The Amazigh as the Internal Other in Myopia: Challenging State Management of Space, Exclusion and Dominance

Yahya Laayouni
Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: Sanaa Akroud’s individual dedication to centering her film Myopia (2020) on an Amazigh woman reflects a broader trend in Amazigh cinema that prioritizes indigenous women’s issues. Amazigh women have historically been considered the main guardians of Amazigh cultural heritage and a living archive of the traditional oral tales. One might argue that this role has extended to filmmaking and that Amazigh cinema has become a medium that serves as an alternative space where their contributions, both as directors and central characters, can project their experiences to reclaim their agency and preserve Amazigh stories through visual narrative. In my analysis of Myopia, I examine the agency of the main character, Fatem (Sanaa Akroud), particularly how her transition from a mountainous isolated space to an urban setting redefines her lived experience. Space, as Henri Lefebvre notes, is a social product that acts on the human body and delineates status and authority based on predetermined sociopolitical codes. The change of location in the film announces a change of the social codes which trigger a sense of alienation. The road movie narrative format of the film signals a shift in power positions and dominance, as Fatem moves from an isolated community to the city, while also revealing the socioeconomic disparities between the two spaces. For Fatem, the cityscape becomes a trap, where the periphery/center and other/self-binaries become more pronounced. I argue that in Myopia the alterity of the Amazigh women as “mountainous/rural” is constructed through an internal Orientalist gaze, where Fatem’s presence in the city signifies her non-belonging. However, the visual representation of Fatem portrays her agency as a form of resistance that dismantles the dominance of the center and uses the spatial transition as a site through which authority is exposed and contested.

Keywords: Amazigh cinema, Internal Orientalism, Amazigh agency, blad al-siba, Indigeneity.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, as state suppression of Amazigh voices and the marginalization of visual representations of Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) have eased in Morocco,[1] especially after the 2011 constitutional reforms, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of Amazigh films[2] funded by the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (CCM). Prior to this shift, as Sandra Carter explains, the CCM was not interested in supporting Amazigh cinematographic production because Imazighen constitute the majority of inhabitants of rural areas, which makes them unsuitable as a target audience since most movie theaters are located in cities, and because the state was enforcing an Arab national identity.[3] This institutional censorship and neglect, though not explicitly expressed, are still visible, and the fact that the CCM rejected Sanaa Akroud’s screenplay for her film Myopia, which centers its narrative on the struggle of an Amazigh female character,three times before she decided to independently produce the film is a clear indication of that. Akroud’s behind-the-scenes struggle mirrors a continuation of institutional silencing that many other filmmakers have experienced.[4] However, despite this institutional rejection, Akroud refused to give up and managed to make her film without the CCM support. Her determination to make this film is especially significant because she is a recognized star who has marked the Moroccan film industry as an actress and filmmaker. After its release abroad, Myopia garnered international visibility and won several awards at festivals like Vues d’Afrique in Canada.[5] It was this external pressure, combined with a promotional strategy that leveraged Akroud’s established star power and her notoriety for past roles like Aouisha Douiba,[6] that brought the film to Moroccan cinemas.

Akroud’s individual dedication to centering her film on an Amazigh woman reflects a broader trend in Amazigh cinema focusing on their issues. This cinematic focus coincides with “[Amazigh] women” increasingly becoming a genuine political category in the public sphere of power and authority.[7] Amazigh women have historically been associated with storytelling as the traditional keepers of oral tales;[8] one could argue that this role has extended to filmmaking and that Amazigh cinema is inherently a cinema of women. Their contribution both as filmmakers and/or central characters is quite significant. Thus, the censorship of Amazigh films is quintessentially a censorship of Amazigh women’s voices because cinema serves as an alternative space where they can project their experiences to increase their visibility and preserve Amazigh stories for future generations. In the body of films that exist of which more than half are women filmmakers, Amazigh female characters are neither passive nor submissive; instead, they take on leading roles, navigating, challenging, and sometimes subverting social and cultural expectations.  Therefore, bringing these assertive narratives to life tackles state erasure on two fronts: it not only exposes the state's neglect of Amazigh communities, but it also physically reclaims the cinematic space that institutional policies long tried to deny Amazigh filmmakers.

Even though the earliest successful video-films on Amazigh women started in the early 1990’s with Mohamed Mernich’s film Tigigilt (The Orphan) (1992) and Lahoucine Bizguaren film Tamghart n’Wurgh (Golden Woman) (1993), distribution issues limited their popularity among Amazigh-speakers. Starting in the year 2000, more films exploring Amazigh women’s experiences emerged such as Narjiss Nejjar's Dry Eyes (2003). The film is a testimony to the effects of state policy of exclusion, as it also highlights Amazigh women’s agency and resilience.[9] In The Sleeping Child (2004), Yasmine Kassari, exploits an old Amazigh myth to invoke yet another form of gendered exclusion that stems from male migration from Amazigh communities. Some migrant workers never return, leaving their wives to face an uncertain future in a narrative that Greta Bliss calls an “ethnographic fable.”[10] Lahcen Zinoun's Tattooed (Femmeécrite) (2011), a film inspired by Abdelkbir Khatibi’s novel La mémoire tatouée, is another example of a visual narrative with an anthropological perspective where the story of poet Mririda n’Ait Attiq,[11] an important singer from the Middle Atlas, is revived through the investigation of an anthropologist and the experience of a sex worker. The latest is Sofia Alaoui's Animalia (2023), a film that explores the resilience of an Amazigh woman who is left alone to face her destiny. It is a road movie that reimagines the Amazigh land as a space of meaning, belonging, and hardship.

In addition to feature films, there are also documentaries that speak to the realities of Amazigh women, among them Tarik El Idrissi's The Journey of Khadija (2017), Tala Hadid's House in the Fields (2017), and Mohamed Zeghou's The Tattooed (2023). All three documentaries place women at the center of their lenses. While TheJourney of Khadija challenges the patriarchal system through a narrative of return,[12]House in the Fields highlights young women’s voices and their futures, and The Tattooed is a celebration of a long tradition of tattooing the body, a practice that Amazigh women have kept for centuries.[13] These films and documentaries contribute to a larger discourse on Indigenous identity in cinema, challenging and contesting national narratives about Indigeneity and reclaiming ancestral heritage. In this regard, my definition of Amazigh cinema can be understood within the framework of the larger field of transnational indigenous cinematic studies, which moves beyond the limitations of national cinema to analyze Amazigh film as part of a global indigenous media movement. My definition prioritizes the presence of Amazigh cultural elements, such as native dialects and oral history, alongside stylistic aspects of the mise-en-scène that capture Imazighen’s lived experiences. This approach draws from Barry Barclay’s[14] general framework of Fourth/IndigenousCinema, in emphasizing an indigenous cinematic perspective. As such, Amazigh cinema is transnational in nature and aims to resist national narratives of homogenization.

