“Windows Into Ben Smim”
Jonathan Elwell
“First, she says shoukran to all of you for coming, even if it’s just for the afternoon,” Rayan said, translating Zhora’s words. “Then she said that they started the cooperative in 2013, three years after the bottling company, Ain Ifrane, began operating their plant, and people in Ben Smim lost their former livelihoods.”
Zhora sat on a plain wooden bench near the doorway and Rayan’s hulking frame stood beside her. Moroccan men are generally quite tall, but he took this tendency to the extreme. The rest of us were on the low, backless couches that lined the walls of the small windowless room. Zhora wore a bright purple hijab. I find now that I remember women’s hijabs better than I remember their faces. The hijabs were different to my American eyes and so they stuck in my mind. But for Zhora, I also remember the weary creases around her eyes and long pauses between her words, as if the weight of her story compelled her to rest. We were in Ben Smim for the week to learn about a recent example of neoliberal dispossession and the subsequent sociocultural ramifications. Zhora’s story – translated through Rayan – was about the latter.
I couldn’t possibly remember all of his words, but here is the gist of her story. A little less than a decade ago, a French bottling conglomerate attempted to purchase unilateral rights to exploit the aquifer surrounding Ben Smim, a tiny village of 800 people in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains. Locals resisted this intrusion and maintained their ancestral claims to the region’s water. But in the name of economic development, the Moroccan government intervened, bribed a prominent local family, and opened the door for the creation of a new bottling company, Ain Ifrane. The factory, whose glass facade opened up a brilliant valley view of the downstream village, began operating two years later. Water tables dropped, water quality declined, and the people of Ben Smim – dependent on groundwater for their subsistence agriculture – suffered.
A PhD student from the United States heard about Ben Smim’s plight after the bottling company arrived and came here to do her dissertation project. Zhora said her name was Megan. Megan worked with a group of local women, headed by Zhora, to create a cooperative that produced honey as a replacement for their lost livelihoods. She handled all the initial challenges – buying bees, building crates, registering the co-op, finding places to sell the products – and then returned to the US after about six months to finish writing her dissertation. The co-op was an instant success. They sold honey to tourists visiting the Middle Atlas and to stores in all other parts of Morocco. They won competitions at honey festivals and used this fame to sign a supplier contract with a German grocery store.
But then, seemingly inexplicably, the Moroccan government denied the co-op’s request to renew their permits. Not only were they not allowed to ship products to Germany, they were no longer allowed to sell them anywhere outside the confines of co-op itself – the square building with low couches, bee murals, and few windows. The women wanted to challenge this decision in the courts, but none of them were literate, so they couldn’t file a legal appeal. With neither access nor influence, they soon found themselves unable to operate. Interest waned, production dropped, bees died. Zhora ended her account by saying that we were welcome to purchase some of the little honey they still had leftover.
When she finished telling us her story, the room was silent. Usually we bombarded guest speakers with questions. But here we couldn’t find the words to ask. The story was too perplexing, the actions of the Moroccan government too inexplicable. My mind was a paralyzing mixture of confusion, shock, and hopelessness. And even if we had questions, it wouldn’t have felt right to impose them upon Zhora. There was a layer of dismay in her eyes and a stressed tightness in her posture. To us, this was just a case study. To her, this was her life. Zhora woke up to this pain every morning and the least we could do was not deepen it right now.
We filed out of the room more quietly than we had entered it, and a couple students bought honey on their way out. Then everyone else hopped in the vans to go to an internet café in nearby Azrou. I chose to make the 25-minute walk back to the guest house, a couple hills up the side of the valley where our group was staying.
Only about five of the 25 minutes were in the actual village of Ben Smim, but that was plenty for me. It was a sunny Thursday at 4 pm, but the streets were empty. Cinder-block buildings rose near to the road and everything was shrouded in a layer of baked-on dust. It felt like pictures I had seen of Syria, but without the rubble. I was overwhelmed by Zhora’s story and the empty, desolate streets of Ben Smim only reinforced how foreign I was to this place, how small I felt in the face of great suffering.
Someone called at me as I climbed the sloped road out of the village. Of course, it was Duygu, our professor. She and I had a penchant for finding each other in moments like this, moments when we thought we wanted time alone to reflect, but what we really needed was a friend with whom to debrief.
“That was something, no?” she said, with her Turkish accent curling the ends of her words.
“Yeah, I’m not quite sure even how to think about it. Like I really don’t know what can possibly be done. The situation seems almost totally hopeless.”
“I know, but this is not some abstract socio-political problem. These are people’s lives. And when people’s lives are at stake, you always have to maintain hope.”
We were then silent for a few minutes. Of course she was right. But equally certain was the impossibility of a successful resolution through the Moroccan court system. First, the women had been dispossessed of their water rights by a French bottling conglomerate, making them unable to farm. So, they built an alternative, sustainable livelihood. Now, this had been taken away, but by their own government. How much more could people take?
The white-gravel road clung to the side of the hills surrounding Ben Smim. A lush, vibrant layer of grass made the slopes appear less steep than they actually were. Every few minutes, a donkey-drawn cart would pass us carrying some combination of produce, tools, and children hitching a ride home from school. Even less often, a car would drive by. In this valley, nearly every car belonged to the government or Ain Ifrane. The cloud of dust the cars kicked up made them seem almost counterproductive. A clean car would have a thick coat of dirt after only a few hundred meters, leaving their drivers squinting and guessing and abusing their windshield wipers. But the men walking alongside their donkeys? Their journeys took more time, but their views of the world were never obstructed.
Eventually, our conversation moved to government corruption. It seemed to be the only explanation. Duygu was especially adamant about how destructive this was.
“It felt like we were in a fantasy world,” she said. “Like this could not possibly be true. Like a real-life Macondo. Somehow, someway life here does not add up. It’s really terrifying that this can so easily happen to people, that corruption can so completely warp one’s reality.”
She asked me if I had learned anything from Rayan about corruption in Morocco, but I hadn’t. And I couldn’t really take the conversation anywhere. I didn’t have anything certain to say and the topic was too real, too heavy to just speculate.
We arrived back at the guest house with enough time for a quick nap before dinner, so I went off to lie down for a few minutes. All three of my roommates had gone to the internet café, so I had a rare moment alone, indoors. Secluded from the outside world, away from my program classmates – this could have been Ben Smim or it could have been my home in Vermont. I was sheltered.
Everyone else eventually returned, and they woke me and we sat down to dinner. The dining room was on the west side of the guest house, which had windows covering the entire western wall. This often made for lovely scenery, as the persistent, scattered clouds of the valley tempered sunsets so that they were not too bright, not too dull. But today there were no clouds, so a waiter lowered the shades to save our eyes.
Now able to see, I looked out towards the light, towards Ben Smim. There was small hill between us and the village which just about blocked it out from our view. If you walked to the edge of that property, you could see the village’s last houses peeking around the corner. From here I could only see the hill, the sunset, and maybe a few donkeys on a neighboring farm. But not Ben Smim. Not the place where Zhora lived and persisted and suffered. Not that I could really see it anyway.
