We all laughed at Bouzebal memes on Facebook (all of us I mean, if you’re over 25). I remember he was everywhere on my feed. But now, more than ten years later, I couldn’t help but wonder: how did Bouzebal shape Moroccan memes?

“Bouzebal” is built on the Arabic word “zbel” garbage, everything meant to be thrown away with the prefix “bou”: literally, the garbage guy. Before any animation existed, the term already circulated in Moroccan urban slang to describe the pauper, the lowlife. The insult came long before anyone drew him.

The Moroccan meme scene at the time was mostly imported; Rage Comics, Trollface, Forever Alone, formats borrowed from elsewhere, rarely connected to local reality. Memes existed, but they didn’t speak Moroccan. And here’s the twist: Bouzebal’s face wasn’t Moroccan either. The original image was an American Rage comic face that found little success at home, migrated onto the Moroccan web, and got baptized “Bouzebal” by internet users themselves.

Then Mohamed Nassib entered the chat. An audiovisual graduate who taught himself animation online, Nassib created the Bouzebal Facebook page in August 2011, building it around a meme name that already existed and it was the community’s participatory content that first turned the character into a phenomenon. Then, he launched the first animated episode. Over 330,000 views within days, as if it filled a gap that had been waiting for a work like this. Nassib gave him a body, a voice and a neighborhood.

Because at its core, Bouzebal is a satirical but realistic portrait of a young man you can find in almost any Moroccan neighbourhood. A local anti-hero shaped by his environment. His power came from proximity. He put a usually invisible figure at the center of digital culture. By using Darija, social context, and a character rooted in everyday life, he became the first Moroccan figure truly designed to turn into a meme. Memes started carrying identity.

Through his contrast with Kilimini the educated, well-off, French-speaking, memes took another turn, exposing the class tensions embedded in Moroccan society, using humor as social commentary rather than pure entertainment. And it was always at Bouzebal’s expense. The joke needed him at the bottom. And the debate over what Bouzebal meant raged in real time. For some, the character condensed all the condescension directed at those who speak broken French, prefer raï to rap, tajine to filet mignon. For others, the series was a deliberate, hyperbolic mirror of Moroccan social reproduction an invitation to recognize class determinism in order to fight it.

More than just making people laugh, Bouzebal gave Moroccan memes a voice, a face, and a point of view. But the series did something the meme never did: it explained him. How everything around him predestined him to become that persona. He never got to choose his own name, the least the culture could do was ask why.

The other day I came across a TikTok featuring a scene from the Much Loved. The comments were full of praise, calling it iconic. I couldn’t help thinking about the firestorm this film triggered when it first came out. It made me ask: what did that movie say about us as a society then, and what does our reaction say about us today?

Directed and produced by Nabil Ayouch, Much Loved became a defining moment in our pop culture. As soon as the first promo snippets were released, people from all over the country, backed by the political party PJD, took to the streets demanding its ban, without even bothering to watch it and form a proper opinion.

And of course, the movie was banned nationwide, considered an attack on moral values and damaging to the image of women and Moroccan society.

But the most shocking part of this storm is how little it affected Nabil Ayouch’s career. He was criticised, sure. But the person who paid the price was Loubna Abidar, the actress portraying Noha, a Marrakech sex worker. The film was so raw, so unfiltered, that people couldn’t separate the actress from the role. And things only got worse when uncut scenes were leaked online, raw footage stripped of any narrative context, making the film look like provocation for provocation’s sake.

Ayouch made the film. Abidar wore it on her skin. She was insulted, mocked, the entire country turned on her. Then, in November 2015, she was physically attacked by three men in the streets of Casablanca. She fled to France shortly after. She never came back. A few months later, she was nominated for Best Actress at the César Awards the first Moroccan actress ever. The performance was never the problem. What it showed was.

“Deep down, they insult me because I am a free woman. And there is a part of the population in Morocco that is disturbed by free women, disturbed by homosexuals, disturbed by the desire for change.”

— Loubna Abidar, “Pourquoi je quitte le Maroc” (“Why I am leaving Morocco”), opinion piece published in Le Monde, November 2015.

And somewhere in the past decade, a cultural switch happened. A new generation took over the public debate a generation more open to the world. In 2024, 2.18 million Moroccans went to the cinema, up 26% from the year before, and 1.08 million of those tickets were for Moroccan films. This generation is filling movie theaters again. More exposed to art and to art that portrays Moroccans.

Younger generations finally saw Much Loved, (probably on illegal streaming) and judged it for what it says rather than for scenes that did nothing but show lives that exist. What was once polemic is now considered a great film. Iconic, even, judging by the TikTok edits.

And one question keeps coming back: how can we evolve as a society if we refuse to acknowledge parts of it? Isn’t that what art is made for? Putting us in someone else’s shoes, pointing at what we choose to ignore?