Avuncular American

Morocco & American Studies

It all started in February 2011, when three wise men from the east (eastern Algeria, as it happens) visited Tangier, seeking to learn more about TALIM, AIMS, and how their focus on American Studies might benefit from a relationship with the Legation.  We invited several Moroccan scholars and visiting Fulbrighters to meet their Algerian counterparts from the University of Guelma, and had a nice brainstorming session, reported in TALIMblog.

For me, the visit was the lightbulb-in-brain moment: eureka... Maghrebi scholars studying America, at the very place where the young United States of America established its first diplomatic property, in the country whose monarch was the first foreign head of state to recognize American independence.

It was the ideal mirror image of what TALIM was already doing - as the AIMS (American Institute for Maghrib Studies) research center in Morocco - fostering American scholarship of the Maghreb.  And using the Legation's USP - our "unique selling propostion" or competitive advantage - to best advantage.  More than two centuries' worth of history, increasingly cross-fertilized between our research library and our museum, enriched by blog posts and press articles, on relations between Morocco and the United States.  And diplomatic and other archives for scholars to explore.

So last weekend's workshop, starting with a musical hommage to an American - Paul Bowles - who did much to help educate his fellow citizens on Morocco and especially Tangier, was the culmination of a four-year effort on our part to show that TALIM could also be a home to Maghrebi scholars of America, especially of Moroccan-American relations and America's engagement with the Muslim, Arab, and African worlds, symbolized by this institution.

And of course we know that this realization didn't start here.  "American Studies in North African Universities," the proceedings of the 2nd conference on American Studies in the Maghreb, is dated September 1992, and "The Atlantic Connection: 200 Years of Moroccan-American Relations," published in conjunction with the 1986 bicentennial of the historic bilateral treaty, show that serious scholars have long been preoccupied with the subject.

Closer to the present, the excellent December 2012 Marrakesh conference on American Studies in Arab Universities, post-Arab Spring (organized by Hassan II University, Ben Msik, Casablanca), was a chance to gather scholars in the field from Morocco, the greater MENA region, and from Europe and North America.  Last weekend, our friends from Ben Msik, joined by fellow Moroccans from universities in Meknes, Rabat, and Tangier, as well as Dartmouth College (TALIM President Dale Eickelman) and Kennesaw State (ASA International Committee member Nina Morgan) in the US, as well as Boris Vejdovsky of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, convened in Tangier.  The workshop heard from representatives of the American Studies Association, who detailed what eventual affiliation with the ASA might offer a Moroccan association.

Moroccans who would form the nucleus of an association - perhaps to be called M.A.S.A. or Moroccan American Studies Association - debated the issues related to possible ASA affiliation, but in the end came to the conclusion that organizing a national association took precedence.

The consensus was that a follow-on gathering would take place in early May, to finalize the shape of a Moroccan association, with nationwide membership and inclusion of the numerous faculty and graduate students of American Studies in Morocco.

Conclusion: our intimate gathering of scholars and interested partners - TALIM received vital help to host this workshop from the US Embassy Rabat Public Affairs Section, as well as from the American Language Center of Tangier - is a promising start to what we hope will be finalized in early May.  How nice it would be to have a Moroccan representative from the new association attend the annual ASA conference in Los Angeles next November...

Gerald Loftus, text and photos

They Were Promised the Sea

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) film fest screening in New Orleans of Kathy Wazana's beautiful documentary "They Were Promised the Sea" was my chance to see the film I had missed when it was shown at Tangier's 2012 Moroccan National Film Festival.  There, it was shown under its French title, "Pour Une Nouvelle Séville," which gives an excellent indication of the story line.

The Seville of the French title is that of Moorish Spain, when Muslim al-Andalus was the "Ornament of the World," and home to coexisting communities of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  This convivencia ended when Jews and Muslims were expelled starting in the late 15th century.  For many Jews, Morocco provided refuge for centuries, and it is from this transplanted population that filmmaker Kathy Wazana hails, growing up in Casablanca and moving to Canada as a little girl.

Filmed in Morocco and Israel, Wazana interviews Jews and Muslims about their respective memories of each other.  We are used to imagining urban Jews from Casablanca and Tangier finding new homes from Tel Aviv to Toronto, but They Were Promised the Sea takes us to places like isolated, mountainous Illigh, whose mellah or deserted Jewish quarter is now in ruins.

