Rabat - The world has become a small village nowadays due to new media and the revolutionary technological inventions. Everyday thousands of TV channels/cultures are hosted inside our living-rooms and seen by our impressionable young children and adolescents. Also, the internet now is at the disposal of people of all walks of life. This is great, but…. The questions that we should raise are as follows: Are we really immune against the dangers of this cultural erosion and cultural invasion waged upon us by the East and the West alike? Do we redress the balance or simply act as passive receivers of what others produce? Just yesterday, many values that were ours lived and flourished, now they ebb and fade away under the influence of others.
Rabat – The world has become a small village nowadays due to new media and the revolutionary technological inventions. Everyday thousands of TV channels/cultures are hosted inside our living-rooms and seen by our impressionable young children and adolescents. Also, the internet now is at the disposal of people of all walks of life. This is great, but…. The questions that we should raise are as follows: Are we really immune against the dangers of this cultural erosion and cultural invasion waged upon us by the East and the West alike? Do we redress the balance or simply act as passive receivers of what others produce? Just yesterday, many values that were ours lived and flourished, now they ebb and fade away under the influence of others.
Yesterday I saw Amina walking gracefully with her loose robe and beautiful veil; gorgeous, respectful, and chaste she appeared. When I spoke to her, she blushed and rushed away without uttering a word; she disappeared and I couldn’t follow her as she walked in the direction of the shining sun that sparked my eyes. Today, I saw her again; she tore off the veil, put on new tight blue jeans and an EMO t-shirt. Her face that naturally blushed yesterday is covered with layers and layers of cosmetics today!! She was chewing gum, and every now and then she blows bubbles of it and then bursts them seductively. When I talked to her she shrugged and tossed locks of hair on her back and disappeared in the dark!!
Yesterday.. Yesterday, Jamal was a good boy. He showed all the manners of an intelligent, hardworking, obedient, and courteous boy. He never missed his classes and all his teachers praised his sense of creativity, eloquence and savoir-faire. He liked painting, reading, writing, correspondence and martial arts. Jamal was an active boy, indeed. Today I came across him at the end of the street (ras derb). I could hardly recognize him leaning against the electricity pole with his weird haircut, baggy trousers, loose t-shirts, heavy necklaces and strange bracelets. Jamal radically changed and renamed himself Peace-Rap-Top 5. Even his movements got strange; nay, rather stranger than what you could imagine. His performance at school declined gradually and “excellent work” no longer appeared to be jotted on his test worksheets. Jamal emptied his mind of Picasso, Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Thomas Hardy, Najib Mahfoud, Abderrahman Mounif, Plato, Bruce Lee etc. and crammed it with Fifty Cent, Eminem, Snoop Dog, Don Big and, imagine, even Haifae Wahbi and her ‘bous lwawa’!!
Everyday we lose a great deal of our culture that was. I remember how I used to sit beside my old uncle and listen attentively to his glorious stories of resistance against the colonizer. He spoke about his remote days in “Lmoqawama” (resistance) with nostalgia and pride; sometimes his deep eyes brimmed with tears. Our poor fathers gallantly and relentlessly fought and seized the independence more than fifty years ago. They optimistically thought things will take the right way, and their sons and daughters will enjoy and cherish dignity, liberty, justice, democracy and independence; the latter meant much to them, MUCH. The wind, unfortunately, blew counter to the stream and against all their sweet expectations. Neocolonialism is tearing us apart starting with the most precious thing a nation can have; CULTURE.
Before I close, I would like to call Amina and Jamal to reconcile with their identities and know that Modernity should take place in our essences not just superficially. Let’s campaign against political corruption, despotism, illiteracy, poverty, prostitution and all the social ills. And please consider this saying of Mahatma Gandhi: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to blow about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
