I Am Pregnant And I Exist

In an already bifurcated country, The November issue of Femmes du Maroc – Women of Morocco, a Moroccan magazine that caters to the interests of Moroccan women with a panoply of feminine subjects is bound to turn into lascivious fodder for a misguided and testosterone charged fringe of society, an opportunity for vitriolic religious condemnations and exhortations to aspiring jihadists to perverted religious zealots, and a cause for celebration to post-feminists and advocates of women’s rights. The magazine dedicated its cover to a very pregnant former 2M anchorwoman Nadia Larguet, in the buff, with one hand covering her breast and the other one holding her belly a la Demi Moore on the cover of the August 1991 Vanity Fair. A first in an Arab and a Moslem country. It will certainly spur a vocal public backlash against Mrs. Larguet and Femmes du Maroc. National and international news outlets will cover the story ad nauseam.

The issue transcends the aesthetic aspects of pregnancy and nudity. The exclusionary and sometimes castigating treatment pregnant women are subjected to is a leading cause of abortion in Morocco where the number of out of wedlock pregnancies have dramatically risen. The pool of medical doctors performing abortions today has grown exponentially. They charge 3000 Dirhams ($391.00). Additionally, an increased number of women, especially in rural areas where medical oversight is minimal and sometimes non-existent, die from standard pregnancy complications.

The message of the magazine’s cover is a loud and clear confirmation of the self: I am pregnant; I am beautiful, and I exist. I agree. In our society, pregnant women need to feel less excluded and be viewed in a more gratifying fashion. For a country like Morocco, where television channels are flipped at the mere sight of a man an a woman kissing, where, in neighborhood foodstuff stores, menstrual pads are stuffed in a black plastic bag to conceal them from the embarassed looks of customers, the idea is outrageous. I find it revolutionary and prescient. I am hoping the cover will set off a debate on what some might see as mere sexual objectification of women and others as feminine empowerment. I see in it an expression of the beauty of fertility and a much needed glamorization of woman as a genitor of life in a male dominated society that regards pregnant women – especially those in their third quarter – as nothing more than diaphanously dressed humanoid incubators, breast feeders, care providers. Generally speaking, men in the Arab culture are outside the emotional support system of their pregnant wives. The task is often delegated to female family members. Husbands who accompany their pregnant wives to OBGY consultations are a rarity. Seldom do men assist their delivering wives or witness the birth of their babies; they financially support the endeavor, but remain content in their impervious insularity.

I will ask you to not judge the magazine by its cover. You can choose to see it as nothing more than a nude picture. Such is your prerogative. You can also choose to see the glossy cover as an attention grabber to all the problems women endure on a daily basis. Everyday, in a remote decrepit mud hut in one of our villages, a pregnant woman is dying from complications while her husband, because of that traditional mindset we are so attached to, is detached from that reality. The problem is in the multitudes of abortion clinics in our cities. The problem is the increased teenage pregnancies caused by, not promiscuity, but lack of sexual education. Tradition has not solved these problems. In fact, in some cases, it has exacerbated them. It takes moral fortitude to recognize that aspects of our traditions are part of the problem. It’s outrageous to me that there are some who refuse to see beyond the nudity. Was it necessary to sensationalize the issue with a nude picture? Absolutely! Because the Arab psyche is so traumatized that only shock therapy would work. Countless articles were written about Moroccan women’s problems, but they all failed to dislodge the entrenched retral thinking. If a polemic is what will do, so be it.

We need to purge ourselves of that mentality. 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Morocco: Criminalizing The Independent Media

The Moroccan government’s unremitting onset against freedoms of the press and of expression has been gaining momentum recently. After the arrest of Idriss Chahtane, the managing editor of the weekly Al Michaal, and the sentencing of Rachid Mhamid and Mustapha Hirane, two journalists working for the same weekly, the gavel struck again in the case of Ali Anouzla, the managing editor of Al Jarida Al Oula, and Bouchra Eddou, a journalist of the same daily. Both journalists were handed suspended jail terms of a year and three months respectively. Sentencing of Tawfik Bouachrine, the publishing director of Akhbar Al-Yaoum, and Khalid Kadar, a caricaturist for the same paper, was postponed till October 30th. A jail sentence, it seems, will soon constitute a required journalistic credential to establish the bona fides of Moroccan independent journalists and activist bloggers who write in defense of democratic principles in Morocco.

The French newspaper Le Monde and its corresponding Spanish one El Pais were banned in Morocco for publishing caricatures by Jean Plantu lampooning the Moroccan royal family. Khalid Naceri, in justifying the banning to the Spanish Agency for International Information, labeled the caricatures irreverent to the monarchic institution. The government’s tendency to apotheosize the royal family is rather disturbing and creates an environment that is hostile to the permanence of democratic ideas.

