Chalk Dreams: The Use of Fantasy as a Method of Rethinking Life in Ali Zaoua

by Tiffany M Johnson

Set in the city of Casablanca, Morocco, Nabil Ayouch’s Moroccan film Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets (2000) drifts between reality and fantasy to depict the realistic experiences and animated dreams of four young street urchins, Ali, Kwita, Boubker, and Omar. Chalk drawings recur throughout the film as a physical representation of the boys’ dream to move beyond their deprived lives on the streets. Unable to achieve modernity through physical or monetary means, the street children use these chalk dreams to temporarily obtain the reality that they desire: a modern life with a house and a traditional family. The technique of blending dreams and reality allows the film to create a dialogue about the dichotomy in Morocco between wealth and poverty, modernity and tradition. It is only in the moments of fantasy that the boys are able to imagine a world beyond the streets in which they can become a part of the modern society while keeping their traditional values.

The film opens with images of chalk-drawings overlaid with the voice of Ali as he is being interviewed by a female reporter. He explains his outlandish dreams, goals, lifestyle, and past for both cameras – that of the interviewer and that of the film. When we finally see him, Ali is surrounded by a large group of boys, including his three companions. Ali is depicted as the clear leader of the group through his central location in the frame and the way the others hover over him. After a close-up of Ali’s face, the camera cuts to a scene with the four boys running and playing. Ali tells Kwita that he is going to leave them and go to his island, and then shows his companion his most prized possession – a compass that will guide him in a land with two suns. From this point on, the story drifts back and forth between reality and fantasy by intertwining realistic experiences with animation and dreams.

The chalk drawing at the beginning recurs and progresses throughout the film as a physical representation of Ali’s dream — to escape from his life on the streets to this mythical island with two suns. However, after a gang of boys kills Ali, his dream is transferred to his friends, whom he gave a hope of escape when he passed on his compass. The compass serves as a reminder of Ali’s dreams, and of the modern world that the boys cannot afford to enter. Unable to achieve modernity through physical or monetary means, the street children the chalk dreams to obtain the reality that they desire. If the two suns represent the two modes of life in Casablanca, Ali’s compass is the dreams that allow the children to navigate between them. The fantastic dreams serve as the link between the modern and traditional aspects of the children’s lives, thereby inspiring and moving them to work hard and actually fulfill those desires to unify the two sides of society and live happily.

Nabil Ayouch’s use of dreams as a way to cut the divide between the wealthy, modern society in Casablanca and the more traditional, poor one can be seen throughout Ali Zaoua. However, before it can create a bridge between the two modes of life, the film must first show the separation between the two within the city of Casablanca. After Ali’s death, his companions drop his body down into a hole in the ground – one in which we later find out is full of chalk drawings of Ali’s dream island. The film then fades to white and cuts to an image of the Casablanca Twin Center — two towers that each rise twenty-eight stories into the sky (Emporis). These towers are being shown from a helicopter shot that emphasizes the structures’ immense size in comparison to the rest of the city (12:30).

The towers are in the center of the frame, thus symbolically central to the city. In an attempt to place Kwita, Boubker, and Omar within the landscape of the city, the camera pans over the towers and surrounding metropolis to the sounds of Boubker singing an Arabic song. His song is a singular cry of remorse supposedly arising from a part of the city that isn’t even on the screen – you cannot see the dock where the boys have hidden Ali, just the concrete jungle that is Casablanca’s downtown. When the scene cuts, the camera is seemingly moving down from the aerial view to a closer shot within one of the city’s concrete buildings that is half destroyed (12:47). It pans down to the boys, two of whom are sharing a cigarette while the other sings his lament. If the boys are being presented as a part of the city at all, it is the decrepit ruins that they inhabit, not the well-built, modern architectural portion that was represented by the image of the two towers. The film is depicting a clear divide between the wealthy portion of the city that has modern architecture and the poor street-urchins who spend their days in old, run-down buildings.

The use of the two towers as a symbol of modernity is not a technique unique to Ali Zaoua. “Repeatedly visible as imposing landmarks in the backdrops of numerous Moroccan films … the Twin Towers and La Grande Mosquee are two monumental symbols that most effectively represent contemporary Morocco as a country caught between two opposing poles: one representing the modernist, capitalistic, secular future; the other the religious, archaic, obscure past” (Orlando, 76). While the film also shows La Grande Mosquee as a symbol of tradition – Boubker is even seen reading a prayer from a book with La Grande Mosquee drawn on it (52:08) – there is less of an emphasis on this aspect of tradition. The mosque is in the background of some scenes, and Kwita does visit a smaller mosque, but he is turned away because he does not have the money to bury Ali and is not “pure” enough to enter the grounds anyway (16:22-17:10).

