Top Secret
Written by Moulay Idriss El Maarouf
Top Secret: The Ideology Behind Festivals in Morocco
COMM 1
It is believed that we all need a social life of some sort. In fact, there is a pressing need to live the collective, the communal, the shared. In the past, men and women joined in twos. Later, they grew into quite larger families, with sons and daughters. When they realized it was not enough, they constructed tribal systems. Till that time, villagers enjoyed a genuine sense of gettogetherness within the strong bonds they had created. Inside these rural communities, sprung what we now identity as the neighbourhood. Soon after, Neighbourhoods developed into cities, cities into larger cities then into gigantic cities. By then, the world was divided among massive populations.
Little did people know, taken unawares by a culture of narcissism, that the collective life their ancestors strived to build, with intrinsic spontaneity and inherent leaning, will be dissolving into a dull individualism. In the absence of a community life, one had to be forged, fabricated; imagined, to use the concept of Benedict Anderson. To weld the community together, to spare the nation the nightmare of a selfishly destructive individualism, politicians felt the need to become puppeteers of the public order, composers of the national chorus. In Morocco, this culture of narcissism is driving the country into a sinisterly dreadful whirlpool of stubborn corruption.
Bribery, fraud, embezzlement, misuse of political positions by a small privileged group, generated thick cracks in the social echelon, creating wide inequalities among social classes. For this reason, the masses are cautiously angry and their fury is camouflaged within the compulsory systems of adaptation and compromise. The managers of the social order feel that this fury will eventually eat away the ties that hold the nation together. The youthful public, sucked out by the vampirisms of unemployment and despair, have started to grow out of the optimistic visions each government tailors for them.
COMM 2
Ironically, but ominously, the most desperate, frantically terrorized by the workings of social injustice, avenge themselves by choosing to become terrorists. They think they are fighting terror with terror, a necessary evil they should inflict on the social body to destroy the original evil exacted by the elite on the people, a sin, they believe, they should purge perforce. To nobody's astonishment these terrorists are no longer positing their bombs where to be most undetected to finally blow them up by means of a remote control. Inversely, terrorists are now making sure they would carry the bomb's remnants with them to the grave, if there were any.
Alarmed by the rise of a politics of fear, the government is now looking for alternative ways to put things back to order, to dupe the nation into yet another tornado of ideological illusions. When it could not fortify the sense of national identity in the disillusioned creatures in society, who are mourning, like isolated isles, their forlorn remoteness and aloneness, the government has sought to contain the budding evil by engineering, however fictitiously, a sense of communal interconnectedness by means of the ancient therapeutic prescription called festival.
In the past, people used to work throughout the whole year. They would work day in, day out, ploughing the land, hunting, fishing, constructing cottages, cutting the wood till they would feel they could no more go like that. For this reason, they would choose a day they would make holy, a day during which they would sing and dance, eat and drink, laugh so loud, jump in the air, run and riot.
COMM 3
They would get a recreational break to escape the way life is incessantly working seven days a week. Those were the old beautiful days, where people, young and old, male and female worked together to take pleasure in the celebration. In their hearts, they wanted to get rid of their impurities, decontaminate their souls from the remnants of the previous year. Since they were realizing that life ingrains in them the seeds of a harmful selfishness as well as a spirit of poisonous individualism, they would choose a space where they could be able to meet their friends, families, and beloved. They would blurt out their anxieties, get shot of their old worries and get ready for a new start. A new year; therefore, a new life.
Today, things have changed, and that ideal vision of the world and the self has been corrupted.
COMM 4
Far from aspiring to create an organic society, or a platonic utopia of the world where people receive a worldwide invitation to meet every so often to be given a new lease of life, to 'express' themselves in the most beautiful of ways, festival organizers are reacting to what they think is a new cultural tsunami of terrorism by trying to package the country within a gala of eternal entertainment and amusement both to contrive a condition of 'visitability' by pulling towards the tourist, and to fashion a syndrome of glocalization, in which habitual fusion with the other is meant to boost up the psychology of tolerance, accordingly veiling the political and cheerless social defects behind the carnival mask. Once people lose the sense of existence in their own countries, once they turn into strangers at home, the ruling system invents 'themed' celebrations to give meaning to their life. Festivals are good institutions of group psychotherapy not only because they fabricate a fake social life of some sort, but also because they provide moments of mental drunkenness, putting to sleep the consciousness of the outraged, alleviating their anger, creating an out-of-mind situation, producing an agitated ecstasy, a mental intoxication.
COMM 5
In reality, nearly all festivals in Morocco are sponsored by an industry of intoxication that wildly serves what could be symptomized in the four 'Ds': drugs, delusion, dancing and dating. The festival citizens hunt for a space that places blinkers on their awareness, where they would ultimately fail to remember the temperaments of Moroccan policy, social integrity, authority, personal well-being in an atmosphere characterized by a deep-seated suppression of social pains, urging the revellers to take on the false conviction that the enjoyable is identical with the good.
Given Morocco's tense economic problems, youth insurgency takes fanatical forms. The unemployed is at a disadvantage having to adequately feed the body in times where the body takes more than simply food to be nourished. While the body could do without sufficient provisions and victuals, it gets easily agitated at the absence of the basic requirements of good living, which reasonably results in youngsters' anguished acts of vandalism. These angry outbursts are being variously contained by way of festivals and public celebrations as well as through the encouragement of half-awake, half-asleep states of intoxication. These youngsters certainly enjoy great powers and stamina which they can invest in felony, wrongdoing, destruction and terrorism.
The festival's other main objectives are to keep this energy dormant, by crafting a fake peace-and-love Gnawa culture ( festival of Essaouira), legitimizing vulgar music like that of Big lkhasar (festival de Boulevard in Casablanca), radicalizing the attraction of spiritual music ( festival of fez). Far from directing their heartiness and verve to things terroristic, these are seen by the official discourse to be better invested in unarmed profanities and defenceless vulgarities. The festival is hence a space for invariable partying, riotous manners, and revelry. It is in short a tranquilizer pill the festival goers take every so often, given the assemblage of festivals at offer annually. To generate happiness, they indulge in alcoholic merrymaking to finally live up to the Bakhtinian notion of laughter. This, at best, bestows upon them moments of oblivion, whereby thinking about their inner lives or about employment is the least to be pondered. It is true that regardless of everything they might remain distressed or discontented, but, just like drugs, their drinking and dating stimulates momentary distractions, charged by a nomadic drifting pointlessness.
Consequently, it is of note to understand the festival not merely as a space visitable by people who seek festivity, nor as an annual congregation of artists and fans. It is a space for therapist endurance to depression and insanity. More delicately, drunkenness soothes the mental disorder that constantly plagues the revellers. It is a calmative, relaxing mediator between the self and reality. It can effectively be comforting, assisting sociable conviviality, building companionship. During these moments of festal hospitality and constructed friendliness, festivalgoers make sure they will, through celebration, take a trip of imagination, wishful thinking, and elevated unconsciousness.
Moreover, such countercultural propensities provide a potent flight, or perhaps a communal coma, smudging the lines amid the abstract and concrete, fantastic and real, possible and impossible. The Ministry of Culture manages to sponsor countercultural reactions and sentiments within art (music, comedy, films), breeding a sense of domesticated 'communal noncompliance' outside the real world, inside the fantasy.
© Moulay Driss El Maarouf