The shamelessness of the Moroccan government’s dictatorial policies against the independent media is even more contrasted now that the French and Spanish governments have opted to respect the rights of Le Monde and El Pais to free expression. Indeed, one has to ponder the Moroccan government’s emerging political praxis of distressing the country’s national institutions and citizens to ingratiate itself with foreign organizations and regimes so as to promote its recreant foreign policy. A Moroccan court of law, at the behest of the Moroccan government, amerced Le Journal Hebdomadaire with the ludicrous fine of 250,000 Euros for an alleged libel on the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC), a Belgian think tank. Some suspect the government’s litigation against Le Journal was motivated by the fact that ESISC’s president, Claude Moniquet, a staunch advocate of Israeli tactics in Gaza and the West Bank, has supported, through his editorials, Morocco’s position on “Western Sahara;” In a similar fashion, Al Jarida Al Oula, Al Ahdat Al Maghribia et Al Massae were put in the dock for supposedly defaming libya’s dictator by calling him a …dictator. They were ordered to pay 99,000 Euros each.

Such practices created significant strains between the government and the independent media. Based on comments left on a number of online Moroccan newspapers, the Moroccan people consider their current government disastrously unprepared for the advance of democracy. Indeed, our inchoate and paranoid government is run by men who did not suffer the crucible of Hassan II’s regime, but strengthened it, moralized it, rationalized it the same way they are today rationalizing their repressive actions against the independent media and Moroccan’s right to express their views on the leadership. The strategy they have conceived and orchestrate has lowered the standards of free speech and pluralism and is inching the country to a post Hassan II nadir.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

TAXI

I just posted my latest short story – TAXI. You can read it here.

About Face

Driss Chahtane

If you want to find journalists, human rights activists, and bloggers that speak their mind in Morocco today, look first in the government’s prisons. Then, check the holding pens of the country’s judicial system. You will find them clustered in groups waiting to be slaughtered. Driss Chahtane, Mostapha Hairan, and Rachid Mhamid of Al-Mashaal have just been meted out excessive prison sentences and fines for their publication of what the government alleged was false information on the king’s health. The sentences are disproportionate to the offenses and are most likely political reprisals to bridle what our irascible government deems a rambunctious independent media that has, in its view, stymied the democratic process. But the true cause to the unraveling of the democratic process in Morocco is not the independent media. The Moroccan government was never adept at dealing with opposing ideas. The government’s baleful reactions to the beachheads the media establishes in our hamstrung freedoms of expression and of the press have widened the schism dividing the reality of democracy in Morocco and the government’s florid rhetoric and slogans.

The king’s speech, on August 20, in which he announced a sweeping revampment of the judicial system, buoyed up people’s hopes that the democratic experiment in Morocco might succeed after all. To some, it was an indicator the king is attuned to his subjects’ primary concerns. Morocco’s antediluvian justice system, it is argued, is a major anti-democracy juggernaut. Its reform would represent a positive token of the government’s commitment to democracy. What happened after the speech seemed rather counterintuitive; Abdelwahid Radi, Morocco’s minister of justice, promoted judges he was expected to retire; he raised the salaries of self-serving judicial bureaucrats. The closed-door judicial proceedings against journalists and activists have intensified. The system’s gumption fails to materialize when it comes to investigating its own officials. When Mohamed Taieb Ahmed, a.k.a. El Nene, Morocco’s infamous drug lord, recently provided the names of high ranking judges as being on his payroll, and the information was leaked to the media, the justice system tried to cover it up. None of the judges was ever summoned by the police. The system’s licentiousness in cases involving prominent political or business figures is shameless and revolting. Hassan Al Ya’koubi and others come to mind. In retrospect, the king’s August 20 announcement seemed more an appeasement policy than a genuine effort to overhaul the system. It seems to me democracy in Morocco has the durability of a smoke ring.

Toufik Bouachrine

Toufiq Bouachrine and Khalid Gueddar, both from Akhbar Al-Youm, are already pushed through the curvy corral toward judges who have demonstrated an uncanny knack for injustice. Akhbar Al-Youm published a caricature by Gueddar depicting Mouly Ismael with as a background the Moroccan flag centered by a Star of David. Chakib Benmoussa, the minister of interior, in a blatant violation of due process, ordered the newspaper shut and its assets seized. Bouachrine has no legal recourse to address the grievance. When he brought the issue up to Khaled Nasseri, the minister of communication and the government’s official spokesman, during a news conference, the latter’s answer was so unintelligible it sounded like he was scatting. Who in Morocco doubts that Bouachrine and Gueddar’s verdicts have already been decided?

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Banning Zafzaf

Mohamed Zafzaf

For the past three years, at the start of each school year and ever since Mohamed Zafzaf’s novel “An attempt to living” was introduced into the 9th grade curriculum, Islamic political parties and activists in Morocco have been calling for its banning. They contend the novel desensitizes the students to debauchery and entices them into un-Islamic behavior. Al-Tajdid, the official newspaper of the Salafist party Al Adala Wa Tanmiya – Justice and Development, published an article on 25 September, 2009, decrying the inclusion, once again, of the “immoral” novel in this year’s curriculum and calling for its removal.

