The Moroccan Specimen

I have always thought that my generation will break that curse of social toxicity, that my generation will be the rise of a new era of conscious people who view social matters with serious determination, take active actions to change some stigmas, break the cycle of repetitive patterns that consists of just letting things go instead of fixing them, hides deep significant weighty issues with the shallow sentences of ‘it’s just humor” or “it’s just sarcasm”.

I thought my generation will destigmatize love, will stop believing that everything is a conspiracy theory destined to shatter our culture and beliefs.

I even had the audacity to hope that my generation will stop obsessing over women’s bodies and clothing.

But little did I know that all the thoughts I had were made based on the small portion of people I lived within, that those people around me were not the whole society but just a fragment of it. And not that those people, including me, were perfect but we are doing our best to change things within and around ourselves.

Although the attributes we are going to discuss and talk about in today’s blog are not solemnly ascribed to Moroccans as those things could be shared and found in all humans despite from where they come and where they live, this blog aims to give a humble insight based on a Moroccan perception and ways of life. Albeit the world is sharing common problems whether we are economically, ecologically or politically speaking, social problems remain distinguished because they do not bend to our current beliefs and future projections rather than an old social heritage of manners, habits and customs, they also seem to “upgrade” depending on which part of the world we live in so we most certainly cannot expect them to be shared copy paste among all humans all over the world. It is obviously that middle eastern and north African societies, as they both share a conservative background mostly blamed on religion, do not share the same troubles and worries as the western world (But somehow they tend to have a common view on things specifically when it comes to women issues/ male privileges.)

This blog is not a bitter, vitriolic, rancorous attempt to explain basic absurd issues that still exist, it is not filled with hate nor resentment and it undeniably does not in an implicit way imply that I or the people around me are more woke or better than the rest. Or maybe it is full of bitterness and just like mourning I am in my denial phase as the things I start to realize are wrong and that I used to think are okay for the sake of being cool and unproblematic, just because everyone did not raise the issue of them being wrong, is just starting to hit me.

Through this essay we’ll try to decompose and highlight some issues that I am personally so done with, by bringing examples from daily life.

When Moroccans discovered the word “sarcasm”:

“How could you be depressed if you live in Morocco”, numerous Tiktok videos declare while showing some footages of either cool taxi drivers, people dancing to Wai Wai music, lovely people who make innocent jokes or pranks in places like Jamaa Lfna , etc. All this is nice and lovable.

But things get shady quickly, the thin façade that promotes Moroccan people as one of the funniest, most amusing and humorous nations to exist conceals a darker reality, and if you believe that everything can be joked about I am afraid I would have to tell you to stop reading until you grow up to understand that not everything is funny.

It is immensely and incredibly childish and unserious of a nation we become when “humor” gets to baseness and vulgarity that is beyond description and profoundly immoral.

I don’t find anything funny about a murder case in which the criminals ran away years ago without any justice to the victim and his family, without any consideration to their feelings, without a legal punishment for the atrocity of the murder.

I don’t find anything funny about this serious situation that implies that our legal system is deeply rotten and corrupt, that implies that if my friends kill me tomorrow there are big chances my case could not be relevant.

In 2022, I still cannot see “the funny” about “the jokes” that talk about selling black people, or calls them slaves, or the jokes about the Amazigh as cheap people.

I cannot find what is funny about the misogynistic videos whether on youtube or tiktok, where men claim to know women so much that they get dressed like them and start acting in the cliché way promoted to be women’s, claiming that all women that go to the middle east are prostitutes, all women that get to travel somewhere nice gave something in exchange for that, something for a man, and by something I mean sex. I am tired of everyone sexualizing innocent women. I don’t see anything funny about men insisting that they know what I go through during a menstrual cycle. I am fed up of men who don’t even shower requiring their wives to look like the European woman who quickly gets better and well after giving birth, expect her to be all pretty and nice while not helping take care of that baby. Or Moroccan men that show “the difference” between the loving western woman who is full of affection, who wakes up beautiful, who has it pink, and the Moroccan woman who nags all the time, wakes up ugly, and has it black/ blue/ dark, because I have genuinely never seen, in comments, men of another country, bringing their women down, or being obsessed about the color of their genital organs publicly, but I have also seen how every country praises Moroccan women and to me it just seems like Moroccan men are like the toxic boyfriend who makes you believe that you are less of a person and that he is the one settling for less to be with you just so that you don’t dare look away or expand your horizons.

