16 Stunning Images from Morocco's L'Boulevard 2019 Festival

For the Spring 2017 season, TheFashionSpot examined 299 shows and 8,832 model’s appearances across the New York, London, Paris, and Milan shows. They found that 74.6 percent of models cast were white and a staggeringly low 0.40 percent of all models cast were of Middle Eastern origin. While the entire industry scrambles to be more diverse, to cast more models from a deeper variety of ethnic backgrounds, body sizes, and gender identities, it seems that in the push for representation many communities have gone overlooked.

Hollywood doesn’t fare much better. Jack G. Shaheen’s 2001 book, Reel Bad Arabs, found that the majority of American films show Arabs and/or Muslims in a negative light. This is in part because of orientalism, a perspective that purposefully ignores the diversities between Middle Eastern countries, that was originally used by the French and English colonializers to perpetuate images of MENA countries as exotic, backward, and alien.

This also repeatedly conflates Arabness with being Muslim and Muslim with being Arab. Over 3x as many Muslims live in Asia as in the Middle East, and yet this false perception persists. Islamophobia has been prevalent in Hollywood since well before Trump ever set foot in the White House. However, a new generation of young, internet-connected, worldly, creative Moroccans are rising, creating their own narrative for themselves and for their country.

Luckily, no better single event showcases the rising alternative culture scene in Morocco than L'Boulevard, now entering its 20th year since being founded by Mohamed Merhari and Hicham Bahou in 1999. While originally conceived as a competition to showcase and find the best local Moroccan talent from three distinct musical categories: rap, heavy metal, and pan-African/fusion, it is now more than a cultural festival. There is also a full-featured studio for all local musicians to use, support for local street artists who paint murals around the city, a radio show, a live stream, and countless other resources to help support and incubate local, regional, alternative talent and culture.

This specific iteration of Boulevard finds Morocco at a crossroads, not only in terms of a younger generation growing up with full access to the internet and social media for the first time but also at a unique intersection of questions of Moroccan identity. Scattered throughout North Africa but with the highest concentration in Morocco, roughly 60 percent of Morocco is "Berber" — an ethnic group that have inhabited the region for thousands of years. They represent a distinctly African component of Moroccan culture, whose struggle for recognition roughly equates to that of Native Americans in the US. The term "Berber" itself is now rightfully acknowledged as a derisory, catch-all term for many different groups across North Africa — it originally came from the Greek barbaros or "barbarian" — they now prefer the term Amazigh, which means "free people" in the Tamazight spoken language.

The Amazigh dialect Tamazight and written language of Tifinagh were only officially recognized by the Moroccan government in 2011, but further struggles still remain, such as lifting the ban on Amazigh names, and official recognition of the Amazigh New Year as a national holiday in Morocco. The complex, multi-layered identity of 2019 Morocco, as it slowly accepts and realizes the distinctly African components of its identity via Amazigh roots — after centuries of repression, scorn, and racism — is fully on display at this year's Boulevard. Teens joyously mosh and throw up metal horns while brandishing the colorful Amazigh flag. Hicham Bahou, himself of Amazigh origins, proudly points out to me how much the official artwork for this year's L'Boulevard utilizes the Amazigh written language— and thus stresses the fundamentally African nature of Moroccan culture.

And so, here are the images of L'Boulevard 2019, showcasing a Moroccan identity in the process of remaking, decolonizing, and re-embracing itself fully and truly.