It is ironic that Kwita is turned away from the mosque because the only reason the boys ever seek to be a part of this aspect of tradition is because of their lack of money. If they could afford to bury Ali without the mosque’s help, Kwita would never have turned to it as a resource and Boubker would not have had to read the prayer book for things to say at the funeral. The main reason that this traditional side of Moroccan life is brought up in Ali Zaoua is to show that though the boys are poor and unable to participate in modernity, they cannot turn to traditional institutes for help either. They want to aspire towards traditional Islamic familial goals – getting married and raising a family – but that is the extent of their “tradition.” They look to wealth and the tools of modernity as their only hope for that happy family life and Ali’s proper burial. The aspirations of these poor boys play out through the dream sequences of the film, in which a sailor meets a girl and starts a family on an island away from the stress of poverty.

Boubker’s sorrowful song in Ali Zaoua is one of many cries for help that Moroccan cinema has to confront. “Like many former colonized countries in the postcolonial era, Morocco seeks to revisit its past by reconstructing its history to reflect the voices that have been effaced by violence, human rights abuses, and oppressive regimes since the end of French occupation in 1956” (Orlando, 1). As a country with between 10,000 and 14,000 street children (Carter, 272), the nation is not lacking in underrepresented voices. In an effort to confront these voices, Ayouch’s film calls attention to “a social ill and some of the difficulties street children face, not least of which is a culture of violence amongst street children themselves” (Carter, 272). One method of answering this cry for help is to offer the children a fantasy – a dream of escaping their miserable lives on the street.

Author Valerie Orlando writes in her book Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society that “the ‘deregulation’ of narrative systems, melding the imaginary and real, has become a thematic staple of the Moroccan cinematic oeuvre” (Orlando, 6) in order to recreate the culture and identity lost to the many citizens who have suffered these abuses (Orlando, 5). “Moroccan authors and filmmakers, seeking to recapture the past through literature and film, waver between the mythical and the real in their efforts to depict the reality of their history. Constructing a world of images between the real and the surreal or unreal creates a fragmented narrative space, whether in text or film” (Orlando, 5). This filmic technique is manipulated in Ali Zaoua through the use of the animated chalk dreams that offer up modernity as a way of achieving traditional family values. The ability to own a boat, have the skills to operate it and know which direction to sail, and the capacity to buy or build a home are all modern ideas that the real boys of the film do not have access to. Kwita fantasizes about a life in which he can afford to learn or buy such things in order to attain a girlfriend or wife and the happiness that he assumes would come with actually living in the modern world. His dreams are based off of the fairy tale that Ali told him in the beginning of the film, but they provide for him a means of remaining happy and hopeful while being unable to actually attain many of these goals.

After Ali’s death his dream becomes the focus of the boys’ lives – it gives them a purpose and something to aspire towards. They attempt to give Ali a proper burial in hopes that it will fulfill his dream of sailing away to happiness. They believe that he will be the “prince of the island” in the sky if they can only make sure that he is buried in the right way (1:22:17). As a religious ceremony, the idea of performing a burial in hopes of sending the deceased to heaven is an important part of Islamic tradition (Abu Aisha). However, it is clear that the mosques do not want to help the boys, so they do the best they can in uniting the modern ideals of burial with their own traditional beliefs in prayers and rites.

After Ali’s death Omar begins to complain that perhaps the boys should not have left Dib’s group with him. Kwita reminds Omar that the reason Ali took them to the port and away from the dominant street gang was to fulfill his dream of embarking on a journey (14:17-14:30). It is the remembrance of a dream that keeps the boys strong when their life is falling to shambles. Kwita is determined to give Ali a worthy burial (thus trip to the afterlife) and says, “the whole world will cry! The whole city–even you!” (14:44) as he points at a clear sign of modernity – a billboard with an ad for facial cream. The intersection between people that can buy or sell such products and those boys who just want to have money to live creates anger in the boys. Throughout the movie, Kwita uses this attachment to Ali’s dream as a way of dealing with his anxiety towards modernity while struggling to give his friend a traditional ceremony. His own desires are relayed through a progression of animated chalk dreams, which provide an outlet for his emotions and a way of working through the conflicts between modernity and tradition, wealth and poverty.

