Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture

Preface

xi Preface i began working on this book over a decade ago, when i lived in fez. While shopping at a local bookstore, i discovered a wonderful new literary form—the Moroccan arabic police novel. Modern arabic literature is rich in narrative experimentation but there is little genre fiction. considering the highly negative image of the police in arab society, it should come as no surprise that novelists ignored police fiction. in fact, by the late 1990s, the arabic police procedural did not even exist outside Morocco. and that made the novels that i discovered in my local bookstore that much more interesting. What was happening in Morocco that led writers to depict a cop as a sympathetic figure at the center of a novel? Why did the genre exist in arabic in Morocco but nowhere else in the Middle east or north africa? as i read these novels, i began noticing a connection between them and the crime articles in Morocco’s new independent press. like the novels, the crime stories in the country’s highest-circulation newspaper at the time typically took the perspective of the police and used fictional narrative techniques to depict real-world criminal investigations. it hardly seemed like a coincidence that police fiction was emerging in Moroccan arabic newspapers only a year or two after it first appeared on bookstore shelves. i immediately wanted to know why journalists of the new independent press had decided to narrate the details of real-life crime and punishment in a style that seemed consciously to mimic the country’s new police novels. i became even more interested in the link between the police novels and the increasingly commercial mass media when i discovered that the television stations were making movie versions of the novels. novels have a very limited readership throughout the arab world and Morocco is no exception. selling only a few thousand copies makes a novel a bestseller. by producing the police novels for the small screen—and in Moroccan, not standard arabic—the television stations made police fiction accessible to millions across the country. Moreover, the police movies, with their taboo themes and modernist audiovisual techniques, represented a striking break from the conservative television programming of previous decades. after seeing police fiction in novels, newspapers, and now television , i asked myself why it was suddenly becoming so popular in Morocco in the early 2000s. Why was police fiction spreading so quickly in the mass media? and what was the connection between these new images of the police in popular culture and large-scale changes taking place in the mass media and politics at the time? xii | Preface These questions set me on a long and challenging investigation into the development and spread of mass media images of the police in contemporary Moroccan society and their connection to transformations in the nature of authoritarianism in the country. i immediately found myself in the role of a detective, chasing down leads, searching for evidence, and finding unexpected connections. and i quickly found that it would not be easy. after discovering that the novels emerged in an atmosphere of growing sensationalism and state involvement in the depictions of crime and punishment in the press, i went in search of back issues of newspapers that would allow me to trace the development of this new kind of reporting. i went to newspaper headquarters in casablanca and rabat but i discovered that most did not keep complete organized archives. i then went to the national library, al-Maktaba al-Wataniyya li-l-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya/bibliothèque nationale du royaume du Maroc (bnrM) in rabat , which collected most newspapers in the country. as in any archive, it took a tremendous amount of time to locate issues that i needed and to find ways to copy the sheer volume of articles that i wanted. each chapter in this book is based on thousands of newspaper articles and it was an ongoing challenge to collect such an enormous amount of material for analysis. issues that could not be located during one research trip turned up during the next, while issues that i had read previously went missing. rules about copying or photographing newspaper pages changed from time to time, further delaying the collection process. Moreover , all of the newspapers that i worked with were only available in the form of paper copies, not microfilm, and were commonly organized in stacks, not bound volumes. This added considerably to the time it took...