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May 31, 2006

The (Moroccan) Future Will be Blogged

My friends at the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy have arranged two speaking gigs here in Rabat at which I've been able to speak with young Moroccans about the potentials and the challenges of social software and the expanding Internet. The first was in darija (Moroccan Arabic) on May 19, and the second yesterday at ISCAE, the Institut Supérieur de Commerce et d'Administration des Entreprises. Both are podcast, thanks to Gar Green and Stetsonville.com:

May 30, 2006

3lash had dunya, 3lash meskin mess3oud?

I am down to my last four days in Morocco, where I have been bloviating about the richness and potential of the form of Arabic actually spoken by most Moroccans and trying to recapture my mid-90s sense that the Internet is about to transform Moroccan society. Today's exercise is to get a draft blog out on "Mess3oud,"a remarkable short rap piece by a young Moroccan who goes by the pseudonym "3awd-lil," the "Night Horse."  The rendering of both the song title and the author's pseudonym is in transliterated darija, Moroccan colloquial Arabic, employing numbers for Arabic letters that cannot easily be approximated on a French/English keyboard: 3 for Arabic `ayn, 7 for the aspirated ha, and 9 for qaf. these conventions have developed over the last few years has millions of young Arabic-speakers have found their way to cybercafés and school computers in North Africa, Europe, and North America.

 This post will necessarily be a draft, as I cannot produce a satisfactory version of the text to be discussed either in Arabic script (I'm devoid of keyboard skills) or in transliterated form (the transliteration system I learned long ago at the University of Michigan is quite different from that improvised by today's chatters in what might be called the "darija diaspora"). Nor can I get many of the rapid and highly colloquial turns of phrase (I have this problem with American rap as well). What I will offer as a guide for the English-speaking reader is not a translation of the verses but rather an approximate text summary of the "plot" of the song. I hope, with the aid of my native-speaker colleagues (Sa`id, Hamid, this means you), to offer something better in the near future. I imagine something in the way of the three- or four-language posting with a credible version of the darija original and parallel translations in English, French, and perhaps Modern Standard Arabic.

First a word about the author/artist. Discussions on the Web of the small and powerful oeuvre (three songs to date) of "3awd-lil" (cf. "Awdellil"), the "Night Horse," either characterize him as anonymous or cite an interview in Telquel, a Francophone Moroccan weekly magazine of political and social commentary, in which he is identified only as Nourrendine, a 22 year-old Moroccan who lived in Casablanca until the age of 19 and then moved to Paris to study "informatique" (computer or information science). For the time being this June, 2004, interview, in which Awdellil (previously listed by Telquel among the "50 most influential Moroccans"!) appears to be the main source of information. Awdellil says he has no interest in celebrity or any career in commercial music production, and thathe writes his words himself and produces the music in collaboration with friends.

The Telquel article offers French translations of two of Awdellil's songs, "Raw Daw" and "Messaoud": I will paste the second of these here, followed by Google's machine-translation, in hopes of inspiring someone to do a better job. The author's performance of this four-minute piece is currently available as a podcast ("Une chanson tragique mais comique!"), and I recommend you listen to it and, if you read French or transliterated Arabic, browse some of the comments at www.mon-maroc.info/index.php?2006/01/26/51-mes3oud-3awd-lil. There's also a copy on the excellent MarokZik.com site.

French translation of "Messaoud"

Dans un village aux environs d'Ifrane, un vieillard passait sur sa mule. Attiré par des cris d'enfant, il découvrit dans les buissons un nouveau-né, bleui par le froid. Ses cris firent peur à la mule, qui se cabra. De sa patte, elle écrasa la jambe du bébé. C'est ainsi que commença l'histoire de Messaoud le maudit, l'homme que la poisse ne lâcha jamais.

Les jours passèrent, Messaoud grandit dans la cabane du vieux et sa femme, mangeant rarement à sa faim. Les catastrophes se succédèrent, jusqu'au jour du drame. Messaoud n'avait que cinq ans. C'était un lundi de fête, il s'était réveillé tout content. Voulant jouer avec un pétard, il mit le feu aux couvertures. Les deux vieux moururent dans l'incendie!

