Exactly fifty years before Israel’s “genocidal incitement” on the besieged Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip began, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) would make his first visit to Morocco at the invitation of Wassef Mansour, a well-regarded and connected journalist, writer, and diplomat with the Palestinian mission in Rabat. Darwish embarked on a short reading tour in Rabat, Marrakech, Tangier, and Tetouan, where he was accompanied by artist and human rights activist Latifa Toujani (b. 1948; Figure 1; Toujani, 2019). In a 1973 televised interview, which was republished in 2022 by la Société Nationale de Radio et Télévision SNRT, Darwish is seen sitting in Toujani’s Rabat-based studio surrounded by her oil paintings. In the interview, Darwish discussed the role of the poet in the Palestinian cause and defined the genre of adab al-muqawama, or resistance literature (See Adey Almohsen’s contribution in this issue).[1] Later, he recited the poem “Returning to Jaffa,” dedicating it to Abu Ali Iyad, a leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) killed two years prior in the Black September conflict.
For Darwish, becoming a poet (or an artist) was simply a product or response to the Palestinian cause; real resistance literature, which exploded after June 1967’s al-Naksa, or the reversal, opposed the Israeli occupation, and in the process, expressed aspirations of liberation.[2] Oppression, according to Darwish, took on many forms, including political, mental, economic, national, and lastly, physical; he noted that every Palestinian in the occupied territory is considered a prisoner, deprived of basic human rights, stripped of land, and treated like a fourth or fifth-class citizen. Finally, when the interviewer asked Darwish about his visit to Morocco, he expressed being in awe of the beauty of the land and people, considered himself a lover of the country, and acknowledged that there was a real and deep connection between Morocco and the so-called Arab east, specifically as it related to the Palestinian cause.
Figure 1. Latifa Toujani, front row, at Mahmoud Darwish’s reading, 1973. Latifa Toujani Archive, Rabat, Morocco.The left-leaning cultural journal Souffles (1966-1972), and its Arabic-language counterpart Anfas, was instrumental in introducing its readership to foundational anti- and post-colonial texts by writers including Darwish and served as a prime example of the “real and deep connection” Darwish referred to in his interview (Harrison, 2016, 20). Souffles-Anfas compared the plight of the Palestinians to the Moroccan post-colonial condition; it is important to note, however, that Souffles-Anfas was not the only journal to have engaged with Palestine in the Moroccan cultural landscape of the post-independence period. Additionally, Souffles-Anfas was arguably Francophone in nature, emphasizing the experience of French colonization and continued French cultural and economic hegemony as well as the repressive tactics of the autocratic [Moroccan] state under King Hassan II’s reign (1962-1999; Harrison, 2016, 19).[3] The five decades of King Hassan’s rule are popularly referred to as the “Years of Lead,” (les années de plomb in French, zaman al-rasas or al sanawat al-sawda in Arabic, and liyam l’khla in Darija) a phrase that describes the “ubiquity of state violence” which impacted people, the economy, urban planning, and the production of knowledge (El Guabli, 2022, 208). According to Susan Slyomovics, “thousands from student and intellectual communities - of every political persuasion, Marxist, Islamist, nationalist, Sahrawi, feminist, Amazigh/Berber activist - were arrested, held incommunicado at various sites, tortured, and tried en masse in waves of political trials for ‘plotting against the state’ […] with artistic expression - articles, books, magazines, broadsides, graffiti, and cartoons” comprising most of the evidence of their so-called crimes (2005, 2). Historian Susan Miller argues it is the life sentence of Souffles-Anfas editor Abraham Serfaty in 1977 for “attacking the security of the state” that marked the start of these tumultuous decades (Miller, 2013, 170). Serfaty and his comrades made up the Jil al-sab‘īnāt (Generation of the 1970s), formed the Marxist-Leninist political party Ilā al-Amām (To the Forefront), and used the journal as their mouthpiece.[4]
