Cultural Expressions of Class Conflict in the Apple Orchard 

Nadir Bouhmouch & Soumeya Ait Ahmed
Tizintizwa Collective

Abstract: Cultural Expressions of Class Conflict in the Apple Orchard is part of Remedies for Monotony, one of two publication series. While the first series, Against Monoculture, deals with ecology, extractivism and agriculture in a larger sense, Remedies for Monotony deals with how they impact human experiences. Inspired by northeastern Brazilian literatura de cordel, both series are part of Against Monoculture and Mono-Culture– a long-term multi-disciplinary art and research project which lies at the intersection between popular North African oral poetry, folktales and legends, food sovereignty and history, environmentalism, the transition from peasantry to proletariat, and agricultural wage labour in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. While touching on an inter-related web of subjects, all somehow revolve around the contemporary expansion of apple monocultures in the Atlas Mountains. 

1.     Introduction

Across Morocco’s middle and central high Atlas Mountains, a heterogeneous agricultural landscape of wheat, barley, walnuts, almonds, turnips, maize, prunes, potatoes, onions, and alfalfa is uprooted in favor of a single crop: apples. Sometimes, on the shiny surface of these fruits, we can find small marks. Soft spots, sometimes shaped like a thumbprint or the tip of an index finger or, sometimes, tiny cuts – as if they were made by a fingernail. These marks can quickly turn brown and, if left in a bag or a crate of apples long enough, they can be the point from which rot begins to spread, spoiling the entire batch. Unless one has witnessed an apple harvest, these marks may make little sense. They are neither like the holes left by insects and birds, nor the blue craters left by fungus, nor the large bruises left on an apple which has fallen from its tree. They are human markings left by harvest workers who had pressed too hard with their fingers or slid their nails across the surface of an apple while picking it. Was the worker who picked that apple inexperienced–still unable to master the technique in which apple harvest workers twist before pulling apples off a branch, so as to avoid clutching too hard with their fingers? Was the worker experienced but under strain, absent-minded, bored, or distressed? Were her fingers jolted by the shouting of an abusive cabran (overseer) or a boss, causing her to press harder than anticipated? Was it purposeful disregard motivated by anger at her mistreatment or her dissatisfaction with her wages? Did her thumb press too hard because she was laughing just as hard at a joke made by one of her co-workers? Did her fingernail distractedly scar an apple because she was engaged in a passionate conversation with a co-worker with whom she had become friends? Whatever the reason behind them, if these apples are made visible in supermarkets where light is carefully placed to attract our attention to them. These hidden, sometimes imperceptible markings beg our attention to those made invisible by the monotonous process which put them there in the first place.

“We are asked to wear gloves,” tells us one worker, “not to protect us from the pesticides on the apples, but to protect the apples from our hands” – to prevent human traces. For those who hire them, she implies, the object their labor produces is more important than they are. “The worker puts his life into the object,” writes Karl Marx, “but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object… Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself.”[1] The more apples workers produce, the greater the sensation of monotony, the more they feel estranged from themselves and the product they are producing. For Marx, wage workers are alienated from both their own labor and its products, partly because they only experience a limited fragment of the productive process – the one task they are coerced to perform repetitively. Compared to peasants who own and work their own land – planting, irrigating, fertilizing, grafting, harvesting, and ultimately watching the fruits of their labor grow in front of their eyes; agricultural workers, as proletarians, will tend to perform only one or two of these tasks over and over again all day long – to pick and pick and pick. Monotonous sounds accompany monotonous gestures of labor, those of apples falling into buckets or those of a cabran barking “get to work!” and “quicker!” at what feels like constant three-minute intervals – stripping the workers of their sense of dignity. This alienation, or what some Moroccan apple harvest workers refer to in Darija as l’qent, meaning boredom or monotony, removes any pleasure or sense of self-fulfilment that work may offer an individual; instead, it causes physical and psychological distress. “The work is miserable in itself,” explains one worker – it is unpleasant, stressful, tiring, and boring. That is, unless they take matters into their own hands in remedying the monotony and making their work as enjoyable and fulfilling an experience as possible.

To speak of exploitation and work conditions without speaking of how workers resist them would be to deny their agency. It would be to see them as nothing more than passive, complacent victims. It would also be an aberration of a reality in which workers wrench any means at their disposition to challenge the alienation they experience. Entertaining themselves is one of such means. While performing the same tasks every day and every year, from dawn to dusk and for several weeks, workers find ways to have fun while working, despite the constant surveillance, shouting, and even threats made by their superiors. In finding ways to have fun or دوز الوقت – “to pass the time,” workers ultimately look to making their toil as tolerable and dignifying as possible. While workers may say that “the work is miserable in itself,” they can just as easily describe how they make their workplace, the orchard, a vivacious place to be – singing, making jokes, gossiping, playing, flirting or listening to music. Remedies for monotony. In fact, these ‘remedies’ are so present that if one is not familiar with the workers’ complaints or has not witnessed a conflict break out between a worker and a cabran first-hand, the apple harvest may even seem cheerful – especially when the cabran is absent from the workers’ immediate vicinity. This should be familiar to anyone who has been forced to perform unenjoyable tasks for a superior – do we not all know of at least one person who plays video games during work hours, especially when a supervisor isn’t looking? Let alone the many people, including the authors of this article, who listen to music while working – whether we enjoy our work or not. Besides play or music, do we not all find distraction in conversation while we work? Do we not all take more pleasure in our work when there is someone to joke, gossip, or flirt with? In this sense, the remedies for monotony practised by apple harvest workers in the Atlas can help us reflect on what it means to be a worker in a universal sense. 

Aside from describing how workers have fun while working and its psychological implications, this article hopes to go further by interrogating whether remedies for monotony could also be forms of contestation against the economic injustices and exploitation which characterize the working condition globally. Could making a monotonous experience eventful, breaking up what are intended to be a mechanical, almost robotic, series of repetitive gestures, be understood as a subtle challenge to a mode of economic production designed to extract as much labor as possible for the cheapest cost? If so, we can apprehend the different remedies as more than just simple tactics to make work fun or to cope with stress and anxiety, but also as covert forms of resistance by which workers can affirm their own humanity. Through play, music or gossip, workers can criticize or challenge their superiors, and impose better work conditions without making a single direct demand. While workers may appear compliant when the eyes and ears of the cabran are on them, it only takes him turning away for them to gossip and conspire against him – especially when he is particularly abusive. James C. Scott describes this type of infra-political behavior as an interplay between public transcripts, “open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate,” and hidden transcripts, “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders.”[2] In the public transcript, a worker may address his boss as “sir” and thank him for his generosity. Still, in the hidden transcript, he may call him a “greedy bastard.” For Scott, in ‘power-laden situations,’ it is hardly in the interest of a subordinate to challenge their superior directly. Since open confrontation could pose a risk – in the case of harvest workers, losing one’s job and therefore losing one’s livelihood – subordinate groups resort to using hidden transcripts to voice themselves without facing punishment or retribution.[3] In other words, hidden transcripts permit apple harvest workers to claim justice, or their perception of what justice is, using gestures and language undetectable to those who have the power to fire them. What seems as banal gossip or horseplay can therefore help galvanize solidarity between workers, empowering them enough for a confrontation with their superiors, sometimes veiled in allegory (for example, through a joke or a song) and, on exceptional occasions and when absolutely necessary – without mincing their words. 