(Refrain) Pourquoi la vie en a-t-elle après Messaoud? Pourquoi toutes les portes se referment-elles sur lui? Pourquoi est-il autant marqué par la poisse? Pourquoi lui?

Messaoud atterrit dans un orphelinat à Meknès. Pendant 5 ans, il se fit casser la gueule par tous ceux qui passèrent. Son visage en conserva les traces. L'école? Il n'y comprit strictement rien. Jusqu'au jour où il en eut marre et fugua. Ce soir là, il dormit seul, dans le froid d'un terrain vague. Ali Boulahya passait par là. Il attira Messaoud derrière la décharge et hmm… jusqu'à la garde!

(Refrain)

Messaoud vécut en clochard jusqu'à ses seize ans. L'âge des fantasmes, même s'il louchait et qu'il avait le pif de travers. Complexé à l'excès, il aperçut, un jour, une bonne étendant le linge sur un balcon. Elle lui fit un signe et sourit. Le pauvre en perdit ses moyens. Chaque jour, il revint guetter sous la fenêtre. Un matin, elle descendit enfin. Ayant une course à faire, elle lui donna rendez-vous à 9 heures. Messaoud resta à l'attendre, tremblant d'excitation. À l'heure dite, il eut à peine le temps de la voir traverser… quand elle se fit écraser par un bus qui passait!

(refrain)

Messaoud, détruit, sombra dans la fume et la sniffe. Un jour, un islamiste le vit, et le conduisit à une mosquée de riches. Il lui servit à manger, lui apprit à prier et à s'exprimer. Messaoud, fier de sa nouvelle fonction, se mit à orienter les gens. Il fit le tour des mosquées, rameuta les jeunes et se fit un peu d'argent. Vint le jour où il fut appelé pour le jihad. Il prit l'avion, tout content de rencontrer Ben Laden. Arrivé au camp, on lui donna une arme et on lui dit : "Ne bouge plus d'ici, tire sur tout ce qui bouge, ta place au paradis est garantie". Messaoud se figea sur place deux jours durant. Dans un moment d'inattention, zdaou! Un Américain lui donna un coup sur la tête. À son réveil, il se retrouva en cellule, avec un Pakistanais, qui lui souriait bizarrement. Messaoud hurla de dépit : c'était à nouveau Ali Boulahya!

(Refrain)

Messaoud passa un an difficile, avec Ali Boulahya. La poisse le poursuivait tant que les Américains le renvoyèrent au Maroc. De retour au pays, chômeur et sans abri, il frôla la folie. C'est là qu'il rencontra Mhammed le violoniste. Avec lui, il fit la manche et récolta quelques pièces. Mhammed lui confia qu'il avait un plan pour "brûler" en Espagne. Messaoud fut tout content à l'idée de fuir ce pays maudit. Arrivés à la frontière avec Sebta, ils se glissèrent dans un camion de poissons. Mhammed s'en tira, Messaoud mourut frigorifié.

Pourquoi Messaoud est-il mort? Pourquoi la poisse lui collait-elle tant? Pourquoi lui?

Google machine translation of "Messaoud"
(obvious grammar mis-renderings fixed by d2, aided by WordReference.com)

In a village around Ifrane, an old man passed on his mule. Attracted by the cries of child, he discovered in the bushes a new-born baby, turned blue by the cold. Its cries frightened the mule, which bucked. With its leg, it crushed the leg of the baby. Thus commences the history of Messaoud the cursed, the man never left alone by misfortune. The days passed, and Messaoud grows up in the hut of the old man and his wife, seldom eating with his hunger. The catastrophes followed one another, until a day of tragedy. Messaoud was only five years old. It was a Monday of festival, and he had awaked very content. Wanting to play with a firecracker, he set fire to the blankets. The two old ones died in the fire!

(Refrain) Why does life go after Messaoud? Why are all the doors closed to him? Why is he marked so much by misfortune? Why him?

Messaoud lands in an orphanage in Meknès. During 5 years, he was hit in the mouth by all those who passed. His face preserved the traces of them. The school? He understood nothing at all there. Until the day when he had enough and ran off. That evening he slept alone in the cold of a waste ground. Ali Boulahya [a bearded man] passed by there. He lured Messaoud behind the dump and hmm… to the hilt!

