Welcome to the MoroccanCulture Blog

By Junia Mink
12:51, April 11th 2008

Kate and Gerry McCann, parents of missing Madeleine, responded with anger to publication of leaked transcripts of interviews with Portuguese police last year. According to BBC News, the transcripts suggested that on the morning she vanished, Madeleine asked her mother why she did not come when the children were crying the night before. McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, named the leak as a “deliberate smear.”

Madeleine’s parents called for the Portuguese Justice Ministry in order to start an investigation into the leak, which breaches the country’s strict judicial laws. Mitchell explained Madeleine told her mother “Why didn't you come to me and Sean [Madeleine's younger brother] when we were crying last night?” and mentioned Kate was puzzled by that, as she was “checking her every half an hour and they had seen no evidence and heard no evidence that she was crying.”

The McCanns have been in Brussels promoting a new EU-wide monitoring system for kidnapped children. They urged the European Union on Thursday to implement a cross-border alert system for missing children, similar to one used in the United States. The system is credited with aiding to find 400 children abducted in the US since 2003, most of them in the 72 hours, Reuters reports.

130,000 children go missing every year in Europe, where only Belgium and France have such a monitoring system. It appears that the EU last year proposed an EU-wide phone hotline for kidnapped children, which is due to be implemented by member states. Kate McCann declared the chances of finding their daughter would have been bigger if the alert system was in place.

“The costs of setting up such a system are relatively low,” Kate McCann said. “Please do not wait for another child and family to suffer as we have,” she added.

Madeleine’s parents are still official suspects in the case. Their daughter disappeared lat May from her bed in a resort hotel in Portugal.
http://www.enews20.com/news_McCanns_Furious_over_Madeleine_Leak_07193.html#

To escape the maelstrom of Marrakech, Linda Cookson goes on an off-road trip to the desert – and revels in its stony silence

Saturday, 5 April 2008

There's not a speck of sand in sight in the southern Moroccan town of Ouarzazate – no dunes, no tents, no wandering nomads. Yet the trail to the Sahara desert starts here.

The town's name, approximately pronounced "Waz-a-zat", sounds rather more exotic than the reality, which is a fairly unremarkable colonial settlement built as a garrison by the French in the 1920s. It has palm-lned streets, municipal gardens and fountains, and a seemingly endless selection of car-rental outlets. But the name's meaning in Berber dialect – "without noise" – hints enticingly at the otherworldly stillness of vast skies and shifting sands that lies just beyond the town known as The Gateway to the Sahara.

The 290km journey south from Ouarzazate passes through an eerie, biblical landscape of cool oases and sun-baked kasbahs, right down to where the desert sands begin. It feels like a ride in a time machine – a journey into the very heart of silence. Ouarzazate's history as a staging post for travellers long predates the current French fortress. Lying where three rivers converge, it's a natural crossroads linking east with west and north with south. Until coastal shipping came to Morocco in the late-19th century, it was a busy stopping-off point for the caravans that plied the trans-Saharan trade route. Thousands of camels and their owners made the arduous two-month journey across the Sahara to Timbuktu, bearing cargoes of salt, dates, barley and goatskins and returning with the gold, slaves and ivory that would make North Africa wealthy.

The idea of following a trade route into the deep south struck us as wonderfully exotic. With that in mind, we opted not to start our romantic journey into the desert in Ouarzazate itself, but to begin 210km to the north in Marrakech. Unsurprisingly, we chickened out of attempting a 500km camel-ride. Ali Leghlid, our cheerful driver-cum-guide, was more than happy for his trusty four-wheel drive to take the strain for most of the trip.

The Tizi n'Tichka road out of Marrakech, a magnificent feat of engineering built by the Foreign Legion in 1936, leads directly to the deep south. It cuts through the High Atlas mountains by way of a spectacular pass – 2,260m at its highest point – that snakes and twists like a length of grey ribbon that has been wrapped round the red earth of the mountainside. We set off from Marrakech at dawn. Even early in the morning, we discovered, manic Marrakech doesn't do stillness or silence. The muezzin's recorded wail was crackling through loudspeakers outside a mosque. Blacksmiths had lit their fires and were already hammering away. And the narrow streets of the kasbah were crammed with the usual early-morning traffic.

Soon, the cacaphony was behind us. Ahead, the mountains of the High Atlas beckoned, their shapes a rosy glow on the horizon. As we grew closer, they separated into smoky layers of soft greys and pinks. The sun rose in the sky like a silver coin, and we passed through what felt like half-a-dozen different countries in the space of a couple of hours. Agricultural flatlands began to give way to arid mountains, as we climbed high above olive groves, fruit orchards and bamboo fields in to a Martian wilderness of blood-red rocks and tall shadows. The snow that we'd seen on distant peaks started to appear around us. The landscape became increasingly barren.

Pine trees were soon replaced by acacia trees and tamarinds. Colours shifted constantly across a spectrum that ranged from charcoal to crimson. By the time we emerged from the vertiginous spirals of the high-altitude pass to begin the descent towards Ouarzazate, the mountains were devoid of vegetation. The pale stone settlements that clung to their sides were coated in dust.