These different practices – in concert with each other – are also related to a particular historical junction: Atlas communities have been, for the last few decades, transitioning from peasant to industrial modes of agricultural production; from varied, small-scale, locally-consumed crops, to mass-production for national and international consumption; from working one's own land and for oneself, to working on that of others and being paid a wage for it. This inevitably makes for new forms of community and, in terms of cultural expressions, these changes are significant for several reasons. First, they have led to the destitution of ancestral agricultural practices and modes of production which were, through both ritualization and practical reasons (e.g. using music to coordinate labor), connected to cultural production. As Atlas communities began to rely on migrant wage labor and remittances, the social and economic structures which for example produced agricultural music changed – and so did their musical practices. One can make a loose comparison here with the development from agricultural work songs to industrial folk songs in 18th and 19th century Britain. In this period, industrialization pushed peasants into the factories – in the process transforming harvest songs into factory songs but also completely reshaping British social and political life.[4] Similarly, as former peasants from different Atlas regions began to converge in the centers of apple production as wage workers, the human need for cultural and social diversions developed. We thus hope to explore these modes of diversion and cultural production as they stem from two fronts: the nature of apple harvest labor itself, and the economic and social transformations which transpired from the proliferation of this new crop. 

Ultimately, this article delves into the interactions between Moroccan apple harvest workers, their environment, and their social, cultural and political practices. In the first section, “Before the Work Begins,” we start by providing a brief sketch of the history of apples in the Atlas, the origins and trajectories of the workers and the different tasks which constitute apple harvest labour. In “Making Friends Around a Crate,” we describe how relationships and bonds form between workers and how camaraderie is the foundation of all remedies for monotony. This is followed by “Mental Disorder, Coping and the Tammara of Silence,” where we outline the psychologically-excruciating aspects of apple harvest labor and how gossip, music and other remedies for monotony help alleviate the workers’ anxiety and stress. In “The Lion Has Left the Path,” we delve into the esoteric language used by workers as well as the political implications of jokes, play and nicknames and how contestation can be disguised in these seemingly mundane remedies for monotony. In “To Sing to Cope, To Sing to Resist” we explore the role of music in the agricultural workplace, the different musical practices used by workers as well as how they are deployed to protest their boss’ abuse. Finally, in “Tunnant, Qaroun and Divine Justice” we look into the role of spirituality and superstition as forces which, in conjunction with gossip and rumor, can help informally regulate mistreatment against workers by deploying the threat of punishment in the hereafter to claim justice in the here-and-now. The research we have just outlined and the knowledge it contains was almost entirely constructed from what was shared with us by the workers themselves. In this sense, this article is nothing more than a translation of the workers’ ‘hidden transcripts,’ worldviews, and opinions as they were expressed to us. We collected the information contained within this study through interviews, focus groups, and observation of dozens of harvest worker teams in Ait Ayach, Tounfit, Imechimen (Midelt province), and Ait Bougmez (Azilal province) between 2015 and 2022. This article accompanies a photographic and film project which brought us to encounter the workers in the first place. This experience is what led to the realization that the workers, their voices, and their stories could hardly be relegated to one such project, and deserved to be shared in a format that better explored the lives they live and their relationship to labor.[5] Given the sometimes abstract nature of art and the concrete, urgent nature of harvest work conditions, this formulation – a straightforward research article – becomes a necessity and responsibility. We hope that through its intersection with the artistic components of our work,[6] we can make a reasonable plea for better work conditions and wages for seasonal workers – the backbone of any agricultural sector.

2.     Before the Work Begins

Although common urban belief in Morocco holds that apples are a native species to the Midelt region, with some promoters and even the Ministry of Agriculture itself referring to it as a produit de terroir,[7] the first apple plantations were actually established by French settlers in the 1940s, most notably through a company called “Les Fruits D’Aderhoual.”[8] As such, the first apple varieties to be introduced were French and American (Such as Cremsonne, Rouge de Juin, Reinette Rouge, Winter Banana.[9] Initially, apple cultures were rejected by local populations who preferred maize, wheat and other crops which responded to their immediate alimentary needs – endemic apples, if they were planted, were almost uniquely restricted to domestic gardens (e.g. in courtyards) and not mass-produced.[10] Despite the best efforts of the colonial administration to promote them, the population’s resistance to the crop meant that, in the first decades after their introduction, apple orchards expanded slowly.[11] This would continue to be the case until the 1980s when the fruit, encouraged by the independent Moroccan state’s export-oriented agricultural policies, would start to become prominent. This was not restricted to the Midelt province but across the Atlas mountains – from Azrou to Imlil. As a consequence, the amount of land in Morocco dedicated to apple cultures increased from about 10,000 hectares in 1980 to about 45,000 hectares today.[12] If this monoculturalization has disfigured the Atlas landscape, it has also played a significant role in reshaping social structures in the region by transforming its relatively autonomous nomadic and peasant inhabitants into dependent migrant workers. As such, monotony of landscape has potentially yielded a monotonous, alienated human experience, one which revolves around apples and almost nothing else.[13]

Every fall, thousands of Moroccan seasonal workers leave their towns and villages, making their way to one of the many middle and high Atlas valleys where apples have become the primary cash crop: Ait Ayach, Boumia, Zaida, Imilchil, Outerbat, Ait Bougmez or Tounfit. Each of these centers of apple production attracts workers from a more or less expansive radius around it – the more important the production, the larger the radius. Those who work in Ait Ayach, for example, may come from as far away as the Mzab. Meanwhile, Ait Bougmez only attracts workers from the localities in its immediate vicinity – say, Ait Boulouli or Tanant. Sometimes they come in groups – friends they had made in previous harvests, family or neighbors from their village – to rent an apartment or the backroom of a café where they can huddle together in one of these mountain towns. Sometimes they come alone and wait to make friends with whom they can rent once they find a job. At the heart of each town, a mouqef can be found, a specific area, a square or a sidewalk, designated for workers to stand and wait for work. The small town of Ait Ayach probably has the largest mouqef for those seeking work in the apple harvest. There, in a large square, we can find an assortment of tents and stands which start opening at around six in the morning as workers – men and women of all ages – begin to gather. The tents offer bissara,[14] bread and tea for those who have set aside a few dirhams to pay for their own breakfast – especially the first morning after their arrival, when they have still not found work. The stands, sometimes in the back of a pick-up truck, offer all sorts of canned fish and other processed foods for the workers who may find themselves working for a boss who doesn’t provide lunch during the work day. If you’re lucky, you may meet a boss who will provide both breakfast and lunch on top of your wage – a mere 70 dirhams per day for pickers and 100 for crate-carriers and crate-organizers.