(Refrain)

Messaoud lived as a tramp until his sixteenth year. The age of the dreams, even if he had a squint and his nose was bent. Complexed with excess, he saw, one day, a fair one hanging laundry on a balcony. She made him a sign and smiled. The poor one lost his means. Each day, he returned to watch for her under the window. One morning, she finally came down. Having an errand to run, she gave him appointment at 9. Messaoud remained to await it, trembling of excitation. At the appointed time, he had hardly time to see her crossing when she was crushed by a bus which passed!

(Refrain)

Messaoud, destroyed, sank in smoking [hashish] and sniffing [glue]. One day, an Islamist saw him, and led him to a rich person’s mosque. He gave him food to eat, taught him to beg/pray and to express himself. Messaoud, proud of his new function, started to direct people. He made the turn of the mosques, rounded up young people and made a little money. Came the day when he was called for the jihad. He took the plane, very glad to meet Bin Laden. Arrived at the camp, someone give him a weapon and another says to him: “Don’t move any more from here, fire on all that moves, your place in paradise is guaranteed.” Messaoud stays on the spot two days. In one moment of carelessness, zdaou! An American gave him a blow on the head. On waking, he was found himself in cell, with a Pakistani, who smiled to him oddly. Messaoud howled of spite: it was another Ali Boulahya!

(Refrain)

Messaoud spent a difficult year, with Ali Boulahya. Misfortune pursued him as the Americans returned him to Morocco. On returning to the country, unemployed and without shelter, he came very close to madness. It was there that he met Mhammed the violonist. With him, he made a match and reaped some denefits. Mhammed entrusted to him that he had a plan “to burn” [herraga, slang for emigrate] to Spain. Messaoud was very glad with the idea to flee this cursed country. Arrived at the border with Ceuta, they slipped into a fish truck. Mhammed drew some [?], Messaoud died refrigerated.
Why Messaoud did he die? Why does misfortune stick to him so much? Why him?

For anyone who "gets" the Moroccan Arabic lyrics -- and perhaps for anyone with an ear for the poetic resonances of the text in the cleverness of its presentation -- these "translations" are near useless. From the opening kan ma kan, mashi ba3id f-had zaman ("it happened or it didn't, not far from this time"), evoking the classic tales of the 1001 Nights, there is a constant play on the ironic sense of Messaoud's name, "Lucky." The misfortune that haunts him -- his (Oedipal?) crippling as an infant, his childhood near starvation, his physical and mental abuse in the orphanage, the sexual abuse alluded to in his repeated meetings with bearded older men, the soap-opera quality of his doomed love and his brief tenure as a holy warrior, his brief success as a Tangier street musician, and his absurd death in a fish truck trying to escape to Spain -- all this sets up the poignant refrain:

Why is the world so against Messaoud? The door at night, why does he find it closed? Why, O world, why is Messaoud so poor?

3alash ya dunya 3alash mat Messaoud?
l-bab l-lil li9a mesdoud
3alash ya dunya 3alash miskin Messaoud?

May 17, 2006

Swords and pens: the morning email

The morning e-mail. An old friend has sent on a religious screed forwarded by a mutual friend, with the comment, "Makes for some good Religious Sci Fi"? I loaded the attached URL and read "Sword without Leniency: The West Must Scuttle Arrogant Materialism and Take Jihadists at Their Word," and somewhere about the following passage my blood heated, as we say here in Morocco:

Even though some in the Islamic world, when dealing with Westerners, will tactically repeat such ideas [about readiness to discuss, or negotiate, or stage a truce], the true believer sees in them nothing more than ignorant insults reflecting our own materialist prejudices, and signs of our spiritual bankruptcy. He sees our spiritual sickness manifested not just in our philosophical and economic materialism, but in our self-loathing, our groveling guilt over presumed imperialist and colonialist sins, our flabby tolerance, and our multicultural idealizations of dysfunctional cultures.