By now, it felt as though we were already in the midst of the desert. But there were further surprises in store. The journey south from Ouarzazate, reckoned to be one of the most beautiful in Morocco, led back in to bewildering lushness – 125km of thick, green, palm groves in the valley of the River Draa – before we made our final approach to the sands of the desert.

The Draa is technically the longest river in Morocco, rising in the mountains just outside of Ouarzazate and notionally flowing some 1,100km along the edge of the Sahara to reach the Atlantic Ocean near Tan Tan. In 1989, after a freak flood, it ran its full course for the first time in living memory. For centuries, it has been dry for the final three-quarters of its journey. After carving a rocky channel between the Anti Atlas mountains to the west and the volcanic peaks of the Jbel Sarhro to the east, it flows through tracts of fertile valley that seem endless. But then, abruptly, its waters peter out, and the bed becomes an empty strip of dry rocks. At the oasis town of M'hamid it simply vanishes into the sands.

The Draa valley is known as the Valley of the Thousand Kasbahs, and the route from the start of the valley, in the small town of Agdz (70km south of Ouarzazate), to the fringes of the desert itself is packed with these evocative fortified settlements, which are built up from the earth around oases. Often, they're barely visible from the road, hidden as they are among the palm groves. Fashioned from clay pressed together with pebbles and straw – a technique known as pisé – and with roofs made of reed matting inserted into wooden frames, they rise as though from the land itself.

Newer buildings are red in colour, their thick walls clearly defined. But what's especially fascinating is how, as the buildings age, they simply collapse back in to the land.

Ali, our guide, was born in southern Morocco and proved an invaluable source of information. There are heart-breaking pockets of poverty in the region, we discovered. The upper reaches of the Draa valley are provided for by the El Mansour Eddahbi dam, built near Ourzazate in 1971 in order to distribute water more evenly among the 50 or so settlements in that area. Fruit trees, vegetables and crops all flourish, alongside the date palms for which the area is celebrated. But the impact of the dam has been devastating to residents in the lower reaches of the valley, who are now deprived of running water and their livelihoods as farmers.

Ali drove us off-piste at several points so that we could see the contrast for ourselves. First, we visited Tamnougalt, a prosperous settlement 6km south of Agdz. The air smelt of honey. Almond blossom drifted like snowflakes, as women tended the bean-fields by the river bed. A crowd of young boys were busily packing orange cardboard boxes of dates in to crates, for selling at the roadside. At the other end of our journey, nearer the Sahara, it was a different story. In the Berber settlement of Ait Atta and the Jewish settlement of Beni Sbih, withered date palms stood like totems in the stony ground. A date palm can yield an income of 150 dirhams (£10) a year, Ali explained. Deprived of that income and in no position to raise the 10,000 dirhams (£650) needed to buy a camel, villagers scratch an existence as best they can, keeping chickens and goats among the rubble and sieving the earth for saleable fossils or brightly coloured stones.

As every schoolchild probably knows (although I didn't), the Sahara is mostly made out of stone. Less than 30 per cent of its total area is covered in sand. But the pot of gold – or bucket of sand – at our journey's end was to be the romance of a dromedary ride across the dunes at sunset. And the great moment had finally arrived.

Hassan, our chamelier, was waiting for us at the palmery-village of Oualad Driss, where a thrilling drift of sand across the surface of the road marked the end of the stony sub-Saharan wastelands known as hammada and the start of the desert itself. And off we set, into the silence. It was a journey like no other we'd ever made. For two magical hours there wasn't another soul in sight, just rolling folds of fine beige sand dotted with occasional tamarisk trees. Theirs were the only shadows cast, apart from our own. The only sound was the gentle, rhythmic plodding of the camels' hooves. All above and around us – the sky feels like a dome in the desert – the day sky that began as a haze of brilliant blue slipped in to the colours of night. Sands rose into crescent-shaped dunes as the light began to fail. And finally, ahead on the horizon, we saw the light of a fire marking the camp where we would spend our night under the stars.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

Getting there: Fly from Gatwick to Marrakech on easyJet (0905 821 0905; www.easyJet.com) and Atlas Blue (020-7307 5803; www.atlas-blue.com), or from Heathrow on Royal Air Maroc (020-7307 5800; www.royalairmaroc.com).

Linda Cookson travelled with Inntravel (01653 617906; www.inntravel.co.uk) which offers a one-week City & Sahara Experience starting at £875 per person in March and April. It includes hotels and a night in a camp with breakfast, some meals, as well as the services of a driver, and the camel ride. International flights not included. You can buy an "offset" through Abta's Reduce my Footprint initiative (020-7637 2444; www.reducemyfootprint.travel).

