Articles by Rona Lorimer
Marocko åtalar rappare – fruktar ny ungdomsrevolt
När den marockanske rapparen Mehdi Black Wind greps anklagad för att ha förolämpat kungen såg många det som ännu ett angrepp på yttrandefriheten. Men åtalet handlar om mer än en rappare. Efter fjolårets Gen Z 212-protester har den marockanska monarkin trappat upp repressionen mot en ny generation regimkritiker – med hiphopen i skottlinjen.
In Morocco, Royalist Authorities Silence Critical Rap Lyrics
El Mahdi Lyoubi, aka Mehdi Black Wind, the Moroccan filmmaker and rapper, is currently being held in pretrial detention in Casablanca’s Oukacha prison, charged with defaming the king. His arrest has provoked international outrage, with multiple open letters signed by artists, filmmakers, and rappers, a viral social media campaign, and demonstrations in twelve cities calling for his immediate release.
France’s Trial of “Left-Wing Terrorists” Is a Farce
The case was quick to fall apart, and the prosecution’s closing arguments sounded more like a defense of the case’s legitimacy rather than an exposé of the culpability of the accused. On October 25, the two state prosecutors spoke for a total of over five hours, saying so much and so little. In reality, many of the defendants were born long after the historical facts implicitly leveled against them in Chambre’s fire-and-brimstone speech.
The Fictional Terrorist Conspiracy Being Tried in France Original
Activism / Seven are accused of belonging to a far-left cell, despite the paucity of evidence. Ad Policy A 220-kilogram blend of industrial-strength ammonium nitrate, sugar, and acetone peroxide explodes in the cherished Place de la Vendôme in central Paris. The bomb, assembled by a far-left terrorist cell, sets off hundreds of meters of destruction, felling the square’s famed column and damaging many of the surrounding government buildings, including the Ministry of Justice.
Emmanuel Macron’s Government Is Using Evictions as a Tool of Control Original
On August 28, the prefect’s office of the Val d’Oise département northwest of Paris took to social media to brag about the eviction of a family from social housing. The tweet concerned the family of a rioter who had been sentenced to twelve months in prison for looting an optician’s shop during June’s uprisings over the police killing of seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk.
Dreams Under Confinement
I started “Dreams Under Confinement”—a collective, international dream journal spanning the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic—a few days into the French lockdown, which I spent in Marseille. My social media feeds reflected panic—frenzied, haphazard organizing alongside variously futile proposals for connecting with others while being shut inside. We didn’t yet know what the pandemic would mean; it was hard to make out a horizon or a bigger picture.
Strike Diary
MARCH 2023 Issue Field Notes In November there were the murmurings of a movement around the question of the cost of living—“la vie chère”—in France. This coincided with a week of strikes by refinery workers, which stalled the country. The workers were striking for a wage increase in the face of high energy company profits. The leftwing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon had tried to create a movement around inflation.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
The French presidential elections brought what many were dreading, a standoff between what has long been called the “authoritarian liberalism” of Emmanuel Macron and the “avowed fascism” of Marine Le Pen.
French strikes in the state of exception
These notes, written between December 2019 and March 2020, chronicle the longest general strike in France’s history. I wrote them when I was working as a language assistant, teaching English to undergraduate students at the Sorbonne. The strike now seems like a long time ago, suspended and truncated. In the universities, as the pandemic was announced, classes and exams were moved online, and previously striking workers found themselves in a quandary about how best to support students.
Images Against Images
1. In November, police violently evicted a camp of migrants set up at Place de la République in Paris. We saw this through images online, which were the only way in which we could have witnessed such a thing; we were in lockdown and not in Paris. The following week, a black music producer called Michel Zecler, leaving his house, was set upon by several plain clothes policemen, who he didn’t realise were police.
The Rewilding of Dreams
I started a collective Google document where people could write down their dreams. This was partly inspired by a friend of mine, who used to run a Tumblr called “cheese dreams”. Cheese is thought to be a stimulant of either even sleep or crazy dreams because of the essential amino acid in milk called tryptophan. Dreamers would record the cheese they had eaten before sleeping, along with the dream, which they would send to my friend Sam.
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