From the wilds of the Atlas mountains to... the borderlands of Israel.  The sea that Moroccan Jews were promised was the Mediterranean, perhaps a new home in Haifa.  Instead, many were shunted off to communities exposed to hostile fire from neighboring Arab countries.

Many of the Moroccan Muslims interviewed express regret at the loss of their former neighbors.  The numbers are astounding: Morocco lost upwards of 300,000 of its people to Israel, France, Canada, Venezuela and a number of other destinations in the space of a few years.  Essaouira lost half of its population.

Some of the Moroccan Israelis talk about their departure in terms of "everybody is going," often prompted by the Jewish Agency's enticements.  These are not the sophisticated urban "palace Jews" that Ralph Toledano writes about in his recent novel "Un Prince à Casablanca," but people who provided Morocco with a range of skilled trades and occupations across the entire country.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the film is the commitment of some of Israel's second and third generation Moroccan Jews to maintain links with their parents' and grandparents' homeland.  Moroccan cuisine and music have a home in Israel, and many of these young Israelis embrace their roots.  A visit to a windswept Jewish cemetery in Tetouan provides one of the most touching images, a young Israeli woman conversing with the Moroccan custodian whose care for his charges is evident.

The same young woman gets a political tongue-lashing from the late Simon Levy, then director of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca.  Perhaps the only jarring moment in an otherwise elegiac film, Levy takes strong issue with Zionism, and includes the earnest young non-Zionist in with all Israelis in what he sees as the ending of what had been Jews' home for centuries.

Fortunately, the films closes with another great image, and with some lovely music featuring a Moroccan Andalusian orchestra - with a rabbi providing vocals.  Echoes of convivencia. 

The MESA screening, with filmmaker Kathy Wazana present, was sponsored by AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, of which TALIM is the research center in Morocco.

Gerald Loftus

Filming Morocco's Lower Rungs On the Social Ladder

On the Edge (Sur la planche) - Leila Kilani, Morocco 2011

Death For Sale (Mort à vendre) - Faouzi Bensaidi, Morocco 2011

We were very well advised, at the outset of Tangier's just-concluded 13th edition of Morocco's National Film Festival, to see the two films that in fact came to win the top two prizes.

 

Leila Kilani's Sur la planche, her first feature film, following her excellent 2008 documentary Nos lieux interdits, won Grand Prize.

This time her focus is on an unlikely caïd-ah (can the Arabic word for a local crime boss use this feminine suffix for the head of a group of amateur thieves?), a young woman whose day job is at one of Tangier's Free Zone factories, peeling shrimp by the thousand (she likes to count them, even though she's paid by the kilo, as a way of resisting what she calls slavery).

Sur la planche appears to have been filmed mostly at night and/or in the rain, so don't expect to see the usual Tangier vistas.  But for a glimpse of the world that most of only pass by on the way to Rabat - the sprawling Free Zone which employs thousands of young women like Badia and Imane - Sur la planche ("On the Edge" will be the international title) is cinéma vérité at its raw best.

Writer/director Kilani provides us with a single-minded Badia, intent on scrubbing out that smell of shrimp as intensely as she drives her foursome (pretty Asma and Nawal dabble in the seedy nightlife of illicit Tangier, the chance pickups with characters who might best be described as biznismen - traffickers, "importers," contrabendistas).  But it's not a "team;" Badia is too much the loner, both at work and in her extracurricular hours.  She is driven.

Sur la planche moves at a frenetic pace, perhaps Leila Kilani's way of getting us to appreciate the hard lives of these young women On The Edge.  The performances of apparently first-time actresses Soufia Issami (Badia) and Mouna Bahmad (Imane) are particularly impressive, and we expect to see them a lot more.  Jury - well done.

- - - - - - - - -

Jury duty can't have been easy, because Faouzi Bensaidi's Mort à vendre - which won the Special Jury Prize - is a powerhouse of a movie, a film noir shot in the spectacular setting of nearby Tetouan, overlooking the Rif Mountains.  Though there is beauty out there, the action takes place in Tetouan's poor neighborhoods, where things are not always what they might seem.

