Instantaneous Poetic Compositions and the Amazigh Public Sphere

Amazigh poetry is not a private affair. It is, rather, a performative art that can only achieve its potential when composed and sung in the public sphere. In this sense, Amazigh poetry's value is cheapened if it fails to find its way into the space of performance where audiences can appreciate the force of the word and the beauty of the composition. Amazigh audiences interact with the poets and admire their ability to create lm‘na (wisdom, lasting truth, memorable words, and meaning) extemporaneously in the dialogical space of the performance arena.

The poet in Tamazight is called amarir or anddam (the one who composes or puts words in order).Footnote ¹² Ndm or tanddamt is the art of composing poems that are most often accompanied by singing and dancing in the famous musical art called ahwash, mostly practiced throughout the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas Amazigh areas.Footnote ¹³ Anddam is the master of the performance space called asays, where two or more poets challenge each other to entertain the audience and give them a satisfying experience of witnessing several master poets deftly manipulating words to leave their mark on the poetic scene for generations. In addition to being the art of composing and declaiming poetry instantaneously, tanddamt is most importantly the art of addressing significant cultural and sociopolitical questions in ways that widen the capacity of the public sphere to include or accommodate opinions that may not be initially welcome by conservative sections of society. Racism, and social hierarchies inherited from the time when slavery was still legal, in Ben Zayda's context was one of these topics that poets tackled in their poetic exchanges.Footnote ¹⁴

An anddam, the practitioner of tanddamt, has the capacity to create lm‘na (coded or metaphorized meaning) by rearranging words and infusing them with intense imagery.Footnote ¹⁵ Hence as creator of lm‘na, an anddam also has a supernatural force, allowing them to communicate with forces beyond the reach of ordinary people. Similar to the pre-Islamic Arab poets who declaimed the qasida, anddam is a “sha‘ir,” a person who is able to transcend the human and enter the mystical or mythological world of spirits.Footnote ¹⁶ The poet is therefore in contact with the world of prophecy and revelation, access to which is facilitated through agurram, or “saint,” who gives the gift of poetry to the seeker who becomes a poet.Footnote ¹⁷ This quality disposes him to be both worldly and otherworldly, capable of communicating with the realm of spirits.Footnote ¹⁸

Inddamn (plural of anddam) have a social mission in addition to their poetic prowess. Particularly in rural areas, as Moustaoui argues, the poet is “the newspaper, the book, the theater, and the cinema.”Footnote ¹⁹ Beyond entertaining audiences, an anddam also provides them with news and helps them gain a critical awareness of the world around them. Instead of a static function that pins them down only to singing and merrymaking, the poet in this illiterate Amazigh context is a conscience-builder who harnesses all the socio-cultural possibilities afforded to them by their privileged position in order to elevate their audiences’ critical ability to denounce injustice and tackle problems of importance in their community. Many generations of Amazigh poets have used asays to grapple with the exclusion of their language and culture from the public sphere, pointing to their own roles in making some reforms possible and in pushing toward a more inclusive program.Footnote ²⁰ The same way television works as an informative or pedagogical platform, asays is the anddam's domain to disseminate ideas and impress audiences who, in turn, further spread their message.

This is what gives the construction of lm‘na its transgenerational significance. As a mnemonic sphere, where ideas are transferred and transmitted through memorization, lm‘na gives the poem the power to carve out its life beyond the limitations of time. Lm‘na is awal iddirn (living speech) that never dies; it is an insight that survives the author, endowing them with a transgenerational afterlife. By aspiring to achieve lm‘na, the Amazigh poet really aspires to defeat death by ensuring that they will be remembered long after they are deceased. Lm‘na in this sense is the endeavor to capture an insight that would speak to humans through the infinite wisdom and the endless interpretive potential intrinsic to its very composition. Arabic and Amazigh speakers in Morocco certainly know the names of the poets Sidi Hammou Talb and Abdurrahman El Majdoub. Both men lived centuries ago, but their words cannot be more appropriate to our time. They managed to capture the essential aspects of human existence and its struggles in ways that speak to listeners beyond their own time.