As I have reiterated in my forthcoming article entitled “Constructing an Archive: The Case of Tetouan’s National Institute of Fine Arts,” the voices of artists and writers from Tetouan, the former capital of the Spanish Protectorate (1912-1956) located the northeast of the country, were infrequently heard, if not entirely absent, in these left-leaning and politically committed cultural journals (Barouti, 35). The Francophone hegemony over the cultural discourse that crossed the borders of the country overshadowed Tetouan’s cultural scene and its contribution to the issue of Palestine. This lack of representation helped fuel the misconception that Tetouan’s artists failed to uphold the celebratory narrative of the “decolonial artist” and further marginalized the city, its art school, and its artists in Morocco’s modern art history (Barouti, 34-35). Where does Tetouan, located in the disenfranchised Rif region of Morocco, fit within this narrative of solidarity between Morocco and Palestine? How did the sidelined artists of Tetouan relate to not only Palestine, but also to the domestic politics of the 1970s and 1980s? To help answer this question, I would like to turn to one of Tetouan’s most politically engaged and formally diverse artists – Ahmed Amrani (b. 1942-1944). His paintings Palestina (1978) and Adelante (1979) both center around the Palestinian experience and serve as a gesture of solidarity with the Palestinian cause (a sentiment which was growing globally amongst colonized peoples and specifically amongst pan-Arab artistic circles). I also read the paintings as metaphors for domestic turmoil, particularly the disenfranchisement of the Rif region during the bloody Rif Revolts of the late 1950s at the hands of the central Moroccan government in the post-independence period. I argue that Amrani’s work serves as a conduit for understanding this volatile moment, and an analysis of his paintings and the context in which they were made help us gain a more complete picture of the ways Palestine served as a metaphor in Morocco.
Between 2017 and 2019, I made regular visits to artist Ahmed Amrani’s Tetouan-based studio, where we would discuss his artistic practice at great length. At that point, Amrani was one of only three artists remaining from the first generation of modern painters who had studied at Tetouan’s Escuela Preparatoria de Bellas Artes, or Preparatory School of Fine Arts.[5] The school, founded by the Spanish in 1946, today stands as l’Institut National des Beaux Arts, or The National Institute of Fine Arts. Amrani’s oral histories and archives provided a rare glimpse into an understudied art historical moment. My visit to his studio on June 25, 2019, proved to be an extraordinary one. Amrani and Spanish art historian Clara Miret Nicolazzi guided me into a narrow well-lit room with high ceilings where I would first encounter Palestina, a massive plaster on burlap painting completed in 1978 (Figure 2). At first glance, I gasped at its grandeur, both in terms of size and immediately identifiable subject matter. I was also left perplexed by how long it had taken for Amrani to show me the work. In a recent conversation with Nicolazzi, she described the painting as “escondida,” meaning hidden or concealed (Miret Nicolazzi, 2024). It was exhibited once in the 1980s in either Casablanca or Rabat (the details of the group show evade the artist); to transport the work, Amrani decided to cut the burlap canvas down the middle, transforming it into a diptych. Aside from that exhibition, Palestina spent its life tucked away in Amrani’s studio. In contrast, the 1979 oil on canvas triptych Adelante, which similarly centers around the Palestinian experience, has a public life (Figure 3). In 2021, it was featured in the group show Moroccan Trilogy: 1950-2021 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (March 31-September 27, 2021). Today, the work is on display at Tangier’s recently launched Museum of Contemporary Art located in the former prison of the Kasbah.