I started dictating a response to my friends and, at about the point I was interrupted by a Skype conversation with a friend here and started describing my feelings to him, it began to seem I should try to express myself to a larger audience. The segue from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent letter to George W. Bush seems a little forced, as I reread it, but I realize that it grows from my own dismay that this is just what has been happening of late in discussions of particular Middle East/North African/Arab/Muslim political issues: the actual details of each different crisis, the literal content of what was said and the likely connotations thereof for listeners in the writer/speaker's country and elsewhere, and the relevant history of international relations among the antagonists are often overlooked as we are treated to grand generalizations about Jihadists and Crusaders, Arabs and Jews, believers and infidels. Herewith, what started out as an e-mail response.

I hadn't paused to find the Ahmadinejad letter, the current target for a good deal of rage and ridicule in the mainstream media, when it was first mentioned in the press; and I did so only after a blogger friend referred to it with such a casual disdain (appending a parody that had nothing to do with the actual content of the letter) that I wondered what the despised president of Iran had actually said. I finally bothered to track the letter down a couple of days ago, and I think it's worth doing so before you get enmeshed in Bruce Thornton's or anyone else's sermon about it, and about the large topics of Muslim character and intentions. Ahmadinejad is a politician, one nurtured in a very different school than ours, and like many others in power today he has much to answer for -- in his case the hostage-taking in Iran in 1979 and his un-readiness to take responsibility for his country's support of Hizbollah and of dangerous nuclear technology, as well as some very bad gender politics and abuses of personal freedom, from the point of view of this Western observer. His letter was intended for public consumption by a large international community including, to be sure, millions of Muslims concerned about US policies in general and about the ghastly prospect of a major military attack on Iran -- perhaps using nuclear weapons -- as the next battle in our "war on terror." Had he wanted to influence US opinion, Ahmadinejad should have taken the advice of some of the many Iranians educated in the States and written a much shorter letter focusing on Iran's reluctance to abide by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty we have not applied with any consistency or moral firmness toward our Israeli and Pakistani allies, or our North Korean enemies, or ourselves. I wish Iran were not developing nuclear weapons, as I believe they intend to do, and I believe it's long past time we took this risk seriously. The two real points, however, are (a) will we proceed by saber rattling and a military attack that will likely produce exactly the result we do not wish -- radical movements around the world convinced that they must acquire the weapons that will frighten us away from attacking them, and (b) will our policies be guided by a tendentious (mis)reading of religious history or by a complex assessment of the actual situation in the developing nations of the Middle East and elsewhere in a globalized 21st century world? It would be nice, too, if the Western press included a couple of non-committal paragraphs about the history of US dealings with the petroleum-producing Middle East in general, and with the Irans of Mossadegh and the Shah in particular.

Ahmadinejad’s letter, read in English or French, will sound awkward and rambling here in Morocco, as elsewhere. I suspect it flows rather well in Farsi, and I can imagine how easily it can be rendered into persuasive Arabic. The real point is that most folks over here will find much of the argument he makes plausible: the self-styled Christian leader who favors representative democracy as a universal human goal should be behaving differently than the Bush administration -- and most American administrations in the past half-century -- have in fact behaved for the Middle East, where our major allies tend to be pseudo-Democratic authoritarian regimes riddled with corruption and hypocrisy (Egypt is a fine example) or theocratic states (think of the very different examples of Saudi Arabia and Israel) that are hard to reconcile with any American model of democracy. The recent Palestinian elections were in fact closer to an adequate expression of democratic voting than the elections in our client and newly-liberated states. The Taliban are back in Afghanistan, and only Cheney and Rumsfeld sound convinced that what's going on in Iraq is not the preface to its collapse as a state.  The Palestinians elected Hamas because (a) they were completely fed up with a corrupt Palestinian leadership that has spun them into an endless cycle of violence, corruption, and increasing Israeli control of the West Bank, (b) they had actually seen Hamas deliver social services in the form of education and food to neighborhoods where neither PLO administrators nor Israeli occupiers had seen fit to do so, and (c) they did indeed want to send a message to the world that they will not simply acquiesce to their eradication as a society. Some of those voters support suicide bombing and deeply wish that Israel would disappear. A large majority, as near as I can tell, believe that suicide bombings are contrary to human decency and to Islam and are at least resigned to living side-by-side with the Jewish state, if only they can have a viable one of their own.