Despite its importance, lm‘na is not the poet's end goal. The anddam is aware that the refined and multilayered word is “a tool for the expression of the people's pains and aspirations by expressing his own suffering and that of his own local society.”Footnote ²¹ The verbal masters of Tamazight engaged in sociopolitical and economic critique. Some of them, Mohamed Albensir Demsiri (1936–1989), even elicited the anger of the agents of the repressive Years of Lead (1956–1999) when they addressed the hardships of the structural adjustment crises that caused deep economic and social strife among the vulnerable. Albensir, one of the most gifted Amazigh poets and musicians, spent time in jail for his snide critique of the economic crises engendered by the structural adjustment in the 1980s.

This deep engagement with societal issues in their communities is not limited to just parochial concerns. In fact, many of the Amazigh poets address issues relevant to them as members of a larger humanity. Hence, the number of poems and songs that Imazighen have composed about the occupation of Palestine and the wars in Iraq is remarkable.Footnote ²² It is in this poetry that the Amazigh poet reveals and consecrates the indissoluble connections between Tamazight and Arabic and the deep connections that tie Tamazgha – the larger Amazigh homeland extending from the Canary Islands to the Siwa oasis in southwest Egypt – to the Arab world. Even if some conservative Amazigh intellectuals sustain a dream of disengagement from Arab issues by retrenching to isolationism, Amazigh poets empathize with victims of war and imperialism beyond Tamazgha's borders.

These local and universal dimensions of Amazigh poetic engagement are all the more significant due to the spaces in which they take place. As I argue in a forthcoming article, the performance arena is the space where they practice their art, mesmerize audiences, and outperform their opponents. The poets, both men and woman, are aware that whatever they say in asays is beyond mere entertainment.Footnote ²³ The stage is a platform for self-expression as well as a socially-sanctioned loudspeaker where things not ordinarily verbalized, like open discussion of racism, are permitted. The stage endows the poet with an unlimited and socially-sanctioned immunity against legal or moral judgments. Because the stage, both as a physical and mental space, eschews censorship, the poet is supposed to remove all inhibitions. In fact, the stage is inherently antithetical to censorship and self-censorship.Footnote ²⁴ This does not mean that it has no ethical constraints. Lm‘na requires the poet to be creative and avoid crude language, like calling his opponents donkey or mule, which usually elicits the audience's instant condemnation. However, the poet can say anything they want if they skillfully weave it into their poetic language to uncover issues that may go unnoticed in ordinary life.

Racism is one of the topics that the Amazigh poetic arena has unsilenced in confrontational ways. In fact, by paying attention to Tamazight, Imazighen, and their cultural production, it is clear that their mostly, albeit variably, egalitarian society has allowed them to confront the question of race beyond any shame and in ways that are reminiscent of democratic agoras in other places. Amazigh social memory is replete with names of families who owned black slaves, and some, like Abdessadek El Glaoui, went as far as to write about their own family's practice in this regard.Footnote ²⁵

Contextualizing Racism in Amazigh Poetics

African American historian Michael Gomez has written that race “refer[s] to the culturally orchestrated, socially sanctioned disaggregation and reformulation of the human specificities into broad, hierarchical categories reflecting purported respective levels of capacity, propensity, and beauty, and in ways often tethered to phenotypic expressing.”Footnote ²⁶ Before the evolution of this phenotypical hierarchization based on pseudoscientific research in the nineteenth century, cultural difference and national origins were the mechanisms by which racialization operated. However, racism and race-based policy as methods of “social control,” as historian Paul Lovejoy has asserted, were developed in the United States where “African slave owners established their own methods of domination.”Footnote ²⁷

