Haunting Prospects in Morocco: The Ghosts of Imider's Long Fight for Water Rights

Santarsiero, Rachel

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Haunting Prospects in Morocco: The Ghosts of Imider's Long Fight for Water Rights

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In what was dubbed “The Movement on the Road ‘96” (MOR96), residents in the southeastern Moroccan commune of Imider—a collection of seven villages—protested the intensifying depletion of groundwater and soil contamination by a nearby silver mine. From 2011 to 2019, the movement gained international news and media coverage and came to symbolize decades of environmental and indigenous Amazigh rights struggles. Since the movement’s official end in 2019, coverage of Imider has been limited. In this thesis, I attempt to fill this gap in coverage by investigating how Imider continues to struggle with the effects of silver mining in the aftermath of the MOR96. I argue that Imider’s rural women continue to uniquely embody the MOR96’s ideologies of environmental and indigenous rights through their relationship with the land, water, and the Tamazight language. Women exemplified this in their narratives, daily responsibilities, artistic expression, and ritualistic practices, and I demonstrate how this embodiment translates into an oblique resistance form more intimate than the movement’s normative resistance form. Through the theoretical lens of Avery Gordon’s haunting and Sara Ahmed’s use of affect theory, I show how Imider’s rural women are uniquely haunted by the MOR96 in ways that are distinct from Imider’s men and youth. I read their haunting experience as a continuation of oblique resistance which disrupts dominant narratives around the valorization of Amazigh identity, and, on a deeper level, the Kingdom of Morocco’s hegemonic narratives of its commitment to indigenous rights, gender parity, and environmentalism. Ultimately, the legacies of the MOR96 lives on within the lives of Imider’s rural women.

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