«Faisons de nos coeurs le jardinet du dernier cerisier»: Rhetorics of Development, Cultural Fractures, and Narratives of Crisis in Sefrou

Abstract

This article attempts to offer the reader a first restitution of the elaboration of specific narratives of the crisis and the contested attempts to (re)imagine the future in Sefrou that occurred following the prolonged suspension of the city’s main public event, the Festival des Cerises, inaugurated in 1920 and inscribed on the ICH List since 2012, by framing these dynamics within the delicate processes of urban redistribution of development designs defined by the Moroccan state. In Morocco, cultural festivalisation gives rise to a series of articulated processes of (re)invention of national history, memory and culture and seems to act like a ‘politics of hope’ operating through the transfiguration of urban spaces, which take on the appearance of ‘spaces of hope’ in which the ritual of intercultural and interreligious coexistence is celebrated. Moroccan urban festivals thus prove to be complex spaces of reconfiguration of State-city relations, in which the socialisation of certain representations (meta-ideology and infra-ideologies) of development takes place. We examine here the specific case of Sefrou, tracing the transformations of urban morphology, demographic profile and investigating the multiple links between urban identity and festival identity. From this analysis emerges the presence of multiple cultural fractures, which serve as devices for the articulation of a process of democratisation of cultural memory, which is expressed through the elaboration of counter-discourses that give rise to alternative ways of understanding and interpreting the course of events.