Watching Singing and Being

Before I write about this past weekend, about women, woman, dead dogs, and "saints", I need to write about this.

There are protests on avenue Mohammed V nearly every day. They're pretty pro forma, which is not to say that the men and women protesting aren't serious, or that they don't badly need the attention, but, simply, if you live in Rabat you see a protest almost every day. Usually, you hear the protests before you see them, because no matter how many protesters there are they sing as long as they are standing, and it travels, the singing, in a way that yelling or even chanting doesn't.

This afternoon, my friend, Alex, and I were looking for this hotel "near the train station", which is rumored to have recently gotten internet. We made circles around the train station, and each time we came back to the station, which is right on Mohammed V, there was a larger crowd of men and women in blue jerseys gathered narrowly along the median in the middle of the avenue. After 15 minutes of futilely looking for the hotel with internet we found ourselves stopped on a corner off Mohammed V, either because everyone else was stopped or because there was something to see--at least, because state police with clubs in black boots and green jumpsuits and steel helmets were suddenly materializing from side streets and converging around a half-dozen fat and tall men in suits with cell phones, which fat and tell men were standing in the middle of the street, blocking traffic.

Nothing happened for a few minutes. The state police smiled at one another, twirled their clubs, stared at their boots, though while they were doing this the men in suits were pointing in various directions, looking behind and into cars, talking amongst themselves, strategizing. Eventually, the men in suits gathered the state police in small clusters and gave what had to have been orders; you could see the state police get excited, stretching, standing on their toes, shaking out their arms. Still, nothing. Cars honked, more people gathered, a cold wind passed several times. The men and women in blue jerseys were watching the state police (the men in suits might as well have been operating from building tops) with as much curiosity as us the thousands of people along and within the perimeter were watching them.

Then, someone screamed, someone amidst the protesters so that it seemed like they had planted their cue, and then the state police ran directly at the disarrayed mass of men and women in blue jerseys. They ran with an orderliness, and when it looked like they were losing this orderliness it was because they were fanning out in a V. They ran with long purposeful strides that reminded me of the way I used to run home down our block in New York very late at night. Like they were really relishing the running, which was so slow and controlled it was fearful and calming to watch at the same time. It was easy to admire, almost; until your eyes shifted to the suddenly panicked crowd of protesters dispersing in all directions, screaming, seriously running as fast as they could with the failing stutter steps of a nightmare.

Now, I wonder what would have happened if they hadn't run (what if just 20 Americans ran with them?). But they did, and of course some protesters were slower than others; some found themselves suddenly engulfed by men in green jumpsuits. I watched this happen to one young man. He stopped, holding his chest, and looked at the calm, expectant police forming a circle around him--again, with as much curiosity as fear. Is it that he realized then that the line between him and them was at once so fine and so consequential? I think he did; I think realized that these Moroccans were just like him but employed by the government, probably even less educated than he was; I think he saw right through them; because I saw him rage upwards, which is the only way to describe it, and throw his arms in the air, not at anyone, and scream; and get clubbed down by 5 police in a matter of moments.

How did the everyday milling about of minutes ago become this? Was it a big deal yet? At one point could I justify writing about this--I mean, kids were walking by, mostly not even looking, whistling at women who were looking; a tall ugly white guy walked by with an utterly pleased grin; men read, smoked, drank coffee, passed judgment; it was only the still presence of my friend, Alex, that touched the sick fear and pain that was shaping itself within me.

The point of the police running at the protesters was to move them back--I guess away--though I'm not sure to where. They kept on coming at them in waves, moving them down Mohammed V, so that if it went on like that we all would have ended up in the Atlantic. Me and Alex and a lot of other people moved with the police and protesters; as we moved, with each successive wave of loping police and scattering screaming protesters, all of us got more entangled, so that 15 minutes later I found myself engulfed by men in green jumpsuits, who had their backs to me but felt like they were on me, about to hit me, too, nonetheless.

They were surrounding a women who had fallen, who was wailing and rocking back and forth, her legs stretched before her, as two friends held her. They picked up the two friends, two women, and threw them off the wailing woman. The watching crowd hissed frighteningly at this. The police had noticeably avoided hitting or even looking at the women protesters until now, which maybe goes to show the real meaning of too many scruples, and they had been hissed at anytime they came close. Now, they threw the two women off their friend and because everyone was watching this everyone moved with the thrown women. The women, any of the women, screamed in a singing warrior-like way any time they were touched or even approached, and these cries always signaled to people where to run to next, to watch or fight or hiss; even if you didn't seek the source, you heard a scream every few minutes, people respected it until it died, and it let you know something, some thing, so that heeding it was in a way as much a form of action as running to the screamer's aid.