Rather than simply creating categories for the sake of categories, racialization has real world effects on the racialized. Dominated or minoritized groups are forced to deal with the far-reaching effects of the codification of random traits that serve as a basis for discrimination. In the Amazigh-speaking Morocco specifically, discrimination against black Imazighen ranges from living in separate neighborhoods, being buried in separate cemeteries, and forsaking intermarriage, to treating racialized individuals by pejorative terms, such as asuqi, which combines blackness with the word suq (market) to refer to the association of blackness with slavery.Footnote ²⁸ In the Tashlhit variety of Tamazight, the first meaning of the word “amazigh” is the white free person, which is the opposite of asuqi. Imazighen, therefore, means white and noble people, which semantically stands in opposition to “isuqiyn” (plural of asuqi), who are black. The terms “isuqiyn Imazighen” or “Imazighen ungaln” or “imazighn ihrdn-n” (Black Imazighen) constitute what I have called an oxymoronic identity in which a word and its opposite are used to refer to the same identity.Footnote ²⁹ Amazigh intellectuals, like Boujamâa Hebaz who has been “disappeared” for his Amazigh activism since 1981, have complicated this oxymoronic identity by asserting their Amazighity despite their blackness.Footnote ³⁰ By using the word Amazigh to refer to all Amazigh speakers, including black Imazighen, the logical dissonance latent in the oxymoronic identity liberates the term from its racializing connotations. A black Amazigh saying “we Imazighen” literally says “we black white free people” in the same breath. In fact, Amazigh Cultural Movement's claiming of the adjective “amazigh” has a deracializing force beyond merely advocating for linguistic and cultural rights.

The Amazigh distinction between Imazighen and isuqiyn has real effects on the people. Depending on your place and position in a variegated “racial topography,” your skin color determines your place in a local social hierarchy. My mother's side of the family is all black and they lived in a predominantly black and brown village in the outskirts of the city of Ouarzazate. The fact that my mother's family's racial topography is predominantly brown meant that hierarchies were between people of the same color or those whose skin color were close to each other. Nevertheless, the first insult my mother received from people with fairer skin was tasuqiyt (“female black slave”). Theoretically, this is a community in which people's skin color is not easily distinguishable from each other, but still there is always space for some racial slur. Asuqi, abaqqar (black cow), and ismkh/ismg (slave), which describe different shades of blackness, are just some of the words one growing up hears in this environment.

Skin-color-based racialization is compounded by lineage, particularly in Amazigh areas where some people consider themselves both white and igurramn, or descendants of the prophet. Shurafa’ are then pitted against i‘amiyn (ordinary people), who most often are racialized. The combination of lineage and skin color complicate the way race works in an Amazigh context. A few years ago, a very successful white friend of mine from an i‘amiyn family made a marriage proposal to a girl from an igguramn family, but the girl's family rejected his proposal. Although race was not adduced as a factor because of his whiteness, the difference in lineage and whether it was permissible for i‘amiyn to marry tigurramin (women of sharifian descent) was referenced. However, race permeates this case, which shows how a group of people considers its color and social heritage purer, distinguished, and more valuable than any other relationships that can be forged by people. When people cannot intermarry or mingle socially because of their awareness of some invisible divide that makes them unequal, racism is at work. As elsewhere, racism in the Amazigh context has social, economic, territorial, and spatial dimensions that Ben Zayda's poetic experience helps us to critically elucidate.