Akroud's film Myopia (2020) fits this definition and offers a perspective that aligns with the films mentioned above, especially Dry Eyes and The Sleeping Child, but diverges in the narrative structure as well as in the sociopolitical optics it uses to reveal the state’s indifference and neglect towards Amazigh communities. In my analysis of the film, I examine the agency of the main character, Fatem (Sanaa Akroud), particularly how her transition from a mountainous to an urban setting redefines her lived experience within each space. Space, as Henri Lefebvre notes, is a social product that acts on the human body and defines individuals' status and authority based on specific sociopolitical codes.[15] The change of location in the film announces a change of the social codes which trigger a sense of alienation. The road movie narrative format of the film signals a shift in power positions and dominance, as Fatem moves from an isolated community to the city, while also revealing the disparities between the two spaces.

While the mountain living is characterized by the harshness of the landscape, as captured in long and medium long shots, it remains navigable for Fatem because it is her “lived space” and her body is part of it. However, the city space, even though it is flat and seemingly easy to navigate, causes Fatem to feel alienated because in the urban environment the body is managed and moves according to the codes of city planning. For Fatem, the cityscape becomes a trap, where the periphery/center and other/self binaries become more visible. I argue that in Myopia the alterity of the Amazigh women as a "mountainous/rural other" is constructed through an internal Orientalist gaze, where Fatem’s presence in the city signifies her non-belonging. Fatem gradually understands how the code system in the city works but rejects its dominating logic. The visual representation of Fatem frames her agency as a means of resistance that dismantles the center’s dominance and uses the spatial transition as a site through which authority is exposed and contested.

Myopia tells the story of a pregnant Amazigh woman who decides to repair the glasses for the Taleb/Sheikh[16] the only person in her village who can read and write. Thus, Fatem understands that the Taleb’s glasses are not only a source of vision but also a symbol of knowledge, and she would do anything to restore them, as her life and that of her community depend on them. Her decision comes as no other able male in her village wants to take on this responsibility, which subverts from the very beginning the gender roles dynamics. What Fatem thought would be a short trip to a nearby town becomes a long journey to Casablanca. With no prescription and no help, Fatem, undeterred and determined to continue the journey, endeavors to have the glasses repaired. As space shifts from mountainous/rural to urban, Fatem no longer belongs. The urban space feels alien and hostile to her, and Akroud’s camera captures these moments as Fatem tries to navigate it, only to find herself caught up in a protest. Next, she is in a police station where two officers interrogate her about her role in the uprising. Fatem explains that she only wants to repair the Sheikh’s glasses so he can read the letters she and others in the village receive from their loved ones. Fatem’s explanation is ignored, and the situation grows increasingly absurd as her explanation becomes a refrain repeated to the point of exhaustion. The repetition of the same words does not make her story any more truthful, but it turns it into a Kafkaesque loop that reflects the state’s absolute indifference. We, the viewers, know she is telling the truth, but the truth does not even matter to those listening to her because it does not fit their institutional logic. The situation escalates when Fatem’s water breaks, and she is then admitted to a hospital where she becomes the central focus of the police, media, and human rights advocates. At the end of the film, Fatem returns to her village with an empty frame sitting on a windowsill in a clear indication that those who lack vision are not the village’s Taleb but those in power.

Forms of Discursive Dominance and the Amazigh’s Resistance

Myopia uses a documentary-style filming technique, which enhances the realism of the narrative and implicates the audience in the lived experiences of the characters. Akroud right from the beginning of the film introduces the viewers to Fatem’s harsh living conditions. In the film’s opening scene, a close-up shot of a leaky ceiling shows water dropping; the camera then cuts to a wide shot to show the water falling on Fatem’s “bed.” She gets up, changes the bed’s position, puts a bucket to catch the water, and goes back to sleep. Fatem’s action suggests this happens often, and she is accustomed to it. The wide shot of the room also reveals a lack of basic living and sanitary conditions, especially considering her pregnancy. A few scenes later, a shaky camera follows Fatem in a mountainous area as she digs out shrubs and branches, which she piles and carries on her back. We hear her heavy breathing, with no dialogue, only her footsteps as she walks across rocky terrain surrounded by snow. This scene lasts four minutes with few cuts, where a subjective camera alternates between medium shots and full-body shots as it follows a visibly struggling pregnant woman, capturing her every movement as she climbs uphill. The chores continue after she returns home, encapsulating countless experiences of Amazigh women living conditions in the mountains and who continue to fight for recognition and opportunities for their children to have a better life.

This scene will resurface later in the film as a monologue when a journalist visits Fatem after she is admitted to the hospital and blames her for choosing to travel while pregnant and even accuses her of being “selfish” for not thinking about her baby. Fatem rejects the journalist’s moralizing discourse and instead reframes it through her daily survival conditions, addressing both the journalist and the viewers. In a medium close-up facing the camera, she adjusts her posture and with a steady voice, she begins narrating her daily life: 

We, mountaineers, get up in the early morning. I go and collect wood from under the snow. Then I go to another spot on the mountain to look for dry wood. I put the thorny wood into a pile, which I carry home on my own back. Then, I walk a long way to fetch water from the spring. We clean our grain and trade hens for wheat from the merchant. We clean and grind wheat. We bake and make bread. We do everything. Nothing frightens us. What can be frightening is being lost in the snow. Nobody knows if you are alive or dead. You will not get news from your husband or son… who will tell me if my husband sends me anything. I was frightened when the Sheikh’s glasses broke. I almost lost hope for a new life. Every morning when I wake up, I keep telling myself there is a better life there where my husband lives.

