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Morocco in Fragments: Perspectives on Gender and Agency in Fieldwork InHae Yap Abstract Drawing on my own field experiences in Morocco, this creative nonfiction piece meditates on ethnographers’ relations to informants during fieldwork and in postfield stages of writing and processing. Challenging the norms of anthropological writing, I seek here to explore ways in which we can counter the usual researcher-subject power relations by understanding how the subject gazes back at us and seeking alternate ways in which to write about ethnographic encounters in productive (though not necessarily “analytical”) ways.
Malgré Les Yeux “He could be looking for work, but he is lazy, il ne veut pas,” Aicha1 told me of her husband, Yousef, with frustration. Time was languid in summertime Morocco, where daily activity revolved around the sun’s mercy. The midday meal, for which Aicha was slicing carrots with admirable speed, occured at the sun’s hottest. Aicha and Yousef were a couple with whom I was lodging with in Amizmiz. I was sitting with her on a cushioned bench, chatting between episodes of a Turkish soap opera. We awaited Yousef ’s arrival—the creak of metal hinges, a mumbled salaam alaikum, the inevitable mispronunciation of my name: labaas, Inhee?—from the cafes, where he had been with other men all morning. He would spend the hottest part of the day at home, but leave soon enough after lunch, return and leave again for dinner, and return and leave again for the late-night meal. His movements centered my day, and hers, more so than the daily calls to prayer that blasted simultaneously from every mosque in town. “His authority,” Susan Ossman remarks in an anecdote about locals awaiting a Casablanca official, “is underlined as much by his ability to make us wait as by his decision themselves.”2 I shared Aicha’s frustration about her husband’s unemployment, although for a different reason. It was infuriating for me to sit inside as Yousef moved in and out as he pleased; my different selves—woman, ethnographer, American—bristled with indignation, unspoken protest. Still, I pointed out the obvious: “Mais, aren’t his eyes bad?” Yousef was technically a part-time employee in his friend Hamsa’s tourist company but was rarely given the work of guiding tourists through the mountains because of a medical issue with his eyesight: to look at his phone he held it right up to his eyeballs; to talk to someone sitting a few feet away, he had to squint hard and lean in extremely close to them. When I did not hear him, or pretended not to hear, he repeatedly poked my arm and then left his fingers lying there so he could yank me back into his narrow field of vision. The very act of looking became physically intrusive. 1 Pseudonyms are used for all individuals throughout this paper.
2 Susan Ossman, “Time’s Power.” In Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City. University of California Press, 1994: 101