I don’t find anything funny about the rape jokes, may be because I am a woman and that those type of jokes are premium gold jokes I cannot have access to because I am not privileged enough to be a man so I spent my time actually worrying about getting kidnapped and raped while I go get some bread at 10pm, thinking that the sharp little key in my hand is a weapon I could use if anyone gets close to me.

I don’t see anything funny in making fun of poor people who struggle everyday to afford and get the basics of a living, not to dare say a “decent” living, while you get to have that because your parents work for you.

No, it’s not just sarcasm, I know you learned that word about 2 years ago and you still fancy it so much that you enjoy using it in every serious situation to get a pass for how childish you are, hiding behind the mask of being cool and unproblematic while you accuse me of being too serious, humorless, reserved and unbearable.

Merendina: The complex of love:

“I find the packaging not pleasant at all, the packaging containing those terms ruins society. Kids buy those products and they should not see such things. I wouldn’t allow my kid to buy it. This really ruins our society. I urge the company to change the packaging and use another one that is less shady.”

“We are in a Muslim society and country in which such things shouldn’t be done. A hijabi woman with a man laying his arm over her shoulder? Such things shouldn’t be done or seen on TV or in contact with kids. I am not satisfied with the packaging for a product we have consumed for years. I would not allow my kids to purchase it”

“This is not within our traditions”

“This is a Muslim country, not a Jewish one”

Those were some claims among many, in facebook posts and from street interviews.

Far away from the indirect implies and hints that suggest:

.Kids being exposed to any type of expression of love is wrong

.Only Hijabi women must have modesty and represent the ultimate image of righteousness and virtue. The role model that must not do wrong. (what about men? Who is the role model?)

.Only Muslims have morals and are gifted with guidance and light. We are better than other people because we are Muslim, whether we actually practice and live by Islam or not, the rest is doomed and cursed to be different and to having no values or principles.

So apparently this year I was lucky enough to be in a modern society that is thriving, prosperous and successful, where every big debate about human rights, sexual assault, educational system, unstable economy, mediocre healthcare system, climate change, all of those things were solved and we moved on to other serious matters such as biscuit packages.

There were no causes to argue and fight for, real world complains and worries vanished, all the big problematics were taken care of. It was cake time.

From hashtags, boycotts, enraged posts, viral furious videos expressing “disappointment”, about what? Well, it was not about a change of formula, nor intoxication by the product. It was not about a change in the price. It was not because the packaging was promoting nudity or any indecent element, nor because a minority was insulted or basically any type of rational reason one could think of as chief importance.

A huge, opinionated assertive polemic was born over some drawings and sentences such as “you are the most valuable person to me” “I miss you” etc.

How did we get to this point where drawings, inanimate things that are not real but only a pure result of imagination and an economical strategy used to marketing and advertizing a company, how did some illustrations that did not invade anyone’s privacy or offend anyone’s beliefs make people inflamed and intensely raging. Why does our society have problems with love and with expressing it? Last time I checked love wasn’t haram if we are religiously speaking, but the intimate association we created between religion and traditions over time made us believe that traditions have a sort of supremacy over religion, and saying such thing out loud would have been outrageously unacceptable, so making people believe that their traditions were part of Islam by gaslighting them seemed to be an ideal choice. If loves occurs and you are emotionally and legally grown to make wise decisions for yourself, than there is nothing about religion that stops you from getting married and making things religiously “right”, love was never a problem. But socially speaking, it is hard to do so because you are supposed to be financially stable.