As the workers arrive, so do the bosses – themselves coming from different towns or cities like Meknes, Khenifra or Casablanca. The bosses are mainly individuals with enough capital to buy apples “off the tree.” That is, individuals who buy apples before they have been picked from an assortment of small landowners who generally don’t have the capital to pay for equipment, workers, distribution or storage. Unlike other agro-industrial contexts characterized by large land acreage, the apple industry in the Atlas mountains consists primarily of small landowners who are often themselves economically precarious. In other words, bosses are rarely also landowners. They are, to put it more precisely, investors, middle-men or businessmen whose profit is generated not from growing and tending to orchards but from the removal of apples from the trees, their organization by size and variety, their storage in refrigerated warehouses and, in some cases, their distribution and exportation. Profit is also generated by keeping the apples stored for months after the harvest season passes, when the market isn’t as inundated by the fruit – the longer the wait, the higher the price. In sum, when the bosses arrive at the mouqef, they are generally not hiring people to work their own land but to work on a series of different orchards which are, more often than not, owned by several different small landowners.

During the first days of the harvest, bosses walk around the mouqef, sizing up workers, their strength and the amount of experience they have. They need workers for each of the four primary tasks of the apple harvest: pickers, bucket-carriers, crate-organisers and crate-carriers. The pickers remove the apples from the trees, placing them in buckets. Bucket-carriers carry the full buckets to and empty buckets back from the semta, the “belt” – a series of crates placed side-by-side like a make-shift factory belt in the middle of the orchard. At the semta, crate-organizers sort the apples out by size and variety in different crates, then arrange the apples to make each crate presentable and more or less consistent in its weight – 21 to 23 kilograms per crate. Finally, the role of crate-carriers is to move the crates from the orchard to a truck where they are stacked and secured for their journey to the warehouse. With the exception of crate-organisers whose task requires more skill and experience, workers may perform any and all of these different tasks throughout the work day. 

3.     Making Friends Around A Crate

Given its collective nature, apple harvesting makes for a highly social work space compared to other types of labor required by apple production, like pesticide-spraying, weeding or grafting – tasks often performed in solitary or in duos between harvests. During the harvest, however, a single orchard may see as little as ten and as many as a hundred workers laboring together. Since they come from different regions and villages, they are unlikely to already be acquainted with each other and, if they are, it is usually when they come as a group of friends from the same town or as a family unit. Another exception, although not common, is when an investor calls upon the same workers every year. In most cases, however, the workers will only come to know each other during the first day of work. “In the beginning,” says one worker, “when you’ve just started, there’s silence. But slowly, the groups gathered around each tree begin to speak amongst themselves… that’s how a relationship is made.” As some workers stand on the higher branches or ladders above, they pass down bucket-fulls of apples to the workers who pick apples from the ground-level. The moment they “pass down their buckets and you take them from them, they start speaking to you,” in the words of one worker. In other words, the tree-group or team is the instigator and primary unit around which bonds begin to form, breaking the ice in the process of harvesting the same tree.

These bonds are consolidated during breakfast and lunch breaks. “On the first day, there’s a lot of silence,” affirms another worker, “until we meet around a table for breakfast or lunch. If there are a lot of women working, we set a table apart from the men and sit together. That’s how conversations really get going.” It is during these breaks when cliques begin to form, sometimes but not always along gender or generational lines. Scattered throughout the orchard, sitting on the ground around a crate turned into a table, we can sketch out small groups here and there. For those coming from other regions and who have still not found an apartment to rent during the next weeks, these cliques can also become roommates who rent together to reduce their spending. After work, at night, the cliques would get to know each other better and, in the case of the men, going out together to watch football in a café, pitching in together for a batch of kif[15] to smoke, or attending one of the Izlan, Cheikhat or Chaabi[16] music performances in nearby towns like Boumia. Once these relationships are formed, they can last for the remainder of the harvest period, and sometimes even long after, through social media. In sum, other people, co-workers – the friends one makes during the harvest are the first remedy for the monotony of apple harvest work. They keep each other company, they look out for each other and, if needed, they will cover for and defend each other against their superiors. An informal, temporary worker’s union, if you will, is formed.

As the harvest progresses, the bonds tend to only become stronger despite the temporary-nature of their encounter and despite the fact that they come from different places. The identitarian, generational and gender differences between workers are overshadowed by common experiences: they all travel to find work, they are all doing the same work and they all share a class difference from their superiors. When there is difference, for example in dialects, language or culture, it becomes something they share in itself – they are all different and this is something they all have in common. If anything, these regional or provincial differences become an important factor in relieving their boredom as they discover new things – from new songs, to new funny expressions to unfamiliar accents. In other words, workers can also find relief in the number of people and the diversity of their origins as this worker explains:

Everyone is from a different place… I work and laugh with those who work with me… we play, we tease each other, like by teasing each other’s accents or if someone brings water, but not the tub to wash! We tease each other, using whatever ticks or deficiencies they have and laugh about it together. So we meet in good faith (nia) and leave each other in good faith… When we finish the harvest, it becomes difficult to leave each other, we feel like something is missing and it becomes difficult to stay at home alone afterwards.

How is it possible that the same worker can describe such joy while also describing the work as being “miserable in itself”? Perhaps the answer may be familiar to anyone who has attended a temporary gathering of professionals from different regions or countries who spend a lot of time together for several days, say, at a conference; or how a group of artists would describe the bonds they made with other artists from other places during a residency; or how students would describe a summer program with students from other schools. How the worker above describes her return back from the harvest sounds a lot like the feeling of emptiness which plagues any person who has spent an intensive, temporary period with many people, some of which become new friends. It could have to do with the fact that, during such encounters, we feel a certain anonymity, a lack of judgement from those who still don’t know us well, free of the rumors, gossip and problems we can face from those we left back home. Indeed, apple harvest workers wherever they come from, tend to be some of the poorest and marginalized members of their village. Whereas amongst others like them they may find relief, their return to the village can be a sharp reminder of their condition and their unemployment for the remainder of the year. This is particularly true of women workers who face an enormous amount of stigma back home for working side-by-side with men but who are left with no choice. Most women who work in the apple harvest are either divorced, widowed or have left a bedridden husband back home. To avoid the stigma, those who are married and who have able husbands will work alongside them in family units, sometimes even including their children.

This is why we must insist that the point here is not to compare art residencies and summer programs to apple harvests characterized by exploitation and tiresome manual labor, but there is an argument to be made about how workers find ways to overcome these negative aspects through new relationships with people they would never normally meet but who share their plight. This is particularly true of the rather exceptional mixing of genders (the source of the stigma referred to above) which occurs during the apple harvest as workers, both men and women, coming from communities which typically segregate them – aside from weddings or other celebrations – find each other in close contact during the harvest. Comparing apple harvest work – bringing together people from many different places and genders – to working as a small group of subsistence farmers from the same community and gender, one woman from Ait Bougmez claims that monotony can be more easily overcome because the workers are “much more numerous” and “everyone is mixed together, there are women and there are men, while in the old days they worked separately.” Teasing, exchanging glances, and flirting with members of the opposite sex, then, makes for one of the remedies to the monotony of their labor – stigma be damned! This doesn’t necessarily mean that intimate relationships will develop, but there is a relatively larger margin for what would normally be considered unconventional gender relations, made possible by the distance from the watchful gazes of their communities and the knowledge that they may not meet their co-workers again.  

