Tangier, August 14, 2009. Click image to see a larger version.

Not long ago, I wrote an article called “Why Is Morocco Stuck?” in which I blamed Morocco’s lack of progress on two things: “the political and economic system, and the mentality of the people.” This provoked the following exchange with one of my readers, which I think is worth reproducing here.

reader: You’re naive to say it’s the people’s responsibility. Take those magazines that always get slammed illegally but soundly by the authorities. That’s terror against a corporation, and the authorities don’t fear public opinion. So what do you think can happen to individuals put in the same situation? Simply worse.

I won’t say we’re stuck, we’re just slow. Some people just have to bear with it because change is progressive. I think you’re being naive, but also impatient. I believe that if Morocco becomes a lot better in the future, with democracy and clean streets, you probably won’t like it.

eatbees: You mention the dangers involved when individuals speak out, but my point is that people need to take this risk in large numbers, because the authorities can’t use their techniques against millions at the same time. Yet this requires a change in mentality.

For the moment, the majority accepts things the way they are. They’re ruled by “fear and ignorance” as a friend of mine says, and the authorities get their way. But African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, or those living under communism or third world dictatorships (Chile, Philippines, South Africa…) changed things by no longer accepting the way things were, and the regime was unable to put down this new mentality.

So the situation in Morocco is first of all the responsibility of the authorities, but it’s also the responsibility of the people, because the people accept it—and in many cases, actively collaborate! As a guy I know recently put it, “The mafia is us. We’re all part of the corrupt system in one way or another. It won’t change until we change ourselves.”

I don’t know why you say, “If Morocco becomes a lot better in the future, with democracy and clean streets, you probably won’t like it.” If a traditional beach is destroyed to put in fancy apartments and cafés for the rich (and launder their money from trafficking) then it’s true I won’t like it. But if Moroccans are able to choose their own leaders and plan their own destiny, and this results in cleaner streets, better schools and a more modern lifestyle, why wouldn’t I like it?

reader: Maybe you don’t say it, but it’s what I think. I can imagine cities after getting modernized, turning to be exactly the same as Casa or Rabat, which you and I dislike.

eatbees: There’s good and bad forms of modernization. Casa has its good points and bad points. What I like there is the freedom there, and the autonomous culture among young people. What I don’t like is the chaos, pollution and lack of planning.

Too often in Morocco, modernization is what I call “bastard modernization,” which is either bricolage to serve the needs of the moment, with no thought to sustainability; or projects designed to enrich the interests of well-positioned individuals without serving the needs of the people from the bottom up.

Maybe any developing nation has to start this way. I guess the U.S. began with bricolage too, and evolved its ideas of citizenship and humanistic development later. But there have been so many theorists studying how to integrate economic development with concerns for the environment, sustainability, local tastes, and a healthy quality of life. What I’d love to see in Morocco is development driven by the choices of citizens, aided by experts, and designed for high quality over the long term. I don’t think that would turn out like Casa today!

“Bricolage” is a French word that means putting something together out of available scraps, rather than, for example, inserting Part A into Slot D according to the directions on the ready-to-assemble kit; or drawing up a plan, obtaining the best tools and materials for the task, and executing the plan with attention to quality and detail. Bricolage is probably the best metaphor for the way the average Moroccan lives his daily life.

Examples of bricolage go from the most simple, such as using laundry detergent to wash floors and dishes rather than buying a specialized soap for each task, or making folded cones out of old newspapers to hold the roasted nuts sold at neighborhood stands; to the more complex, such as installing a light switch in an awkward location because that’s as far as the wire will reach, or sharing shirts and pants with one’s brother so each can have a wardrobe instead of a single garment, or the system of “grand taxis” which allow Moroccans to travel to places buses won’t go, so long as they’re willing to squeeze six people into a space meant for four, and wait until enough people gather who are going to the same place. The ultimate example of bricolage is the Moroccan shantytown built from rocks and scraps of metal; or on a less desperate level, the sort of neighborhood where homes are built as the owners can afford them, a floor or two at a time, with empty lots in between waiting for their neighbors to pull together enough money to begin their own project.

Bricolage is the opposite of professionalism, which has standards and procedures for everything. I used to like Moroccan bricolage, considering it an art form, a sign of an irrepressible free spirit and the Moroccan genius for improvisation. In the West where everything works as it should, we are in danger of losing our spirit of self-reliance, and becoming paralyzed should things ever actually break down. Moroccans, however, deal with broken-down systems on a daily basis, so their sense of improvisation is finely tuned. I considered this a competitive advantage.

When I expressed these feelings to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, he objected that bricolage is in fact an obstacle to development. He is an adept at web design who believes in doing things the right way. He pointed out that bricolage is a response to a lack of resources; and he seemed to feel that adapting things to tasks for which they aren’t really suited is an unhealthy mentality. He pointed out that in the West, when we improvise—as in the famous case of the first PC, cobbled together in a garage in Silicon Valley—we do so within a system where everything works and the material resources are readily available. Bricolage, however, is a desperate response to a system in disrepair. My friend sees it as a sign of Moroccans’ misfortune, not as something to celebrate. Perhaps it is even a factor in perpetuating the breakdown, by accepting it as normal and multiplying it into the future. More professionalism is needed in Morocco, my friend would argue. The solution is to reform the broken-down system and do things the right way in the first place. However, this requires a material investment that is not being made; and bricolage is an engrained habit that will be hard to break.