But none of this really expresses the mixture of anger and sadness that I feel when I read yet another testament to the thesis that the world of Islam is in the grip of a unitary, duplicitous, violent, and implacably hostile empire against which we must engage total global war; and that this state of affairs is somehow intrinsic to Islam as a religion, and revealed by history to be the inevitable character of its relationship with non-Muslim regimes, with modernity, and with democracy. It takes a while to absorb the 1400 years of Muslim history, particularly in the context of its relations with the 2000 year history of Christianity. Much of that sanguinary history might indeed convince one that God spreads his message on rivers of blood -- whether the sword is forged in Christian Burgundy or Muslim Damascus. I was surprised just now to learn that there were nine crusades, the first of which [I did know this] massacred the civilian population of Jerusalem. There are also, however, non-negligible historical periods, both in Jerusalem and in the 700 year Muslim history of southern Spain, during which members of the three major religions seem to have gotten on rather well. I believe, though, that this is not what's at issue with the text to which you pointed me, or with its counterparts in the East. Millions of militant Christians, and equal numbers of militant Muslims, and a fair percentage of the supporters of Israel, are now itching for a fight. Some of them are more less well-informed opponents and defenders of globalization, and some of them can make academically respectable arguments about why neoconservative or neoliberal policies are, or aren't, likely to create a peaceful and prosperous future for everyone.

The ones who scare me most have a much darker picture of the immediate future, in which apocalyptic destruction of the earth proceeds along lines deduced from tendentious readings of the Book of Revelation and the Qur'an. On this view, the last 20 or 30 centuries of human history have been the inevitable working out of a "divine" plan by which humans will be given a chance to be tested by an immensely powerful -- yet curiously human in its jealousy and propensity for road rage -- extraterrestrial force that is about to appear in our skies and sort us out into a few goodie-twoshoes types who get to live forever in a sort of Epcot Center with infinite credit and perfect plumbing while the rest of us are quite literally in deep shit. That's not what this convinced Quaker believes. I think the "that of God" in every human is manifest in the many acts of kindness and understanding that every religion with legs has helped most of its believers to achieve in much of their daily lives, to teach their children as a value, and to imagine as a given in an Earth freed of hatred and hypocrisy. You can get there from the Gita, or the Torah, or the Gospels, or the Qur'an -- or you can figure it out on the playground and in the boardroom and call yourself a secular humanist, or a Bokononist. I don't care, as long as you don't do to other people what you wouldn't want them to do to you and are willing to open yourself to the better angels of your nature, whatever you believe those entities to be.  And I still believe -- most mornings -- that Homo sapiens sapiens could figure that out collectively, and that we might and yet begin to experience a future worthy of being called Divine.

In the meantime, I'm here to tell you that the good people of Morocco -- the old friends in Sidi Kacem and Rabat with whom we've shared the same joys and sorrows we've gone through back in the USA these past 40 years, the drivers of the taxis that spare us the road rigors of Morocco who express their pleasure at our Arabic and our obvious affection for their country, and the students to whom we speak about our years of work here and our hope that we can all get past this current bad patch in international relations and start learning each other's poetry -- are not swaying hypnotically in some mosque as they drool at the prospect of a great Jihad. They're shaking their heads at the day's headlines -- whether those are about the corruption of the Ministry of Education under the previous regime or the pictures of yet another Baghdad or Jerusalem or Paris neighborhood filled with the smoke of burning cars and the bloodstained bodies of fellow children of Adam -- and then they're getting the kids off to school, chuckling over a bit of dialogue from last night's satellite-viewed soap opera or the joke their cousin in Belgium just e-mailed, wondering if the guy with the moped would really sell at that price, or hoping that mom's really committed this time to keeping her blood sugar down. They are praying a bit more these days, but mostly at home, and mostly for children and parents at home and abroad, for a little more strength to get past these current worries, and for a little more faith that things are going to get better.  And those guys in the pulpits and minbars with their gleaming eyes and their delight in the pain the folks on the other side of town or river are about to experience when God gets on their case? Dubru-riyyushom: let them look to their own selves, and let us get on with our lives.

____________________________________________

Note: The "sword and pen" allusion is to Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah, (1377 AD/ 778 AH) analysis of the clash of civilizations it might do today's religious totalitarians well to read.

May 06, 2006

Youthful Moroccan Identities on the Internet

D2 presentation notes for a talk at the 10th EARA conference in Antalya, as part of a symposium on globalization and adolescence.