4.     Mental Disorder, Coping and the Tammara of Silence 

According to apple harvest laborers, making friends with co-workers, no matter how numerous or diverse they are in terms of origin, age or gender, makes no difference if they are forced to work in silence – a reality in orchards managed by particularly authoritarian bosses who forbid chatter. When asked what happens when there are no conversations, gossip, play, singing, music, jokes or laughter between workers, one worker responded: “only tammara would remain” – Tammara being a term which loosely blends the English words, misery and toil – or, to be more precise, toil which keeps you in misery – a recurrent term used by workers to describe their work. “It would be boring,” continues the same worker. “You would work one day and never return!” In other words, making friends with co-workers is not necessarily about forging lasting relationships, but about mutually relieving and helping each other to escape tammara. “If you’re silent, you’re like a machine!” says another worker, suggesting that, in the absence of remedies for monotony, workers’ bodies become nothing more than tools for their superiors, emptied of their dignity and humanity. To feel a lack of dignity, in conjunction with the stresses of work, the economic precarity one leaves back home and the sensations of having no agency over one’s own life, can cause or accentuate feelings of depression or anxiety. Looking at similar factors, one study on Mexican migrant and seasonal agricultural workers found that “nearly 40% of the farm workers revealed significant depression” compared to “about 20% of individuals from the general population.”[17] Meanwhile, “about 30% of the farm workers demonstrated anxiety, compared to about “16% of the general population.”[18] One can only wonder what a similar study amongst Moroccan agricultural workers would reveal. But for now, we can only assume it would yield similar results based on the testimonies we collected in our attempt to understand apple harvest labor from a psychological perspective.

“Your mind is constantly working,” says one worker, pointing out the psychologically- excruciating dimension of the work. “You keep reeling over bad thoughts if you don’t talk to other workers or laugh or play. You quickly feel tired.” Another worker elaborates on these “bad thoughts,” adding how silence during work causes some workers “to think about their regrets, others [to] become anxious about the future… so the ambiance becomes toxic and you feel tired.” Testimonies like these point to a possible link between silence, boredom, monotony, anxiety or depression, and physical fatigue. “If you’re silent, you will feel tired” affirms one worker, adding: “You would only hear the sounds that piss you off!” By “sounds,” this worker is referring to two things at once – both significant stressors. On the one hand, the real-life sounds of the workplace – those made by the overseer, yelling orders and shouting at individuals for not picking apples fast enough as well as the monotonous rhythm made by the sound of apples falling into buckets. On the other hand, she means the “mental sounds” produced by anxiety or, as another worker clarifies: “the sound of your mind [saying]: ‘I have to hurry, I have to do this, I have to do that…’ It’s like a hammer in your head, you work until you go mad.” 

This mental ‘hammer,’ this ‘madness,’ is associated with the nature of the work itself, described again and again by workers in similar terms: “Like a machine, like an alarm” says one worker, before elaborating on how she perceives the relationship between toil and anxiety: 

You’re working, and your mind is working. Like a clock: ‘tick, tick, tick’ and,” she adds, mimicking the voice of an overseer, “‘get to work!’ But it’s not like that if you have people to speak with and laugh with. It alleviates the monotony. 

Indeed, when asked more explicitly what monotony means to her, the same worker describes a relationship between the psychological and the physical burdens felt while working, on the one hand, and the conditions of work on the other: 

Monotony is when you feel mentally troubled, when you feel agitated. If you’re happy, you won’t feel monotony. But if you’re distressed or if you’re tired, and you’ve been working, you feel it… If you’re working for someone who’s no good or when there aren’t good people working alongside you, you feel monotony. 

Being emotionally distressed, being physically tired, working for someone who’s no good and having no one to help you relieve all of the above – all of these constitute monotony. In fact, the workers we spoke to all seem to conflate anxiety, stress, depression, boredom and fatigue into one term: l’qent. But there is nothing new about the feelings expressed by apple harvest workers today, Marx had already detected similar sentiments amongst 19th century industrial workers, writing [emphasis mine]:

Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.[19]

In light of the above, remedies for monotony can be understood as ways to feel “at home” to the greatest extent possible through a set of tactics for psychological evasion. Psychologists refer to this as coping, an “individual’s efforts to manage stressors and/or stress.”[20] In the case of apple harvest workers, we could see coping as a means to help the mind distance itself from the anxieties which burden it at the same time as it distances itself from the physically-tiring, repetitive tasks performed by the body – thereby reducing lqent/monotony in both senses, mental and physical.[21] In psychological terms, when workers laugh, talk, sing, or horse-around, they are engaging in “emotion-focused coping,” a strategy in which an individual enacts a “change in the meaning of the relationship between [them] and the environment.”[22] Something which happens “in reaction to stressors that cannot be physically eliminated…an individual may rely on the emotional support of others, cognitively reframe his or her reaction to the situation [or] develop a healthy sense of humour…”[23] This is part of what the apple harvest workers are looking for when they make friends out of co-workers, someone to whom they can look to for emotional support – they are transforming an exploitative environment into a “home,” a fun environment (or at least as fun as possible!). As one worker puts it, “we laugh at tammara!” Beyond humor and jokes, coping is implied and runs through all of the remedies for monotony we will discuss in the following sections: music, play, gossip, or foot-dragging. However, it would be a mistake to understand the psychological aspect of the remedies for monotony as being isolated from their social and political implications and how seemingly insignificant behaviors like gossip or play can express workers’ views on injustice and exploitation. Coping is undoubtedly an important part of the remedies for monotony, but, as we hope to show, there is much more to them than their psychological component.    

5.     “The Lion Has Left the Path” 

Worker : Hey, boss?

Boss : What?

Worker : I swear to God, I’m sick.

Boss : Who’s sick?

Worker : I am.

Boss : Get to work you bastard!

Worker : God damn me if I’m not sick. I’m sick, man.

Boss : Come down here and I’ll show you what a vaccine looks like.

Worker 2 : [laughing] He’ll get a needle in you!

Worker : That’s good, I’m still not vaccinated!

Although he was not allowed to rest and heal himself, by retorting with a joke, the worker in the dialogue above had at least found a remedy, a way of deflecting the unbearable humiliation inflicted upon him by his boss. This real-life situation we recorded in Ait Ayach reflects how, in order to survive psychologically, apple harvest workers must find a way to restore their dignity and affirm their rights without getting themselves fired. Once friendships are established amongst workers, jokes are an ideal way of accomplishing this as they can often involve an esoteric component, as terms like ‘inside joke’ imply. In a way, all jokes are ‘inside’ of a culture or a subculture, hence the near-impossibility of translating them from one culture to another. The same applies to many jokes made by apple harvest workers who allude to the particularities of their experience, sometimes rallying the laughter of the group against their abuser. In one orchard in Ait Bougmez, a nickname given to their cabran behind his back, “Aasser” (afternoon prayer) became the basis of many jokes which, besides relieving their boredom, lamented the fact that their boss kept them working overtime since the Aasser prayer typically marks the end of the work day. For example, the nickname was formulated as a question: “Where did the Aasser go?” This may not seem like a joke to those of us who were not working in this orchard, but provoked snickering and hooting amongst this particular group of workers. Just as we did not initially understand it as a joke and a dig at their boss, he too would not have understood. However, what is important here is how this joke exemplifies a hidden form of protest, lamenting the fact that they were forced to work overtime with no extra pay.