More information: Moroccan National Tourist Office: 020-7437 0073; or got to www.visitmorocco.com

My recent visit to Morocco helped to flesh out, in three dimensions, what it means to be a Moroccan and Arab woman today

Khaled Diab

April 3, 2008 2:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/khaled_diab/2008/04/threed_moroccan_women.html

The Hollywood Casablanca is an enigmatic place of wartime intrigue peopled by a multinational cast of gin-swigging refugees and fraudsters, shady Nazis and heroic members of the resistance. The real Casablanca, Morocco's frenetic commercial hub, is quite a different place - for a start, it's inhabited by Moroccans, who are notable by their absence in the celluloid version of the city, excepting perhaps the doorman who lets people into Rick's Café Américain.

That said, the Moroccan Casablanca has been - given its size, cosmopolitan population and commercial status - a major ideological battlefield with its fair share of political tragedies and conflicts, particularly in the so-called Years of Lead under the late heavy-handed king, Hassan II.

Fatna el-Bouih, a quietly commanding woman with a solemn and earnest face, was, as a student and young activist, one of the many who fell foul of the regime in the 1960s and 1970s. As she drove us through Casablanca's broad and congested boulevards, el-Bouih recounted what happened to her during those dark years.

Born in 1955 in a small village about 60km from Casablanca, el-Bouih showed promise from an early age, earning herself a scholarship to the Lycée Chawqi, a prestigious girls' high school in Casa. Soon after joining the school, she discovered political activism and became a member of the Syndicat National des Elèves, Morocco's national union of high school students.

Her first serious run-in with the authorities was as a leader of a 1974 students' strike. "By a strange coincidence, the holding centre where I spent the night was next door to my school," she told me as we drove past the Lycée Chawqi.

She went on to tell me about the five years she spent in prison and how they changed her outlook on life. "Prison is a school you don't wish upon your loved ones but it is also a school where you learn a lot about life," she reflected. "In prison, my determination and understanding deepened and sparked my interest in women's issues."

However, it would be several years after her release before she recovered enough from the lead poisoning she got in jail to become politically active once again. Since then, she hasn't looked back. She has been involved in the campaign to force the government to face up to the legacy of the Years of Lead, which led to the establishment of an Equity and Reconciliation Commission, and she set up an NGO to help prisoners reintegrate into society. She was a leading voice in the successful campaign to make Morocco's family laws more friendly to women and she is in the process of writing her third book.

We continued through Casablanca's more affluent neighbourhoods and past the walls of the small historic medina - the fact that Moroccan towns still retain their original city walls adds a touch of beauty and timelessness to modern metropolises. Our destination was the crumbling masonry of decaying industrial buildings and the narrow alleyways that make up the working class Mohammadi neighbourhood, which was one of the half dozen or so areas in the country hit worst by government repression during the Years of Lead. Today, el-Bouih is coordinating a major initiative - funded by the EU's European Neighbourhood Policy - to rejuvenate this neglected district.

According to el-Bouih, Mohammadi - built originally to serve as the city's industrial hub by the French on confiscated farmland - was once a veritable talent production line churning out some of Morocco's greatest writers, artists, musicians and sportspeople. Today, the deprived neighbourhood is suffering the consequences of decades of neglect by the former regime as punishment for its obstinacy.

Our first stop was a place of painful personal association for el-Bouih. We parked in the courtyard of a nondescript concrete block with laundry hanging on the balconies. In the basement of this mundane-looking building was the infamous Derb Moulay Chérif "secret" torture centre where el-Bouih spent seven months in 1977 enduring psychological and physical abuse.

When I asked her how it felt to revisit the source of so much personal anguish, she went quiet for several moments, caught in her own thoughts. "Visiting this place affects me in a way that words fail to express," she confessed, struggling to maintain the customary calm of her voice as she gazed up at the freshly washed clothes fluttering on the balconies, concealing the dirty human laundry hidden in the bowels of the building and locked away in the vaults of time.

"So, people live here now," I remarked casually.

"People have always lived here," she responded with a hint of bitterness. "They just pretended that nothing was going on under their noses. Some of our torturers lived in those apartments up there."

I told her that I wasn't sure whether I would be able to endure what she had. "When people are faced with dire situations, they discover capacities they didn't know they possessed," was her response.

After taking the photographer, Mohammed Chamali, and me on a tour of the local youth centre - a rare space crammed full of local kids keen to express themselves in sports, music and culture - she drove us to the station.

On the way, we picked up her husband, Yusuf, from his office, who stepped into the car and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek. When I was doing some background reading before my visit, I learned that Yusuf, despite his busy life as an IT professional, found time to support his wife in her numerous activities by taking care of her correspondence and typing up her manuscripts.

When he found out I was Egyptian, he told me about how much he enjoyed visiting Cairo and that he felt that it was his spiritual home. We chatted about his favourite haunts in the city of a thousand minarets, a million contradictions and 20 million restless souls.

Not only is Egypt the spiritual home of Imane Masbahi, a young Moroccan film director and distributor, but she can also speak Arabic with a distinct Cairene lilt. This took me a little by surprise when she greeted me in the Casablanca office of her film distribution company, giving me an eerie sense that I had somehow stepped through a portal and fetched up in another town.

