Scripting Sounds and Sounding Scripts

Building from the rhymed prose register, chapter four analyzes the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Instead of foregrounding the aural/spoken soundscape or the visual/graphic linguascape, I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects, everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. Scholars have written about Arabic soundscapes, the acoustic environments, listening practices, and ritual sounding in which Arabic shapes public discourse and Muslim subjects. Others have focused on the emergence of Arabic dialect writing movements as expressions of political movements, local advertising campaigns, and youth-driven social change movements. Both the soundscape and darīja writing literatures hint at the multisensory channel practices and ideologies mobilized to make Moroccan persons, and they include laments about modality failures that motivated writing changes in the last decade. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan national identity, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms (billboards, websites, and mobile apps), but not others (books and newsprint). The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of making Moroccans in Fez.