While the workers may use this nickname, veiling insults directed at their boss in the form of inside jokes, they will also speak respectfully and use terms like “yes, sir” when addressing him directly. While this seems contradictory, it makes sense when we consider the risks workers incur if they were to challenge their superiors directly: 

The performance is often collective as subordinates collude to create a piece of theatre that serves their superior’s view of the situation but that is maintained in their own interests… The equivalent manifestations of hatred – we may call them insolence and rejection – cannot, by definition, however, be expressed openly in the public transcript. They must either be insinuated cleverly into the public transcript to avoid retaliation or else be expressed offstage.[24]

“Onstage,” in the presence of their overseer or boss, workers are limited to jokes and spoken expressions as they must keep their hands busy to maintain the illusion of hard work, subordination and respect – only their voice can rebel, and this rebellion can only be esoteric. The same can not be said about what happens “offstage,” when the overseer or the boss are out of sight and out of earshot – surveilling a group of workers on the other side of the orchard, or by the road, meeting with a truck driver. “The lion has left the path!” yells a worker to the others – a code to signal the overseer’s withdrawal, after which a sharp shift in behavior can be observed for the duration of the overseer’s absence. “‘The lion has left the path’ means you can do whatever you want,” explains one worker, “people say that out loud so all the workers know that the cabran is gone.” Once the news spreads that the cabran is away, “we take it easy on ourselves,” says another worker, describing how people start to not openly speak ill of him or complain about their work conditions – “how badly he feeds us or how he shouts at us” – but also how they begin to drag their feet, working slowly or stopping work altogether. 

Perhaps this has to do with Marx’ conception of wage labor (not all labor) being “not the satisfaction of a need” in itself, but a result of coercion: “it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that “as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague.”[25] Indeed, in the absence of a cabran as a coercive force in the orchard, work can be swiftly replaced by relaxing under the shade, making phone calls, getting on social media, cigarette breaks, or horseplay:

There are some who, if the cabran isn’t watching, climb up the tree, pull out their phones and start playing video games… As soon as they hear the cabran coming back, they slide their phones back into their pockets… working hard again, ‘give me a bucket, take this bucket.’

In this last statement, by mimicking the voice and gestures of someone pretending to work hard, this worker’s testimony affirms a conscious ‘collective performance’ of a public transcript. One which quickly dissipates in the cabran’s absence to reveal a hidden, presumably more candid, transcript. The performance is turned off and on using cryptic messages only the workers understand – “there are rocks in the sack of wheat” signals the return of the cabran and the beginning of the performance – action! However, as long as “the lion has left the path,” the workers will not only speak more freely but will also take small actions to reclaim their dignity, grabbing any semblance of economic justice they can.

From the perspective of bosses, relaxation or cigarette breaks, video games, horseplay or foot-dragging demonstrate the workers’ apparent dishonesty. In fact, bosses in any context may see this kind of behavior as akin to theft – “I pay them to work! Not sit around!” being the universal motto of bosses and laziness’ supposedly being an inherent attribute of working classes and people of color. In Morocco and beyond, laziness is the founding argument used by the wealthy to justify why the poor deserve to be poor, as implied by another universal expression: “I worked hard to get where I am!” Yet, when considered from a worker’s perspective, “sitting around” can be a justified response to inequitable pay – a means to slow down their productivity to a rate that more closely matches their wages. This tactic, referred to as a “slowdown” in syndicalist discourse, is often also used informally in contexts where workers are unable to organize into formal unions or strikes. Just as a boss may see “sitting around” as theft of the wages he offers, the main cause of slowdowns is workers’ perception of unfair wages as theft of their labor. As such, whether formally or informally, to avoid having their labor and time stolen, workers will retract their labor whether it is by doing nothing, gossiping, playing, singing, or listening to music during work hours. When we also consider the fact that seasonal harvest workers are conscious of the repercussions to their health (from exposure to pesticides and/or carrying heavy crates), the risk of accidents (by falling from a ladder or tree, by dying in a road accident on crowded pick-up trucks) and the absence of medical insurance or pensions, the time workers reclaim for relaxation and leisure seems all the more justified. After all, their wages fail to reflect neither the risks they incur nor the amount of labor they are expected to perform.                     

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that, between “the lion has left the path” and “there are rocks in the sack of wheat,” workers go beyond tacit “slowdown strikes” to show their discontent. They can, for example, stop working altogether. In one situation in Ait Bougmez, two young workers took advantage of both our presence with a camera and their overseer’s short absence to playfully stack several empty crates over their shoulders. Laughing, they proceeded to humorously throw them off their shoulders, attracting all the other workers’ attention, drawing them in, eventually acting as a catalyst for a total work stoppage around them. As others joined in the play, a sort of ‘micro-strike’ took place. When we realized the time of day it was, it became clear that this horseplay was, in fact, a protest in disguise: they had been working two hours overtime without any extra pay, and their cabran had still not dismissed them.

Retracting one’s labor isn’t the only way of showing discontent. In cases where overseers or bosses excessively mistreat workers, they may resort to sabotage – a way of making their oppressors pay by directly affecting their profit. According to one worker, it is common practice to “make apples fall to the ground, to waste them on purpose” in protest of abuse, overtime, or a lack of respect for breaks. In such situations, “when the cabran isn’t around, there are more fallen apples under the trees,” claims one worker, “the workers make the apples fall.” Meanwhile, her co-worker affirms this by mimicking a gesture of using two hands to violently tear as many apples as possible off the tree to make them fall – “one in the bucket, two on the ground!” she says, laughing. The workers know that fallen apples will quickly rot and, even if sold, lose more than half of their value. In other cases, workers “would start throwing buckets or crates around and start breaking things.” In this sense, the horseplay described above doubles as both a work-stoppage and sabotage at the same time.

Nevertheless, conscious of their own economic precarity and desperate to keep their jobs despite the conditions, it is for workers to make sure that these actions are either performed “offstage” or that they be interpreted as naive clumsiness, horseplay, or jokes. “Tactical prudence ensures that subordinate groups rarely blurt out their hidden transcript directly,” writes Scott, “But, taking advantage of the anonymity of a crowd or of an ambiguous accident, they manage in a thousand artful ways to imply that they are grudging conscripts to a performance.”[26] Indeed, the point of all of these jokes, nicknames, and horseplay is to communicate their complaints to their superiors. In doing this, the workers are effectively able to get messages across to their cabran who remains unable to detect who exactly is responsible for the sabotage or the nicknames given him. One rather extraordinary example from Ait Bougmez demonstrates how workers use anonymity to signify their discontent:

One year, I worked with some young men from Ait Boulouli who would play-fight with apples. They would throw apples at each other. One of them suggested: “let’s try hitting the cabran, whoever hits him will win 100 Dirhams.” One of the young men was able to hit the cabran, and the cabran had no idea where the apple came from. He started yelling at them, insulting them, but he didn’t know who threw it. The workers of course knew who the culprit was, so they kept snickering. Workers would do these kinds of things on purpose.

