suspended

i had been walking around and he asked me where i was from

australia

ah, he said, christmas island

yes

so close, he said

and yet so far away

i thought

stare well

oil painting, squat

brothers in arms

now you’re watching – foreign labour

stare xii

third generation expat worker

uncertain position

suez canal crossing, between ismailia and october 73 war memorial site. obscured in the background, a ‘welcome to egypt’ sign.

no to abuse. let the kidnapped ‘brek az adin’ go.

these four images were all taken at the february 20, 2011 fes protest organised by the moroccan feb20th movement. for reasons apparent to me at the protest, i decided to withhold these photos until i had departed morocco. as hinted in a post long ago, my decision to be cautious was retrospectively confirmed.

not that i believe myself (or any of my images) to be of any great interest or importance, nor under any protracted surveillance. but i do need to be street smart, and the protest was my first serious encounter with the muscular morphologies of violence that states exert. let me be clear, the protest was entirely peaceful.

i have much respect for those citizens who assert their rights (granted, tolerated or otherwise) for their voices to be heard. for imagining otherwisenesses and claiming them as their own. because i enjoy the privilege of being geographically mobile, having a foreign passport and possess the additional benefit of being male - i calculate that the risk which i run is deportation. i assume, without knowing, that most of the citizens who protested, and continue to do so, do not enjoy the same matrix of privileges as i do. and there are risks that run far higher than deportation.

i have no political stance on moroccan politics per se. these are, in my mind, issues for moroccans and the moroccan diaspora to work out. during my time here, i have encountered a very broad range of opinions -  from unquestioning support of the status quo through demands for tinkering at the edges through full blown demands for revolution and uprising. politics is everywhere and yet, in a strong sense, nowhere at all.

i am now elsewhere. there will, of course, be the odd archival excursion. who knows, perhaps even a future return to morocco itself. i do not want to leave an aftertaste that my experiences here have been solely political, or threatening, or menacing. or that i have ever feared for myself. indeed, quite the contrary.

i was once challenged, quite rightly, by a moroccan woman who wanted to know why i was so interested in photographing protests. i figured it like this. every regime has sets of rules and conventions which dictate how we interact, how we are perceived and how we think about ourselves. gender is a regime, politics is a regime, economics is a regime. and yet, despite the regimes presenting themselves as natural, unchanging and ideal, there are always people testing the boundaries of the possible. and it is exactly here, this witnessing of explorations of boundaries that so captivates my interest.

enough.

i had arrived early at the algerian embassy, anxious to ensure that i would be first in line. the voice through the intercom confirmed that this was the correct location to request a visa - i would just need to wait an hour until they opened.

i waited outside in the shade, wondering. patiently. i was the only person, apparently, eager to obtain an algerian visa.

i noticed a woman opening a large window on the first floor of the building. i caught her eye and smiled. hoping that my pleasantness would impress. 

she smiled with a closed mouth and drew the drapes across the window, obscuring the office behind.

i asked, very politely, if i could apply for a visa to algeria. 

she asked how long i wanted a visa for.

sixty one days, please.

what do you want to do in algeria for sixty one days?

i want to travel.

that is a long time to travel.

i have heard that algeria is beautiful and i want to see for myself.

but you can travel in morocco if you want.

and with that, i understood, there would be no visa  - dissapointed that somehow my smile hadn’t made the slightest bit of difference.

in fairness, i imagine a line of smiling algerians waiting for the australian embassy to open. anxious in the shade.

prisoner of war

there is no formally demarcated border between morocco and mauritania, rather a three kilometre buffer between the final moroccan military post and the first mauritanian military post. a geopolitical no man’s land. it has been contested by the polisario.

the area is filled with land mines and there is just dirt tracks. on either side of the tracks lie hundreds of abandoned and rusted cars. it contains an informal settlement of would be migrants, neither able to return back through mauritania nor continue on to europe.