(Un)Green And Filled With Malls, The New “Consumptional[1] Identity” Of The Moroccan City As Imaged In The Photographs Of Yto Barrada
Boxes at the Border (1999/2011)
Introduction
Yto Barrada is a contemporary female Moroccan artist who uses photography to criticize the government policies concerning the city and its inhabitants. Her focus is on her hometown, Tangier, which she transforms into a series of pictures and forces us to perceive in a new way. In her photographs, Tangier is illustrated as a closed city, full of boundaries and walls. Its massive concrete buildings are similar and faceless; its new architecture is soulless and its urban development projects do not take into consideration the real needs of the community which are intimately related to the convergence between environmental and personal wellbeing. In this paper, I question the use of photography as a means of resistance to dominant structures and show how Yto Barrada’s pictures reflect Morocco’s urban ecological discontents and invent a visual space to those marginalized by urban planners and politicians. Barrada’s work also includes films, publications, installations and sculptures; but my focus is on her photographs. Yto Barrada works with pictures and I work with words to engage in a debate concerned with ecological vulnerability and the city in Morocco
Tangier: a Place Reinvented, Made and Unmade by Anouar Majid in Si Yussef.
Introduction
Anouar Majid is a Moroccan American writer of a double-voiced literature bearing relationship to the Anglophone tradition and to the Moroccan culture. He has created a new narrative space for the representation of the Moroccan experience through and within the realm of the English language.
Majid has stepped outside his culture in order to 'defamiliarize' it by translating it into a new mode of discourse. English is a space of freedom within an alienating medium which helped him come to terms with a new identity that transgresses national boundaries. It is a coded language which he uses to escape restrictions characteristic of our national literature in Arabic.
In Si Yussef, first published in 1992, and republished in 2005, Majid describes the psychological journey of Lamin (Majid as a young man) into the idealized past of Tangier. Tangier, the writer’s native city becomes the locale of identity. It is transformed into a symbolic space into which multiple tales and diverse identities transmitting the rediscovered memory of the past are projected.
My interest in this paper is to study how the dialogue between one’s culture and the language of the Other that allows one to 'think otherwise' operates in the fiction of Majid. It is my desire to demonstrate that the novel invites readers to question fixed definitions of identity and take a journey towards diversity and plurality.