Fatem’s monologue is a testimony to the hardships she and other women in her village face daily and it also highlights their resourcefulness and resilience. What threatens these women’s strength, however, is fear, not of doing more work, as we see Fatem even while pregnant in her third trimester still works, but of disappearance, such as being lost in snow, cut off from news, suspended in the mountain between “life and death,” waiting for letters that may never arrive.  Later in the film, in a response to one of the interrogating officers’ questions, “How do you live?!” Fatem replies, “With the letters the Sheikh reads to us.” Even though the officer does not expect a response, as his question is meant as a rhetorical comment and reflects his disbelief vis-à-vis the living conditions Fatem describes, her spontaneous answer nonetheless re-centers the importance of the glasses as her Amazigh community’s only way to access information. What may seem trivial or insignificant to the officers is lifesaving to Fatem and her community. Women like Fatem remind themselves each morning that a better life exists “where their husbands live,” but even that hope is threatened if no one is there to read the letters.

From the beginning, the film emphasizes that Fatem’s struggle is both physical and existential. Her unplanned journey to the city becomes a quest for recognition, proof that she and her community matter as human beings. Fatem’s monologue, thus, is more than a recitation of an Amazigh woman’s daily struggle; it documents the experiences of entire communities and serves as an inscription of Amazigh oral history. Fatem’s act of speaking aligns well with Fatima Sadiqi’s assertions on the historicity of Amazigh women’s agency and their role in preserving Amazigh language and cultural heritage.[17] The monologue is a narration of communal knowledge that is on the verge of being erased. Fatem's words before the camera are confessions that reverberate across generations, transforming her monologue into a counter-archive that upends dominant narratives. For Imazighen, the counter-archive or what Guabli calls “other-archives” functions as a window that allows them to question the official records about their history. It provides an alternative record embodied in “texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited memories where stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the forgotten live in a ghostly state,”[18] and provides a corrective contesting version of what the official discourse permeates. The aim of the counter “other archives” is to fill the gaps, voice the silences, and expose the lies in the official monolithic discourse of the nation. This process is a constant struggle to preserve what the State tries to liquidate and counterbalance the source of historical hegemonic authority.

Her testimony is a lived experience, asserting that survival and hope depend not on physical endurance alone but on the collective consciousness and shared experiences of her community. In her monologue, she asserts this position as she alternates between first-person singular and plural pronouns to show the connection between the individual and the community. Through this linguistic oscillation, Fatem refuses to let her experience be fragmented or flattened. Instead, her shifting pronouns weaponize her testimony as a counter-narrative against state homogenizing logic. In doing so, she transforms an individual’s monologue into a collective voice that directly challenges and disrupts the official discourse. Fatem demonstrates that her individual identity exists within the framework of her community. The pronoun shift works as a rhetorical strategy which forces the center to hear a collective political claim rather than an isolated, personal grievance. She asserts that the reciprocity between the personal and communal is essential for Indigenous communities' survival. This reliance on collective memory over individual heroism is representative of FourthCinema as it explains that Fatem's identity and her survival are meaningless outside the context of her Indigeneity.

Fatem’s articulate narrative, thus, positions her as a subaltern not because she is voiceless, but because her speech lacks institutional representation that would have given her the power to be heard. In her seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”[19] Gayatri Spivak argues that the problem is often not whether the subaltern can speak, but whether their speech is legible and effective within dominant systems and whether it is authorized as knowledge and treated as actionable. This is intensified for the female subaltern who is positioned “more deeply in shadow.”[20] Fatem can express herself, but the routes from speech to recognition to action are foreclosed for her, which reflects exactly what Spivak describes. Akroud grants Fatem self-awareness and the ability to represent herself and her community. However, those in positions of power, such as police officers, journalists, and human rights activists, who are expected to listen and help, are incapable of doing anything. Their promises to help her are performative and function as a strategy to access, manipulate, and reframe her story. To borrow Judith Butler’s terms in a different context, [21] Fatem is recognizable only inside a restrictive “frame,” as a constitutive outsider and her story is accepted as consumable content but foreclosed as an authoritative political claim. Subsequently, the film exposes the premise that “giving voice” becomes a substitute for legitimacy and accuracy. Fatem can speak on camera, but her speech is mediated and fragmented for specific purposes. She is perceived as a source of content rather than as a speaking subject with agency.

The journalist exploits every piece of information Fatem mentions. Her later questions about religion are irrelevant to Fatem’s visit to the city but they are used by the journalist to sharpen the same framing mechanism to elicit certain answers from her. Because she works as a Jewish cemetery caretaker and encounters Western (Christian) travelers, the journalist sees this as an opportunity to press Fatem on her religion, Islam, and what she knows about Christianity and Judaism. She uses this method to create a sense of perplexity and reassert her dominance by emphasizing Fatem’s lack of “education.” When the journalist asks Fatem whose God these visitors speak about, Fatem responds, “How many Gods are there?” The journalist replies, “You see why it is important to have an education.” This is yet another attempt to reposition her as a naive informant rather than a thinking subject. This method of extractive questioning is reminiscent of a traditional colonial ethnographic technique, in which the “exotic other” was manipulated and objectified to satisfy colonial curiosities rather than to establish a genuine understanding.[22] In this role reversal, Fatem breaks the interviewer's script and reasserts her own agency. Akroud, once again, uses a FourthCinema technique to wrest control of the camera away from the “colonial ethnographic gaze,” and refuses to let Indigenous subjects be used as raw material.

Fatem refuses the role of being othered, which I will analyze further in the next section. She then asserts that spirituality and faith are not owned by degrees. She also exhibits a practical ethic of religious coexistence. Being Muslim while caring for a Jewish cemetery and synagogue, she understands belief as a lived experience that brings people of different faiths together. It is something felt, experienced, and interpreted through contact with nature and daily encounters. Fatem speaks with poise, reframes the premises, and exposes the journalist’s dominance as fragile. The power reversal reveals the journalist’s distorted perception while Fatem reasserts her position as a conscious subject. To understand the indifference of the journalist and those who claim to help Fatem, we must go to the beginning of the interview. The journalist shows Fatem the video of the protest that led to her arrest and how protesters were moving around her.Fatem asks, “why does no one want to help me?” The journalist remains silent. Fatem’s question does not apply to that instance alone, but it foreshadows what happens throughout the film. It emphasizes the fact that no one is interested in Fatem as a person nor in her story; all they care about is a reason to legitimize their protest. This reality materializes at the end of the film when she leaves the hospital and none of the protesters notices her departure as she is walking through the crowd unrecognized.