Although this particular case only seemed to enrage the cabran initially, one can be sure that a hard knock on the back of his head would make him aware that the workers are not pleased with the way he treats them. According to the workers we spoke to, through a combination of jokes, nicknames, horseplay, sabotage, and slowdowns – in addition to the fact that they are collectively elaborated – cabrans and bosses are able to deduce what the discontent is about. Often pretending concessions are not concessions (superiors in this dynamic also have their own performances and hidden/public transcripts) but their own idea, they respond to the workers’ demands as long as their authority isn’t directly questioned and as long as explicit confrontation does not explode “onstage” in the ‘public transcript.’ For example, suppose enough buckets have been broken and apples wasted, enough people have slowed down their work to a snail’s pace, enough jokes alluding to Ramadan and fasting have been made, and singing reaches a crescendo – the cabran will finally announce a lunch break. In this manner, the workers can make concrete concessions without getting fired, all the while having fun reclaiming their most basic rights.           

6.     To Sing to Cope, To Sing to Resist 

Work and music, or agriculture and music, seem to go voice-in-hand – the apple harvest is no exception to this rule. Historically, in Morocco, like in all agricultural societies, the act of harvesting was transformed into a performance, as gestures of labor form rhythms on which harvesters elaborated all sorts of work songs. In fact, the historical relationship between agricultural labor and music is so acute that in Moroccan Darija, until today, musical and agricultural terminology are congruous: “to plant a rhythm” or to “play a grain.” In the Atlas mountains, our specific field of study, many forms of traditional labor were even accompanied by their own type of work song. For example, in the southeast and central high Atlas, taloussi or tintloussi (depending on the dialect) is a specific work song genre for wool-shearing. Timnadin, Tamawayt, and Ourar are other examples of work song genres from today’s apple-growing regions. Although they all preceded the apple industry, they are far from being condemned to history books. In fact, according to many testimonies collected across the region, they were still ubiquitous until the 1990s, and only began to disappear throughout the 2000s. This came alongside the arrival of electricity, roads, television, the internet, and the new ideas they brought. In conjunction with the apple industry, these have led to substantial economic shifts from which cultural transformations would logically follow – music included. This is without speaking of other factors, like the rise of cassette tapes and the development of recording studios in towns like Khenifra. However, the point here is not to delve into how exactly these converging factors contributed to musical transformations – this would make for an article in its own right – but to set the backdrop necessary for us to apprehend the diversity of musical practices amongst apple harvest workers today: an amalgamation of the ancestral and the new, of the ancestral used in new ways and of the new used in ancestral ways.

Today, there are considerable variations in how song and poetry continue to be deployed in the agro-industrial work spaces of the Atlas. The manner by which apple harvest workers engage with music depends on the workers’ age, gender, and region of origin. For example, men and women above forty years of age will generally sing out loud, without any technological support – either to themselves and others (individually) or with others (collectively). Of the genres that are sung collectively by workers of any gender or age, the most common are Izlan n’Ouhidous (in the Middle and Eastern High Atlas) and amarg or ahwach (in the Western High Atlas), ancestral call-and-response genres usually sung by both men and women during weddings; or Middle Atlas Izlan, of the type popularized by musicians like Mohamed Rouicha and Hadda Ouakki in the 1980s. While all workers will participate in singing without any technology, only young men (and sometimes middle-aged men) will do both: sing with and without technology. It is very common for young male workers to play music from their smartphones, either directly or using additional devices like earbuds or, on rare occasions, even Bluetooth speakers. It can be both an individual and collective practice, as using earbuds and speakers implies: listening together, listening alone, singing along together, singing along alone – all are possible. Meanwhile, the type of music played depends on which region they are from. For example, in the region of Midelt, young workers will play and sing along with contemporary recordings of chaabi, rai, izlan (in the style of musicians like Mohammed Rouicha or Aicha Maya) or occasionally – amongst the youngest workers – Moroccan contemporary trap played from smartphones. On the other hand, young men working in the region of Ait Bougmez, coming from less varied regional backgrounds but working in a valley that sits on the border between the Tassoussit and Tamazight cultures, will play both Soussi music (rwaiss or ahwach, usually recorded in Agadir), Middle Atlas izlan (usually recorded in Khenifra) or Southeastern Izlan (usually recorded in Errachidia or Ouarzazate).

While the manner by which apple harvest workers interact with music is variable, its role as a remedy for monotony is a constant. As discussed above, music, like gossip or conversation, is used by workers to flee the workplace psychologically – as a coping strategy. “What will you do without singing? Nothing! It’s either you sing, or you talk,” says one worker who, when asked which she prefers as a means to relieve monotony, preferred singing by far. Aside from coping with stress and anxiety, music may have other benefits which conversations can’t provide, the same benefits which have motivated humans to sing while working for thousands of years.[27] Music can raise morale, help give rhythm to the task being performed, and coordinate gestures between a group when the task is collective. “When you sing, you work fast,” says one worker, “You don’t feel anything; you don’t feel tired or bored. You work and sing, and you work more.” While silence can lead to “bad thoughts” and physical fatigue simultaneously, singing, according to apple harvest workers, can alleviate both, all the while helping you to perform whatever task you’re doing better. Singing “follows the movement,” says one worker. “When you work, you sing and it helps. It helps with breathing. When you sing, you breathe out.” This testimony is corroborated by a variety of historical accounts and studies which show music’s “efficacy in reducing fatigue and enhancing endurance.”[28] One specific study “showed that a group of women exposed to a regular dose of morning music worked better and with less resentment than their musically deprived peers.” Another study demonstrated “that the vast majority of workers preferred to have music at their place of employment.”[29] Scientific studies aside, we need not look further than within ourselves to know that music makes work easier – starting with this article which, without music, would have never been written!

However, to focus on music’s role in enhancing endurance would be conducive to viewing workers as nothing more than “machines” whose productivity increases when you oil them with music. It would be to understand music and work from a boss’ perspective, as a couple of the studies cited above do. Even some rare bosses in the Atlas orchards demonstrate their awareness of this when they invite musicians to entertain workers on special occasions. Yet, according to Ted Gioia, when bosses introduce music, workers tend to resist: “Workers can and will reclaim their music. It is… the last inviolable perk, the part of the workers’ inner lives that they are least willing to give up to the boss”[30] – and this is for good reason. Music is far from just a means to reduce fatigue and be more productive. It is also a means to make friends, strengthen bonds with co-workers, criticize the boss, and negotiate better work conditions – even if indirectly.

In the apple orchards of the Atlas, workers coming from different places use music to forge a new community out of the many communities represented by individual workers. This isn’t unique to the Atlas, in other working contexts where “singers and their audiences belonged simultaneously to several communities, defined by gen­der, location and class…‘Community’ is best regarded not as a geographical concept but as a plurality of allegiances, constantly forming and reforming in the context of immediate opportunity or threat.”[31] In this case, a community of apple harvest workers is formed around a common threat of humiliation, mistreatment and (possibly) unemployment posed by the overseer or the boss as an otherized figure. It is also united by common opportunities, like friendship and allies who can help in confronting superiors or practicalities like finding roommates, catching the same ride, or borrowing money for a café “until the boss pays me tomorrow.” While ancestral work songs, performed alongside neighbors and kin, helped to reinforce an existing community by diffusing tensions within it, in the ever-changing identities of individuals and groups which travel for the apple harvest, music and singing together can help galvanize communities where none existed before. If punk music can form a community across international borders,[32] what would stop music from bringing together workers from the same mountain range? 