Masbahi studied filmmaking, with a particular focus on screenwriting, which she describes as the orphan art in Morocco, at Cairo's prestigious Higher Institute for Cinema. Although she has focused mainly on television films during her career, she released her debut film for the big screen in 2002, after some eight years of on-off production. The Paradise of the Poor (Paradis des pauvres) explores a theme familiar to many young Moroccans: the allure of emigrating and the tough reality of life on the margins in Europe.

Masbahi's love of Egyptian cinema and culture has sparked in her a steely determination to carve out a niche for Egyptian films in Morocco. Almost a decade ago, she set up a distribution company for Egyptian films and now she shuttles back and forth between Cairo, where she has an Egyptian boyfriend, and Casablanca.

This surprised me somewhat, since I had assumed that Egyptian films, produced in the "Hollywood" of the Middle East, would not need someone to champion them single-handedly. After all, it is easy, as a visitor, to come away with the impression that Moroccans are passionate about all things Egyptian and are well-versed in Egyptian popular culture.

As in Egypt, traditional teahouses in Morocco still resonate with the legendary vocal chords of Umm Kulthoum, the undisputed grand diva of the Arab world. People's televisions are as often as not tuned in to Egyptian satellite channels or channels showing Egyptian productions. Sometimes, with the sounds of Egypt all around, one could almost be lulled into thinking they were a few thousand kilometres east.

People also tend to become warmer and friendlier when they find out you're an Egyptian, particularly now that Egypt has been crowned African football champion for the second time running. This proved particularly useful at a checkpoint, when a bored gendarme started being difficult with Umar, who was driving us to the Rif Mountains. When Umar identified me as Egyptian, the gendarme called over his mates, all of whom started congratulating me on Egypt's victory and telling me that all Moroccans had rooted for Egypt and that the national side had done all of North Africa proud.

Masbahi was surprised that all Moroccans seemed so friendly with me. "Surely the women are friendlier than the men?" she asked. "Moroccan men are often jealous of Egyptian men because Moroccan women are so infatuated by them." I though to myself that perhaps Moroccan women would be somewhat less enthusiastic if they actually lived in Egypt!

Masbahi explained that this love for Egypt did not actually translate into bums on seats in cinemas. "In Morocco, most people go to see Hollywood, Bollywood or Moroccan productions," she said. "Another big problem for Egyptian films is widespread piracy. You can get knocked-off DVDs and videos everywhere in the market."

In addition, she explained, most Egyptian films that make it to Moroccan cinemas are lightweight and incredibly commercial. "The reputation of serious Egyptian films among Moroccan filmgoers was hurt by the so-called 'contract' films of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, when businessmen who had no idea about the industry financed highly formulaic films in search of a profit," Masbahi says. "In recent years, there have been lots of high-quality Egyptian films which Moroccans are not really aware of."

Being a small fish in a very large distribution ocean, Masbahi struggled to draw audiences to her first releases, many of which were highly political or focused on very Egyptian issues. But she puts much of the trouble down to her shorter reach compared with the distributors of American and Indian films. "Not only do they have a larger distribution budget, but they benefit from all the press hype and publicity prior to the film's release," she points out.

This led her to seek sponsors to finance the promotion of films, but she soon abandoned this because it was too commercial for her liking. Then she managed to get hold of some EU funding aimed at helping distribute films across the Euro-Med area. With better promotional campaigns, she soon discovered that there was a latent appetite for Egyptian cinema.

The veteran Egyptian comedian Adel Imam has proven to be a good investment for her. His latest satire, Morgan Ahmed Morgan, has been at the top of the box office takings for Morocco's main cinema chain for the entire first quarter of 2008.

The film, which she invited me to see, is about a billionaire of modest roots who believes he can bribe his way through anything. When his children express their shame at his uncultured and uneducated ways, he buys his way into parliament, and they join the opposition against him. He then decides to go back to school and joins the same exclusive university they go to and goes about trying to buy himself an education. When his son and daughter more or less disown him, he begins to reform.

This unexpected success has been uplifting for her small company. Masbahi is now considering setting her sights on the trickier challenge of promoting Moroccan films in Egypt. One major barrier is language, since most Egyptians cannot understand fully the Moroccan dialect. Another is the Egypt-centrism of the Egyptian cultural landscape, which often ignores the creative output of other Arab countries, particularly those to the west.

Masbahi is proud of the fact that Egyptian films are, thanks to her efforts, gaining in profile across Morocco. She is doubly proud of this achievement given the fact that she is the only woman boss in the Moroccan film distribution industry.

But it is not just women from Morocco's educated urban elite who are entering traditionally male domains.

Chefchaouen is a breathtakingly beautiful town of blue and white buildings perched in the luscious green of the Rif Mountains. In its hinterland, Chamali, the photographer, pointed out to me that up here in the north it was the women who did a large share of the work out on the fields, unlike in the south. "A lot of men in the rif are too lazy to work their land," he maintained. I hoped, but very much doubted, that these absent men compensated by doing more domestic chores.

