Of Chicks, Lice and Mackerel:Carnival and Transgression in a Spanish Enclave in Morocco

In 2006, a group of Ceutan Carnival performers were sued for their antiMuslim

lyrics, resulting in a convoluted trial that took six years to resolve. Ceuta is

a small, cosmopolitan Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Its

Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities are tenuously held together by

the City-led ideology of convivencia, that challenges mono-cultural models of Spanishness

in favour of the idea that that Ceuta’s ethno-religious groups live in harmony, all

being validly Spanish. This paper contends that the Ceutan Carnival does not fit functionalist

theories describing it as a stress-tap that reproduces power-relations by temporarily

allowing their transgression. The long-drawn-out trial, which incurred vicious

feuds, spiked tensions between Christians and Muslims, collapsed ‘convivencia’, and

challenged the authority of State institutions, suggests that the Ceutan Carnival is

an uncomfortable space, better understood if treated as a Foucaultian ‘mirror’, a

space where society appears to itself as dangerously anarchistic, making individuals

long for, not resist, State control.