Figure 2. Ahmed Amrani, Palestina, plaster on burlap, 1978. Photography by the author, Tetouan, Morocco, 2019.Figure 3. Ahmed Amrani, Adelante, oil and mixed media on canvas, 1979.Both Palestina (1978) and Adelante (1979) perfectly encapsulate the priorities of an artist working in Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s, when so-called Arab art developed into a transnational project. Against the backdrop of intensive Arabization of education and politics, pan-Arab artistic networks began to emerge out of decolonization struggles with Palestinian solidarity as a key focus. In 1975, the Palestinian artist Mustafa al-Hallaj wrote that Palestine was “fundamentally an Arab issue” and art became a vehicle by which Arab and Third-World artists could reflect on the complex condition of the Palestinian people (2018, 389). Yet during this time, Morocco was undergoing its own volatile period of history. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the country witnessed the explosion of mass protests and political instability under King Hassan II. The 1980s were also marked by the Amazigh Spring, a repressed cultural movement and series of mobilizations led by the Amazigh Cultural Movement demanding recognition of Amazigh identity and language. This undoubtedly threw a wrench in the post-independence period’s project of Arab-Islamic nationalism, which according to Brahim El Guabli, was constructed in contradistinction to ‘Berberness’ and Frenchness (2022, 3).[6] Opposition to the monarchy was widespread with left-leaning activists, including artists, writers, and musicians, posing a great threat. The Rif region of Morocco, the context in which Amrani works, experienced an extreme militarization and disproportionate violence; clashes between civilians and Moroccan military in cities like Nador, Al Hoceima, Larache, Ksar El Kabir, and Tetouan have only recently garnered scholarly attention and remain relatively underexamined in scholarship in foreign languages (Amnesty, 1994, 38-39).[7] While Palestina (1978) and Adelante (1979) are manifestations of a growing pan-Arab solidarity with Palestine, they also present Palestine as a metaphor for liberation, justice, and sovereignty, particularly in the Rif.
The Rise of Pan-Arab Artistic Networks and Palestinian Solidarity
“In our age of collectivism, the artist does not have the right to be a hermit.” – Mohamed Melehi, excerpt from Responses to the Souffles Artists’ Questionnaire (1967)
According to historian Malcolm Kerr, urgent appeals for Arab unity emerged as a popular political sentiment as early as the second World War (1965, 1). Palestine became a focal point in the goal for unity largely after the Six Day War of 1967, when the Arab states’ militaries faced a crushing defeat by an Israeli army actively armed by the United States. It is a “longstanding Western myth,” however, that Palestine united the Arab states, even when they were divided on all else (Kerr, 1965, 151). Kerr argues that the PLO, recognized by the Arab League in 1964 as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, was viewed as a “device” that enabled Arab governments to pass the responsibility of confronting Israel to Palestinians, thereby avoiding shouldering it themselves (1965, 153). According to art historian Alessandra Amin, the 1967 war “loosened the grip of pan-Arabism on the PLO,” which by 1968 was dominated by the “Palestine first” ethos of Yasser Arafat and his political party Fatah (2022, 6). The ongoing Israeli war on Gaza since October 2023 has made clear and concrete the allegations that Arab states have largely paid lip service to Palestine. Normalization efforts with Israel and the relaying of narratives by the media justifying Israel’s war in Gaza by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and even Morocco is evidence of that dishonesty.