Considering the subordinate status accorded to apple harvest workers, community-making becomes a prerequisite for balancing, even if minimally, their power relationship with superiors. In the absence of an organized worker’s syndicate, and given the difficulty of unionizing with people you may never work with again, a community – even if temporary – can shield any individual worker from being singled out for complaining or speaking their mind to their boss. In this sense, music can bring people together while acting as a discrete outlet to express discontent. Here, we would like to go back to the conversation between the sick worker and his overseer transcribed above. It is now worth noting that the situation did not end there. After being refused sick leave, the worker was forced to continue working or potentially lose his job. But instead of accepting the situation and picking apples quietly, he began to sing loudly, in open defiance of the cabran who screamed back at him to “shut up” and “get to work” repeatedly. The man’s singing was supported by his fellow workers who emitted sharp cries of approval and “tell him! tell him!” This isolated the cabran who realized he may have to confront all the workers. It was in the cabran’s interest to back down, or else find himself in a situation where everyone would stop or slow down work, not just the sick man. He can’t possibly fire everyone, nor can he afford to lose a day’s worth of work – it would cost his own boss’ money. Eventually, the sick man was able to walk off the orchard without a word to the cabran and without consequences – he was there the next day, working and singing again.

Whereas in the last case, there was nothing subversive in the lyrical content of the song but rather in how the song was used in response to the situation, in other instances, the content itself can be subversive. For this, there is a long and powerful Amazigh tradition of poetic criticism through a variety of improvised Izlan music/poetry genres, from lamentations like Tamawayt to ballads like Tamdyazt to insult poetry like Lehja or Timaayrin. Izlan poetry is composed of several izli (singular for Izlan), short poems like Haikus, which can stand alone as poems in themselves. One such izli, a work song directed at cabrans was, according to some workers, improvised by a worker during the harvest:

Asiw a boulaajib, asiw!                                              Relax on your high horse, relax!

Han rebbi iwjad akiwd.                                              God is here, preparing his bludgeon.

Today, this izli has spread throughout the orchards of Ait Bougmez and is used when workers face abuse. Its two lines are repeated over and over again as a call-and-response, with one group saying the first and a second following with the second. When asked about the meaning of this izli, a group of workers seemed to agree on this response: “if there is someone who surprises you [with his evil/treachery], he can keep his hands to himself and prepare for his own destiny. For example, if I am working for you today, you should be careful because destiny can change and maybe one day you will be working for me.” The same group of workers claimed that cabrans are fully aware that it is directed at them, “but they don’t say anything… when you sing it, it becomes acceptable. Any opinion is acceptable if you sing it!” According to some workers, songs such as this one, like the sick worker’s situation, can have quite an effect on overseers who respond positively by relaxing their harsh behavior out of fear of God’s judgement. 

7.     Tunnant, Qaroun & Divine Justice

If we have used the terms “slowdowns” and “strikes” earlier, it was only to shed light on the significance of gestures and actions which may otherwise seem banal to an outside observer – not to imply that the workers we encountered subscribe to a socialist worldview. Despite our favorable and biased inclination towards such a worldview, we would be lying to ourselves if we claimed that their actions are products of leftist ideology, organizing, or training. In reality, they are responses to a palpable set of injustices workers face from the day-to-day and products of ideologies emanating from a variety of ancestral and religious values. There may be hints of socialist discourse as remnants of the previous decades when Moroccan socialist parties and unions were influential, but they remain negligible. For many apple harvest workers, injustice and exploitation are unlikely to be resolved through legal means or formal workers’ organizations but rather through the power of divinity and fate. Some may attribute this to ignorance or reactionism, but considering their position – the fact that seasonal work involves no contracts whatsoever, that they will never be able to afford a lawyer, and that no organization or syndicate comes to their defense – there is perhaps nothing more pragmatic and “progressive” than calling on divinity to serve justice. The claim that spiritual belief implies consent or passivity towards exploitation “assumes a fatalistic acceptance of the social order or what Marxists might call ‘mystification.’ One may claim, on the other hand, that the explanation for passivity is not to be found in peasant values, but rather in the relationships of force in the countryside[33]” [our emphasis]. In other words, if the relationship is too steep – the strong too strong and the weak too weak – resistance can only be disguised, and justice can only be deferred to an external, greater power with divinity being its epitome. We can here recall the izli poem and work song from Ait Bougmez cited above. This izli reflects a wider pattern in which workers invoke God and deploy common spiritual faith as a means to discourage bosses and overseers from mistreating them. When abused workers imply that God is watching the orchard, it is about leveraging the threat of justice in the hereafter to claim justice in the here and now.

Earlier in this article, we also spoke of how workers give nicknames to cabrans. Perhaps here it is appropriate to speak of a particular one we came across in Ait Bougmez: Qaroun – a nickname, this time not used to refer to one specific cabran, but used and re-used to refer to any excessively abusive cabran. “From the people of Moses” (28:76), Qaroun (Korah, in the Old Testament) is described in the Holy Quran as an arrogant and extremely rich man who attributed his wealth to his own doing instead of God.[34] Despite the advice given to him to “be good to others as Allah has been good to you” (28:77), Qaroun remained defiant and, as punishment, God “caused the earth to swallow him up, along with his home” (28:81).[35] The teaching of this account, according to the Quran, is: “That eternal Home in the Hereafter We reserve only for those who seek neither tyranny nor corruption on the earth. The ultimate outcome belongs only to the righteous” (28:83).[36] As such, in using Qaroun as a nickname for cabrans, the workers position themselves amongst the righteous and in opposition to their superiors’ tyranny and corruption – sending a clear message which echoes the izli cited above: “beware, or else Qaroun’s fate will be yours!”  If religious belief can dissuade pretty much any pious cabran or boss from abusing their power, local superstition can be just as effective in dissuading those specifically from the Atlas regions. In this sense, Tunnant, a supernatural force in Amazigh culture linking wrongdoing to catastrophic repercussions (similar to Karma), is a good example. According to one worker, when workers are mistreated:

We say ‘Tunnant will get him’ and if he oppresses [hger] someone and something bad happens to him afterwards, we say that it’s ‘Tunnant which showed herself to him.’ If he’s ‘followed’ by the worker’s Tunnant, his truck may derail in an accident, he could get into a car crash, or his apples could rot – he might remove the plastic covering [in the storage] and find that all of his apples have gone bad.

These misfortunes, along with their attribution to a higher power, are spread across the community through rumor to help to reinforce the workers’ otherwise weak position vis-a-vis their superiors and establish informal social norms – workers’ common law, if you will, enforced by mystical forces instead of courts and judges.