Nevertheless, even in this traditional and very conservative environment, there are young women who are taking their first bold steps towards emancipation. For instance, I was surprised at a small co-operative goat's cheese factory I visited that the most technical job there, that of lab technicians, was being performed by two young female graduates.

One of them, Zeinab, was quite pleased that this place had opened up in the area. "It gives me the chance to practise my specialty, which is very fulfilling," she told me. "As a first job, the income also isn't bad." Betraying a healthy spirit of ambition, she remarked: "This is only a first step. I hope to develop my skills and find more challenging work in the future."

And the ambition to move onwards and upwards is one that is doubtless shared by many Moroccan women.

Moroccan King hails President Wade’s peace-building efforts in Africa
http://www.apanews.net/apa.php?page=show_article&id_article=59734

APA-Rabat (Morocco) Morocco’s King, Mohammed VI, on Friday hailed President Abdoulaye of Senegal’s "constinuous efforts" for "peace, stability and progress" in Africa.

Hailing his efforts as part of Senegal’s 48th Independence Day, king Mohammed VI paid tribute to President Wade for his continuous efforts for peace, stability and progress in our continent and for the triumph of the Islamic noble values of tolerance, moderation, dialogue and understanding among religions and cultures".

The Moroccan King also hailed the Senegalese head of state’s strong commitment for "the consecration of democracy and the promotion of development" in Senegal that he described as a "brotherly country".

Mohammed VI further stressed the concordance of points of view while meeting with President Wade as part of the 11th organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) convened in March in Dakar. These included bilateral ties and regional and international issues.

"This understanding accounts for the fact that Morocco and Senegal share the same values of Islamic solidarity and sue for African brotherly and unity spirit", the king said.

He also expressed his "strong and continuous commitment" to pursue with President Wade the strengthening of the strong ties ushered in through time and our two peoples brotherly united by a common history and the sublime values of a common culture".

YB/sd/tjm/APA
04-04-2008

http://newmeaningsofpeaceconference2008.blogspot.com/2008/02/reserach-group-on-culture-and.html
Research Group on Culture and Globalisation (RGCG)
Abdelmalek Essaadi University
Tetuan, Morocco
Organises a conference on:

The New Meanings of Peace after 9/11, 2001
Call for Papers
The idea of peace cannot be adequately formulated in the absence of clearly identified territories of conflict, war, and violence. Peace is not applicable where it does not qualify as imperative and decisive. Different ideas of peace can be negotiated or devised for different zones of trouble. At the end of World War II, peace emerged as a follow-up to the military victory of the Allies against totalitarian regimes that advocated Nazism and dictatorship and exercised genocides and holocausts. With his extreme ideologies and unobstructed territorial ambitions, Adolf Hitler posed a serious threat for Europe and for humanity at large, and as such the restoration of peace in Europe was conditioned by a sweeping military victory of Western democracies and the complete destruction of Hitler’s apparatuses of power. During the Cold War era, peace was both sustained and endangered by the nuclear armament in which both the US and the Soviet Union ferociously and boastfully engaged for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In a context of heightened military and technological rivalry between Western and Eastern blocks, peace depended upon the imminent possibility of a planetary war, and as such was often defined and negotiated in such terms as reciprocal deterrence and parallel power. The supremacy of one side over another represented a fatal threat to the idea of peace in a world that continued to be bi-polar up to 1991, the date that marks the dramatic and unexpected disintegration of the USSR .
On September 11th, 2001, New York and Washington DC were subjected to a surprise terrorist attack that resulted in the death of three thousand civilians and the collapse of two majestic towers in the World Trade Centre, which were claimed by Al-Qaeda Jihadists as the miraculous success of a “divine” conquest at the heart of the West’s most emblematic and thriving of all metropoles. The West bemoaned the horrors of these terrorist attacks, and the Muslim world had to face the glaring reality that Islam had been hijacked by extremists and terrorists to be re-engineered into a tool of mass murder. The events of 9/11, 2001 supplied an alternative arena for the war of ideologies and ideas and hastened the transition from a fading conflict between the democratic camp and the socialist camp to a new and bloody clash between liberalism and Islamism. The most defining markers of the reality of such a new conflict of ideologies was the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the immediate overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Husein as well as the series of terrorist explosions that shook some of the world’s major capitals such as Casablanca, Madrid, London, and Istanbul. However, despite the fact that the conflict between Islamism and liberalism can be best denominated as ideological, the wars on the ground, the casualties, deaths, and serious threats looming on the horizon make the conflict a much more serious threat. The “global war on terror” is not a metaphorical expression even if the armies engaging one another in this war are not conventionally deployed on a neatly bounded battlefield.
The restoration of peace in a world made increasingly volatile by the exercises of terror and the excesses of military power is, however, not dependent this time on a neat military victory of one party over another as was the case in World War II. World peace depends primarily on the spread of a culture of tolerance and the reform of educational, social, and economic policies particularly in non-Western countries and most crucially in the Arabo-Islamic world. World peace is a global pact that cannot be envisaged and achieved with the will-to-power of the world’s most advanced states and in total disregard of the interests and future of poorer countries. The negotiation of world peace today must take place at the most fundamental level of social debate in view of narrowing the gaps between Western and non-Western countries, richer and poorer societies. Peace can only be a shared legacy and a common destiny for humanity. The world can no longer sustain more wars and regional conflicts.
The organisers of this conference invite papers on these proposed topics:
· The culture of peace in the post-9/11 world;
· Peace and democracy;
· Peace and public policy;
· Peace and globalisation;
· Peace and cultural discourse;
· Peace and religion.