Mbark Ben Zayda: Declaiming Anti-Racism in Tamazight

Amazigh communities have grappled with the double-edged sword of racism and racialization. Amazigh intellectuals and activists have denounced post-independence state racism against their language and culture for decades. One can find many statements in which the Amazigh Cultural Movement draw attention to the discriminatory and racist Arabization policies implemented by post-independence states to displace the indigenous language and culture of Tamazgha. This focus on the larger project of rehabilitating Amazigh linguistic and cultural rights has overshadowed the equally important cultural productions that form a critique of intra-Amazigh color-based racialization. An early attempt in this regard was presented at the first summer university of the al-jami‘iyya al-sayfiyya bi-agadir (The Agadir Summer University) in 1980, and its author was none other than poet and Amazigh activist Mohamed Moustaoui. Entitled Shi‘r al-amazighi al-munadil didda al-‘ubudiyya wa-al-istirqaq (“Amazigh Poetry Struggling against Slavery and Enslavement”), this study, which is a pioneering text and a prescient understanding of the importance of studying race in the Amazigh context, provides a then-novel reading of Mbark Ben Zayda's poetic resistance against racialization.Footnote ³¹ His poetic life has piqued scholars’ interest. As al-Munadil argues, Ben Zayda was “able to establish his poetic experience through the practice of social critique and rebellion against the negative, discriminatory perceptions and position that were predominant at his time.”Footnote ³²

Moustaoui demonstrates that Ben Zayda suffered from the exploitative condition under the authority of a white family. Born fourteen years after the French Protectorate (1912–1956) was imposed on Morocco, Ben Zayda was the child of Ms‘ud and Zayda, who were owned by two different slaving families. Accordingly, Ben Zayda was owned by the owner of his mother as per the laws of slave ownership at the time.Footnote ³³ It is also the reason he is called Ben Zayda (the son of Zayda), attributing him to his mother instead of his father. Moustaoui describes Ben Zayda's context:

As this passage underscores, systematic and color-based racism was directed at dark-skinned Moroccans. Ben Zayda, as an impoverished black person, faced social stigma, exploitation, and racist attitudes.

Ben Zayda was undefeated despite the social stigmatization directed at him. In fact, social stigma motivated him to free himself from the oppression of his origins. He achieved this liberation through what Amazigh scholar Brahim Oubella calls “the poetry of audacity and challenge.”Footnote ³⁵ Per Oubella, fearlessness is in and of itself part of poetic genius. The one who aspires to become an audacious poet can only achieve such a privilege through poetic “skill and competence.”Footnote ³⁶ Thus boldness, undauntedness and discursive bravery are intrinsic to the very fact of being a poet. Yet, a racialized person like Ben Zayda needed more courage to launch himself into the frying pan of societal debates that would elevate some and diminish others or delight one party while angering another. When addressing racism and racialization, the poet in particular could not act as if the topic at hand was ordinary; for it was not and will never be. It cut and still cuts through the very meaning of being human and accepting other people's humanity. Ben Zayda says that:

These two verses indicate his rejection of his society's inhumane attitude vis-à-vis blacks. When he says midden (“people”) do not like to see the status of iwis n usuqiy (“the child of the black”) to be elevated, he points to a generalized situation that dehumanized him. In the next line, he uses the opposite of “grandeur,” which “dlt” (humiliation/submissiveness). While people want reject his aspiration to greatness, they want him to remain submissive.

Poetry allowed Ben Zayda to achieve self-liberation through engagement with racism. He continuously attacked the “[founding] myth of enslavement and slavery.”Footnote ³⁸ However, the wound of enslavement did not vanish for Ben Zayda with the recovery of his freedom since his blackness was recurrently evoked by his poetic and social opponents to remind him of his lowly status. In one of his poems, he says:

As a result, Ben Zayda used his poetic craft to defend his skin color, which others attacked, as the “source of his pride and self-respect.”Footnote ⁴¹ This amour propre was what allowed Ben Zayda to fiercely confront anyone who attempted to diminish him no matter how socially or politically important they considered themselves. His humanity was the center, the beginning and the end, of his treatment of his opponents in the performance space. Anyone who disrespected him knew in advance that Ben Zayda was going to use the egalitarian forum of performance, where “there was no elitism or social class hierarchy,”Footnote ⁴² to redress the discrimination and reinforce self-respect.