The origin of these rumors and the norms they engender can likely be traced to gossip among workers. Indeed, whispers about which men are followed by Tunnant, nicknames like Qaroun, statements like “God will repay him,” and poems warning abusers all act in concert as “informal social controls.”[37] Eventually reaching the ears of would-be abusive cabrans and bosses, themselves being potentially faithful Muslims or superstitious people, what starts out as a mere exchange of words while harvesting apples becomes an effective deterrent against mistreatment. “Most studies repeatedly emphasize the informal social controls which tend either to redistribute the wealth or to impose specific obligations on its owners. The prosaic, even banal, character of these social controls belies their importance.”[38] Indeed, references to divine justice and the use of gossip to reprimand those at risk of facing it not only affects those directly concerned by the gossip, but can have an impact on the behavior of cabrans or bosses in general. “There are some who don’t want to be plagued by the workers’ Tunnant,” says one worker, “so when the time to stop working arrives, they tell everyone to stop. Time is time.” When asked if superstitious cabrans are relatively kinder and non-superstitious cabrans more oppressive, she responded in the affirmative. Indeed, beyond simply relieving boredom and coping with stress, the apparently unimportant conversations, jokes, songs and gossip between co-workers and friends can become a very real counter-force when backed by mystical powers.

Conclusion

Labor and music – this was one of the initial points of departure for what started as an artistic exploration of the social and cultural practices of seasonal agricultural workers in Morocco. More specifically, it first took form as A Seasonal Work Song, a docu-fiction film, and Remedies for Monotony, a photography project about apple harvest workers in the Atlas mountains between Ait Ayach (Midelt Province) and Ait Bougmez (Azilal Province). We were interested in making a performative film in which work songs and songs about work would act as its narration. So, the first question we asked ourselves was whether there are work songs specific to apple harvests. After all, we thought, those who work in harvests come from contexts where work songs were commonly sung only a generation ago! Some workers are old enough even to have themselves sung or directly interacted with work songs in the recent past. Indeed, the Atlas is perhaps the region where work songs have been best preserved in Morocco. We can still find specific work song genres associated with different forms of toil: songs for carpet-weaving, songs for shearing livestock, songs for threshing wheat, songs for collecting wood, or songs for turning a hand mill. As such, it seemed plausible that a new genre of work song may have appeared during the last three decades. For, we recalled, if new forms of Ahidous music have emerged in the southeast and if Tamawayt has been re-adapted to lament the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a possibility to find new work songs dedicated to or associated with the equally contemporary omnipresence of apples in the region. We can find similar transformations in Sicily in Vittorio de Setta’s 1955 documentary film Surfarara, as peasant men sing while they work in the industrial context of a sulfur mine for the first time. The songs and habits they had formed as peasants transformed in the new industrial workplace, adapting their singing and other recreation to the sounds of machinery. The apple orchards of the Atlas see a similar change, as people move and bring with them different traditions – but still seek social and cultural comforts.

Twenty-first century Atlas villages, however, are neither post-war Sicily nor the Britain of the industrial revolution we alluded to in the introduction of this article – technology and apples, amongst other factors, have taken the kind of development witnessed in Surfarara towards completely different directions. Indeed, we never came across a single apple-related work song but many different musical and cultural practices. This fact alone goes to show how recent the apple industry is to the Atlas regions. While for the film this meant we would simply collaborate with workers to write a new Timnadin work song together, in terms of our research, music and oral poetry were only meant to be the points of departure in an attempt to unveil and understand forms of art and culture which emerge from everyday life. Our most important objective was to understand art through a paradigm which “gives due attention to the living reality of creating and experiencing”[39] it; and to apprehend how the cultural and artistic practices of workers converse with the toil itself, their perception of it, their contestation of its conditions and their capacity to affect relationships between workers, overseers, and bosses. These questions are inevitably and ultimately linked to an attempt to understand the power relationships in the Moroccan agricultural workplace. It is to understand the cultural practices of apple harvest workers as expressions of a community-in-the-making, even if it is forging itself on a temporary seasonal basis.

Our quest for apple harvest work songs and our research into workers’ musical practices revealed what is, in fact, a wider pattern of interrelated practices that functioned in concert with each other. Music was not isolated from jokes, gossip, play, or other acts which we have summarized in the term “remedies for monotony.” The prominence and widespread nature of these acts in the agricultural workplaces of the Atlas made them impossible to ignore, thereby transforming our research into something which borders on the ethnographic – despite us not being trained ethnographers but artist-researchers or “research-based artists.” These practices in turn have shown that seasonal workers are dissatisfied with their wages and conditions of labor and who, without organized representation, can only sing, plead to God and make jokes about it.

[1] Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. 28-35. <www.marxists.org>.

[2] Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Porter, Gerald. The English Occupational Work Song. Stockholm: Alqvist & Wiksell International, 1992.

[5] This process is further described in the conclusion of this article.

[6] These include A Seasonal Work Song, a film and video installation; Remedies for Monotony, a photographic, visual and sound installation project with different iterations, exhibited as well as printed, for example in The Lion Has Left the Path, a complementary publication to this one.

[7] A local product, with a connotation of being traditional, artisanal or endemic.

[8] Oukabli, Ahmed. "Repères importants de l’histoire de la culture fruitière et de ses expérimentations au Maroc." Terre et Vie 87 (2005).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Sellika, Issam E. "Perspectives de production et de commercialisation de la pomme au Maroc à l’horizon 2025." Alternatives Rurales 3 (2015).

[13] Some may be tempted to cite tourism as another important economic activity in the region, but tourism is limited to well-defined circuits. For example, Imilchil is a destination, but not nearby Tounfit, Anfgou, Outerbat, Errich or Boumia. Other towns, like Midelt, are only points of passage for tourists on the road between Fes and Merzouga – this hardly makes for an important income to the region.

[14] Bissara is a dried bean or pea soup, typically a cheap cold-weather food.

[15] Cannabis flower, usually in the form of a fine powder.

[16] These are popular ancestral musical genres in Morocco, typically using a bendir drum and vocals in combination with either a viola or an outar.

[17] Hovey, Joseph and Seligman, Laura. "The Mental Health of Agricultural Workers." Agricultural Medicine: A Practical Guide. Ed. J. Lessenger. New York: Springer, 2006.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. 28-35. <www.marxists.org>.

[20] Hovey, Joseph and Seligman, Laura. "The Mental Health of Agricultural Workers." Agricultural Medicine: A Practical Guide. Ed. J. Lessenger. New York: Springer, 2006.

[21] Although, one particular worker sees it somewhat differently, as a means to center, not distance herself. She believes that when a worker isn’t engaged in conversation or singing, the “mind goes elsewhere, thinking of problems. But if people laugh and talk, time passes easier. You feel lighter.” This understanding, that of centering or grounding oneself by engaging with those around you, is something we hope to come back to in our discussion of the role of music in the agricultural workplace and how it can help workers to become more, not less productive.

[22] Hovey, Joseph and Seligman, Laura. "The Mental Health of Agricultural Workers." Agricultural Medicine: A Practical Guide. Ed. J. Lessenger. New York: Springer, 2006.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Ann Arbor: Yale University Press, 2008.

[25] Marx, Karl. "Estranged Labour." Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. 28-35. <www.marxists.org>.

[26] Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Ann Arbor: Yale University Press, 2008.

[27] Gioia, Ted. Work Songs. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Porter, Gerald. The English Occupational Work Song. Stockholm: Alqvist & Wiksell International, 1992.

[32] Lalama, Alexander. "Transnational Punk: The Growing Push for Global Change Through a Music-Based Subculture." LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research 3.1, Article 9 (2013).

[33] Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

[34] The Holy Quran. Trans. Mustafa Khattab. 2015.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37]  Scott, James C. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

[38]  Ibid.

[39] Gioia, Ted. Work Songs. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.