Conference Director:

Dr. Jamal Eddine Benhayoun,
jamaleddinebenhayoun@yahoo.co.uk

Date and venue: 19-21 June, 2008 at the Faculty of Humanities, AEU, Tetuan
Abstracts deadline: 24th March, 2008

by David Shasha

(“Babel” (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and Guillermo Arriaga, 2006)

In the cemetery of Bagneux, departement de la Seine, rests my mother. In old Cairo, in the cemetery of sand, my father. In Milano, in the dead marble city, my sister is buried. In Rome where the dark dug out the ground to receive him, my brother lies. Four graves. Three countries. Does death know borders? One family. Two continents. Four cities. Three flags. One language: of nothingness. One pain. Four glances in one. Four lives. One scream.

Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions: Return to the Book

The generative myth of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) is an attempt to account for the breakdown of human unity amid a welter of different languages. If we cannot speak in the same tongue then we are forced to live separately and at odds with one another. The text in the Book of Genesis accounts for this reality by showing a group of primeval human beings seeking to storm the very gates of heaven. The people were of “one speech and many words.” They had a single way of communicating, but different ideas. Hereafter, they would not only be separated by their ideas, but by the way in which they could communicate those ideas with one another.

The Tower of Babel is a myth that has gripped Western understanding of culture and pluralism. Underlying the myth of Babel is the idea that there is a violent force that brings people to seek and to conquer that which they do not understand. The punishment here is meant to fit the crime: for the violation of the sacred space of God the violators of Babel are marked with the affliction of different and incompatible languages.

The 2006 film “Babel” is a meditation on the myth of the Tower of Babel that shows us a world that is unified by the needs and desires of the human, but which is fatally caught in a whirlwind of mutual incomprehension where people cannot understand what others are saying to them.

The four stories of “Babel” are intertwined with one another. The central linking element is a rifle that passes from a Japanese businessman who goes on a hunting trip to Morocco where he gives the rifle as a gift to his native guide. The rifle changes hands from the Moroccan guide who sells it to another man who buys it in order to kill off the jackals that plague his flock of goats. The rifle is then put into the hands of the man’s two young sons who become curious to see whether the rifle will be able to shoot a length of three kilometers as has been advertised by the seller. When they aim the rifle at a tourist bus passing on the road below, an American tourist from California is shot in the neck by the bullet. The person shot is a mother and wife who has come with her husband to Morocco on a vacation to forget the recent death of an infant child. Back in California, the couple’s two surviving children are being taken care of by a Mexican woman who is trying to get back to Mexico to attend her son’s wedding.

This complex scenario is made even more complicated by the story of the Japanese hunter and his deaf daughter. The young girl has lost her mother in circumstances that are never made clear to us. It would appear that the mother took her own life, but we do not know how or why. All we know is that the young girl is deeply troubled and acts out her pain in the manner of the current misanthropic dysfunctionalism du jour; she does provocative things like walk around without panties, come on sexually to her dentist and generally act in a sluttish way. The young Japanese girl uses her sexuality to express her own personal anomie and alienation; her deafness is a malady that serves to redoubles her pain over the loss of her mother and which incites others to treat her with apathy and disdain.

“Babel” unfolds like a richly dense and allusive piece of literature: the stories crisscross and zigzag with one another during its heady course. We move from California to Japan to Morocco to Mexico in a vertiginous daze which allows us to see the cognitive dissonance that is generated from languages that do not quite line up with one another. People are translating for one another and cultural codes break down during the course of the translations. To make things more difficult, the narrative plays with time in a way where the events do not occur in a synchronized framework. Minor alterations of the temporal scheme take place that disorient the viewer.

The politics of a post-9/11 world are never very far from the surface of the narrative: after the American woman is shot by the Moroccan boy, a frenzied attempt at getting the woman to the hospital takes place. The wounded woman, played by the actress Cate Blanchett, becomes a political football as the American embassy marks the shooting – incorrectly – as a terrorist act. Once terrorism enters the picture, the life of Blanchett is less important than the purported geopolitical implications of the act. The US embassy refuses attempts by the Moroccans to have an ambulance sent to transport her to a hospital from the remote desert village where she is now bleeding to death. The passengers on the tourist bus, mainly British and French couples, become increasingly worried that the natives will come out of their hovels with machetes to kill them. They are panicked by the worry of the Arab Other who is viewed as a terrorist.