Part of racism's dynamic was frontal attacks on the racialized individual's family. Ben Zayda's opponents, both socially and poetically, revealed their racism by targeting his family, which they did not even need to call former black slaves. The mere fact of referencing his family insinuated their racist ideas. In one of his poetic jousts with a poet named Hjoub, the latter declaims:

These sentences are meant to remind Ben Zayda of his social insignificance. They insult him with the poverty of his parents, and the fact that he relied on his mother to take care of him after the passing of his father. Ben Zayda, in his response, uses equally harsh terms to reclaim his family history:

Ben Zayda here explicitly owns family history and does not try to distance himself from it. By reasserting his pride in his lineage, Ben Zayda foiled this “bullet” and turned it into an empty shell that required the opponent to come up with something better and stronger as their public performance unfolded.

Racism blinds people to ethical considerations, pushing them to even commit acts that would be considered sacrilegious within their faith. We know that enslavers of all religions presented themselves as people of faith, though their religious traditions did not condone slavery. Enslaver in the American south still attended church and reconciled their faither with owning slaves. This is certainly also true for Islam, which theoretically created a framework for the manumission of slaves.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, slave owners managed to reconcile their ownership of other humans with their ritualistic practice of Islam. In post-independence Morocco, these dehumanizing acts could not continue due to the abolition of slavery upon French colonization of the country in 1912. Dehumanization, nonetheless, continued in the form of social stigma and repetitive reminders that black people occupied a category apart in predominantly racist communities. Here, for instance, Ben Zayda's own facial features are attacked by his former master during a performance:

Obviously, this is a way to call Ben Zayda ugly. Ben Zayda, in his response, took the higher moral ground by drawing attention to the sinful nature of his opponent's words:

Here Ben Zayda refuses to weaponize the opponent's father's physical disability in an insult, but he still reminds him of it. However, Ben Zayda chose to limit himself to what can be said and not transgress God's laws and his creation. The lesson was that the racist master committed an injurious act against God and not against Ben Zayda.

Ben Zayda's insurgency against racism stemmed from his acute awareness of his privileged social status as a poet. As I have already explained, poetry is not given to just anyone, Ben Zayda's opponents used his social status to question his poetic legitimacy. However, his response was one full of pride in declaiming that:

Obviously, Ben Zayda's gift is in composing and reciting poetry, which belongs to the form of work that did not require the hard manual labor that his former enslavers thought was more worthy of him. In fact, Ben Zayda made a living as a poet, and freed himself from hard labor, further fanning the hatred of the racists. Hence, in this poem, one addresses him:

As it is clear from this verse, awal in Tamazight means poetry, speech and authority. In the mind of his poetic opponent, Ben Zayda did not have any legitimacy to articulate anything in the public sphere because that right requires social status and authority, which he did not have as a former slave.

The poems from Ben Zayda's jousts indicate that classism and racism go hand in hand. Diminishing someone by social class feeds the larger project of racializing a category of people who can then be disempowered, delegitimized, and deprived of the moral and social authority to act as equals. Ben Zayda responds virulently to this classist and racist discourse in chanting:

The poet who attacked Ben Zayda based his attack on his own superior status. However, Ben Zayda returns the exchange in kind and reminds him that when he worked in Casablanca he served as a porter for Jews and Americans. It should be said here that the reference to both Jews and to Americans evokes World War II-era Morocco. Of course, Moroccan Jews were still in the country and mass immigration to Francophone countries (France and Canada) and what would become the State of Israel in 1948 had not yet occurred. This also points to the historical importance of Amazigh poetry as a source for understanding broader histories beyond Arabic and Francophone sources.