While in the political realm Arab states were in disarray, with major disunity defining the Arab left, the cultural sector’s calls for Arab unity appeared utopic. In the immediate post-independence period, cultural workers across northern Africa and western Asia worked to develop transnational networks and platforms. This was done to create regional unity amongst Arab artists, foster contact, and establish a cohesive framework for artistic production. By 1961, the General Union of Arab Plastic Artists was formed with artists from Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria as founding members. By April of 1963, the Union hosted its first conference in Baghdad, where it distributed its ideological framework in a statement titled “Art Inspired by the People, the Struggle, and Liberation in the Trilogy of Heritage, the Present Moment, and Contemporaneity.” In the statement, they warned that fascism of the twentieth century, specifically “imperialist, Zionist, and expansionist colonialist forces,” was attempting to erase Arab identity and civilization (“Art Inspired,” 2018, 374-375). The arts were seen as a response to this erasure, ultimately serving as a form of resistance to it and a vehicle for expressing the issues of society and the nation, all while overshadowing the existence of ethnic minorities in the region. According to the statement, the struggle for Arab liberation revolved around the pivotal issue of Palestine (“Art Inspired,” 2018, 374).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, cultural workers in Morocco were engaging in Palestinian solidarity. For example, Souffles 15 (1969) was a special edition of the cultural journal entitled “Pour la revolution palestinienne.” In it, the editors framed Palestine as a representation of the colonial experience and condition. In addition to a variety of anti-Zionist writings by numerous authors, including Israeli and Jewish intellectuals, the issue featured an action plastique, consisting of posters by artists Tahar Benjelloun, Mohammed Chabâa, Mohamed Hamidi, Abdellah Hariri, Mohamed Melehi, Ali Noury, and Saâd Ben Cheffaj, as well as a caricature by the Tunisia-born French cartoonist Georges Wolinsky. In 1971, the Faculté des Sciences and la Galerie Nationale Bab Rouah in Rabat hosted an exhibition in support of the Palestinian people, where Latifa Toujani exhibited her work. In 1974, the Union launched the first Arab Biennial Exhibition in Baghdad, where artists expressed solidarity with Palestine through their art; Toujani presented a poster she made earlier at a printmaking workshop at l’Académie Internationale des Beaux Arts in Salzburg alongside Iraqi artist Dia Al-Azzawi (Figure 4). The director of the newspaper al-Anbaa in Rabat, Mohammed Tanjaoui, would help print the posters, which were then chosen to represent Morocco at the Biennial. By 1976, it was Morocco’s turn to host the Arab Biennial in Rabat.
Figure 4. Latifa Toujani, Untitled (Poster for Palestine), 1974.
In 1974, the newly formed l’Association marocaine des arts plastiques, or the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts (AMAP), penned their own manifesto stating that Arabs needed to affirm their existence in the world and that they could not ignore the role of art in doing so. The manifesto adopted a militant rhetoric, equating the “motivating canvas” to a bullet and arguing that the difference between an artist and a soldier was merely one of appearances (L’Association, 2018, 384). AMAP echoed the words of Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata from his 1971 “Art in the Time of the Palestinian Revolution.” He argued that today’s painter needed to be a critic, artist, politician, human, lover, and warrior all at once. For Boullata, it was necessary that artists of the Third World join the revolution for “a revolutionary artist in an inhumane world is a hero” (Boullata, 2018, 327).
Syrian painter Fateh al-Moudarres, in his 1971 paper entitled “The Arab Artist’s Rights and His Obligations,” written for the First Arab Conference of Fine Arts, stated that artistic work was an important component of the Arab nation’s battle. Al-Moudarres argued that the artist was engaged in an artistic war against the “enemies of the Arabs and the Arab civilization” (341). Palestinian artist Mustafa Al-Hallaj noted that armed Palestinian forces understood the role of consciousness and aesthetic expression in the battle against negation; he went on to state that the gun does not work on its own, rather various disciplines including poetry, theatre, and painting “all converge on the focal point of the battle” (al-Hallaj, 2018, 390).
Amrani’s oeuvre related to Palestine joined in the artistic battle against this cultural erasure. In Palestina, grief pervades the painting as it centers around al-Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” which refers to the expulsion and displacement of nearly eight hundred thousand Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Adelante imagines an alternative and victorious future that survives cultural annihilation at the hands of Zionism and its proponents. Both works are evidence of the great impact the loss of Palestine had on artists of the Arab world in an age of “growing global awareness of Palestinian armed struggle” (Amin, 2022, 6).