Overview. We adolescence researchers have been doing it the hard way: modifying each other's questionnaires for our own samples, administering them to captive audiences of intro psych students or kids hustled at the local mall, rotating correlation matrices of the data and hoping that variables around which we can spin a convincing story at the next convention will drop out of the factor analysis. We do recall other ways of looking at adolescents, though: a time when it was about our own nascent identity struggles as we searched for self-relevant stories in a literature that was actually literary. Our own life stories include narratives of youthful selves we may have inhabited in decades past and, while few of us have actually written out those narratives, we've probably imagined doing so; and we responded powerfully to the examples of other young people who had done so.  To recall the most famous example, Anne Frank did it for us, up there in her Amsterdam garret. She wanted to be a writer, and she wanted her writing to express honestly and powerfully the strange beauty of her prison life, her rage at her long-suffering and uncomprehending mother, her empathy for a father suddenly reduced to negotiating for vegetables and praying that he could buy his family some safety, her admiration and disdain for sister Margo, her lust for Peter. It wasn't about the war, really. It was a story she spun chapter by chapter for imaginary Kitty, who took on the role of confidant and chum.

Now imagine a million Annes sprawled with laptops in quiet bedrooms, or headphoned at the corner computer at the nearby cyber, telling us their stories, contextualized at the moment of typing with setting and ambient sound, literally giving voice to all the themes we've been writing about in our professional journals. They're doing it for free, and leaving the manuscripts were we can find them -- not in a hidden drawer in a secret attic, but broadcast to the world as blogs, and searchable on Google.

Theses. I contend (a) that the Internet is now the single most engaging venue for adolescence and early adult self-expression, (b) that the ready availability of personal data on millions of young people through the medium of the Internet allows -- indeed, compels -- major changes in our methodology for understanding youthful psychologies, supporting both richly qualitative and broadly quantitative data-collection, and (c) that the globalized production and universal availability of personal data on the Internet is about to allow adequate comparative studies of populations differing greatly on socio-cultural, religious/ethical, and socioeconomic dimensions never adequately or consistently addressed by the existing literature. I hope to explain and illustrate, but not to corroborate, these contentions with respect to a seemingly remote corner of cyberspace, the colloquial Moroccan virtual "street" in which chat, hip-hop, and a first glimmer of blogging and podcasting may be about to articulate a 21st-century adolescent discourse.

"Darija." The Internet has captured the imaginations of Moroccan youth, as of their peers around the world. But what is this network of networks of individuals that beckons from cybercafés, private tech schools, and vendors of "informatique" on every block in Casablanca and from four small shop fronts in Zawiya? What is it that persuades 100,000 youths to spend much of their evening at a smudged keyboard before a dusty screen constructing a verbal image of themselves, sending it off to the person they imagine hiding behind another MSN nickname, and hoping that the jerky image of the camera into which they peer appeals to that someone who likes their music, shares their frustration at school, and just might be their ticket to someplace better? How do they feel as they wait 20 minutes for a track of "H-Kayn" (a Moroccan hip-hop group) to download to their flash drive so they can fall asleep listening to it and perhaps quote from it tomorrow on the walk to school? I can only guess the answers to these questions for a handful of young acquaintances, but I have a growing conviction that "The truth is out there," just out of reach, beckoning to us from the blogosphere.

This short presentation will touch on several aspects of youthful behavior in relation to personal computing and the Internet. I do hope to engage your interest in one or more of these topics, and by finding your way back to this blog you will be able to explore the topics touched on in more depth and, if you wish, to contribute your own thoughts to the discussion.

I will quickly report on a dozen years of Moroccan Internet history, focusing on the rapid emergence of satellite, cell phone, and cybercafe resources available to most young Moroccans. I will state my own convictions, some of them supported by data, about the ways these new resources compel us to revise the picture of Moroccan adolescence presented by Davis & Davis (1989), and I will briefly compare Moroccans' activities in cyberspace with those of the relatively affluent English-speaking children and adolescents my students and I have been studying on the Web for the past decade. I will conclude by sketching a picture of vernacular Moroccan self-expression on the Net as it exists in 2006 and as I hope and expect it may develop over the next few years.

Pertinent links:

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