I am not saying or encouraging people to get married absurdly but when two people are determined to spend the rest of their lives together and that their parents separately spend money on them for rent and other things, why can’t they agree to let the kids get married and spend that money on them to help them be together and at the same do what they separately do (studying mainly) rather than separately. But that is socially unacceptable, all that to say that the society that criticizes love and calls it unreligious, immoral, abominable because “religion dictates so and says is haram” is the same society that makes the reunion of two people with endless demands and expectations nearly impossible and hardly reachable. I don’t think everything is as complicated as it seems like, it is only as complicated as we make it feel like or be like. When it comes to love, I think my religion is tolerant about it, encourages it and makes it seem magical, I don’t believe my religion is against its expression but our social norms made us believed so and robbed us from having it as soon as we can, as soon as we are sure. I don’t think my view on this subject is simplistic or superficial, I just stand by the idea that some things are easier than what we commonly see.

Over sympathizing: The apology of injustice and crime:

A type of injustice I am currently, along with many comrades of mine, are “victims” of is the project of integrating medical students who came back from Ukraine because of the war. Not that I am formally strictly against it or for it, the government’s determination to increase the number of doctors in our country gives a prediction of how the modalities of this integration could potentially be only based on making a big number of doctors rather than actually giving access to people who merit it truly only.

People sympathize with those medical students because of the so-called trauma they lived in Ukraine, which is fine, but explaining to them that the circumstances which we are currently facing, mainly the overcrowded faculties and hospitals, the very poor mentoring we get whether from the professors or the residents because they are so busy in the middle of a rotten health system, explaining those valid points makes us selfish and the bad guys.

How dare we care about being decent good future doctors, or dare think we have the right to have a decent training while those traumatized people “survived” a war. Those people who take it as their sacred duty to defend those students, in another controversy, are the same people who once thought of them as less of students because they did not get good baccalaureate grades, only go to Ukraine to buy the medical diploma, all because they now pulled the “trauma/ surviving” card.

And I can’t help but think of why they are now defended while just about a year ago they were not considered real students or doctors because of the reputation of the medical Ukrainian diploma. Is it because they don’t live in the heart of the problem, is it because they are too emotional and ruled by their feelings and blinded by them that seeing actual facts such us the crowded mediocre training we get are no longer relevant?

In parallel, when it comes to murder, the criminal must be forgiven and you know why is that? It is because he has a mom. A mom’s tragedy of her years of raising her kids gone to waste are enough for us, as a society, to make an apology for the atrocities her son or daughter made.

The sexual assaults men commit must be forgiven because my feelings and the damage done to me are not valid enough like his mom’s tears or his sister’s claims of him just being “young” and “he could not have known better”.

I must sympathize with the person who stole my purse and think of how his future could be ruined because I am sending him to prison, because of something HE DID. And sometimes, in those situations, it is the police itself, the institution that is supposed to protect us, that puts a “gentle” pressure to push us to “forgive”.

The rationalization of crime went as far as to saying “I think that the murderer is the biggest victim here, I mean look at the victim, she has no incredibly attractive shape to die for, she is an average girl” a Moroccan comment among many, about a girl who was killed, stabbed, because she refused a man’s marriage proposal.

In law dissertations and essays, conclusions are not mandatory which is something I wish was general because what can I miraculously conclude in such a topic. There is nothing to conclude, there is just a hopeful urge that our society becomes more than a good cuisine and charming landscapes, I wish for us as a society, to be more conscious and aware of the things we say and do, of the social norms we “religionnalized”, of people who use religion to give their traditional retarted mindsets a pass to serve their own agenda and also more aware of the toxicity we indulge for the sake of seeming different or cool. Being woke is the new cool. Prentending that serious matters can be joked about makes you the joke.