Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

4: Interpreting French Politics

      Friday afternoons were quiet and slow in the Fez medina, the old walled city. The normally bustling commerce and tourist venues stood shuttered and locked so people could rest and attend the communal Friday noon prayer. Even those in the populist neighborhoods of the ville nouvelle would gather for a longer lunch break after the Friday prayer—often over couscous. Toufiq had invited me to lunch with his family that afternoon. While changing work and school schedules did not allow the whole family to gather for lunch every day (Newcomb 2017), the television was an important contributor to the social gathering. We had all just leaned back into the couches surrounding the table, with a large half-eaten couscous platter resting in the center. The television had been on throughout lunch, but we only turned our attention to watching al-Arabiyya news after eating. Al-Arabiyya satellite station had been created by Saudi businessmen in 2003 as a counter to Qatari-managed al-Jazeera, started in 1996. Interest in both news stations waxed and waned in the Arabic-speaking world depending on events (Cherribi 2017; Darwish 2009; El-Nawawy and Iskandar 2003; Khalil and Kraidy 2009; Lynch 2006; Rinnawi 2006). Most Fassi families channel-surfed between news stations, including French and English programs, in order to triangulate perspectives. Toufiq’s father, Mohammed, followed the news out of habit rather than real interest in events. Discussing current events was part of his sociality outside the house as well as within it. The current al-Arabiyya report was about the Saudi foreign minister visiting France and showed an image of the newly elected French president at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy.

       The family had worked in the Fez medina for generations. The grandfather operated several communal bakeries and supplied bread (and smuggled guns) during the French occupation. The father, Mohammed, broke into the tourist trade in the 1970s, learning conversational French, English, Spanish, Italian, and German as he bartered Moroccan handwoven carpets, antiques, and hospitality. The eldest son, Toufiq, followed his father’s craft, selling carpets in the plurilingual enclaves of a medina bazaar. He had learned formal French and Arabic in school and English as a third language up through the first year of university. The bazaar where he worked contracted with tour guides to bring both large bus groups and smaller private tours to the three-hundred-year-old historic house, to see the marble and tile mosaics, water fountains, gypsum wall carvings, painted woodwork ceilings—and carpets for sale. In the small talk moments after Toufiq answered their questions about Moroccan aesthetics and customs, he plied these potential clients with questions of his own about their politics, sports, and life.

      As we languidly listened to the news after lunch, Toufiq launched into a commentary about French tourist responses to their May election.²⁶ He said most of them claimed it was the youth who voted the president into power. Some of these tourists didn’t like their president because they feared he would change everything. As he was recounting their views Toufiq mixed French and Arabic in a common form of urban darīja, mostly when he was quoting the tourists or paraphrasing their positions. This led his sister Loubna to jump in, opining in French why she thought a majority supported the president. Although she had studied Spanish as a third language in high school, she worked at a service call center for a French telecommunications company that had outsourced its labor to Morocco, where they didn’t have to pay as much for French-speaking employees. Her interactions with French clients were about media promotions and telephone plans, but to build rapport with her clients she tried to keep abreast of French social life via French media programming. As she spoke, Toufiq translated a few of the French political words in Arabic for his mother, whose schooling was limited to Qur’anic classes at the local mosque, and a younger sister, whose French knowledge primarily covered phrases that had entered into everyday Moroccan use or the conversational domains she was just learning at school. His father regularly interjected with jaded jabs about the corruption of elected officials. This precipitated agreement through slight nods by the mother, a resigned darīja vocable, ايوا, īywā, “well …” that trailed off into a sigh by Loubna, and Toufiq’s counternarrative of youth civic projects inspired by Egyptian religious television figure Amr Khaled.

      In this episode, Mohammed’s family illustrated phatic communion, the ritual after-meal conversations of relational work. I had observed this Fassi family, as well as many others, engaging in this kind of activity over the last decade. It did not qualify, however, as gossip or small talk, but—spurred by the news broadcast—political commentary imbedded in the connectivity webs of Moroccanness. Toufiq’s family called it لاحتكاك (liḥtikāk): associations and knowledge that came from regular contact, mingling, and friction (in the sense of heated and generative exchange). Morocco has a long history of contact with French tourists, missionaries, ethnographers, militaries, and administrators (Burke 2014), as well as French language and policies (Ennaji 2005). Traces of French influence continued in the bilingual Moroccan educational system (Boutieri 2016), French-language tourism relations described earlier, but also in the naturalized use of French language forms among seemingly illiterate and unschooled Arabic speakers. The news broadcast was in the transnational standard Arabic, fuṣḥā, a written and spoken language acquired primarily through formal schooling. Spanish and French were also acquired primarily in schools, though also through contact with tourists and broadcast media, as related in this account. The linguistic code they associated with everyday Fassi interactions was darīja, which included regional and social variants such as Toufiq’s unmarked French-Fassi Arabic urban way of speaking.

      On the surface this appeared as a story of linguistic mediators, in which Toufiq rendered standard Arabic news and French conversational interactions meaningful for family members who hadn’t acquired those language skills (Wagner, Messick, and Spratt 1986). My Fassi interlocutors, however, viewed these interpretive events as collaborative relationality and knowledge making. For Toufiq, contact could create impassioned critique and disagreement even as it affirmed social connection. It involved friction: repeated contact, a labor of distributed literacy (see Chapter 2), and ideologies of languages as channels that connect—however imperfectly—signers and interpreters.

      In anthropological theorizing, channel and code have been described using a similar analytical metaphor (or trope): language codes (the speech habits of a population however understood) and channels (socially recognized communicative mediums such as writing, speech, gestures) are bridges that facilitate or filter interpretation and circulation. They connect signers and interpreters physically and perceptually through channels, cognitively and socially through codes (Kockelman 2010, 406). The bridge trope occurs in discussions of media as language channels:

      Spoken utterances mediate relations among co-present communicators, print artifacts at greater remove in time and space, electronic technologies at varying degrees of mutual awareness, directness of contact, and possibilities of reciprocation. To speak of communicative mediation is to observe that communicative signs formulate a bridge or connection among those they link, mediating social relations through activities of uptake and response at different scales of social history. (Agha 2011, 163)

      In this quote, Agha explicitly linked linguistic codes with media channels. They served as social bridges between signers and interpreters, though “receivers” shaped those collectivities by the ways they responded to the messages across contexts. Agha viewed spoken, print, and electronic media as all material channels mediating social relations: “Utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human activity—made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media—which exercise real effects upon our senses, minds, and modes of social organization” (Agha 2007, 2–3). As recounted in Episode 4, linguistic codes (urban French-infused darīja, French, and standard Arabic) mediated the family’s relations as channels for renewing their family closeness as well as transnational politics they connected to their own lives (telecommunications and tourist clients).²⁷ Importantly, I explore the social-material effects of these phatic moments, when Fassis foregrounded or erased language forms and channel affordances.

      I will argue that Fassis see codes and channels as partaking of some of the same qualities. They are both tools of connectedness, both susceptible to hidden agendas (parasites),