The political complications are compounded when we see the Mexican housekeeper back in San Diego. Trying desperately to find someone who can watch Blanchett’s two children when she goes back to Mexico for her son’s wedding, the maid becomes increasingly frenzied. Her devotion to the American family is absolute, but has now been compromised by the events in Morocco. We hear Blanchett’s husband, played by Brad Pitt, first telling the maid that he will arrange for someone to come and watch the kids – but then hear that he has been unsuccessful and that he is depending on her to stay.

Loyalty is here something that is obscured by the power relations between the individuals. The Mexican illegal is subservient to the rich American and is trapped in his grip. She is not oblivious to his dilemma, but after all this is her son’s wedding. She is now torn between her devotion to her son and to the responsibilities of her job. Desperate to resolve both problems, she fatefully decides to bring the two kids to the wedding.

Her nephew comes from Mexico to drive her to the wedding with the kids now in tow for the trip. As their mother is suffering in Morocco, the children embark on what will become a dangerous trip across a border which is now charged with the political electricity of the current American debate over illegal immigration. Leaving the US is a simple affair – getting back in is not.

While all this is taking place, we see the young Japanese girl and her life in Tokyo. She is a very troubled young lady who frequently flies off the handle and is quick to use her sexuality in quite provocative and often transgressive ways. She and her friends cruise the electrified boulevards of Tokyo – a place of ominous and anonymous modernity – without the ability to hear. We see them flirting with boys, getting stoned and living on the edge of the law. It is clear to us that the girl’s deafness and the great difficulty that she has in communicating with others points to a serious void in her life that is redoubled by the personal tragedy of the loss of her mother. Here the Babel model works at the level of an absence of spoken and heard language. The young woman cannot hear and speak as others do. And because of this her world is fraught with pain and imbalance.

Back in Morocco, we see a predatory Moroccan police scouring the mountain villages for the perpetrator of the shooting. The police act with flagrant disregard for the niceties of civilized policing and beat up and threaten anyone in their way. The children who have the rifle are themselves distraught over the mistake they have made. But a mistake it is – there is no malicious intent or terrorist implications involved in the action. Here the language conundrum is absolute: the Americans have raised the shooting to an international incident when in reality it is merely the foolish act of a couple of kids who do not understand what they are doing.

The language conundrum redoubles the alienation of the non-Arab tourists in Morocco. As Blanchett is brought into the village, we see a community that expresses the traditional Arab hospitality at the very same moment that the tourists are filled with dread and pathological fear that these same Arabs will kill them. The block between the languages and the way in which they are parsed is absolute. Pitt is initially comforted by the help provided to him and his wife by the Arab villagers, but he increasingly takes out his understandable frustrations on the people of the community who are just trying to help him.

The US embassy is responsible for blocking the ambulance and from providing the help the bleeding woman desperately needs. The danger comes not from the Arab villagers, but from a hysterical American bureaucracy that is now shot through with wild visions of Al-Qa’ida terrorists.

The trip to Mexico is a release for the housekeeper and the children. The celebration of the son’s wedding liberates the group and they cut loose. The little children enjoy the celebration and integrate into the native element. But tragedy is always waiting in the wings. After a long-night’s celebration, the nephew who drove the group to Mexico decides to drive them back. Now drunk, the nephew foolishly takes a short cut through a desolate area and the crossing over the border turns into a tragedy. After losing his battle with the border agents to be let peacefully through the crossing, the nephew decides to hit the gas pedal with aggression and a chase ensues. In the midst of the chase, the children in hysterics, he drops the three off in the middle of the desert where they spend the night. In the morning, frantic and hysterical, the housekeeper seeks help to get them back home. Of course, she is picked up by the police and arrested while the children are left behind. And though the children are eventually found by the border patrol, the housekeeper is less fortunate. She is arrested and deported back to Mexico.

The web of these intricately complex tales is an infinitely reflecting set of mirrors that are united by the misadventures involving language and (mis)understanding of the Other. The Tower of Babel model functions at the level of dysfunction and alienation. Systems of thinking clash and break up the ability of human beings to communicate and express their own values and needs. The hegemonic construct of American superiority infuses the various discourses with a cruelly pathological irony: Americans turn to outsiders to help and protect them, but immediately turn on those people when trouble arises.

Loyalty is here a one-way street: Americans demand fidelity and respect from others, but others are not granted the same respect in return. The Mexican maid is expected to watch the kids, but she is not permitted to take care of her own son on his wedding day. The Moroccans are expected to care for an American woman who has been wrongly shot by a couple of their kids, but the Moroccans cannot expect that the Americans will respect their own national integrity as they are all marked as terrorists.

This series of degenerative pathologies is tied together in the figure of Chieko, the deaf Japanese girl who is motherless. Her behavior reinforces the dysfunctional state of communication and discourse along the lines of the Babel model. No one is able to understand the young girl just as no one is able to understand the Mexican maid or the Moroccan boys. No one seeks to speak to these alien non-Americans as human beings or to provide them with the rights that Americans expect as part of some natural due course. There is here, post-Babel, a hierarchy of languages and cultures that infects the human condition. Some people naturally see themselves as superior to others.

