I did not experience the Agadir earthquake in 1960, but I experienced the El Hoceima earthquake in 2004 and I still remember this feeling of nausea and this suppressed anger, in the face of what seemed to me to be a sinister injustice of fate and reminds me that it is always the poor who toast. Television turned the knife in the wound by displaying the pain of the survivors over and over again; a pain contained by a dignity that would make us blush, we the spared and the lucky, guilty of forgetting the very existence of these damned people of a land that rumbles especially against the poorly off.
And now the earth acts up again and begins to rumble again, causing pain and driving people from their refuge. Men, women, children, panicked, lost under a sky indifferent to the misfortune that surprised the country in its first sleep. I knew that the images were going to invade cell phones and that WhatsApp would be the corypheus and like a kind of demiurge choir, distributing horror and misfortune with images stolen by the very people whose neighbor or friend is perhaps among the victims. Sad use of progress!
“And God in all this?”
Enough of the misfortune that always nestles among the poor, the joyless and those without a future; these peoples of the wadi banks, mountain slopes and sated outskirts. It’s not because we end up getting used to everything that we can confuse fate and resilience!
And then, we reassure ourselves a little, all shame drunk, by hiding behind the resilience of the Moroccan people, as if this single viaticum could absolve us from our daily indifference to the fate of these rural populations, often deprived of the essential and… clinging to life in huts, made of mud and spit, built with their calloused hands, and ordered to resist as best they can, the furies of the wadis in flood or, paradoxically, of the drought.
We know that in the aftermath of the disaster the number of dead and missing will increase hour by hour, day by day, as the rubble is cleared, and that eyes will very quickly turn towards this country. deep, in what remains of the adobe slums and disappeared hamlets. We also know that the entire country, rich in its proverbial solidarity, will do everything to calm the immense pain. But we also know that once the tears have dried, the survivors will rebuild other adobe houses with their own hands, while waiting for the Sky to become a little more clement and for the sun to finally rise for them.
In a land of Islam, nourished for centuries by the promises of legal solidarity, we continue to say sometimes, when men have failed: “And God in all this?”.
Moroccan painter, sculptor and writer, Mahi Binebine is notably the author of Stars of Sidi Moumenof Jester and of My ghost brother. Text originally published in the Spanish daily El País.