The film illustrates how visibility, when not accompanied by empowerment and concrete change, fails to address systemic neglect. In this regard, Myopia provides a strong critique of the idea that mediated or representational visibility equates to justice. To deepen this analysis, it is useful to apply Nancy Fraser’s notion that true justice requires both economic redistribution of wealth and resources and cultural recognition that guarantees human dignity and respect.[23] In the case of Fatem, neither redistribution nor recognition is achieved. Fatem receives attention from the media and human rights activists, but their attention is for marketing and ideological reasons; both abandon her later in the film. Fatem’s visibility does not guarantee an automatic gateway to becoming recognized as a subject to whom material responsibility is owed after decades of state marginalization.[24]

The mechanism of this failure is visually emphasized during her recorded interview with the journalist. Filming Fatem and asking her questions irrelevant to her trip shows that the journalist is collecting extractable testimony rather than engaging with what matters to Fatem. The journalist's “representation” of Fatem confines her to a narrative that evokes compassion and solidarity, but because the recording can be edited, it becomes a different narrative completely detached from Fatem’s control. This detachment is weaponized when the police come uninvited, wake up Fatem, in complete disrespect of her right to privacy, and accuse her of telling the journalist they have beaten her, something she insists she never said.

Through this confrontation, Fatem becomes a target of retaliation because her answers have been reconstructed to produce an emotional reaction without any political commitment or institutional recognition. In other words, the interview does not provide protection; it becomes a liability, since her words circulate through institutions that can reframe them as accusations, provocation or even as evidence to prove her guilt. The media manipulates her narrative and treats it as content, and the police weaponize that “content” against her. The film exposes how subaltern speech can become visible but never recognized as a claim that obligates accountability. The camera repackages her speech into a form that others can own, and that ownership is what later returns as punishment. To resist this form of nonrecognition, as Fraser puts it, Fatem's interruptions, counter-questions, and eventual return to her village empty-handed function as acts of defiance and a refusal of symbolic compensation. Fatem reminds the viewers that human dignity requires more than temporary visibility on a screen; it demands the concrete, material redistribution that true justice entails.

The film, however, insists that the distorted narrative of Fatem’s and her community’s story does not obscure the structural isolation of their village. At the beginning of the film, the viewers are introduced to a Jmâ’ath (community), a traditionally male dominated governing council, gathering to discuss the utility of the Taleb’s glasses and how to resolve the issue. In a claustrophobic space barely lit, a medium shot of women and men gather to discuss the matter, the camera then cuts to a tiny round table where the empty frame is placed. Though everyone shows concern, it is the women who took the lead to convince the men to repair the glasses and argue the importance of educating the youth. Including women in this gathering subverts gender roles and forces men to hear women’s voices, which continues when none of the men volunteered to travel to fix the glasses and Fatem took on that responsibility. The next morning, a woman volunteers to temporarily care for Fatem’s daughter while she is away. In addition to the inclusion of women, the mise-en-scene reveals the absence of basic infrastructure, mainly electricity. The gathering, though intense, shows a sense of shared responsibility which aligns with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's framework of Indigenous communal resilience[25] as we see the village collaborate through a practical ethic of shared survival. It is a community that speaks less and acts more, in complete contrast to the journalists, activists, and police, who are more interested in the political implications they can extract from Fatem’s story. Where the village practices a tangible form of material support, the urban actors, to return to Fraser, would engage only in performative politics, prioritizing their own ideological gain.[26]

While the village shows strength and perseverance, silence dominates most of their everyday interactions. This silence reflects a sense of loss more than a lack of ability to speak; it signals their proximity to death. Women die in childbirth, newborns die, the weather kills, and life is harsh. Here, the film visualizes Fraser’s argument that severe economic disadvantage is inextricably entwined with institutional nonrecognition. The opening establishing shot of the mountain overlooking the village makes it more than part of the landscape. It functions as a physical manifestation of state marginalization, a wall that buries the village beneath it, separating the villagers from services, clinics, and the very possibility of becoming visible. Because the state deems them unworthy of material redistribution, their physical isolation becomes fatal. Letters become a thin thread connecting them to the outside world, and for Fatem, the awaited letter is what brightens her days until her trip fails and, with it, her hope for a better life.

Myopia gestures to Amazigh citizenship politics. During Fatem’s stay in the city, the police treat her as an enemy, and the journalists and activists see themselves as culturally superior and treat her as a profitable case. The quest to fix the glasses, an object meant to correct vision, fails, turning the broken lens into a metaphor for a broader social and institutional myopia. The film narrative unveils the truth of a society that refuses to see Fatem as a person; since the beginning, she has been treated as a case. Here, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that the first encounter with the “Other” commands us to recognize their vulnerability and act on it.[27] Fatem’s decision to leave the city without notice becomes legible as an indictment of this failure of her interlocutors’ ethical obligation. It exposes the hypocrisy of the official national discourse that preaches inclusion while reproducing the very domination and exclusion that keep her life stuck between visibility and abandonment.[28]

Domination in Myopia is not only enacted through discursive narrative but also built into the management of space and the hierarchy of language. Lefebvre argues that:

Space has become for the state a political instrument of primary importance. The state uses space to ensure its control of places, its strict hierarchy, the homogeneity of the whole, and the segregation of the parts.[29]

To reinforce Lefebvre’s concept of space, James Scott further explicates the effect of city structure, “the city laid out according to a simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to administer and to police.” Both Lefebvre and Scott help us understand how authority relies on making both landscapes and subjects "legible" for the purposes of surveillance and administrative management.[30] Akroud visualizes this logic by turning the city space into an instrument of exclusion, repositioning Fatem from a competent subject in her village to a disoriented outsider/intruder in the city. The idea of intrusion is especially significant as Amazigh rural and mountainous areas in Morocco have historically been classified by the state as the land of dissent or blad al-siba and the land that falls under its control as blad al-makhzen, which I will discuss further in the next section. The contrast between mountainous/rural and urban space is striking. The first is steep and rugged, yet readable and manageable for Fatem. She moves through it with confidence because she knows its paths, rhythms, and codes. In contrast, the second is restrictive because it is not designed for the citizen's comfort, but for the state's legibility. When she arrives, she must ask for directions; her movements become hesitant and surveilled. A Dutch-angle shot renders her disorientation, with the city appearing slanted, unstable, and hostile to her. Before she even grasps what is going on, her trajectory quickly changes course, and the space becomes more restrictive. Her forced displacement from the street to the police station to the hospital suggests that urban space rejects her, and she can remain there only if confined to an enclosed space where she can be administratively categorized and managed.