The first time Kwita actively fantasizes about the island with two suns occurs directly after he returns to a school yard where he stole the wallet of a rich girl. She is wealthy and modern – she has a wallet full of money, attends school, and is later seen riding off in a car. She has access to the good things in life that as a street kid, Kwita does not. When the girl gets into the car, Kwita acts like he wants to talk to her but cannot bring himself to raise his voice enough or move closer (20:00). Behind where the girl was standing is a chalk drawing of a face. The head becomes a sailor on the water who rows until he becomes sweaty and tired. In the animation, the figure looks around and sees the sun. As he is looking up, the camera cuts to a vertical strip of real road, almost as if it were an eyeline match with the figure. The land is shown from above, placing it in the center of a body of water. The road presumably leads to the port, which the scene cuts to immediately after the camera pans down the stretch (20-21:23).

The chalk animation depicts Kwita’s struggles to interact with someone outside of his class. The girl is wealthy and modern, while he cannot even afford to attend school. The figure is rowing the boat seemingly without any direction, and gets tired from his struggles to attain something he cannot even navigate to. Just like the sailor, Kwita works hard to survive, but can only do so much without something to guide him on his journey. He needs help, but neither society nor the mosque will help him. When the chalk sailor looks up in exasperation and the camera changes back to reality, it is as if he is acknowledging where Kwita is from (down the road to the port) as the reason why he cannot continue on his journey. He needs some kind of guidance or assistance to move beyond his situation – the compass that Ali left the boys, or a companion to help him navigate. In the next animated sequence, the scene continues and the film reveals what the sailor needs to continue with his journey.

When we see the animated chalk sequence again, Kwita has been watching Boubker play soccer with other street boys (40:49). The camera cuts to the same billboard from the beginning of the film when Kwita said he was determined to bury Ali. We can assume that Kwita is looking at the billboard from the shot-reverse-shot sequence that Ayouch provides in this scene. In the boy’s perspective the billboard morphs from a real photograph of a woman into a chalk drawing of one. When the camera cuts back and forth between Kwita and the image, we see that the chalk woman smiles at him, making him smile back at the image.

This is one of the only times in the film that we see this typically morose character smile. In the next frame the billboard loses its boundaries and becomes a sketch of a woman sitting on a bench that is floating in some body of water. When Boubker scores a goal, his yell calls Kwita back to reality, but the boy seems happier from having fantasized the experience through the modern apparatus. It is as if the dream gave him the opportunity to interact with a woman despite his inability to do so in real life. Ali’s dream of sailing to an island has thus inspired Kwita to come up with his own dreams of escape. The boy pulls out a photograph that he stole from the school girl and tells the other boy sitting with him that the girl in the picture is his sweetheart, and that she saw him on TV. Kwita then says that the two of them are going to get married and have a house. From the fantasy based on Ali’s dream, Kwita is able to reflect on his own life and what he would like – a female companion and a house in which he can live with her.

The completion of the sequence from the last time he dreamed implies that the reason the sailor was unable to move forward was because he hadn’t yet met the girl that united traditional family values with modernity. Kwita’s dreams are somewhat materialistic and modern, and completely beyond his means, but they give him hope for his future and inspire him to do more with what he has. While he would like to make Ali’s funeral wonderful, he must also make his own life better through the unification of modern and traditional ideals.

The animated drawings pick up where they left off the next Kwita sees his school girl crush. The progression of the film’s plot follows that of the dreams – the boy begins to try to communicate with the modern girl as the sailor meets and courts his own lady friend. In the ‘real’ scene, Kwita sees a flower-stand and then the camera cuts to him watching his imagined sweetheart leave her school. She walks over to talk to her friend by a chalk drawing of some sunflowers. We see and hear Kwita having an imagined conversation with her in which he has supposedly given her those flowers and she is responding happily. It can be assumed that Kwita drew the flowers for the girl after seeing the flower stand on the street. He cannot afford real flowers and the drawing is as close as he can get to giving her a present. As the “conversation” continues, the girl asks Kwita about his occupation and where he lives. “I don’t live off anyone’s back… and I’ll have an occupation, like Ali” (1:09:30). He then explains that Ali wanted to be a sailor and that he needs to find his own calling. He fantasizes that he has given her a necklace as well and says, “‘you still have my necklace?’ ‘Yes, I wear it at night, when I go out with my girlfriends” (1:09: 26-1:09:45). As the girl drives away, ending the imagined conversation, Kwita yells out of desperation. “I’ll bury him. Then I’ll come back!”(1:10:00). He’s made an excuse for his inability to talk to the girl, but in reality Kwita is separated from what he desires by his lack of money to court someone in the modern society.

