBIR, Morocco — Ahead of the World Cup semifinal between Morocco and France on Wednesday, the flip side of Moroccans’ euphoria at having made it this far in the tournament was excruciating stress.

In Casablanca, a young woman said she kept dreaming that Morocco had lost, waking up in a clammy sweat night after night, while her friend has been devouring so much soccer content on social media each night before bed that she saw one of the players smiling triumphantly in her sleep. And in the town of Ksar el Kebir, amid the strawberry fields and low green hills of northern Morocco, people were begging God for their hometown hero, the star defender Achraf Hakimi, to give them a reason to once again lose their minds with joy.

“We hope we win, but it’s in the hands of God,” said Houda el-Asri, 36, who was taking the trash out on Tuesday afternoon in Ksar el Kebir, where Mr. Hakimi’s mother grew up before immigrating to Spain. Mr. Hakimi was born in Spain, returning regularly to Morocco to visit family.

Suite sur le site Mediapart.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week threatens to further strain economies across the Middle East already burdened by the pandemic, drought and conflict. As usual, the poorest have had it the worst, reckoning with inflated food costs and scarcer jobs — a state of affairs that recalled the lead-up to 2011, when soaring bread prices helped propel anti-government protesters into the streets in what came to be known as the Arab Spring.

Read the rest of the story on the New York Times

Read the story on the New York Times' website.

Morocco has made a name for itself as a climate leader. Renewables make up almost two-fifths of its electricity capacity, some fossil fuel subsidies have been phased out and the country lays claim to some of the world's largest clean energy projects. The country has received much praise for its actions to decarbonise.

The country's reputation may be well deserved, but it still faces real challenges – its geographical position in a warming hotspot makes it vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. And even as it seeks to end its dependence on fossil fuels, its energy demands are rising fast.

You can read the rest of the story on the BBC's website. 

In this discussion at Youmein 2021: Roots and Traces, anthropologist George Bajalia and journalist Aida Alami explore the roots and traces of contemporary cultural life in Tangier, especially as they relate to northern Morocco’s border regions. 

https://legation.org/podcast-roots-and-traces-of-contemporary-cultural-life-in-tangier/
 

Casablanca (Maroc).– C’est avec le même mélange d’horreur et de sentiment d’impuissance que le public a assisté, ces dernières semaines au Maroc, aux procès des journalistes Omar Radi et Soulaimane Raissouni. Au fil des audiences, les deux amis, incarcérés à l’isolement dans la même aile de la prison d’Oukacha, ont vu leurs destins s’entremêler, et la tragédie qu’ils incarnent symbolise désormais les derniers souffles de la liberté d’expression au royaume du Maroc.

Jugés tous les deux par la cour d’appel de Casablanca, ils ont partagé la même équipe d’avocats bénévoles, des spécialistes de la défense des droits humains. Leurs audiences au tribunal ont même fini par se dérouler les mêmes jours. Celles de Soulaimane Raissouni dans la salle 7, celles d’Omar Radi dans la salle 8.

Ce ne sont pas là leurs seuls points communs.

Deux journalistes devenus des symboles

Ils ont tous les deux passé environ un an en détention provisoire – Soulaimane Raissouni a été arrêté en mai 2020, Omar Radi deux mois plus tard, en juillet, après, à chaque fois, une campagne de diffamation profondément troublante. Ils ont tous les deux été accusés de crimes sexuels (Omar Radi les cumulant avec une accusation d’espionnage).

Leurs procès ont été jugés inéquitables par les organisations internationales de défense des droits humains. Et ils sont désormais tous les deux officiellement condamnés.

À l’ère d’après #MeToo, donner la parole aux plaignant·e·s dans les affaires de violences sexuelles aurait pu être un moment décisif au Maroc, un pays où les juges infligent des peines minimales aux auteurs de délits ou de crimes sexuels et ne poursuivent que très rarement les hommes puissants accusés de tels faits. En d’autres circonstances que celles visant Omar Radi et Soulaimane Raissouni, les féministes et les organisations internationales auraient applaudi des deux mains la volonté de la justice marocaine d’entendre et de poursuivre de telles affaires.

Lire la suite sur le site de Mediapart.

In early 2011, thousands of Moroccans joined the stream of regional uprisings demanding social and political freedoms in their country.

Triggered by events in its North African neighbours, Tunisia and Egypt, the February 20 Movement was born, named after the date of the first planned nationwide protest, which would soon spark further mass demonstrations.

Though the constitutional reforms put forward in response by King Mohammed VI failed to deliver on their promises, the fervour running through the country at the time - as in the rest of the region - was high. Tech-savvy Moroccan activists turned to the internet to voice their opinions and mobilise in unprecedented ways.

In addition to calls for social and political reform, threats and intimidation also rippled through the cybersphere. A propaganda campaign online and in the government-run press sought to slander the February 20 youth, calling them apostates, homosexuals, or supporters of the Polisario Front independence movement.

It was this antagonistic climate that inspired Moroccan cultural journalist, poet and literary critic Yassin Adnan to begin penning his debut novel.

Following unpleasant encounters with online trolls after he launched a cultural television programme in 2011, Adnan began to write a short story at a writer’s residency in France’s southern Cote d’Azur.

And so the character of Hot Maroc’s protagonist Rahhal Laaouina was born.