Palestina (1978) and Adelante (1979)
Amrani’s Palestina is massive, modern, and meaningful, featuring a canvas loaded with symbols that tell a story of both displacement and the hope for (or promise of) return. Here, Amrani’s painting serves as a scream in the ear of injustice, speaking to the misery and affliction that has been imposed on Palestinians. The composition appears to be in the form of a puzzle piece with a white border surrounding it. On the right-hand side of the canvas, we see a figure appearing to kneel to the ground. Her breasts are large and exaggerated and her head is tilted upwards to the sky with her mouth agape. The whites of her eyes are dominant, and her arms are raised to the sky. Behind her is the figure of a man, who similarly raises his hands in the air. Their gestures are ambiguous and can be interpreted as either a prayer or surrender. Are they praying to God? Are they anticipating airstrikes? Interestingly, Amrani has chosen to replace their hands with flowers, noting that they are “what we become” once buried in the earth, thereby marking this imagery a symbol of rebirth (Amrani, 2019). This imagery reminds me of Amin’s description of Mona Saudi’s illustrated prose poem “A Person Grows from the Soil of His Dream” (1974), which describes a tree growing from a woman’s womb and bearing an apple, thereby emphasizing the connectivity of Indigenous Palestinian people to the land (Amin, 2022, 25-27). In recent months, this imagery reemerged in the photographs of flowers in the rubble in Gaza that have been circulating on social media.
To the left of the composition, we see a figure wrapping their arm around another, with a small child sheltered in the huddle. The latter gazes directly at the viewer, while the other two look over to their left with fearful expressions, leading us to wonder what is approaching. In the background is an exaggerated, large figure with arms outstretched. His downturned head is wrapped in a keffiyeh. While the sun’s rays illuminate him, darkness overwhelms the figures in the foreground. The highly textured strokes to the left of the diptych suggest a crowd of people. For Amrani, this mass of individuals represents the “departure of the Palestinians during al-Nakba,” a traumatic moment in modern Palestinian history (Amrani, 2019). I would like to read the figure donning a keffiyeh as a symbol of optimism, embodying the grand dream of imminent return. He is soaking up the sun’s rays and in turn embraces the mass of people who make their forced exodus out of the homeland.
Sketches and drawings found in Amrani’s studio dated to 1970 reveal that the artist was preoccupied with the subject for several years prior to executing Palestina in 1978. In one sketch, we see Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem at the upper right-hand corner (Figure 5). Another preliminary sketch for the work reveals something more graphic: the body of a deceased individual is sprawled on the ground (Figure 6). The gesture of the wailing couple with flowers for hands becomes clearer in this scenario: their cries are to mourn the loss of their loved one. In the final product, however, Amrani seems to have omitted this disturbing detail, creating an abstract form instead of a corpse in the foreground using thick brushstrokes and earth tones. A photograph from the 1980s, when Palestina was once shown in a group exhibition, reveals the changes and damage that the painting endured in its decades of obscurity (Figure 7). In the original photograph, the rays of light currently visible in the painting have not yet been added by the artist, but a contrast was still maintained between the large figure in brighter tones and the individuals in the foreground depicted with darker hues.
Figure 5. Ahmed Amrani, studies for Palestina, 1970. Ahmed Amrani Archive, Tetouan, Morocco.Figure 6. Ahmed Amrani, studies for Palestina, 1970. Ahmed Amrani Archive, Tetouan, Morocco.Figure 7. Ahmed Amrani in front of Palestina (1978), circa 1980s. Ahmed Amrani Archive, Tetouan, Morocco.In the original painting, we see a series of numbers painted down the middle of the canvas. In the photograph I took 2019, one can see that Amrani painted over those numbers, added more numbers, and moved them lower in the composition. According to the artist, they signify key dates in the history of Palestine. 1917 refers to the Balfour Declaration, 1919 to the Nebi Musa Riot, 1936 to the Palestinian revolt against the British administration, 1947 to the beginning of al-Nakba, 1974 to Yasser Arafat’s UN General Assembly Speech, and 1978 to the Camp David Accords. The numbers move downwards eventually “disappearing” to emphasize that the Palestinian struggle to end the occupation is ongoing and without a clear end date (Amrani, 2019). Given the earlier sketches and the many changes made to the original painting, it appears that Amrani’s own relationship with Palestina is a dynamic and ever-changing one. Ultimately the work is full of contrasts: man and woman, dark and light, fear and hope, and life and death. For Amrani, these contrasts make up the “diversity of the Palestinian experience” (Amrani, 2019).
