On Pistons and Patriarchy

I suppose that I should write something about the suicide bombers in Casa and Algeria this past week, but I don’t have much insightful to say. Last Sunday, I was in a café watching Al-Jazeera reporting on the latest explosions, which were bizarre in their aimlessness, when an older man sitting near me commented that this phenomenon has become à la mode among 18-25 year-old men, the way clandestine immigration was five years ago. He was referring specifically to the form immigration known here as l’ahrig, or burning, referring to the means by which young Moroccan men would rid themselves of their identification papers, then pay someone to get them across the Straights of Gibraltar by fishing boat. These boats often sank, and though the vast majority of most migrants have and still prefer air travel, these became high-profile events on both sides of the Mediterranean.

I’m not sure that this is an apt comparison, since one is intentionally violent and presumably political, while the other risks, but does not aim for death, and is presumably economically-driven more than anything else. But it did strike me that, in spite of the Moroccan government’s official discourse, these suicides are very much related to the marginalized standard of living for the poor in Morocco’s bidonvilles. The man’s comparison also made reference to the faddishness of the recent events, an aspect that, I think, distinguishes these suicides somewhat from those in Algeria, where Islamist violence dates back over more than a decade of civil war. In distilling the source of these suicides to specific neighborhoods (Sidi Moumen, Hay Farah), and even specific families, such as was the case on Sunday when two brothers blew themselves up, the similarity to l’ahrig, however conditional, seems to me to be one of social capital. Risking your life for a better one somewhere else requires knowing the right people to help facilitate that process. And as with clandestine immigration, the profile of the “victim” is always better understood than the shadowy figures who are manipulating them. Just as the network of passers and snakeheads are rarely profiled as clearly as the immigrants themselves, the young, jobless, unmarried men sacrificing themselves in the name of religio-political ideology are more clearly sketched than those nebulous networks of Islamists presumably pulling the strings via the internet. Paradise Now is the most vivid portrayal of this phenomenon that I ever saw or read which explores the very localized and personal nature of a terrorist network.

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Last week, a friend with whom I studied in 2001 in Rabat visited from the States. We visited both of our former host families who live within minutes of one another in the medina. Even though I visit these friends almost every month, I’m convinced by now that I simply don’t fully comprehend their remarkable hospitality, which never fails to surprise me. This was particularly apparent when we knocked on the door of my friend’s old host family’s home, not having been in touch with them for five years. We were concerned about how this would go over, or if we’d be remembered, and if so in what way, etc., and of course we were welcomed warmly. In both of these families the fathers have often been absent over the years, whether because of work, sickness, distraction or some combination. These two women are both the main breadwinners and the main caretakers, and in these families, they pull this off magnanimously. They are, in a word, matriarchs, and in a very patriarchal society at that. Just as I sometimes wonder whether I wouldn’t appreciate Moroccan society so much were I a) a woman, or b) a Jew, I sometimes think that living in this admittedly atypical, unpatriarchal Arab family structure is perhaps why I enjoyed my experience here from the outset.

Another something noticeable in our visit was that each family member of working age who was jobless five years ago remains jobless today. The most common remark, whether high school graduate, medical student or Arab lit-degree holder, is that one needs a coup de piston to successfully attain a position in the gendarmerie, in a hospital or elsewhere. The large number of jobless degree-holders relates once again to the oft-sited cause for terrorist activity – a lack of opportunity, and the hopelessness that it engenders. While these families do not live in the same misery as those in Casa and Rabat’s bidonvilles, the lack of opportunity is, in a sense, socio-economically blind in Morocco save for the elite. It is no wonder, then, that while the main preocuppation in the States with the the 18-25 male demographic is how to attract their attention and purchasing power through beer advertisements, in Morocco the concern is with keeping these guys from killing themselves in one endeavor or another. A crude generalization, but still…