One of the woman who had been thrown off her friend grabbed the blue jersey lying by her friend and ran across the street, making traffic screech, to the other side of the avenue, where a mass of comrades were watching and waiting for her. This was too brave ("too" being relative; braver, more effective, would have been standing up, I think). I'm sure she didn't know what she was doing. She literally ran through men in green jumpsuits who grabbed at her, pulled off her shawl, even swung at her, all missed. When she made it to her side, she lurched forward though still somehow on her feet and yelled Baraka, I think, which means enough.

At this, another young man ran from across the street, it reminded me so much of playing Capture The Flag at camp, Z, and began to yell at the backs of the police who had thrown the women. Calmly, though on their toes, two police turned to him, and hit him in the legs while he was running at them. He fell, noiselessly, I think. He slapped at their boots from the ground. It looked like he was flattened. Behind us four protesters had made a stretcher with their arms and were rushing another crying man off--to somewhere...an ambulance, I hope, though most likely a bench or a friend's apartment. We hadn't seen that man beaten. This was happening in places we couldn't even see. It made you wonder where. I felt so much a part of it in that moment.

The feeling passed, though, like sickness. Another crying man was flattened across the street, in the park across from parliament. He was wailing but also singing and clapping the cement, and three police ran over to him and pulled off his blue jersey, which I then realized had been their only articulable objective during the event--to pull off the jerseys of the protesters (and if you looked, too, you saw that certain lost individuals were holding tight to bundles, which were their blue jerseys, which looked like something you might wear for work if you were a street advertiser; and yet, of course, but somehow, as this drew on, meant more and more and more...). When they finally got off the jersey, they fought over it, and then one policeman finally had it in his sole position and threw it on the ground in disgust, as if there were any reason in the world that the jersey proclaiming the dignity of jobs should disgust him. This doesn't mean his disgust wasn't real, no, he definitely was disgusted--I think actually that his disgust was the kind of disgust amplified by its lack of object, contracted by the lie of a purpose (given by the government) filling in a void reserved for chosen love.

But I really mean this I have never felt how much more powerful fear is than love, and how much the one makes an enemy out of the other so that it can, if temporarily, for as long as a man or woman lives, prevail.

I was scared to take photographs, though I badly wanted to. I have a few, which did not come out so well. What would they show, anyway? I didn't realize I was scared until I caught myself in the act; I know that Americans are as good as invincible in Morocco, at least as far as state violence goes, but nonetheless my heart skipped a beat. I kept my camera out, though; suddenly, or not suddenly but I hadn't realized, it died, and I ran, as if I myself were involved, to get new batteries. Onlookers who had stayed and been there now as long as me and Alex, probably 15 minutes though it felt longer, activated towards us--in a moment, they clearly (finally) began to notice us. To quietly, then, try to explain us what was going on. What they thought, even. What they all were most interested in, though, was the digital cameras each of us held in our hands. They looked intently at these, a few secretly smiled. This really scared me. What was my camera going to do for them? What did they want from me? (For once, not money, which I can give). Is it possible that the unemployed, educated, men and women of Morocco my age live their lives more intensely, more together, with more heart and thought, than I do?

The jerseys read in four languages: job=dignity. A bachelors degree, even a doctorate, is mostly an adornment here. There's an outdated law from an era of more state control which guarantees employment for any Moroccan with at least a baccalaureate; what a bad law. But it exists, and it is an excuse for these protesters to justify their protesting, since I suppose they need an excuse. It complicates things, though: how much is the government really responsible for mass unemployment? Well, no, probably a lot; they could make jobs; they cut jobs; but is it an awareness that needs to be made; stopping traffic, petty trouble? who says petty; and but so then it is the IMF, really, and its demand/suggestions for "structural readjustment"; in a lot of ways, it's even the US; and then, God, who knows? I definitely don't. Most people for whom it matters, I think, don't. (How far back do you go, or can you go, or should you go, to identify the source of a "structural problem"? Why does the "source" hold such an authority? Because it is unreachable; who does that benefit, man?) All they can know is the inarticulable feeling, not so much simple as deep, that something is wrong. Can you act on that; justify it; justify it for whom? Before the King? One another?

Morocco isn't a country of contradictions; it just fits things together that don't belong together...in my conception. Like state police beating young men to the backdrop of a gorgeous "modern" new train station imminently unveiled. The change here is not so much focused on, though, because we in the West already had ours forty-some years ago. Globalization creates discrete theatrical spheres, etc, etc....

At least, it is the difference between singing and chanting; and who watches people sing?

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