This recurrent interrogation of his social origins complicated Ben Zayda's ability to become an ordinary poet. His opponents adamantly refused to relinquish the card of racism, and his status as a black individual was weaponized anytime the opportunity arose to dehumanize him. As Moustaoui reports, a poet named El Hachimi insulted Ben Zayda by reminding him that he inherited nothing from his deceased father except for a drum and its sticks.Footnote ⁵¹ Again, Ben Zayda snatched the opportunity to demonstrate his poetic brilliance in ways that warned El Hachimi of what was coming if he did not behave in a way that respect him. Ben Zayda beautifully and threateningly declaims:

The language is powerful, and the imagery is brutal. Ben Zayda sees himself as a blazing fire, and El Hachmi as a person who is entirely soaked in a highly combustible substance. Gasoline and fire can only lead to the death of the person who is soaked in fuel. Again, the insult only incited Ben Zayda's incendiary poetic genius to destroy his opponent. He is the fire that could devour them discursively, poetically, and figuratively. Poetry afforded him the space where he could battle social and racial stigma and, more crucially, where he could prove that his skin color or slave origins made no difference in his defense of his humanity.

Racism is not merely a verbal speech act. It is also a palpable and brutal mistreatment of the racialized. The hierarchical world that the racists build in their minds translates itself in their language, but it is also oftentimes embodied in actions that humiliate or reduce the racialized individual or community to nothing. Moustaoui explains a verse in which Ben Zayda addresses a situation in which he was mistreated as a worker. Amazigh work traditions dictate that when you hire workers you must also provide them with meals as well as shelter, particularly if they are not from the same area. Taking into consideration the social change that happened in Amazigh communities in the last seventy years, one could only imagine that this was an even nobler act fifty years ago. However, Ben Zayda was asked to spend the night in the mosque instead of being invited to sleep in the house of the person whom he worked for. Ben Zayda makes sexual allusions in his rendering of this event:

It is very well possible that the person in this situation did not have enough rooms in his home. However, in this charged context, where humiliation breeds explosive responses, Ben Zayda made fun of the socially white father for fearing to have black children.

Nationalism is another area in which Ben Zayda surpassed his racist poetic opponents. Even before the question of nationalism became a source of prebends and hagiographic discourses in Morocco, Ben Zayda questioned his contemporaries’ allegations to have fought against French colonialism. Ben Zayda recorded in his poems that nationalism became fashionable after humble people like him paid the price for liberation during the decolonial period. Perceiving what was happening around him in this regard, Ben Zayd declaims:

The reader may wonder what difference it makes if one is a nationalist or not. In reality, it makes all the difference in the world. When some Moroccans were dying in defense of their country's independence, others were busy improving their business or political careers by collaborating with the French colonial system. However, when the country recovered its independence, these same collaborators claimed to have been engaged in the struggle for liberation. So, when Ben Zayda foregrounds his nationalist past, he really underscores how people like him were left out of history and from the post-independence narrative that made national liberation a matter of white upper-middle-class Moroccans from central Morocco. He explicitly renders this idea when he declaims that “nobody knows those who killed the beast” of colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Again, Ben Zayda snatched the power to tell the truth and redress the historical record in chanting that:

Only Ben Zayda could say the truth, and he spoke on behalf of those Moroccans, like him, who were left out of the nationalist narratives about Morocco's independence.

This close reading of Ben Zayda's poetry shows that race and racism operated on many levels in his surrounding social, cultural, and political context. As a descendent of slaves at the turn of the twentieth century, Ben Zayda was only seen by his opponents as someone destined to serve his masters. Yet Ben Zayda actively embraced his humble origins to upend the performative scene of his Amazigh community and positioned himself as one of the most impactful movers and shakers in the history of Amazigh poetry. Ben Zayda defied the condition of racialization and paved the way for a poetics of anti-racism in the Amazigh hinterland at a time when Moroccan society was still replete with the residues of the not-so-long-forbidden slavery. This Amazigh poetics of liberation has eluded academic studies that have examined race and racism in Morocco. This is due mainly to the fact that most scholars cannot speak or read Tamazight. This situation leaves a wealth of sources in this language unaccounted for in the study of racism and the various ways in which Imazighen contended with their racial legacies openly in the public sphere.