This containment becomes visible in the hospital, where she is placed in a room that resembles a cell. Her mobility is controlled, her time is interrupted, and she "receives visitors" who care more for the information they can "extract" from her than for her well-being. The city denies her agency and presents her as an object to be observed, processed, and interrogated. In the city, she is trapped within a framed space, where her movements are calculated, and her presence is treated as a risk. The spatial domination that the city exerts on Fatem is reinforced by a linguistic “invasion,” which reproduces hierarchy through forced code switching.

To intensify this exclusion, the film delineates who dominates discourse and whose language dominates screen time. Morocco’s Amazigh dialects have historically been marginalized by state policy,[31] and Myopia shows how the dominance of Moroccan Darija outside the village forces Fatem to assimilate linguistically.[32]  This dynamic can be understood through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of "linguistic capital,"[33] whereby the state establishes a "legitimate language" and treats the inability to speak it as an inherent deficiency. In her village, Fatem is within her linguistic world and outside state control, speaking the language she is more comfortable with, but once her journey begins, she must switch codes to be understood. Because her native tongue lacks value in the urban "linguistic market," her speech is treated as a deficit. The linguistic erasure in Myopia alludes to vast regions of Morocco, where speaking Darija is not just a lingua franca but also a means of survival. The first instance of this forced shift occurs during Fatem’s first stop at a nearby village to have the glasses fixed. She addresses the clerk in her Amazigh dialect, and he immediately asks her to switch to Darija because he does not understand her. The residents of the town are majority Amazigh speakers, but to get service, they must adapt to the dominant language even if it is spoken by a minority. For Fatem, this forced switch signals that her identity must be translated into the dominant register to become "legible" to the center. In fact, for so long speaking the Amazigh dialects in majority urban Arabic-speaking settings was regarded as inferior “due to the low socioeconomic status associated with the Amazigh language.”[34] This process has contributed to a significant decrease in the number of Tamazight speakers due to other economic factors, as Hoffman notes, “Tamazight is certainly contracting…it has decreasing numbers of speakers as rural families emigrate to cities and as whole villages shift from Tamazight-dominant to Arabic-dominant, despite an increase in Morocco’s population.”[35]

This linguistic hierarchy extends beyond the choice of dialect to dictate how Fatem is permitted to participate in discourse. When the journalists and activists address Fatem, they deliberately simplify their speech. This is done not in order to aid comprehension because Fatem can understand them, but in order to keep their authorial position and frame her as uneducated. They treat Fatem as someone with a linguistic deficiency, as they attempt to put words in her mouth or trick her into validating their conclusions. The police weaponize this hierarchy further through what Bourdieu would term "symbolic violence,"[36] which in the film takes the form of a forced literacy test.  One of them hands her a piece of paper to read, and she glances at it but is unable to read it, something the police should have known considering Fatem’s trip is to fix the glasses for the only person who can read. They then use her illiteracy to humiliate her rather than recognize it as a direct symptom of the state's failure to educate communities in remote areas, “the communities with the highest concentration of Tamazight speakers in Morocco coincide with the lowest literacy levels.”[37] Since her arrival in the city, Fatem is denied permission to use her own dialect, and her speech is continually downgraded, converted into fragmented testimony, corrected, reframed, and stripped of its authenticity.The illiteracy among Amazigh women in Morocco remains high and the imposition of a two language choices Arabic and French further alienate Amazigh women from their culture because literacy has for so long, and still, is equated with Arabic and French, as Laghssais points out “Despite intentions to reduce illiteracy, this literacy program further erodes Amazigh women’s culture because it is taught in Arabic or French instead of their native language.”[38]

The Alterity of Exclusion and the Amazigh as a Disobedient Other 

Historically, Imazighen in Morocco have experienced varying degrees of marginalization that position them as the nation’s other. For so long, official and non-official discourse has framed the Amazigh language, culture, history, and people as peripheral, and sometimes even as a threat to national identity. In Myopia, Akroud positionsFatem as the other to show how these forms of othering operate. To legitimize her exclusion, Fatem is framed as a disobedient other.

I will use David Jansson’s concept of “internal orientalism” to examine the forms of disobedience that lead to the exclusion of Imazighen. Jansson defines the concept as a spatial discourse whereby a powerful center dominates a weaker region within the state by projecting negative stereotypes.[39] He argues that internal orientalist discourse portrays subordinate regions of the state in an unflattering light to produce an exalted national identity “with desirable characteristics.” Internal orientalism uses prejudice to create a spatial discourse that turns regional differences into a hierarchical structure.

People living in mountainous areas become legible to the center through accumulated stereotypes that describe them as backward, orderless, lacking sophistication, speaking an incomprehensive tongue, and through structural inequalities such as limited access to healthcare, education, and employment. These aspects are reflected in the film through Fatem’s interaction with the police, the journalist, and the activists. They also create a self-reinforcing cycle where poverty and neglect are interpreted as cultural deficiencies, not a government failure. As Jo Little[40] emphasizes, the study of rural othering requires attention to its political basis: "why are certain identities othered, who gains or benefits from such positioning, and who are those who are 'the same'?" Little underscores that otherness is never neutral; it establishes a hegemonic national narrative by naturalizing who gets to speak, interpret, and decide.

To understand how this dynamic plays out in the Moroccan context we have to investigate the division between blad al-Makhzen and blad al-siba. In precolonial Morocco, the blad al-Makhzen and blad al-siba divide described two distinct geographical spaces governed differently. While the former fell under the Sultan's rule, the latter, though recognizing the Sultan's spiritual legitimacy, rejected his authority and disobeyed his orders. Most of the regions that fell under blad al-siba were mountainous Amazigh communities. This divide was more than a territorial distinction; it envisioned a political way of “seeing and managing territory,” in which proximity to the center was associated with governability and distance from it with disorder and disobedience. In modern-day Morocco, though these labels have disappeared from official discourse, the pattern persists and continues to matter as a governing logic, as we see in Myopia. What persists is not the terminology but the practice of perceiving the Amazigh regions as a problem to be managed, either through securitization or through administrative exclusion and neglect.

