1- I was told that in Rabat, the hunt for car guards would have started. When there are not enough car parks, when there are not enough places to park, we are happy that a caretaker offers to look after our car while we do our shopping. We give him a 5 or 10 dirham coin and everyone is happy.
It’s informal. But it’s useful. Removing them would be stupid, especially if nothing has been done before to find work for these men in yellow vests and resolve the parking issue.
I was also told that the Casablanca authorities are hunting down street sellers (of fruit, vegetables, etc.). These carts have always been part of the landscape of the Moroccan city. There is certainly the market, with its well-organized shops, but the street vendors don’t hurt anyone. They live as best they can. Banning them amounts to throwing them on the street, without work, with nothing. Violence will ensue. Recently, thefts have taken place in some opulent villas in the wealthy neighborhoods of Casablanca. The link was quickly made by a victim of this burglary. Maybe. In any case, it is a bad thing to attack this small informal trade before having found work for those who push their carts to meet their needs.
I was told that the shoe shiners are unemployed. Almost everyone wears “unwearable” sneakers. What happened to them? No doubt fruit and vegetable sellers across the city.
2- I was told that at the end of October this year, 14.6 million tourists visited our beautiful country. It’s good. But, what about returns?
I know that efforts have been made to improve the welcome and stay of visitors. There remains a problem that we find almost everywhere in the country: the lack of quality service. The servers are not trained. We don’t teach them the job. It’s a pedagogy. We should take inspiration from the service in Asian hotels and restaurants. Flawless. For this, we should work on this area before hiring young people to serve in hotels where Western prices are charged.
There should be consistency between what the tourist pays and the level of service. For this, there is training and also paying staff well. No mystery. I know of a good restaurant-hotel in Tangier which had to close for three months while it trained its staff. There, the service is impeccable.
“A novel is fiction based on surrounding reality. We can imagine anything, just as we have the right to draw inspiration from the facts of daily life or from the recent or ancient history of a country.”
3- Our Algerian friends are increasing their ferocity when seeing the images of the visit to Laâyoune and Dakhla of Christophe Lecourtier, French ambassador to Morocco, accompanied by an important delegation in the economic, industrial and cultural fields. This trip is part of President Macron’s new policy. Morocco’s diplomatic breakthroughs are making the Algiers regime hysterical. If he ventures to start a war against our country, it would be doubly ridiculous and criminal.
This would be the first time in the history of this region that a state will declare war on a neighbor that extends its hand and preaches peace and good coexistence.
The Algerian people are in no way concerned by the neurosis of generals obsessed with our country, its culture, its diversity and its successes. So, a war to let off steam? It’s not serious. The worst thing about a person with mental disorders is that no psychiatrist can cure them. Because this person is a thousand times convinced that he is right and that it is the others who are sick. It’s sad.
4- Another figure that hurts, very hurts, even if we are far from the terrain of war: according to the United Nations, 70% of the dead in Gaza are women and children. “Terrorists” probably!
Silence. We kill. And we don’t even have the right to shout, to scream, to accuse the Israeli army of committing horrors.
5- What is a novel? It is fiction based on the surrounding reality. We can imagine anything, just as we have the right to draw inspiration from the facts of daily life or from the recent or ancient history of a country.
In “Little misfortunes of married life”, Balzac defines the novel as follows: “You must have delved into all of social life to be a true novelist, given that the novel is the private history of nations.” As for William Faulkner, he wrote in “While I Dye”: “This is what we mean when we speak of the womb of time: the pain and despair of the bones that open, the hard sheath that encloses the violated bowels of events».
I recall these magnificent words to simply say that Kamel Daoud is a writer, a real one, and that everything the Algerian regime is seeking at the moment to smear him is a matter of revenge. Now the whole world knows what crimes the army and the Islamists committed against the Algerian people. The rest is just agitation due to a serious nervous breakdown.
