Slam au Fémínín

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This last Thursday, I had the amazing opportunity to go to a Moroccan women’s feminist poetry slam put on by my university and an well-known spoken word poet, Roxy Azari. Roxy Azari is an Iranian-American spoken word poet whose main topics are gender issues and feminism, and occasionally strife in the Middle East.  You can find out more about her on her facebook page here: Roxy's Facebook Fan Page

She has started many spoken word poetry workshops in schools all around the US. She encourages young people to use their voices and their words to institute social change in the world. Roxy was awarded the Watson Fellowship which has enabled her to run these workshops with girls around the world. She began in India, then the UAE, then Indonesia and for the past three months she has been in Morocco. Now that she has finished in Morocco, she will be moving on to France and then Turkey.  With the help of open-minded professors at different universities, she taught the women and girls here how to write and how to perform poetry. Thursday was the performance of all the girls who participated from my university. On Friday, they traveled to Rabat to perform with women from all over the country before a wider audience.

 This is Roxy’s poem Azadi(Freedom), She is speaking about the Green Revolution in Iran.

Professor Ouafae Bouzekri was the main coordinator on our campus. She is phenomenal. She teaches my Three Religions, Three Peoples class and often also teaches a Gender Studies class for ISA. She taught in the US for a number of years at prominent universities, speaks fluent English, French and Arabic, and quickly became one of my favorite professors here.  She organized the event and got many of the girls interested in participating.

This is Professor Bouzekri.

The theme was feminism in Morocco and the Middle East. While Morocco is a liberal country by Middle East standards, it is far from being democratic or liberal by western standards. Women here have very few rights, sexual harassment by strangers is a daily occurrence, and even though the wearing of the veil or head scarf is not mandatory, choosing to wear it or not to wear it can greatly impact a woman’s life. Just by reading the program, I could tell this was going to be a powerful evening. The titles of the poems say so much before the author has even performed.

Photo courtesy of Roxy Azari

Fatima Zahra Kaddar performing Being a Women

Two of the girls, posing after the show

I started out just by taking pictures and writing down memorable lines from the poems, but quickly realized that in order for people to understand how incredibly impactful these poems were, they would need to see them and hear them. The performances of these women are just as important as their words. They are emotion-filled and raw. You can see that each girl truly feels what she wrote and that she is terrified and exhilarated to be presenting her feelings in front of an audience. This is something many of them have never done before and maybe never thought could happen. They live in a society that doesn’t embrace standing out, which emphasizes the status quo. Women are supposed to accept their lives the way they are. But things are changing. Women want rights, they want equality, and they no longer want to be seen has sinful just because they are women. Maybe the string of revolutions in the Middle East has given them courage or maybe they have been ready for their own revolution for a long time.

Yes, I am a Girl by Nadya Izzamiouine

Ode to My Body by Najia Moussaoui, Nouria Sophia, Souad Zamzmi, and Fatima Zahra Kaddar

These girls stood up on stage and performed their poems about their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences, their hopes and dreams and their bodies. Their stories were personal and meaningful. If I had been in some of these girls’ shoes, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to stand up on stage like they did.

To My Abuser, by Samia Boutoutla was very moving. The poem was written as a girl who had been abused, sexually harassed in the street, something that is very common here. The girl is yelling at her abuser, telling him that all the things he did to her were wrong; asking why he thought it was ok to just attack her and use her. The passion and anger in her voice could be felt by everyone in the audience. The chorus of the poem is “You had no right!” She repeated this often, sometimes soft and sad and other time loud, angry and demanding. The last line of the poem implores the audience to empathize with her, “if you had been there that night, you would say I was right.”

To My Abuser by Samia Boutoutla

The next performance was Silence by Kaoutar Kaddar. She talked about wanting to speak up and to say her mind, but of not being able to do so. In the poem she finds her courage and dares to speak despite the consequences. But the line “I’ll say what I have on my mind, just this once” shows that it takes new courage each and every time they choose to speak, not just the first time.

Silence by Kaoutar Kaddar

There were women of all ages performing, but most were late teens, early twenties. They spoke in Arabic, French, or English, but no matter what language it was in, the audience could understand their anger and frustration, their strength and their sadness, their joy and their pride.

Where is My Voice by Fatima Zahra Riffi was heartbreaking. She wrote about physical abuse and the effects it has on a woman. I don’t know if she was speaking about her own personal experience or of someone else’s but that doesn’t change the message, physical abuse oppresses women and they become afraid to speak out against their abuser. They become depressed and feel worthless. The whole poem was tragic, but there were 4 lines specifically that hit me hard. “He smacked me strongly, my tears fall to the floor.” “Why is it me that you beat? Is it because I’m the only one you can defeat?” “I am asking God, what is left for me?” and the very last line of the poem “If I kill myself, would God count it as a crime?”

Where is My Voice by Fatima Zahra Riffi

Shortly after that poem, I decided to start taking video because I realized that no matter how descriptive I am in writing, actually seeing the performance will be more impact-full. This video is of Sexual Harassment by Lamyae Kani, Fatima Zahra Kroum, and Imane Lahlali. It is about the street harassment that women experience every day. I can personally relate to this one because it happens to me every day. Every time a woman goes anywhere she is bombarded with harassment. This can be anything from the more innocent cat calls to molestation or rape.

This next video is something I think everyone will find particularly interesting. It is called Veil and is done by a group of girls(Dounia Mansouri, Khadija Fadel, Mimouna Nmiri, Fatima Zahrae Ktomi, Latifa Masou, Sophia Nouira, Najia Moussaoui, and Sauad Zemzmi). Each one talks about her reasons for veiling or not veiling. In the US, we have a pretty one-sided view of the veil; veiling equals oppression of women and gender inequality. These girls, however, explain that it is not always oppression. Many of them love their veils because it is an expression of their religious faith. There are also those who do not veil and who view it as an old-fashioned or oppressive symbol. The really amazing part is that veiled or not veiled these women are all friends. It doesn’t matter to them what whether another girl chooses to veil or not to veil.

Revolution by Rajae Neddi was amazing, sadly I did not take a video of this one. Rajae speaks directly to Mubarek and Gaddafi in her poem. She is one of the few poets who used rhymes and they are quite funny at the same time as being direct and straight forward. She begins with “Mr. Mubarek is the picture clear?” and then talks about the Egyptian people. Then she moves on to Libya with “Mr. Gaddafi you are a dictator, you’re turn is coming but a little bit later.” One of the audiences’ favorite lines was “Mr. Gaddafi you’re destined to hell, we hope you forever there dwell.”

Here is I Don’t Need a Man by Kaoutar Kaddar, Fatima Zahra Riffi, Rajae Neddi, and Khadija Masoud. The title pretty much speaks for itself on this one.

Roxy performed again towards the end. She is very modest about her work. She really wanted the focus of the evening to be about the girls, but because of her celebrity, she was asked to perform quite a few of her poems.  This is one of her more famous poems. It is called Flower. I had heard this before, in the US, although I do not remember when or where. Roxy’s poems are well-written, thought provoking, and emotional. Her performance is beautiful. When she performs the entire audience is enveloped into her words and everyone is experiencing her feelings.

This was just a tiny portion of the 4 hour event, every minute of which I was listening intently on the edge of my seat. There were quite a few poems that brought tears to my eyes. Their words were meaningful and they really got inside me. Women’s movements have slowed down in the US. Things are not perfect, but they are a lot better than they used to be, so I forget sometimes that it is not like that everywhere in the world. Living here has been a harsh reminder of the second-class status of women around the world and this poetry slam gave me some much needed insight as to their thoughts and feelings about this inequality.