At night when the boys meet back up to discuss their progress in getting everything together for Ali’s funeral, Kwita talks to Omar and Boubker about what Ali is probably doing in heaven. They theorize that maybe he has a wife, since you can have anything you want in heaven (1:20:42). Omar says that when he goes to heaven, he’ll have lots of money and three cars. In the kids’ dreams, money and family are the central goals. Kwita even says Ali is probably hanging out on the ultimate sign of wealth – a yacht. The dreams –which blend traditional and modern values — allow the boys the ability to temporary achieve both types of goals in their minds. In a world where street children have no money, no family, and no friends outside of each other, these dreams are creating temporary moments of happiness and hope for the future. However, in their dreams the only way to ever achieve a modern lifestyle is to follow traditional religious beliefs that would get them into heaven after death.

The ideas about Ali’s life after death drift into a story about Ali on a boat in a storm (1:21:02). Even Omar participates in the temporary fantasy, saying that Ali dives under water with the rope between his teeth and pulls the boat forward. Ali is so idolized that in the dream he can move the boat without knowledge or money, but personal strength. He is beyond the restraints of the real world because of his own virtue. The camera once again uses shot-reverse-shot to cut back and forth between Kwita and what he is looking at –the sky. When it does so, the moon and stars develop into a chalk drawing from a normal still-frame image (1:22:34). A sailor made of chalk rows across the ocean-sky to his woman, who is waiting on the bench in the water as Kwita saw her earlier. She gets in the boat and they sail off together. The sailor’s dreams are achieved in the sky, just like the boys believe Ali’s are. The idea that everyone can achieve happiness – monetarily or romantically – after they die unites modernity and tradition within the dream to make Kwita smile again. He knows that as long as he remains faithful he will one day move beyond his means and actually get his dream life.

Ali Zaoua concludes with one final chalk dream that actually consumes the three boys and takes them with the sailor and his wife to the imagined island (1:32:30). Kwita, Boubker, and Omar have finally found a way to give Ali his proper burial, and as they sail off into the sun with his body the film morphs back into the animated chalk drawing from the previous sequences. When the drawing becomes a close up of the boat, the sailor (at this point he looks like Ali) and his lady friend are on the boat and there is an island with two suns in the distance. The sailor finally has everything he needs to continue with his journey – a means of directing the boat and a woman to fulfill his ideas of a traditional family. The camera cuts from the vessel to an animation of the island itself with a house on it. The two people walk out of the house hand in hand, and the woman is pregnant. The sailor picks a flower and gives it to his wife, as Kwita imaged doing for his school-girl crush. The dreams of becoming “prince of the island,” being able to court a lady with gifts, and living in a house have been achieved symbolically for all of the children in the film. The animation ends as it becomes the actual drawing in the cave that Ali’s body was hidden in, then pans out of the hole in the ground (1:33:21). The film concludes by returning to Ali’s interview from the beginning. The street boys have finally united modernity and tradition, wealth and poverty to achieve their own dreams because they allowed themselves to follow the dream that Ali left behind when he died.

In an interview Nabil Ayouch said that it was not the character of Ali that mattered, but what he represented to the other children in the film. “The goal was not to give him a physical embodiment, but to journey with the dream of this child, a dream which becomes that of his pals, of all children. It’s the mythical dimension of the character which interested me. As things play out, his status changes from that of a kid to that of a hero, then from a hero to a symbol. The film revolves around that” (Lowry). It is through this mythical dimension that the other children are able to look beyond their current situation as poor orphans to see what the world can offer them – whether modern or traditional in nature. The dreams create a bridge between the two sides of society depicted in Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets while providing moments of happiness and hope as the children struggle to deal with the effects of poverty in Casablanca.

References

Abu Aisha, B. (n.d.). Funeral Rites and Regulations in Islam. Retrieved fromhttp://www.missionislam.com/knowledge/funeral.htm

Carter, S. G. (2009).What Moroccan cinema? : A historical and critical study, 1956-2006. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Emporis, (n.d), Casablanca Twin Towers. Retrieved fromhttp://www.emporis.com/complex/casablanca-twin-towers-casablanca-morocco

Lowry, S., & Dembrow, M. (2001, March 26). Interview with Nabil Ayouch. Retrieved fromhttp://spot.pcc.edu/~mdembrow/alizaouainterview.htm

Orlando, V.K. (2011) Screening Morocco: Contemporary film in a changing society.Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

 
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