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In Le Maroc en mouvement: Créations contemporaines (2001), Brahim Alaoui and Nicole de Pontcharra of the Institut du Monde Arabe speak of Moroccan artists, both literary and visual, as “the face of modern Morocco, that of the freedom of thought.” They declare that “the time has come for artistic creation to be recognized as primordial in the projects of a modern society.”1 This type of statement is not new. One might argue that the Moroccan state and various individuals, collectives, and corporations have recognized and promoted visual art as the face of their modernity since the country gained independence . The problem has always been deemed by artists a lack of deeper commitment to public infrastructures that would promote visual art, freedom of expression, and public access to the arts in Morocco across classes. Perhaps this is just the universal complaint of progressive artists who lament the use of their work to enrich a small and elite population; after all, art markets and art appreciation have always had an elite identity. But in a postcolonial context, the combination of the perceived emptiness of symbolic gestures toward modernity from the state and the difficult negotiations of the international art market have pushed artists to a more intense level of frustration. In 2003 the Egyptian writer Sonaallah Ibrahim rejected his country’s top literary prize in protest against government policy, and in January 2004 the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouzfour turned down the Moroccan national prize for literature, claiming that no one in Morocco reads his work and that the state uses the prize as 159 Conclusion Rethinking the Museum in Morocco a symbolic institution to broadcast its modernity to the rest of the world while doing little to lower illiteracy rates, develop publishing infrastructures, or promote freedom of expression. In a statement given to the BBC, Bouzfour said that he hoped to receive a prize one day from “a government that wants and is able to eradicate illiteracy, to send all the country’s children to school and ensure that they don’t end up in the streets.”2 Bouzfour’s 1999 short story “La valise rouge” (The red suitcase) is the story of unrecognized, unvalued art itself—in short, the story of Moroccan literature in relationship to its environment. A man appears in a city carrying a heavy suitcase that he guards very carefully. Throughout the course of two days, he tries to visit an insurance broker who is never there. He mills about the neighborhood with the onerous suitcase constantly at his side. At the end of the story he is robbed and stabbed by someone he recognizes but never identifies. The thief opens the suitcase to find only a sheet of paper and, dissatisfied, he promptly throws it into a trashcan. The last lines of the story tell about Kawthar , a secretary from the insurance company leaving the building to buy milk, finding the paper in the trashcan, and reading her own story as it is happening : “She skipped directly to the bottom of the page to read the final words: . . . And she rushed off . . . toward the closest shop . . . to buy some milk. Kawthar looked at the two dirhams that she held in her left hand, dropped the piece of paper, emptied the trashcan and rushed off toward the closest shop to buy some milk.”3 Bouzfour’s story is symptomatic of the frustration artists feel in the face of a perceived public and value system that recognize neither their work nor the importance of the arts in the life and history of the country. Exemplifying this condition, the story was published for the first time in French translation in a booklet published by the Institut du Monde Arabe as a free gift to those who attended the Fifth Euro-Arab Book Salon. Pointing to both the Moroccan state’s absence and the powerful but phantasmagoric legitimization of an exclusionary Western culture industry, the insurance agent who can certify and protect value is never there. The work of literature or art as a portable space that holds the heavy story of the country is carelessly discarded into the trash after it is revealed to be monetarily insignificant by the local population—the suitcase is not filled with gold, so the state and the public have no use for it. It offers no immediate rewards. The work of Moroccan visual artist Mohammed Bouafir echoes Bouzfour’s critique and sense of frustration with the...

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