Free the People, Free the Sea.
Reflections on the seas that connect us, and split us apart.
The last week has surfaced more memories of my mother’s homeland than I have faced in years. A number of events have collided, forcing me to face the land and sea that my family has called home for centuries.
When I went to Morocco in 2022, I was yearning to reconnect with my maternal family who I had been estranged from for almost fifteen years. Traveling to Morocco from the Bay Area was always so expensive; every year I echoed excuses to my family over whatsapp calls. I couldn’t afford to cover expenses for both a trip and rent, or take more than two weeks off work. And I wouldn’t be able to see even a fraction of our family in such a short time. When I finally returned, almost two decades had passed, and everyone and everything was different.
When I landed in Casablanca, en route to Tangier, I immediately felt a protective energy. I was hesitant to post photos or even take them. I had spent the previous months on the Pacific coast of Mexico, where colonial tourism had rocked small sleepy surf towns with development they could not sustain, or fight. I often heard non-locals use words like paradise and virgin to describe the beaches and sands I felt held by. It was jarring. When I would push back, and share how this same language was used by Spanish colonizers to justify genocide and land theft through Christiandom, I was laughed at and told I took things “too seriously.”
I left feeling deeply disturbed by the colonialism I had witnessed and inadvertently participated in, by virtue of my passport and USD income. A system that locals even felt protective of at times, as one of the only lucrative paths for economic security. A protectiveness that echoed in conversations I had with Moroccans on beaches in the North and South.
This photo was one of the few I actually took with my film camera during my time in Morocco that spring. It was taken from the beach town of Taghazout. Where recent years have seen a massive increase in tourism, accelerated by the Covid-19 Pandemic, mirroring what I witnessed in Mexico. Europeans and Americans, and even wealthy Moroccan nationals, seeking to escape the mundane reality of their 9-5 economically secure life, overwhelmed the coasts.
At the time, I did not share any photos of Morocco’s beaches because I did not want to add to the plethora of imagery fueling these fantasies. Fantasies that have proved costly to the small beach towns along the coast. Which have seen massive demolitions of indigenous communities, in favor of “approved” “permitted” resorts.
In January 2024, longtime residents of Imsouane (where my friend Jasmina and I surfed two years prior), were given 24 hour notice to evacuate their homes before they would be demolished. Soon, videos circulated online of bulldozers razing the colorful homes and businesses Imsouane is known for. The following month, bulldozers and security forces created the same fate for residents of Belyounech, five hundred miles north. During childhood trips to Morocco, my cousins and I swam in Belyounech on our way back from Tetouan.
My mother cultivated me with a love for the sea before I was even old enough to swim. My Mama was raised in Tangier, and spent her childhood swimming all over the coast. When she moved to California with my father, the Pacific Ocean was her reprieve. The waves and cliffs helped her ease into life here, and a few years later, learn to live with the grief of my father’s premature death.
Throughout my childhood, she would pile us into the minivan, and we would spend weekends driving down highway 1 looking for beaches to visit. The windy single lane turns reminded her of a childhood in Tangier. A childhood where beaches were open and public. And whether or not the sand and the sea belonged intrinsically to the people was a question that wasn’t even conceptualized. Her favorite childhood beaches are now shut off to the public, hidden behind tall villa walls or private resorts reserved for the upper class and passport privileged. Walls we drove by during the spring of ‘22, while she told me stories about the shores held captive behind them.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Tangier as the world witnessed Tangier Med, the commercial port a little less than an hour outside of the city, play a key role in transporting weapons after a Palestinian Youth Movement investigation led to Spain upholding its arms embargo and turning away a Maersk ship that was loaded in Denver, CO with US military weapons to be delivered to the zionist entity. A boat that then made its way across the sea to Morocco, where the people, women particularly, swarmed the streets of Tangier in protest.
Joining them were the kids who grew up in diaspora, who crossed from Tarifa by ferry and flooded the city with their Keffiyehs and Spanish Darija accents.
Tangier, where I watched young men from our Houma gather at the water, fantasizing and sometimes plotting their escape to Spain. The freedom of europe, and the economic opportunity its flags represent, waiting on the other side of the sea; visible from most rooftops and lookouts. Sometimes Spain appeared so close, I wondered if I had the stamina to swim across.
