The Questions of Identity, Hybridity and Colonialism In Morocco. - written by Oussama El Addouli, Graduate Researcher

Colonialism has much affected the people who were colonized economically, socially, politically, culturally, etc. As a result of colonization, colonizing nations implemented their own culture within their colonies. What is more is that the colonial authority requires that it has an essence that is natural and not allowed to be distorted or disturbed. Thus, the colonizer legitimizes his rules of recognition and his rejection of the native's culture. He claims that his culture would not be productive much as the mule if it is mixed or mingled with an eccentric culture. He argues and gives as an example that the mule is neither fertile nor productive because it is born out of two different kinds of animals- donkey and the female horse. He sees that his culture would not be productive if it is mingled with the indigenous one. This behaviour is no more than racism which could not lead to a cultural dominance, but to the fusion of the colonizer and the colonized societies' style of life. Within this fusion, the concept of hybridity emerges since the colonized and the colonizer affect each other. Hybridity, then, is the way two alien and different cultures are blended, mixed, mingled, and in which the individual assimilates an alien culture.
It is one of the terms employed widely in aspects of life. It is used to refer to the creation of transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. To use scientific terms, it is the cross-breeding of two species by grafting to form a third hybrid species. In post colonialism, the concept of hybridity is appropriated by the Indian critic Homi Bhabha from Michael Bakhtin, who refers to the hybrid utterance in which multiple or various different linguistic voices coexist.
Recently, the term hybridity has been mostly associated with Homi Bhabha, whose analysis of colonizer/ colonized relations marks the interdependent and mutual construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space he calls "third space of enunciation." Adopting the term hybridity, Bhabha aims to overcome what is called "the exoticism of cultural diversity", and goes beyond conceptualizing an international culture which is not based on the exoticism of multiculturalism.

Now considering colonialism and hybridity in Morocco and if for Bakhtin, hybridity is a mixture of two social languages, we can safely say that postcolonial history of Morocco- culture, politics, etc. might be considered hybrid within two different cultures- that of the colonizer and that of Morocco. This hybridity would be useful if there had been a feedback and exchange of cultural signs and practices from both sides( colonizer and colonized).
Unlikely, the colonizer was much eager to impose his culture, his lifestyle and, thus, a monolithic cultural hybridity. Moroccans find themselves somewhat forced to assimilate and to conform to the culture and traditions of the colonizer, who wants to gain strength not only through physical control, but also through mental and cultural control. To achieve this dominance, the colonizer imposed, especially his language on the people they colonized, forbidding native Moroccans to speak even their mother tongue. Many studies recount how students were denoted, humiliated, or even beaten for speaking their native languages in colonial schools. This fervent wish of the colonizer to impose his culture makes the history of the colonized Morocco become hybrid.
Not only in Morocco, it was nearly the same policy adopted by the colonizer since the British conquest of India. In this regard, Homi Bhabha says: "it is with the strange of hybrid history that I want to end this chapter- 'signs taken for wonders'. He ends this chapter with a short quotation from a missionary in India in May 1817 by quoting that "...still in India every one would gladly receive a Bible while in England, the public are hearing of so many Bibles distributed, they expect to hear soon of a correspondent number of conversion" (The Location of Culture, 122).2. We can say that the distribution of a lot of copies of the Bible/ colonizer's culture demonstrates the way in which the administration of the colonial power, together with its authority has fractured the indigenous culture and, thus, paved the way to the production of cultural hybridity. Bhabha asserts that "the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an imported change of perspective occurs..."(The Location of Culture, 112).
It is true that the colonizer's cultural dominance and sovereignty is fractured by this hybridity, a hybridity that subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures. For example, that process of denial and exclusion has cultivated intellectuals, who use the language of the colonizer to enrich the local culture and affect the cultures of reception. This disavowal upon which the dominant culture is premised is deconstructed by the very entry of the formerly excluded subject into the mainstream discourse. It is the moment in which the dominant culture is disrupted and contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self. Thus, we can safely say that hybridity has troubled the colonial authority, simultaneously; it has deepened the native's problems and makes him endure for decades its impact.
Being aware of hybridity, Moroccan intellectuals claim that they should restore and renovate their past, history, culture, language and, thus, their identity.
To achieve this, postcolonial writers have produced narratives that would deliver indigenous people from the status of subjects. It is within this aim to restore their identity, writers are able to "write back" against the literature of colonialism.
In response to the imposition of colonial language, for example, some writers and activists advocate a complete return to the use of Arabic language especially in administrative procedures.
Writing in Arabic or any indigenous language of postcolonial countries is a way not only of harkening back to traditions and identity, but also to acknowledging and communicating their presence. In deed, any postcolonial writer should be concerned with preserving the specifity of his individual group.
In fact, colonial education is far from giving people the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters as human beings. It makes them feel their inadequacies and their ability to do anything about the conditions of their lives.
Finally, regardless off all positive things that can be achieved by trying to restore their cultural identity, Moroccans are always split because of their ambivalent relationship to the dominant culture of imperialism. It is paradoxical indeed that though the colonizer is distant, it still inhabits Moroccan imagination through his culture. It inhabits the indigenous even in geographical sense via schools, language centres and departments of foreign languages all over Moroccan universities. From the political position, the colonizer is seen as the police man of his previous colony. Yet, the perception of the dominant way of life is ambivalent as it wavers between fascination- of cultural products- and rejection of political dominance. By and large, no matter how things might change, the indigenous will still live in a world inhabited by both the colonizer and the colonized, and their position will remain that of the other as long as hierarchies of ethnicity and culture prevail.

References
1- Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
2- Robert, Young J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race.
London: Routledge, 1995.
3- Ashcroft, Bill, et al., eds. Postcolonial Studies Reader. New York: Harper,
1993.
4- Wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Decolonizing the Mind.