The oil and mixed-media triptych entitled Adelante, the Spanish word for “forward” or “ahead,” is a more positive and abstracted depiction of the Palestinian experience. (The title of the work also recalls Serfaty and his comrades’ former Marxist-Leninist political party Ilā al-Amām, meaning “to the forefront” in Arabic. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown.) Throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Morocco, there was a tendency to move more towards abstraction in painting, with artists like Mohammed Chabâa arguing that representational realism was not at the “core” of Moroccans’ “artistic mentality” and that abstraction, rooted in Islamic and Amazigh art, was more “authentic” (Chabâa, 2018, 264-265). Unlike Palestina, where the keffiyeh serves as an identifiable marker of Palestinian identity, Adelante’s message is obscured. The triptych is divided into a series of squares, each loaded with various signs and symbols. Close observations reveal the shape of several figures in action with arms outstretched in the air. Unlike Palestina, their facial expressions are not revealed to us. However, Amrani intended for the work to depict an imagined, positive future where Palestinian liberation and return to the land would be a reality. From this, we can interpret the gestures as celebratory. Closer attention to the multicolored squares reveals the shape of a horse, which according to Nicolazzi is a symbol of strength and revolution (Miret Nicolazzi, 2024). Puzzle-like shapes recalling the composition of Palestina appear on the upper left-hand corner of the canvas. The chess board refers to a battle or game and the series of circles within the squares symbolize the four seasons of the calendar and the passage of time. The circles also represent the beginning and end of the revolution (Miret Nicolazzi, 2024). The cross or “x” shape on the very top of the triptych embodies the hardship that provokes the struggle for liberation (Miret Nicolazzi, 2024). Palestina and Adelante not only reveal Amrani’s formal experimentations with both figuration and abstraction and the diversity of his approach to painting, but also demonstrate his concerns as an artist who has always used his artistic platform to intervene in social issues in a quest to “aid humanity” and “construct a better world” (Miret Nicolazzi, 2015, 30). These two paintings can be seen as a solidarity action, framing Amrani as an artist and a militant, fighting against the erasure of Palestinian identity – the cross that every Arab bears, as Darwish noted four years earlier (Darwish, 1974, 7). While Palestina serves as a mirror image of Palestinian reality, Adelante imagines an alternative future.
Palestine as Metaphor for the Years of Lead (1977-1990)
Scholars Khristine Khouri and Rasha Salti noted that after the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, “Palestine became a metaphor for the struggle for equality, justice, freedom, a life of dignity, and the insurgency against duplicitous and corrupt Arab despots” (Khouri and Salti, 2019, 36). While Amrani has never vocalized this himself, I believe it is impossible to separate the two paintings from the local politics of the time in which they were made. I view both Palestina and Adelante as metaphors for Morocco’s instability in the 1970s and 1980s during the Years of Lead and more specifically, the central Moroccan state’s relationship with the Rif region. While the cultural journal Souffles-Anfas was critical of domestic politics and connected Palestine to French colonialism and its afterlife in Morocco, there remains an imbalanced historical record with little attention paid to Spanish colonialism and the former Spanish territories of the northeast. I argue that for artists like Amrani and his peers in the Rif, Palestine served as an avenue for critiquing the state-sponsored violence of these decades without explicitly crossing red lines imposed by King Hassan II’s government. The tense history between the Rif in the northeast of Morocco and the makhzen is a fascinating one with deep roots that has come to numerous boiling points in the post-independence period.