A proximity that reminds me of the 2008 film Salt of this Sea, by Annmarie Jacir, starring Suheir Hammad and Saleh Bakri. A film that depicts Palestinian stories I’ve read and listened to for years, stories of people in the West Bank who can see the ocean from some mountains near Ramallah, but can never reach the shores their grandparents swam in. Landlocked by the occupation wall and checkpoints enclosing them.
The Mediterranean's turquoise waters represent an escape that the upper class and educated of Morocco dismiss as ignorant and naive, as they point out the obvious danger of crossing the turbulent waters and the likelihood of being scooped up by Morocco’s navy before you could make it into international waters. But for young people, denied opportunities to build a life, and whose livelihood is taken by force, the situation is already desperate. The Hirak Rif Movement of 2017 was sparked by the killing of 31-year-old Mouhcine Fikri, who was crushed to death in a garbage truck in Al Hoceima in October 2016. Fikri was killed while attempting to retrieve the fish he caught that day, which police confiscated on the basis that he did not have a permit.
It is with this context that the pursuit of migration, regardless of the perils, becomes simple. As some of the young in Morocco say, “It’s either death or europe, there is no life for us here” or simply, “Lharga or death.”
I think about the dozens of people killed at the occupied lands of Ceuta and Melilla, where the Moroccan and Spanish border patrol colluded and committed a horrific massacre, killing 23 migrants, in 2022. Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish towns closed off to Moroccans without visas. Whose clocks jump an hour ahead to match EU times, signifying the 20ft high barbed wire border walls encircled with armed Guardia Civil towers, are not mere symbols of european ownership, but a reality fortified by its military.
Ceuta, which we drove past on our way back from a day trip to Tetouan. Where, during a pit stop at the beach to picnic and stretch, my family and I met three boys who admitted, after my cousin’s insistence, that they hadn’t eaten in days. The hunger in their eyes communicated more than the words they exchanged with my cousin, who reported back that they had hitch hiked from the outskirts of Casablanca, to get as far North and close to the Mediterranean as they could. They were watching the water too. Waiting for the tide to turn in their favor.
For the past few days, I have been dreaming of the beaches I learned to swim in during our first return home when I was five years old. The beaches where my cousin Ismail carried me on his back as I learned to jump off cliffs for the first time. I have been thinking of these waters a lot in the last year, seeing them reflected in the images of the beaches in Gaza. Where kids, seeking relief from over 400 days of nonstop massacres and displacement by the US-backed israeli occupation forces, are bombed while playing football, or drown while swimming out for the aid america taunts them with.
Beaches whose waves remind me of a childhood spent swimming with cousins in Tetouan. Where we would exit the water, famished, running to my Khalas to beg for a fresh sardine tagine and cold Fanta’s. Tagine’s that I remember when I try to soothe my homesickness by cooking, dicing tomatoes and onions to stew with sardine the way my aunties used to. Now, I peel back a can of sardines and soak the sauce right out of the pan with a piece of sourdough. Something I would be too embarrassed to make for my aunt.
But it is these very flavors that brought me to tears when I saw Medo Halimy make a similar stew on a gas stove from a tent in Gaza. A stew I would have called tagine had I not known where the video was recorded. Medo became beloved to many people around the world, who were moved by his tender spirit and commitment to planting life despite israel’s incessant airstrikes. Airstrikes that would kill Medo on August 29, 2024, on the very beach he loved.
The beach he documented and shared with the world, who watch while Gaza is obliterated by a european colonial force that has repeatedly asserted its desire to build resorts for settlers on the very sand so many Palestinians have died on.
Every day I wonder about the gamble of birth. How possible it feels that my cousins could have called Gaza’s beaches home instead of Tetouan.
There is something that ties people who call the sea home as much as the land. There is an ease to our accents, our sense of time, our detachment from capitalist “success.” Our desires in this dunya are anchored by something older. Something freer. Something more ancient and true than the systems we find ourselves in.
Yet the waters that should symbolize the ultimate freedom, are weaponized and turned against the people who love them. Are turned into a border that keeps them trapped. But whose salt and wind and waves they reach for, still.
Free the people. Free the sea.
Ameen 🤍 thank you for this.
Thank you for sharing ever more of who you are. Your words make me cry in joy, grief and anger - for you and for humanity. I continue to learn much from you and remain grateful for your amazing voice. ❤️