* A man walks in from the back of the room. He is dressed practically, not poorly, not elegantly. He sits in the front row before anyone can redirect him. When he speaks, he does not raise his voice. *
My name is H.R. Gawi.
You have been talking about me for twenty minutes. I thought I would come closer.
I have a brother. His name… well, his name is the same as mine, we are from the same family, but in Germany they call him Herr Gawi. Herr. A title like Monsieur in French. A courtesy. He left the country. Like you did to Canada! He sends some money back. He speaks German now and no longer speaks Darija in his inner monologue either. His colleagues respect him. The bus where he lives comes at the time written on the sign, he told me on the phone once, laughing, like it was a magic trick. He recycles. Correctly. All three bins.
My brother is Herr Gawi.
I am the one who stayed. And you, Hassan. Can I call you Hassan? or do you prefer Kabour perhaps? You have just given a twenty-minute talk about me at a UNESCO World Book Capital book fair where we ban people from entry but that’s not anti-social. Of course not. There has to be a real valid reason for that.
So I want to ask you something. About my brother and about me. Same mother. Same neighborhood. Same school. Same second hand textbooks handed down you can count it using the powers of 2 , a teacher who was excellent and exhausted and underpaid. Same experience of trying to do something small and legitimate in this country and discovering that the theater, and that the real system runs on a different currency.
Same origin. Same Morocco.
My brother calls me sometimes. He has opinions about Morocco now. the kind you develop from a distance, with clean air and a functioning municipality around you. He says: the problem is mentality. He says: people need to have more respect for public space. He says it gently, with love, the way you say something about a place you have decided to stop being responsible for.
I listen. I don't argue. He is my brother and he worked hard and I am glad the buses come on time where he lives.
But I think about what he learned before he left. I think about what we both learned, together, in the same years, watching the same institutions. We learned that the rules in this country are not for everyone. We watched the man with the connection walk through the door the rest of us queued for. We watched the fines land on the person without the phone number to call. We watched the contract go to the name that was already in the room. We learned. Not as a philosophy. As a daily practice.
My brother took that lesson and left. I took that lesson and stayed.
And the way that lesson lives in me, in my impatience, in my distrust of the queue, in my particular relationship to rules I have watched be applied selectively my entire life. That is who you talked about today. That is me you defined, traced, perhaps got a thoughtful laugh about, here in this room full of people who also learned the same lesson in their own way.
You gave my name a talk. You did not give it a cause.
And this is where I want to be precise with you, because I think you are intelligent and I think some part of you already knows what I am about to say.
The antisocial behavior you identified in me is real. I am not going to stand here and tell you I am easy to be around in a crowded train. I am not.
But here is what I am asking. I am asking: where is the talk about the antisocial behavior that came before mine? The ministry that overcrowds the school I described. The developer who cleared my old neighborhood and called it urban renewal. The prime minister, and this happened, Hassan, this is not metaphor, who awarded a government contract to his own company and is still the prime minister. The culture of impunity that is so total, so structural, so generationally entrenched, that my country scores 39 out of 100 on the international corruption index and this does not make the front page of anything.
And the reason for my name, and the whole viral taxonomy surrounding it, being mine only, is very simple. I exist in the public, in compressed and overcrowded and under-resourced public space, because that is the only space I was given. My antisocial behavior is visible because I am visible. Their antisocial behavior is invisible because they made sure to stay that way.
I am what happens when you run a country as an image project for long enough.
My brother got out before the image consumed him completely. He is Herr Gawi now, punctual, integrated, a man with a title and a correctly sorted recycling bin. And when he calls me from and talks about mentality, I think: you are describing the product, not the factory.
I stayed in the factory. I know what it makes.
This country is spending so much to co-host a World Cup that the World bank is giving it warnings. It is projecting itself on the world stage as modern and stable and open and ready. It is managing its surface with extraordinary dedication and skill.
And I am a smudge on that surface. That is my function in this discourse. To be identified, named, discussed in book fairs, and managed. Locate the smudge, not to examine the wall. Could I be a writing on the wall?
You are a talented man, Hassan. I mean that. And this book fair is beautiful. And I am glad someone in this country is still talking.
But the talk should not be about my name.
It should be about everything my name was made to hide.
My brother sends his regards, by the way. He could not be here. He had work.
* He does not leave. He stays in the front row. Takes off his shoes to rest his feet. He has nowhere more important to be. *