In several of our meetings, Tetouan-based artist Saâd Ben Cheffaj would reiterate that independence in the north of Morocco came two years after the south. I was perplexed by his statement. No official history marks 1958 as the “northern Moroccan independence,” yet Ben Cheffaj had a valid reason for repeating this alternative history (Barouti, 2022, 28). While Moroccan independence was formally achieved in 1956, the central government in Rabat faced resistance from citizens in the Rif, which had for decades been largely disconnected from the rest of Morocco politically, socially, and culturally under the Spanish Protectorate (1912-1956). The central government went on to ostracize a significant portion of the country formerly under Spanish control. Several factors including the assassination of emblematic figures of the Rif resistance, such as Abbas Lamsâadi, marginalization under the new Istiqlal Party’s systems, the appointment of judges by the government in Rabat who were unfit to rule over the region, and the silence of King Mohammed V, was viewed by local Rifians as a form of abandonment (El Azrak, 2014, n.p.; Brousky, 2008, 24). The resulting Rif Revolts of 1958 were violently quelled by then-crown prince Hassan II (Brousky, 2008, 24-25).
Rather than respond to the Rif’s demands, the palace adopted a strategic silence, plotting an operation of repression instead. According to journalist Fikri El Azrak, the northeast of the country “has been bled dry by history and has paid a heavy price to the monarchy” (El Azrak, 2014, n.p.). By 1959, the newly formed Forces armées royals, or Royal Armed Forces (FAR) opened fire on protestors, burned down mountainous villages, systematically bombed civilians, and launched a mass liquidation campaign against the Rif’s people, who did not accept the new political and social conditions of the country. Ultimately, 8,000 individuals were killed, and thousands were left physically and psychologically wounded (Maddy-Weitzman, 2012, 86). For journalist Maâti Monjib, “they [the Rifians] are all the more outraged that even the Spanish colonizers left them in peace” (Monjib, 2008, 27). Here, Monjib is implying that foreign occupation under the protectorate era was more peaceful than the so-called post-colonial moment. This of course is a gross misrepresentation of Spanish colonial rule, given Spain’s deployment of chemical weapons in the 1920s against Amazigh rebels in the Rif.
Amrani was deeply disturbed by the Rif Revolts of 1958. Tetouan-based art historian Abdelkrim Chiguer noted that the artist spent a demanding period producing figurative paintings for murals and posters dedicated to the revolts of the northeast (Chiguer, 2016, 86). None of these artistic actions seem to have been documented. There are, however, several archival photographs of paintings Amrani created circa 1967, which feature groups of men appearing to surrender in one canvas and huddle in fear in another (Figure 8 and 9). Themes of protest and peace seem to have occupied the subject matter of several of his works from the 1960s and 1970s. This includes La Paz from 1967, Protesta from 1969, which I examine in more detail in my forthcoming book, and Paloma from 1976. Amrani has noted that the politics of the period deeply troubled him and that liberty of expression in the country was limited; he even witnessed several of his friends imprisoned, resulting in a period of pessimism and discouragement in his artistic practice (Miret Nicolazzi, 2015, 30).
Figure 8. Ahmed Amrani, solo exhibition at the Municipal Casino in Tangier with undated and untitled painting of unknown medium, 1967. Ahmed Amrani Archive, Tetouan, Morocco.
Figure 9. Ahmed Amrani in his studio with undated and untitled painting of unknown medium, 1967. Ahmed Amrani Archive, Tetouan, Morocco.By 1961, the same crown-prince who led the campaign against the Rif would ascend the throne as King Hassan II. The King would gain an unfavorable reputation throughout the 1970s and 1980s with tensions coming to a head in 1981 and again in 1984. There was widespread anger across the nation due to the sudden increase in the price of food staples leading to what is known as the Bread Riots. While the uprisings in Rabat and Casablanca have been centered in scholarship at great length, the deadly demonstrations of the Rifian cities of Nador, Al Hoceima, Larache, Ksar El Kabir, and Tetouan are relatively sidelined.[8] These uprisings led to a “militarization of the north of Morocco,” a region that already distrusted the King (Amnesty, 1994, 38-39). Like in the 1950s, the 1980s saw state-sanctioned violence and repression with the King even referring to the people of the north in a televised speech on January 22, 1984 as awbāsh, which can been translated as “waste,” “scum,” or “thugs.” The northeast’s confidence in the King arguably never existed for it to even be restored.
