Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

(Bayat 2010). He argued against the force of political ideology in driving change throughout the Middle East. Instead he focused on the everyday efforts of those who felt ambivalent about current political ideologies, yet nonetheless created phenomena that states eventually had to address. His view of ideology was classic political philosophy even if it had new iterative guises: neoliberal capitalism, Marxist socialism, Islamic republicanism, Islamist democracy. Rather than leaving ideology aside, I want to pay attention to more mundane yet pervasive kinds of ideologies. I see these Moroccan social nonmovements of communicative renewal as mediated through communicative ideologies about channels and codes. All Moroccans evoked semiotic ideologies, understandings of what made something language, a channel, or meaningful (Keane 2003). These ideologies could be multiple, partial, positioned, and contested depending on the context (Kroskrity 2000). Language and media ideologies were part of the ongoing formations of Moroccaness that arose in everyday responses to laments about communicative longing and loss. Whether it was the failures of Moroccan education to teach the languages employed in national civic and news media effectively; the problems of formal Arabic as the medium of Moroccan educational instruction; the revitalizing of specific Moroccan heritage speech genres in historical melodramas; the reclaiming of a proper multimodal array for socializing citizens into the Moroccan pattern of Islamic practice; or the lack of standardized ways of writing Arabic in online and social media contexts—Fassis participated in the ongoing practices of making Moroccanness, of relationality, through their responses to these laments. The nonmovements I observed were not named phenomena such as secularist or Islamist; rather, discursive fields materialized as intersubjective personas to which Fassis could calibrate themselves in specific moments: listening critic, educated and aware, morality advocate, reading public, Moroccan Muslim. Paying attention to the interactional, shifting nature of these nonmovements can help understand the unpredictable half-lives of political relationality.

       Media and Relationality

      Mass media in Morocco, like much of the world, was everywhere—but not because I encountered the sights and sounds of televisions perched on walls and shelves in Fassi homes and corner grocery shops, newspapers strewn across tables in Fassi cafes, books bouncing in the backpacks of students headed to school, mobile phones that had privatized Fassi neighborhood internet café access, or shepherds wandering hills with their sheep and handheld radios.¹⁹ When I first starting coming to Fez, I thought I was there to learn about Arabic change, but found that the complex debates about language and media I encountered captured my intellectual fascination. The English word “media,” with its sonic and etymological resemblance with the word “medium,” can feel like a container, a transmission vehicle in which messages move untouched through the channel. In Fez, my interlocutors used the word الاعلام (ali’a‛lām) to reference the kinds of media I just described. Arabic noun and verb forms build from triliteral or quadriliteral roots, and al’a‛lām was tied to the root form for “knowledge” and “knowing.” In a decontextualized dictionary sense, it pointed to both the sources of knowledge and the means of conveying that knowledge—its mediums. For Fassis, it also meant media producers and financial backers that used mass media as a not-so-transparent vehicle for their political projects.

      I encountered media talk everywhere—even when there was no television, newspaper, book, radio, computer, or phone in sensory proximity. Talk about media channels, content, affective modes, and morals was the stuff of everyday sociability—to talk about media was to recognize and create a mutual lived experience, one saturated by mass mediations of electronic, print, vocal, and visual kinds (Gillespie 1995). While there was the perception of sharedness, Moroccan media talk was not always cordial or harmonious. It involved animated evaluative work: assessing whether one should align with or amass against the messengers, messages, and mediums—all while sipping tea, enjoying lunch, visiting neighbors, catching a ride, studying for class, making a sale, buying bread, or walking through Fez with friends. In other words, I encountered a great deal of media talk that involved communicative work: the labor of worrying about, weighing, identifying, critiquing, lauding, and lamenting the failures of connectedness and its conduits.

      الحلقة ٣: نسافرو العالم بالتلفزة

       Episode 3: We Travel the World through Television

      Selma’s ḥabib,²⁰ her maternal uncle, had gathered us all on Sunday to enjoy a meal together in the village on the outskirts of Fez where he lived and operated a public communal bath house.²¹ Sunday, persisting in as a vestige of French colonial bureaucratic structuring, was the primary day off during the Moroccan work week. Most public employees and many in the private wage-labor sector lived and worked in the populist neighborhoods of the ville nouvelle, “new city” French-designed urban quarters away from the centuries-old walled medina of Fez. They enjoyed only one full day off on the weekend: Sunday. I was staying with Selma’s family, and so accompanied them to the family feast.

      Selma’s mother was divorced and raising her three teenage children on whatever income she could gather as a housekeeper—which included taking in me, a foreign boarder. Selma was eighteen and finishing up her baccalaureate (high school) education. I had come to know Selma through a mutual friend who knew both of us were looking for a place to live. We were all living temporarily at the mercy of this mutual friend, whose father had died and left the family villa²² vacant while siblings disputed how to divide their inheritance. The friend offered to let us stay in the house until it could be sold. This makeshift domestic space immediately included satellite television serving as a significant contributor to family routines, discussions, and perceptions. It was on most of the time, before everyone left for school or work and as soon as anyone returned, adding to the soundscape streaming through the open windows: cars in the street, Arab music videos, kids playing soccer in the alley, Arabic-dubbed Mexican dramatic serials, neighbors chatting over afternoon tea, Moroccan talk shows, the hiss of a pressure cooker preparing a Ramadan meal on the gas stove, French-dubbed Hollywood and Arabic-dubbed Bollywood films, impassioned laments about the latest political issue, the cascading echoes of the Maghrib (sunset) call to prayer from surrounding mosques alerting us it was time to gather and break the fast—echoed a few minutes later by the call to prayer on national television.²³

      Of course, Selma’s home was not the only household in which satellite television served as a key family interaction member. On this Sunday gathering at her uncle’s small apartment, most of the family lounged on salon couches circling the walls, renewing the everyday conversational ties and emotional bonds contributing to their relationships—with the television as background member. There were about twenty-five members of the extended family there gathering to celebrate the end of Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr. Some of the younger children sat on the floor, watching the television or playing among themselves. Other family members moved back and forth between the salon, the kitchen, and the bath house next door. We were watching Moroccan state television known as الاولة (al-ūla), “the first” of Morocco’s two television channels (2M being the other state-private venture channel). A religious cartoon in Arabic came on about the life of the prophet Joseph, and Selma’s uncle commented to all present how few Moroccans actually knew anything about the prophets without television. While we waited for the chicken tagine to be served,²⁴ Selma’s mother introduced my research by saying, “She’s studying how Moroccans talk about media.” Selma’s uncle offered his observation about the role of television in their homes: “Television is how we stroll the world while sitting in our living room.”

      I heard this idea many times throughout my fieldwork: that television and other forms of mass media facilitated mobility and the kinds of knowing that came from contacts with other people and places for those unable (or unwilling) to learn through travel and book-study. Selma’s uncle was a generous man, and I understood his comments as both social commentary and gentle attempts to instruct me as the inexperienced and ill-informed foreigner as the family gathered that day. He appreciated that television extended his knowledge of things he couldn’t encounter because of his social, economic, and political obligations and constraints. At the same time, he was concerned that his extended