Family breadwinner - and baker - involved in drug trafficking?  Job for big sister in a textile firm - steady work, much appreciated - but where she gets frisked exiting the factory in the struggle against contraband.  That long-haired beauty taking in the mountain view - but maybe she's a prostitute?  Mort à vendre ("Death For Sale" in international release) reserves many surprises for its characters, and for the viewing audience.

Tracing the - probably short - lives of three friends caught up in petty crime, Faouzi Bensaidi's film has themes familiar to the genre: street toughs getting into a league way over their heads; tough, world-weary cop (played by the director with gusto, and with the baggiest eyelids ever committed to film) who will extract a price for favors rendered; the hooker who needs saving by the film's "hero"...

But as with the other prize-winner, Mort à vendre is also a window into Morocco's underside, where people show up at nightclubs and blow their questionably-acquired wealth on overpriced drinks, where the street justice meted out to purse-snatchers can be swift and violent, where you might be "saved" by the brothers of the Islamist gang that patrols the woods, but you will be expected to help them in turn...

Tangier and Tetouan, Leila Kilani and Faouzi Bensaidi, Sur la planche and Mort à vendre - two prize-winning films which merit audiences beyond Morocco.  A few years ago, Moroccans were concerned about not only their film industry's annual numerical output, but also by the quality of the films produced.  I only have two years' worth of National Film Festivals to judge by, but I think that the depth of talent here rivals many a country with long cinematic traditions and much more means than Morocco.  Hats off to the winners.

Gerald Loftus

Valentino's Ghost: Hollywood & TV Imagine Arabs

You have to be dedicated, or perhaps suffering jet lag, to get up to watch Michael Singh's excellent documentary at 08:00 on a Sunday morning.  The time was a function of the setting: this was the annual conference of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, and Valentino's Ghost was making a debut showing.

It's all good fun, at least at the outset.  Rudolf Valentino dashing off to conquer some blond.  Rudy was good for several sequels, that stallion-mounted Sheik of Hollywood imagination.

Singh proceeds from silent film to talkies, so we then have lots of Beau Geste French Foreign Legion desert shots, this time of Bad Arabs being mown down by heroic white Legionnaires, usually in defense of those same damsels that Valentino made swoon a decade or so before.  But it's all oldies, and good fun.

Then we have the more complex portrayal of Arabs in David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia.  Hard to fault this almost perfect film, though the focus of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks is mostly on T.E. Lawrence, the great white hope of the hopelessly "little people, silly people" as the British officer calls the disputatious Arabs.

It was still possible in the 1962 film to portray Arabs as noble (think Omar Sharif).  A decade later, after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and the images in film and on video are almost entirely negative.  And it's this image which still informs - if one can use such a term - most coverage, both fictional and news, of the Arab world.  From Bullfrog Films, the distributor:

Valentino's Ghost takes viewers on a chronological journey through more than a century of images of Muslims, Arabs and Islam in the U.S. media, from the early 20th-century fantasies of romantic sheiks to today's damaging stereotypes as evil fanatics. Through interviews with Robert Fisk, Niall Ferguson, and John Mearsheimer amongst others, the film shows the way in which the changing image of Arabs and Muslims has mirrored America's political agenda in the Middle East.

But chronology would be boring, and so Singh gives us themes.  "The Arab as Indian" (as in Cowboys & Indians), the Arab as devious cheater, etc.  All the stuff of what any other ethnic or religious group would have long ago succeeded in banning from Hollywood.

Michael Singh has apparently made his film with PBS in mind.  Such an important subject does deserve an audience beyond specialist Middle East studies showings.  He feels that it is urgent:

Even our educated American colleagues appreciate orientation on the subject, partly because our subject has never been shown on television: PBS has broadcast films examining media images of Blacks, Jews and Asians, but not Arabs or Muslims. We contend that this lack of knowledge has contributed to widespread ignorance, stereotyping, fear and hatred of those of Middle Eastern heritage or the Muslim faith, including American citizens, and has also bolstered public support for a long line of fictions about the Middle East.

Last year, in India Abroad, Singh voiced doubts that PBS would go through with his film:

One PBS executive has told me personally that he will do everything he can to prevent the film's broadcast.  He has not even seen the film, but realizes that the politics as discussed in the film, especially about our relationship with Israel, is like nitroglycerin.  I think PBS is afraid of angering audiences who, unlike network audiences, directly donate money that is critical for PBS's survival.

