With Love, from Your Sister

In 2019 a friend in Rabat showed me a video of Houda Abouz, who raps under the stage name Khtek. I started following her career, first as a fan and later as a researcher. By 2020 she had performed in several independent music festivals throughout Morocco, more than doubled her social media following, and collaborated with several monumental rappers like Stormy, Tagne, ElGrandeToto, and Don Bigg. The year 2020 marked the release of four singles, and she was named one of the hundred most influential women in the world by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC 2020). Her first official single, “KickOff,” has 2.1 million views on YouTube.In her own words, Khtek’s bass-heavy, trap-influenced music highlights “things that really matter to me, which are mental health, women’s rights, the situation I live in . . . [and] things that I see in myself and my society” (Edu 2023). Like prior female rappers, from the beginning of her career Khtek has made her identity as a woman relevant. She frequently discusses the gendered barriers to success for female rappers, who still make up a very small proportion of the Moroccan rap industry. For example, she told Vogue Arabia in 2022 that even after collaborating with many popular male rappers who “have never put [her] down,” she receives “sexist and reductive comments” from their fans and critics on a regular basis (Bougrine 2022). Khtek understands her gender identity and career in a complicated state of precarity, emphasizing that despite experiencing hardship, she finds “joy” in her work and enjoys collaborating with her peers regardless of their gender. Instead of naming specific elements of today’s hip-hop industry in Morocco as points of contention, she remarks that “it’s not about being a female artist, it’s about being a woman . . . always a subject of discussion and criticism” both in art and in everyday life (Bougrine 2022). This experience highlights womanhood as an element of identity that simultaneously permeates both art and everyday life. The two cannot be separated easily, and Khtek’s career is wrought with a wide range of positive and negative experiences that both affect and are affected by her day-to-day life. Of course, this phenomenon is not unique to Morocco or even the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Khtek’s views reflect the global emergence of women as prominent creators in various artistic locales (El Nossery 2023; LeVine 2022).Like Khtek, many activists and artists across Morocco and the SWANA region use art to conceptualize creative and intellectual goals for what Nevine El Nossery (2023: 5) calls a women-led “parallel artistic revolution” that has emerged following the Arab Spring’s relative successes and failures. Simultaneously, in Moroccan rap, there has been a movement toward increasingly mature themes and crude topics, which has partly replaced the discussions of social issues, public or political engagement, and Muslim virtuosity that were characteristic of the genre through the Arab Spring (Moreno Almeida 2017).What makes Khtek unique, then, is her ability to deftly incorporate the contemporary landscape of Moroccan hip-hop music into a multisited, collectively informed expression of gender that has emerged across the region in recent years. Her persona is characterized by music full of explicit content, and she employs that obscenity to directly engage with questions of gender (as opposed to more common topics like sex and drugs). For example, most Moroccans use khtek, which is Darija for “your sister,” as an expletive. In choosing the word as her stage name, Khtek says she “appropriated it precisely to show that it is not an insult—while telling people who use it in a pejorative way that I, too, am their sister” (Zine 2020). She frequently compares herself to male rappers with lines like “I write better than you, though you think I’m just a girl” and “We are ladies in the country of the dick” (Arab Weekly2020). “Even if I am scarred, I can handle any problem,” she raps of overcoming the challenges of working within an industry with a harsh, largely male fan base. Khtek’s work is characterized by her lyrics’ transparent, profane, and accusatory tone. This synthesis of socially conscious and culturally crude attitudes integrates the push toward disorderly profanity with a comparable push toward gender equity.Importantly, though, Khtek does not consider her views on women in the rap industry to be “political.” She does not focus on reform within the state in her work or public statements, noting clearly that she does not have a political “agenda” in her music (Arab Weekly2020). Rather, she has said that her goals are to empower women “of the street” and to boost the representation of women in “deep Morocco,” the alternative spaces where rappers produce, perform, and distribute their music beyond the formal mechanisms built by the state (Arab Weekly2020). She cares more about her daily experiences, her art, and her success, all of which operate largely out of bounds of the state. Still, though Khtek doesn’t acknowledge typical Moroccan political entities (i.e., the Makhzen/political elite), her music should be understood as revolutionary in nature.Female rappers like Khtek think beyond the social stratification by which the Moroccan rap industry was historically organized by the Moroccan state and reinforced by cultural norms. This resistance is not revolution against the state; rather, it is revolution via engagement with one’s peers and the public—the “parallel revolution” understood by El Nossery (2023: 5) as an opportunity to create new discursive spaces. Here the behaviors and actions of the Moroccan state are not relevant in the eyes of the collective of women artists orienting toward personal, local, and transnational spheres of influence. These are the subversive venues by which women ideate social and political change, however they delineate them. This alternative pathway to agency undermines the political centrality of the state and redefines the revolutionary as something harder to explain than a state-centered power struggle.Like much of the existing scholarship on hip-hop in the SWANA region, I agree that Moroccan hip-hop is revolutionary (see Aidi 2014; El Nossery 2023; LeVine 2022; Moreno Almeida 2017). But to me, this idea has little to do with the proclivity of rappers to inspire dissidence in unilateral political movements led by men. Rather, Khtek’s most revolutionary quality is her ability to creatively work beyond the historical, cultural, and political hegemonies that have consistently failed to encapsulate the wholeness of her personhood. The power of female rappers to reclaim, rework, and renegotiate complicated issues embodies their ability to mediate between the intricacies of Moroccan gender and identity. Today rappers like Khtek represent Arabic-language music and Moroccan culture in meaningful ways, both in and outside Morocco. We are moving toward a future characterized by the greater inclusion and genuine affirmation of female rappers across the globe—not just as singular anomalies but as an abundance of interlocutors included in all levels of production, consumption, and performance. These artists create new forms of belonging, dissonance, or simply good music.