Soon after Morocco’s independence, two major rebellions erupted: one in Tafilalet in 1957 and another in the Rif in 1958. These uprisings against the government’s neglect and subordination were met with emergency rule and military suppression under then-Crown Prince Hassan II, inaugurating decades of structural marginalization for both regions. This historical friction has continued into the twenty-first century through major mobilizations in Amazigh communities, notably the Imider protest known as Movement on the Road '96 (Amussu xf Ubrid n '96)[41] and the Rif Hirak movement. These recent events have reignited discourse surrounding the supposedly rebellious nature of Amazigh regions. These cases among many others demonstrate how the legacy of “the land of dissent” continues as a lived reality for Imazighen.[42]  This association persists not because Imazighen are inherently rebellious, but because the central government continuously marginalizes them while actively framing them as the disobedient other.

In Myopia, this historical divide materializes as a governing reflex during police interrogation. Before the questioning begins, a static shot of Fatem in a closed space alone behind frosted glass makes her silhouette appear foggy and blurred, suggesting she is a suspicious individual that must be surveilled. When the interrogation starts, the officers’ preconceived ideas about Fatem prevent them from believing her. Their positions embody a broader myopic social gaze that fails to see Fatem as trustful. Their mistrust is pushed further to exploit her pregnancy and turn it into evidence of deceit rather than a condition requiring care. They refuse to believe she traveled so far just to fix a pair of glasses and claim interpretive authority over her motives to incriminate her as a political transgressor. To intensify this sense of disobedience, in a later scene, after a “high official” visits Fatem, the police chief, in an attempt to calm his boss, mentions that Fatem's village is “peaceful and only women and elders live there.” The “high official” sarcastically repeats the word “peaceful” and adds: “Why is there all this commotion about this woman then?" His attitude reveals that Blad al-Siba still governs the state’s imagination. Earlier during his visit to Fatem, while she is centered in the frame, all the viewer sees of him is a close-up of his arm and hand, which acts as a symbolic representation of power, authority, and punishment. To stress this position, when he leaves, his body completely obstructs Fatem from view, visualizing how discursive domination translates into spatial erasure.

The perception of Imazighen as inherently disobedient pushed the state to enforce a second dimension of marginalization through what I call the alterity of exclusion. It is a repetitive process by which the other is purposefully kept absent from state records and restricted from using official channels to claim political, cultural, linguistic, or historical presence. This alterity of exclusion is normative and political; the otherness is actively enforced and maintained by institutions, violence, law, and discourse. It is not just that the other is different, but that they are deliberately kept different and prevented from crossing over as is the case with Fatem.

This systemic exclusion is characterized by a significant absence of representation. As Fatima Sadiqi notes, up until the early 2000s, Moroccan history textbooks excluded Amazigh history and culture,[43]  and the Amazigh language was absent from the school curriculum. When Ali Sidqi Azayko, an Amazigh activist and historian, wrote an article in 1981 questioning the Moroccan government’s exclusion of the Amazigh component, he was imprisoned for a year for raising such an issue.[44] In court cases, Amazigh-speaking individuals did not have access to interpreters in complete denial of their right to legal services and a fair legal process.[45]  In addition, the state enforced this exclusion at the most intimate level by banning Amazigh baby names for a long time. These forms of systemic exclusion deepened the alienation of Amazigh communities and categorized their language and culture as irrelevant to the formation of Moroccan identity. The aim has always been to fully Arabize the country, and it is no coincidence that the first conference on Arabization was organized in Morocco in 1961 in Rabat.[46]

The process of Arabization aimed to eradicate Amazigh history, language, and culture to enforce a singular Arab national identity, a marginalization evidenced in the writings of prominent Moroccan scholars such as Abed Al-Jabri and others, who called for the eradication of Tamazight.[47]  Under this state narrative, any non-Arab belonging was viewed as a threat to the Arabness of the Moroccan state and people, which enforced the institutional exclusion of Amazigh people and their history from school textbooks or in public discussions. What remained of Amazigh cultural identity was reduced to mere folkloric performances meant to entertain the local public and tourists. This linguistic and cultural colonialism has contributed to further ramification beyond the state or even regional borders. Morocco and North African countries or Tamazgha have been grouped with Middle Eastern countries and defined as Arab nations. This ideological labeling ‘infested’ political, academic discourse as well as all aspects of social life that undoing it has become an urgent necessity.

In Myopia, the dynamic of exclusion reaches its peak when, early in the film, a police officer asks Fatem for an ID card. She remains silent because she does not possess one; when he demands a marriage certificate, she explains that in her village, marriage is validated through social recognition and oral witnesses. A continuation of this scene happens when later the chief officer asks his subordinate about her proof of identity. When the subordinate says she does not have any, the chief exclaims, “How do I know if these people even exist?” Drawing on Fraser’s framework of social justice is very relevant for our understanding of the process of how the alterity of exclusion works in these interactions, which exemplify a state of "nonrecognition.” Fatem’s lack of ID is not her problem but she is blamed for not having one. To the state, the standard of legibility requires concrete proof, which isolated communities do not have and cannot easily access. Fatem and her community, according to this logic, do not exist and the central government ensures their nonrecognition to justify their neglect.

The promotion of an Arab identity in postcolonial Morocco was cultivated at the expense of obscuring Amazighité. The excuse the central government uses to ensure the “nonrecognition” of isolated Amazigh regions is highlighted towards the end of the film in a conversation between the chief officer and his subordinate where the entire conversation centers around the impossibility to access the mountainous space. As Henri Lefebvre notes,[48] space is not merely an empty backdrop, but “at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures,” meaning the state “call[s] for spaces... which they can then organize according to their specific requirements.” Because space is inherently tied to the “forces of production" and the “social division of labour,” the state's management of space is deeply economic. Since the government historically perceives these mountainous spaces as blad al-siba, it organizes them according to its requirement for marginalization, classifying them as non-profitable regions to justify its neglect. This deliberate postcolonial policy is a continuation of a colonial policy that classified part of Morocco as “useful” and others as “useless,” forcing the changing economic conditions of traditional Amazigh spaces. It is this targeted lack of economic opportunity and infrastructure that dictates the social division of labor, forcing men, women, and later entire families into urban labor migration. This practice drains the population and turns traditional communities into "ghost villages." Though it is applicable to other regions, it affects Amazigh-speaking communities the most because when the entire family moves, they do not just lose their land, but they also lose their dialects, cultural practices, and their communal life.