If that is the case, then maybe you too will have to wait until some classroom near you shows it... at 8:00 in the morning.  Not-ready-for-prime-time, the US-Israel relationship and the skewing it does to American views of Arabs?

Gerald Loftus

Maghribi Scholars Need Not Apply

Geography lesson (image from Kidsmaps.com)

The Maghrib (or Maghreb) is the accepted term for North Africa.

The Maghrib was the birthplace of the Arab Spring (Tunisia).  Its latest blossoming of freedom was in Libya.

The Maghrib is where AIMS Maghribi Grantees come from.  Or came from.

Click on the above link, and this is what you will see:

AIMS Research Grants for North African Scholars

 Note: Due to funding, this program has been put on hold until future notice; please check this page again in the near future for updates. Thank you.

That's right.  Just when spring is breaking out all over the Maghrib, a valuable American program that has been funding dozens of North African scholars' research projects for the past ten years, is under a big funding cloud.

Actually, while the cloud is big, the amount in question is not: the program costs $25,000 annually, and allows (allowed, past tense) ten Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Mauritanian, and Libyan scholars the chance to conduct research in each others' countries.

This $25 K program, of course, is not even worth a decimal point in the larger scheme of things, though the grants that it used to provide do (did) make a difference to the scholars concerned.  If you were a Libyan, newly able to travel to say, Morocco to conduct work in your field, wouldn't you appreciate a US Government-funded program that allows you to do so?

Conversely, might not an Algerian social scientist jump at the opportunity to look at post-revolutionary, post-election Tunisia?  These grants covered every imaginable subject, and we at TALIM have welcomed scholars in fields as diverse as fine arts and water resources.

Part of even larger cuts to international educational exchange, the Deparment of Education reaction to Congressional appropriations prompted a petition garnering thousands of signatures.  The cuts will threaten the work of TALIM and other American overseas research centers, and even such programs as Fulbright/Hays.

"Maghribi Scholars Need Not Apply."  Is that the message that the US intends to give to North African scholars?

Gerald Loftus

Mascarades: Fawda Was Never So Much Fun

فوضى

Pronunciation: Fwḑá

Definition: chaos

It's one of our favorite words, a way to smile at the confusion that sometimes swirls around us.

Arabic teachers searching for that perfect visual aid to illustrate the fawda that can come to inhabit life in places like Algeria could do no better than show the hilarious opening sequence of Lyes Salem's Mascarades, released in 2008 in Algeria and shown last night at the Middle East Studies Association film festival in San Diego.

The MESA screening, with the director/star Lyes Salem providing commentary, was sponsored by TALIM's mother organization AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.  Amidst very serious presentations of papers ("Revisiting Modernity and Heteronormativity in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East," just to cite one with a 50 dollar word), Mascarades provided welcome comic relief.

Not that Lyes Salem does not take his film making seriously.  First of all his choice of colloquial Algerian Arabic (vice the French that often, unrealistically but more commercially, shows up in otherwise excellent Algerian films vying for European financing and audiences).  Such choices are "political," according to Lyes Salem, though Mascarades cannot be said to be overtly political in tone.

There is, however, that running joke of the unseen "Colonel," who provides employment to the principal character Mounir (played by Lyes Salem), and whose convoy of high-powered security SUVs can be rented out for marriage cortèges.  Anyone familiar with Algeria, and with the privileges meted out to those in power, will spot this sly wink at the presence of le pouvoir at the village level. It's just biznes.

Mounir himself is not above using some 50 dollar (or maybe 500 dinar) phrases.  He's a "horticultural engineer" (using the French ingénieur instead of the Arabic), but his friends know that he means gardener.  Mascarades is a good-natured romp through the life of a somewhat dysfunctional but lotsa-fun family, from the six year old son with a soft spot for tortured toads to the narcoleptic bride-to-be sister of Mounir.

Lyes Salem's description of Algerian humor as self-deprecating is on the mark, and he has said that he's tired of the repeated depictions of the difficulties of life in Algeria in much of Maghrebi cinema.  For Mascarades, the director has found inspiration from the zany cinema of Emir Kusturica and the incredibly funny story of life in Italy's shanty towns from 1976, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, one of the classics of Italian comedy.

Lyes Salem, with such inspiration, is on to a good thing.  I look forward to his next films.

Gerald Loftus