Although Adnan had planned to complete the short story during the three-week residency, he quickly found himself caught up in Laaouina’s story, which dragged him down a labyrinth of narrative that lasted far longer than he'd envisioned.

That story eventually evolved into Hot Maroc, a time-travelling, contemporary, satirical tale of political and social changes in contemporary Morocco.

Originally written in Arabic, the novel was published in 2016, five years after Adnan’s initial musings. The following year, the book was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Last year, it was translated into French and the English version is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press in July, translated by Alexander E. Elinson.

Regime change

The plot centres around Laaouina, an insignificant man whom we meet as a student at the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech. Ignored on the whole by his peers, he shrinks back and begins to observe them instead, comparing them to animals and setting up the novel’s uniquely bestial theme.

Laaouina meets a woman and after they marry, his new wife helps him secure work at an internet cafe. He eventually finds himself working as a paid online troll, creating multiple personas to anonymously defame others.

Midway through the novel, Laaouina discovers a news site called Hot Maroc, which covers opinion, news, culture and crime. He ends up using it to attack those he considers his enemies: pretty much anyone who has been more successful than him.

“I was wondering: who are these anonymous people with borrowed names that plague the online social media atmosphere? And why do they intend to spoil people's dreams and attack anything that moves?” Marrakech-based Adnan tells Middle East Eye.

“The phenomenon had become widespread in Morocco. So I decided to work on it.”

Hot Maroc opens at a poetry reading, with flashbacks to Laaouina at middle school, and early on takes us to demonstrations by the National Union of Students of Morocco - a leftist student organisation - that the protagonist joined in the 1990s (the protests themselves span over three decades, during which time they were met with excessive retaliation from the authorities, infiltrating and repressing the wave of dissent in the 1970s and 80s especially).

An apolitical Laaouina becomes involved in the protests as a student in the 90s, merely out of curiosity and a desire to serve his own interests, only joining the activists because they were protesting to reinstate expelled students - including himself.

Read the rest of the review here. 

Ms. Elkayam said she wept the first time she heard the aching, mesmerizing voices of those long-ago Amazighs — often called Berbers, a term some consider derogatory.

The Amazighs are an ethnic group largely from North and West Africa who are nowadays mostly Muslim, though there was a significant Jewish Berber minority in Morocco in the past. In present-day Morocco, there is occasional animosity between Arabs and Amazigh, who often say that they feel their culture is neglected by the Arab-majority state.

In the recordings, the Jewish women from Morocco sang of displacement and the meaning of home as they headed into a new life in a faraway country, leaving behind all that was familiar.

“This is history that you don’t find in books, and you don’t learn at school,” she said in a video interview from her music studio in Jerusalem. “I was crying while listening to the voices of these women. I felt that I needed to make something with it and make it super relevant.”

She and her husband, Amit Hai Cohen, a musician, are recording an album, incorporating those old recordings and updating them with electronic beats and elements of jazz.

In a way, it is a work she was born into.

Read the rest of the story on the New York Times' website.

Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Abdellah Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future."

 The novel is shortlisted for PEN America Literary Awards 2021, Category: Pen Translation Prize . 

LINK TO THE EPISODE

A little over a year ago, 45 people in an inflatable boat died at sea trying to cross to Spain from a beach north of the city of Casablanca along Morocco’s Atlantic shore. More than half of the bodies were not recovered. But for a week following the wreckage, families sat and waited on the beaches, weeping and hoping that the waves would wash in the lifeless bodies of their loved ones.

Tragedies like these are far too common in Morocco, a country that has long been a departing point for clandestine crossings to Europe. Tighter border security and increased patrolling in the north have forced people into taking greater chances and more dangerous crossings, such as ​to the Canary Islands ​off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

The general public has long become inured to such unfortunate events, and the media narrative has recently focused mostly on sub-Saharan migration since fewer Moroccans try to illegally cross today compared to a couple of decades ago. The lives lost could have been just one more passing story about the deaths of anonymous travelers in pursuit of better lives elsewhere, but Casablanca-based reporter Salahedine Lemaizi viewed the deaths as newsworthy.

He forced the public to acknowledge their lack of fortune, their desperation, and the reasons that motivate so many to gamble with their lives. In a series of gut-wrenching stories chronicling their lives and deaths published in the local newspaper Les Éco, Lemaizi explained what it was like to live in a small desolate village before making the decision to try to reach Europe, a decision that may lead to death.

He covered the burials, interviewed the families and neighbors, and produced reports that illustrated the efforts of a community to deal with the cruelty of such tragic deaths. His stories showed the absence of the state in large parts of the North African kingdom, where unemployment among youth is high and poverty is rampant. He showed how the community could only rely on its members due to the government’s failure to provide jobs and other aid to rural areas; with such meager resources, farmers often have little choice but to leave at any cost.

“It was hard. It was very hard,” Lemaizi says. “I wanted to chronicle their despair. I wanted to show how a state disappears during crises like this.”

These days, stories like Lemaizi’s seem increasingly impossible. Press freedom advocates have denounced a steady decline in rights over the last few years. Despite the risks, some journalists are still managing to do courageous independent work. Lemaizi remains one of the last journalists in Morocco who produces strong reporting in a climate of fear and repression.

Read the rest of the report on Harvard's Nieman Reports' website.