Representative of this politics of nonrecognition is the scene about the dead woman in a coffin. Amazigh women die in labor for lack of medical infrastructure. The tragic image of the coffin descending the mountain captures the deadly consequences of the state's alterity of exclusion. Fatem’s journey to the city has failed not because she is unconvincing, but because she is completely illegible to them. She is foreign to them; she is the other who is naïve but dangerous and unpredictable. This dynamic is highlighted in a scene where the activists discuss how to convince Fatem to sign a paper, which she refuses. Stepping outside, one of them explicitly remarks, “She comes from the mountains; she is not like us.” Fatem's refusal to assimilate is a clear indication of her awareness. Her refusal to be commodified by the media, her resistance to the police's symbolic violence, and her unacknowledged departure from the hospital serve as a powerful indictment of the systemic nonrecognition she faces. Her return to the village empty-handed but unbroken reflects her rejection of the performative visibility offered by the state and its representatives.

Conclusion

Amazigh cinema has gained significant momentum in the last ten years, becoming increasingly visible and recognized locally and internationally through film festivals and other venues. This presence has become essential, as its contribution to film as an art form and a mode of cultural representation is vital to social change. Myopia aligns with this effort by presenting a visual narrative that not only speaks to the Imazighen’s struggle but actively dismantles the power dynamics of mainstream discourse. As I have shown in my analysis, Akroud uses Fatem’s journey to expose how the Moroccan state manages the periphery through an alterity of exclusion, relying on spatial domination, linguistic hierarchy, and internal orientalism to keep Amazigh communities isolated and invisible.

Akroud, as a filmmaker and actress, proved that it is possible to make captivating films that center subjects on the margins who have long been neglected. Focusing on women’s issues and giving voice to the marginalized reflects the filmmaker’s profound sense of activism and commitment. While earlier breakthrough films like Narjiss Nejjar's Dry Eyes (2003) opened the door for Amazigh perspectives, Myopia and the other films mentioned earlier are a continuation in the same path. Their aim is to make "invisible" Amazigh communities voice their “anger” and resist cultural erasure and ideological dominance. In Myopia, Akroud forces the viewer to witness the role of the nation-state in manufacturing Imazighen’s marginalization and challenge the structural myopia that refuses to see them as legitimate subjects. 

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Footnotes

[1] This change could not have happened without the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement’s efforts since independence. For a comprehensive analysis of the political evolution of these movements, see Lahoucine Bouyaakoubi, Al Mas’ala Al Amazighia Fi Al Maghrib Wa Al Jazaa’ir [The Amazigh Question in Morocco and Algeria] (Agadir: Souss Impression Edition, 2019). On the role of memory in reclaiming this history, see Brahim El Guabli, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023).

[2] I should clarify here that ‘Amazigh film’ is not a category recognized by the CCM and benefit from a quota, that is not yet the case even though it was recommended to benefit from such privilige in a conference about Moroccan cinema organized by the ministry of communication in 2013, see page 23 of the White Book of Moroccan Cinema: https://cdr.fondationhiba.ma/wp-content/themes/fondation/pdf/file-10259425520000.pdf.

[3] Sandra G. Carter, What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study, 1956–2006 (Lexington Books, 2010), 20.

[4] It is worth noting that Amazigh filmmakers continue to experience marginalization even after the recent reforms. filmmakers such as Aksel Rifman and Mohamed Bouzaggou have been outspoken about the systemic underfunding of Amazigh cinema and the lack of indigenous representation at national cinematic events.

[5] The film was also screened at several film festivals such as the African Diaspora International Film Festival ADIFF-USA 2021, New York Forum of Amazigh film NYFAF 2022, and Festival du Film de Femmes de Salé 2022.

[6] Sanaa Akroud played the character of Aouisha Douiba in Fatima Boubkdi’ film Douiba in 2003.

[7] Fatima Sadiqi, Moroccan Feminist Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 186.

[8] Fatima Sadiqi, "The Role of Moroccan Women in Preserving Amazigh Language and Culture," Museum International 59, no. 4 (2007).

[9] Two articles have explored the film in more details: Said Chemlal, “Screening Femininity and Amazighness in Narjiss Nejjar’s Dry Eyes,” The Journal of North African Studies 24, no. 6 (2019) and Kezia Poole, “Renegotiating the Feminine in Narjiss Nejjar’s Dry Eyes,” in Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Cinema, ed. Lucy McNair and Yahya Laayouni (University of Regina Press, 2025).

[10] Greta Bliss, “An Ethnographic Fable: Yasmine Kassari’s L’enfant endormi,” in Hybrid Genres / L’Hybridité des genres, ed.  Pauline M. Morel and others (Brill, 2018).

[11] Though the film is not about Mririda, her story is remembered and celebrated through the main character who is also a sex-worker. For more on Mririda n’Ait Attiq see the translation of her poems by René Euloge, Mririda n’Ait Attik: Chants de la Tassaout (Idéale, 1986).

[12] Yahya Laayouni and Habiba Boumlik, "Indigeneity and Identity Transmission: Amazigh Cultural Expression through Film," in Muslims and Popular Culture, ed. Rashid Hussein and Kristian Petersen (Bloomsbury, 2023), 245-6.

[13] Amazigh women have always carried tattoos as a cultural marker. Even after the spread of Islam in their villages centuries ago, Amazigh women continued to ink their bodies, it was until the last forty or fifty years ago with the emergence of a more conservative interpretations of Islam that the practice ceased to exist. The women are made to feel guilty for something they have always celebrated as part of their identity. For more on the topic see: Cynthia J. Becker, Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity (University of Texas Press, 2006). Felix Leu, Loretta Leu, Berber Tattooing: In Morocco's Middle Atlas, ed. by Aia Leu, (Seedpress 2017) Hannah Mesouani, "Inked Bodies, Blank Pages; a Study of Amazigh Tattooing" (Master's thesis, Illinois State University, 2019), accessed via Illinois State University Library.