The banning of literary books is not idiosyncratic to Morocco or Islam. More open societies indulged in the delineation of its artists; in the majority of the cases such repression is driven by religion. European and American conservatives and religious zealots have banned quite a few books. George Orwell’s “1984” was banned in Jackson County, FL for being “pro-communist and containing sexually explicit material;” Selman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was banned, yes! yes! by Ayatollah Khomeiny’s Iran, but also by the Wichita, KS, public library for being blasphemous to the prophet Mohammed; Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” was burnt in Drake, N.D.; Lee Harper’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” was banned in schools in Lindale, TX in 1996 because it “conflicted with the values of the community.” Even Hergé’s famous “Tintin au Congo” is banned from the public surface of the Brooklyn Public Library after patrons complained it was “racially offensive to black people.” The list goes on and on. You can find a more comprehensive list at the Banned Books web site of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom:www.ala.org/bbooks.

Mohamed Choukri

There was a time in Morocco when the Islamist groups and the repressive government of Hassan II, despite their irreconcilable political and religious differences, equally loathed Moroccan literature, especially the Arabic written one whose writers broke away from the romantic mold and the burdened narrative of the previous generation – Abdelkrim Ghalab, Abdelmajid Benjelloun, Mohamed Barada and others . The Islamic groups, which at the time were impotent and mostly underground, were incapable of voicing their acrimonious condemnations, let alone act on them. Hassan II, on the other hand, jailed Moroccan writers and poets and banned their books simply for exposing pretense by their unsparing depiction of the hopelessness, violence, despair, and deprivation that were the stuff of daily life to the majority of Moroccans.

Driss Khouri

Up until the nineties, the term “Arabic literature” in Morocco excluded Moroccan writers, playwrights, and poets. The Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito, one of the most celebrated literary critics in the Arab World, noted in an article he wrote for “Art and Thought,” a cultural magazine published by the Goethe Institute, that for Moroccan readers, literary books came from the Middle East and western countries. The curriculums the ministry of education designed for all levels of education regarded Morocco’s native literature as one of a lesser kind. Suffice it to say that Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical novel “For Bread Alone” was originally written in Arabic, but was first published in English in 1973. It wasn’t until 1982 that the book was published in its original form; it was, then, banned from 1983 to 2000. Zafzaf himself became known to mainstream Morocco posthumously. Abdellah Zrika, one of the most famous poets in Morocco today, spent two years in jail and saw many of his poems censored. Idriss Khouri was marginalized. These were (Idriss Khouri is still alive and writing) the Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the Charles Bukowski, the Pedro Juan Gutiérrez of Morocco.

Since Mohamed VI became king, the government has largely withdrawn itself from banning literary books. Islamist, however, resurged as a brutal repressive force against Morocco’s bards of brothels and bars. They labeled some apostates and accused others of heresy. Their constant venomous and over-the-top opposition should come as no surprise; Zafzaf and other Moroccan writers like him railed against a society that both the government and Islam failed; they wrote, not to the academia, but to the downtrodden of Moroccan society in a style far from mellifluous. While the Islamic fringe is revolted, Moroccan readers are besotted by their realism and easy diction.

Between Morocco and a more consensual society, its Islamists. There are writers, poets, and artists in Morocco today who impose on themselves a stiflingself-sensorship and whose creative process is stymied by the pernicious ideology Islamists advocate. Their work, consequently, is piffle compared to that of Zafzaf et al. If the Islamists have their say, school curriculums will consist of nothing more than the Koran and hadith. This literature that Czeslaw Milosz, in one of his poems, described as “A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,/A tournament of hunchbacks, literature” will be on sufferance, or disappear.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Wissam Al ‘Arch Bestowed on a Jewish Lobbyist

The King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, bestowed, on 29 September, 2009, the Wissam Al Arch – Knight of the Order of the Throne of the Kingdom of Morocco, one of the country’s highest honors, on Jason Isaacson, director of government and international affairs of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), an American lobbying group that advocates Jewish interests worldwide, according to a company press release. AJC’s clout is far reaching internationally and is courted by high level political and business figures in the U.S. and overseas. They have strong ties with the current U.S. administration as well as officials from previous administrations.

The ceremony was held during a dinner organized in Isaacson’s honor at the New York residence of Morocco’s ambassador to the United Nations Mohammed Loulichki. Among the attendees was Serge Berdugo, the president of the Israeli Communities Council of Morocco (Conseil des Communautés Israelites du Maroc), Taieb Fassi Fehri, Morocco’s foreign minister, Israeli officials, and AJC’s most senior leadership. Taïeb Fassi Fihri was reported to have secretly met earlier during the week with Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs and its Deputy Prime Minister.

Coincidently, the last Wissam Al Arch the king bestowed was on a Jewish personality, Chief Rabbi of Morocco Aaron Monsonego, on 20 July 2009.

It has been speculated that in the absence of a viable Moroccan lobbying group in the United States, AJC, in coordination with the Israeli Communities Council of Morocco, has been assisting the Moroccan government in promoting its political agenda, emblazoning its image, and revitalizing its military procurement efforts. In the absence of tangible diplomatic bargaining chips such as oil or natural gas, a dependable coalition, or a military force to be reckoned with, Morocco seems to be relying on relations with the U.S. and Israel as deterrents to Algeria and Spain. To that effect, it has made substantial concessions putting itself at odds internally, with its citizens, and externally, with other Arab and Islamic nations.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009