Other artists from the Tetouan art school such as Aziz Abou Ali (1935-1993) and Mohamed Drissi (1946-2003), both of whom died tragically in exile, created work in the 1970s and 1980s that was concerned with the universality of human suffering and played with motifs like corporal mutilation. According to Mostafa Chebbak, artists like Drissi belonged to a group of Moroccan creators from the seventies referred to as “poets of exile” or the “déracinés” (uprooted), who had a taste for subversion, revolt, and a refusal to concede to established society (Chebbak, 2010, 34).[9] In many ways, Amrani’s works can be read within this framework. Amrani used the subject matter of Palestine in paintings like Palestina and Adelante as not only an expression of solidarity – a central issue in pan-Arab artistic circles of the 1970s – but also as a metaphor for the conditions of life in the Rif. Interestingly, Nicolazzi described Amrani’s ultimate goal as “to be seen as the genesis of a movement” from which the “north of Morocco, from the independent and sovereign being that is the town of Tetouan,” could be “capable of stimulating the creation of a new scene for debate, reflection, and open up questions and envision solutions to the issues affecting life and art in contemporary Moroccan society” (Nicolazzi, 2015, 43).[10]
Contemporary Resonances: Hirak and Gaza
In their 2017 article entitled “Morocco’s Palestinian Politics,” scholars Zakia Salime and Paul Silverstein noted that since the start of the Hirak Movement in 2016, protestors in the Rif have drawn parallels to themselves and Gazans. This comparison suggests that the violence that the Moroccan state unleashed on the Rif is equal or reminiscent to that which the Israeli government inflicted to Gazans before October 2023. Salime and Silverstein argue that the Rif, like Gaza, is geographically insulated, politically isolated, economically marginalized, and militarily controlled. Palestine, according to the scholars, becomes an allegory for marginality and aspirations for self-determination in the former Spanish colonies; this allegory is visually manifested in Amrani’s Palestina and Adelante. Revisiting the paintings in the contemporary moment reveal that their concerns remain evergreen in both the Rif and in Gaza. Despite the arguably extreme comparison, Palestine has always been and continues to be deployed as a figure of the colonial, neocolonialism, and repressive tactics of the postcolonial state (Harrison, 2-3). I want to end this essay by acknowledging that decolonization is not solely a metaphor, nor is it a past historical moment, rather it is an ongoing process. As Amrani so thoughtfully illustrates in Palestina, the struggle for liberation is an ongoing one.
The many factors that have led to the social and political marginalization of the former Spanish zone have also limited our understanding of modern Moroccan art history, which arguably has sidelined artistic production from Tetouan of the 1940s through to the 1980s. It is undeniable that artists of the Casablanca School of Fine Arts and the Casablanca Group have been centered in the historiography on modern Moroccan art, which has rapidly developed in the past few decades. A popular, pervasive attitude has developed regarding Tetouan; artists of the modern period are seen as “conservative,” attached to the metropole [Madrid], or stuck on “an island” or even “a prison” (Barouti, 35).[11] The consensus amongst art historians, art critics, and curators, is that Tetouan’s artists were not as socially engaged or as “avant-garde” as their counterparts in Casablanca. This cannot be divorced from the Francophone hegemony that defined the post-independence period. While Tetouan’s artists may not have fit into the celebratory narrative of an anti-colonial artist in the same manner as those of the Casablanca Group, Amrani’s work reveals a thoughtfully and politically engaged artistic practice that challenges these stereotypes.
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