[14] Barry Barclay, Our Own Image: A Story of a Māori Filmmaker (Longman Paul, 1990). Barclay’s concept of Fourth Cinema is essential for situating Amazigh cinema not just as a sub-category of Moroccan national cinema, but as an Indigenous project that operates outside the "First," "Second," and "Third" cinema categories. This framework supports the claims of filmmakers like Aksel Rifman regarding the necessity of an autonomous Amazigh cinematic space. There are, however, some aspects of Fourth Cinema that I find limiting, such as the requirements that films must be made for Indigenous audiences and that the filmmaker must be Indigenous, in addition to issues of production and distribution.

[15] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1991).

[16] In the film the word ‘Taleb’ is used when the village community gathers and is common among Amazigh communities in the Atlas regions to refer to the mosque prayer leader. Fatem uses the word Sheikh to refer to the same person when she travels to the city because she probably knows they won’t understand the word ‘Taleb’ because in common Moroccan Darija the word ‘Taleb’ means student. I use them interchangeably in the article.

[17] Fatima Sadiqi, Moroccan Feminist Discourses (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[18] Brahim El Guabli, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023), 1.

[19] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press, 1988).

[20] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak? 287.

[21] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2009).

[22] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (Zed Books, 2012), 61.

[23] Nancy Fraser, "From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Postsocialist' Age," New Left Review, no. 212 (July/August 1995).

[24] For further discussion on Amazigh marginalization and political activism, see: Paul Silverstein and David Crawford, "Amazigh Activism and the Moroccan State," Middle East Report, no. 233 (Winter 2004); Moha Ennaji, "The Berber (Amazigh) Movement in Morocco: Local Activism, the State, and Transnationalism," in Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, ed. Moha Ennaji (Routledge, 2014); Fatima Sadiqi, "Berber and Language Politics in the Moroccan Educational System," in Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, ed. Moha Ennaji (Routledge, 2014), 81-91; and Brahim El Guabli, "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential," Tamazgha Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2023).

[25] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies” 97.

[26] Nancy Fraser, "From Redistribution to Recognition?

[27] Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1998).

[28] Examples of this hypocrisy can be seen during the earthquake that hit the Al Haouz area in 2023, which exposed the structural marginalization of the region populated by Amazigh communities and how they have been neglected by state policies. For more on this topic, see Brahim El Guabli's, Death is a Traitor: Living in the Morocco Earthquake from the US, The Markaz Review, 11 September 2023, https://themarkaz.org/death-is-a-traitor-living-the-morocco-earthquake-from-the-us/

[29] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1991), 188.

[30] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998) 55.

[31] Though selected Moroccan schools started teaching the Amazigh language in the early 2000s, it was not until 2011 that Tamazight became an official language. See: Fatima Sadiqi, “Berber and Language Politics in the Moroccan Educational System,” in Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, ed. Moha Ennaji (Routledge, 2014), 81-91; and Abdellah Idhssaine, “The Evolution of the Status and Teaching of Amazigh in Morocco: From Marginalization to Institutionalization,” Journal of Language Teaching 2, no. 12 (2022): 1-7

[32] Refers to Moroccan dialect that is influenced by Arabic, Amazigh dialects, French and in some regions Spanish.

[33] Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Harvard University Press, 1991), 18.

[34] Idhssaine, Abdellah. "Family language use among the southern Amazigh communities in Morocco: Between shift and maintenance." Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies 7, no. 2 (2024).163.

[35] Katherine E. Hoffman, "Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction: Gendered Variation in the Indigenous Margins of Morocco," Language & Communication 26, no. 2 (2006): 148.

[36] Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 140.

[37] Hoffman, "Berber Language Ideologies," 115.

[38] Bochra Laghssais and Irene Comins-Mingol, "Beyond Vulnerability and Adversities: Amazigh Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Morocco," Journal of Gender Studies 33, no. 3 (2024): 352.

[39] David R. Jansson, “Internal Orientalism in America: W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South and the Consolidation of American Nationalism,” Political Geography 22, no. 3 (March 2003): 295.

[40] Jo Little, “Otherness, Representation, and the Cultural Construction of Rurality,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 3 (September 1999): 438.

[41] This is the longest sit-in in Morocco's modern history, lasting from August 2011 to September 2019. Residents of the Amazigh commune of Imider occupied Mount Alebbanto protest the environmental and social impacts of Africa's most productive silver mine. Zakia Salime argues that the Movement on the Road ’96 (MOR96) the protest, characterized by embodied refusal and documented through various means, created a counter-archive challenging the official narrative of mining as development, Salime, Z. (2022), A Gendered Counter-archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco. Development and Change, 53: 1035-1058. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12726. Nadir Bouhmouch made a documentary called Amoussou (2019) chronicling this experience of resilience and defiance.

[42] The 1994 arrests of Tilili members and the 2007 Boumalne Dades protests represent two distinct phases of Amazigh resistance: the first centered on the right to use Tifinagh script, and the second on the right to territorial development and social services. For more details on political history and Amazigh movements, see Lahoucine Bouyaakoubi, Al Mas’ala Al Amazighia Fi Al Maghrib Wa Al Jazaa’ir (2019).

[43] Fatima Sadiqi, “The Role of Moroccan Women in Preserving Amazigh Language and Culture,” Museum International 55, no. 3‐4 (2003).

[44] For a detailed analysis of Ali Azayko, see chapter 1 in Brahim El Guabli, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023).

[45] It was not until recently that in partnership with the Ryal Institute of Amazigh Culture that now courts must provide interpreters for Amazigh-speakers. https://www.ircam.ma/ar/ircam-presse/إدماج-اللغة-الأمازيغية-في-منظومة-العدالة-محور-اتفاقية-تعاون-وشراكة-بين-وزارة-العدل-والمعهد-الملكي-للثقافة-الأمازيغية

[46] For more on this topic: https://www.habous.gov.ma/daouat-alhaq/item/2906

[47] Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Adawa’a a’ala moshkil atta’alim bil al Maghrib [Highlights on the problem of education in Morocco] (Dar Annashr al-Maghribia, 1973). 146.

[48] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 85.