If we define bricolage as a lack of appropriate resources, we can see it as the curse of the Moroccan economy and of society as a whole. An educated woman who works as a civil servant recently gave me an example. It’s well known that Morocco produces many college graduates who are unable to find jobs at the professional level. As she put it, thanks to a flawed educational system that isn’t in sync with the needs of the market, a lot of these graduates are unqualified for the jobs they seek. “They don’t even know how to write a simple letter.” As a result, they are forced to look for work as waiters, cab drivers, carpenters or house painters, where there is already plenty of competition and they aren’t qualified either. “Such jobs tend to require either manual skill or brute force, and they don’t have it.” So what do they do? She gave the example of a young man who goes into business as a subcontractor, rounding up work crews for construction projects. Each morning he goes to the place where day laborers wait looking for work, and transports them to the site. He pays them and takes his percentage, all of it under the table, without taxes or benefits of any kind. This is bricolage in the domain of employment. It’s true that a college graduate has found work, and is giving work to others, but it isn’t a sign of health in the Moroccan economy. To the contrary, he isn’t working in the field he trained for, he isn’t contributing his taxes to the national budget, and there is no security in what he’s doing of the sort that would allow him to plan for his future or start a family. The moment he gets sick and is unable to work, he will find himself without income, unable to support himself.

What sort of economy treats bricolage as a normal thing? It can be argued that such an economy is based on exploitation. Rather than investing its resources in the material well-being of its workers, the Moroccan economy prefers to take advantage of a population desperate for work and struggling to survive from day to day. A friend of mine gave the example of a shop that sells trifles like nuts and candy, where a man might work for as little as 500 dirhams a month, or two dollars a day. Such workers spend their entire lives in the shop, sleeping there at night, opening it in the morning, cooking their meals there, and never leaving even to drink a coffee in a popular cafe. If they are frugal enough, even with that meager income they can send money back to their families in the countryside, or save enough over the years to open a shop of their own. But the shop owner is taking advantage of them in the same way that employers in Europe and the U.S. take advantage of immigrant labor, paying a wage that others are unwilling to accept, and driving down wages for everyone in the process. Another example is a computer repair technician I knew in Tangier, who earned about $250 a month despite having a specialized skill. The money he earned wasn’t enough to pay his monthly expenses, and he was always borrowing from his boss or falling behind on his rent. Worse, after two years on the job he was still being paid under the table, so he had no benefits and no job security. I advised him to talk to his boss and try to negotiate a better deal, but he refused, saying, “He’ll simply tell me there are plenty of others like me, waiting at the door for a chance to take my place.”

So bricolage in Morocco isn’t the same as improvisation in a developed nation. It isn’t exotic, romantic, or an art form. It may be the sign of an inventive spirit, but more essentially it’s a response to a dysfunctional and even exploitative system. I now accept that my friend is right, and bricolage is an obstacle to Morocco’s development. Rather than eternally struggling to make the best of what is available, Moroccans should learn to demand the best resources for the task. This will require investment across all levels of society, and a transformation in the way Moroccans think, so they no longer accept a life built from scraps as normal.

This piece was written during the Gnawa Festival in Essaouira at the end of June, after I’d been back in Morocco for four days. Mohammed is a friend who lives in Essaouira, a journalist and activist who was previously referenced in my post “Waiting for the Rain.”

Even though I’ve been away from Morocco a long time, the details of buildings, dress and behavior are instantly familiar to me, and the rhythms of life envelop and somehow comfort me. I guess this makes it hard for me to fully relate to a statement like Mohammed’s that “Morocco is a hard place to live in,” even though the evidence is all around me. Last night a discussion broke out between Mohammed and another friend as to whether Morocco is a “horrible” country as Mohammed put it, or merely a “cruel” one as my other friend said. My friend defended the idea that a country can be cruel without being horrible, which led to the question of how Morocco can be cruel and generous at the same time. I pointed out that Moroccans feel a moral obligation to help each other, even strangers, while Americans tend to feel that other people’s problems are none of their business. My friend feels that if Morocco ever succeeds in developing itself to the European level, this generosity will disappear because it’s a holdover from Morocco’s communal past. In fact, he feels that this type of generosity is actually an obstacle to Morocco’s development, because it goes against individualism which is a necessary condition for progress.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m at the Gnawa Festival, which attracts eccentric young people after all, but there seems to be a wider range of self-expression in Morocco than I’ve seen in the past. I’ve seen a punk with a mohawk and a Ramones T-shirt, an emo with a buzz cut and long locks falling into his eyes, chin goatees, specially cut sideburns, afros, dreadlocks, even the occasional piercing or tattoo. The question is whether all this will lead to expression on any other level, as happened in the 1960s in the West when youthful self-expression mutated into political struggle. I suspect that most of my friends here would say definitely not. In fact, they would call such expression a ruse, a false freedom, a distraction from the real problem which is, as Mohammed put it, that the rich run the country in their own interest. Just as it always has, power in Morocco comes from the top, so nothing ever happens here unless it’s in the interest of the power elite, the Makhzen.

In this vein Mohammed mentioned an article he’d written in which he traced Gnawa back to its historic origin as the music of slaves, and proposed that modern promoters of Gnawa are creating a new generation of slaves, in this case the slaves of globalization, the global consumer economy that in Morocco profits only the rich. As we watched an open air concert I proposed, “So the rich want to turn Morocco into a show for foreigners to get their money, rather than developing the country in the interests of its people,” and he replied, “That’s it in a nutshell.” The Makhzen is happy to see the young poor of Morocco amuse and distract themselves with hairstyles and such, because they expect that’s as far as the self-expression will go. Meanwhile they could care less about the future of these young people, at best seeing them as props in the show they’re putting on, a show called Morocco.