In this context, the security of Americans is not at all protected. Blanchett and her children are put at risk because of this vain and vulgar American triumphalism. As the border patrol seeks to arrest and deport the maid, there is little sense that the maid is the one who is protecting the children and that if she is in danger, they are in danger as well. The organic interrelation between the Mexicans and the Americans is ignored. And in the case of the Moroccan debacle, the concern about international Arab terrorism permits the US embassy to ignore the pressing needs of Blanchett who is in effect put into even more danger by the decision to wait five days to get her to a hospital.

“Babel” is a fierce and unsparing construction of a world that has been decentered by the ways in which language separates human beings. The various discourses are wrenched apart and it is this that tears human beings apart and creates the distrust, hatred and violence that subsume the film’s many characters. Beginning with the innocuous gift of a rifle to a Moroccan peasant, we see the ways in which signs and symbols can link human beings across continents and across cultures, but when filtered through the semiotics of communicating systems such as language that very unity is deconstructed and torn to shreds.

The generative myth of the Tower of Babel serves as the formative template upon which the intertwined narratives are constructed, but which is transformed along the lines of current concerns. Against an incipient Humanism that seeks to protect the inherent dignity of the individual, “Babel” exposes the dysfunctional realities of the present moment: the carcinogenic hatreds that are subsumed under the rubrics of nationalisms, sexualities, politics and media babblings all form a deeply disturbing and disturbed universe where human beings seeking stability and security are left with no protection. All that is left in “Babel” is the principle that “might makes right.”

The stronger is able to withstand the babble and incoherence of the clash of languages and communications by their ability to crush the Other. Mechanisms of control are imposed by means of the policemen that appear throughout the film as an ominous specter. Oblivious to the basic needs of human beings, the police are charged with sorting out the anarchy that has been generated by alienated languages and fractured discourses. Rather than seeking to find a way to repair and heal the broken state of the protagonists, the police act as a mechanism of punishment and retribution meant to break the will of the Other and act as an affront to the dignity of mankind.

“Babel” is a prolix and complex piece of art that speaks to the very intense heart of human civilization. Its overlapping and interwoven narratives are fractured by the use of varying time frames and wildly disparate emotional states. It is a dense and allusive work whose seemingly infinite meanings continue to open up and flower on repeated viewings of the film. The movie continues to shift perspective depending upon the angle which one uses to view it. Different valuations and different meanings emerge depending upon the viewer’s perspective.

While “Babel” constructs its events in a particular manner based on our present circumstances, the overarching themes of the work restore for us the Biblical vision of a tortured humanity that cannot understand itself. The damage that is created by the babble of tongues occurs over the course of time and is not limited to any specific cultural construct. The myth of Babel is predicated on the pain and cruelty of humanity and our inability to treat one another with kindness, decency and respect. Watching the pathetic attempts of the protagonists of “Babel” to find comfort, stability and protection in a world of hate, violence and corruption marks for us a cultural moment that serves as a warning to the vile ways in which we act with one another.

The implicit warning of “Babel” is that we cannot survive if we do not understand who we are and what we are doing to one another. We must find ways to translate our many tongues to discover a shared framework, a common way of being human. The film in no way seeks to paper over or disregard the complications inherent in the post-9/11 world, but it cries out to its audience that we must restore a basic core of Humanistic values that will assuage the pain caused by the violence of language and the cruel ways in which imperial hegemonies are formed and executed.

The imperial hegemon in this case is Western, and more specifically American. The film seeks to examine and critique American global dominance and hegemony; a system which privileges one language and one culture at the expense of others. It is not an attempt to compromise the humanity of the West or of the Americans, but to ensure that all nations and all political systems serve equally to enforce the rights of all human beings.

The first step of this process – always the most difficult – is for those who have violated the rights of others to acknowledge that they are themselves only one branch of the global family. They are not the masters of the world and should not act as if they control others like puppets on a string. Law is a means to effect justice and not a means to place people in danger.

The clash of languages bespeaks a clash of civilizations. It can happen on the US-Mexico border, it can happen in a village in the Atlas mountains many miles from urban civilization, it can happen amid the glitter and bright neon lights of post-modern Tokyo, or it can happen in the paranoid world of a young deaf girl whose lack of hearing is a sign to others that she is outside the realm of civilization. The myth of Babel is a myth that can teach us how humanity can adopt cruel and malicious postures and how people can be made to suffer just for trying to live and get along in the world.

“Babel” as a film reminds us of what it means to be a human being and forces us to confront our own humanity and the ways in which we act in the world and how we look at our neighbors. In our gaze we can see the suffering, feel the pain and hear the piercing screams of those whose languages have torn them apart and whose cultures have marked them as alien and as Other. The lesson of the film is that we must acknowledge and respect Difference, but, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has noted in his brilliant new book The House We Build Together, must never permit Difference to tear down the shared space that we all inhabit as members of the human family.
© The American Muslim (TAM) 1989

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