How can the younger generation develop a critical mind? To help answer this question Jamila Hassoune took hundreds of books to remote communities in the High Atlas mountains of southern Morocco.
The Book Caravan she established in 2006 is about more than just books. It is a mobile cultural space for women and young people to express themselves through books and cinema and to learn through workshops in reading, writing and theatre. Hassoune has organised caravans based on the concept in Belgium, Italy and Bahrain.
“We have this tradition that young people are nothing,” Hassoune says. “Young people they are so, so intelligent. Why I continue to go there, is that they need only tools.”
The travelling caravan facilitates exchange between rural residents and authors, artists and journalists from urban Moroccan centres and abroad.
“It’s very important if we want to change the mentality,” she says. “It’s very difficult to reach them and it’s not easy for them to come to the city.
“Here in the Arab world we are talking about citizens but we don’t give to young students,” Hassoune says. “We have to give them something. We have to teach them if we want them to participate in the decisions of the country, in cultural decisions.”
Hassoune herself was raised in a conservative household, albeit one that was filled with books.
“Books changed my life,” she says. “I was from a conservative family and I was very lucky because we had books. We were not rich but we had books.”
Working in her family’s bookstore, she noticed that young people were too intimidated, and sometimes too poor, to come in.
“I spoke to all these students and discovered that they didn’t have any idea about books,” she says. “It’s like a fiction for them because they’re coming from the desert, outside the city.
If you travel to the desert, most of the time, you don’t find any bookstore and also there’s no libraries.
“For me it was necessary to put those books in the places where you can’t find them. So the book caravan, it was like a trip, a mobile cultural space.”
The caravan travels hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres and stays with a community for several days.
Hassoune also works with village associations and women’s non-government organisations on law, health and literacy to organise the visits.
“We choose a village or the people from a village choose us and for three days I work with a high school,” Hassoune says. “Most of the time those books were the first books in their library.
“When I go there it’s important for me to ignite something, to give them the possibility to discuss a subject about culture, about women, about rights.”
• Hear Jamila Hassoune talking about The Book Caravan in The Bookseller of Marrakech on Saturday at 12.45pm in The Tent
azacharias@thenational.ae
