Silence and Trauma: A Story of Water Privatization in Morocco Atlas Mountain

When I first visited Bensmim, on a hot summer day in 2018, this village of 3000 residents felt still, deeply silent, and uninviting. Bensmim was the battleground of a militarized intervention that ended a seven-year (2000-2007) protest movement against the privatization of its water springs by the French Company Euro Africane des Eaux. Through this resistance the village became an exceptional place for exploring the articulation of capital and affect at multiple scales, and across gendered experiences and sense of place. This paper analyzes silence as the most tangible “effect” (Malmström 2019) of this village encounter with resource grabs. I view silence as a locus of emotions, and an affective container that crystalizes the tensions, fears, and multifaceted disruptions of life in this village. I build an affective account of the ‘ain’s privatization through women’s narratives about state-embodied violence, restricted mobility, and disruption of social ties in a slipping-away place. Bensmim offers a unique configuration of macro and micro-scale resource grabbing, under the form of large public and private investments (a large dam, golf course, airport, and elite club,) small enterprises (cottages, private farms, and resorts), and micro-level bodily extraction, through labor. These developments enable us to understand the penetrating and multiplying effects of one privatization while offering exceptional access points for sensing the “intensity” (Massumi 1995) of life in the proximity of multiple enclosures. I narrate this story through the words of the men and the women who first opposed the project, before becoming entangled with it through state governance, violence, and job quests.