Avuncular American

Tangier: Guides and Gateways

Cover by Robert McDonald, Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

The following is a guest post by Emma Chubb, who made a presentation on her subject to a group of American, European, and Moroccan researchers and interested members of the public at TALIM on June 17.  Emma Chubb is a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois USA) and is a 2013-14 American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) fellow in Morocco.

                                                  - - - - - - -

Guides and Gateways

I spent much of last fall reading through TALIM’s collection of guidebooks and tourism magazines published between the 1940s and 1970s. Perhaps it was because I too was a newcomer to Tangier, but these guides fascinated me. Some folded out like maps, mixing quirky tips for the European or American traveler to Tangier with black-and-white photographs and brightly colored illustrations.

Tanger, Porte du Maroc [Tanger, Door to Morocco] (Marseille: Syndicat d’initiative et de tourisme de Tanger, nd). Collection TALIM Research Library.

With others, it was the advertisements that drew me in. I was particularly struck by how, in the space of a half-page, they bore such efficient witness to the complexity of colonial Tangier when it was an International Zone.

Take, for example, the advertisement for a shop called Butterfly published in the 1952 American guide, Tangier: The Golden Gateway, in which the United States, France, and the so-called Far East come together in the space of a few inches. While both the shop’s name and ad content appear in English, its rue des Vignes address and accented “e” in the abbreviation “Tél” point to France. Yet despite being in Morocco, shoppers will find nary a babouche here. Instead, this Tangerine store sells “rare objects from the Far East,” including, perhaps, silk kimono-clad, paper parasol-wielding female figurines like the one pictured.

Advertisement in Tangier: The Golden Gateway (Tangier: Mediterranean American Press, 1952). Collection TALIM Research Library.

Not surprisingly, many of the stereotypes and stock characters for which the city remains (in)famous appear throughout these guides. Frequent mentions of beaches, sunshine, modern hotels, and a favorable exchange rate promise various kinds of pleasure, while Moroccan handicrafts and produce sold by Rifi women in bright red-and-white striped foutas and pompom-adorned straw hats lend an “authentic,” “traditional,” and, yes, “exotic” ambiance.

Photograph in Hassan Dehbi, “En parcourant le Rif [Crossing the Rif],” in Maroc tourisme 59 (1970). Collection TALIM Research Library.

These clichés don’t only appear in guides from the colonial period, however, as TALIM’s collection of materials published by the Moroccan Ministry of Information and Tourism, such as Maroc Tourisme, makes clear. With its many examples from both before independence and after, TALIM’s guidebook collection raises important questions about the persistence of colonialist clichés in the postcolonial period.

These questions, like the guidebooks themselves, merit further study, particularly today as Tangier and the North take center stage in Morocco’s efforts to become a top global destination for tourists and in the many new guidebooks that they will undoubtedly bring with them.

Emma Chubb

Morocco & American Studies

It all started in February 2011, when three wise men from the east (eastern Algeria, as it happens) visited Tangier, seeking to learn more about TALIM, AIMS, and how their focus on American Studies might benefit from a relationship with the Legation.  We invited several Moroccan scholars and visiting Fulbrighters to meet their Algerian counterparts from the University of Guelma, and had a nice brainstorming session, reported in TALIMblog.

For me, the visit was the lightbulb-in-brain moment: eureka... Maghrebi scholars studying America, at the very place where the young United States of America established its first diplomatic property, in the country whose monarch was the first foreign head of state to recognize American independence.

It was the ideal mirror image of what TALIM was already doing - as the AIMS (American Institute for Maghrib Studies) research center in Morocco - fostering American scholarship of the Maghreb.  And using the Legation's USP - our "unique selling propostion" or competitive advantage - to best advantage.  More than two centuries' worth of history, increasingly cross-fertilized between our research library and our museum, enriched by blog posts and press articles, on relations between Morocco and the United States.  And diplomatic and other archives for scholars to explore.

So last weekend's workshop, starting with a musical hommage to an American - Paul Bowles - who did much to help educate his fellow citizens on Morocco and especially Tangier, was the culmination of a four-year effort on our part to show that TALIM could also be a home to Maghrebi scholars of America, especially of Moroccan-American relations and America's engagement with the Muslim, Arab, and African worlds, symbolized by this institution.

And of course we know that this realization didn't start here.  "American Studies in North African Universities," the proceedings of the 2nd conference on American Studies in the Maghreb, is dated September 1992, and "The Atlantic Connection: 200 Years of Moroccan-American Relations," published in conjunction with the 1986 bicentennial of the historic bilateral treaty, show that serious scholars have long been preoccupied with the subject.

Closer to the present, the excellent December 2012 Marrakesh conference on American Studies in Arab Universities, post-Arab Spring (organized by Hassan II University, Ben Msik, Casablanca), was a chance to gather scholars in the field from Morocco, the greater MENA region, and from Europe and North America.  Last weekend, our friends from Ben Msik, joined by fellow Moroccans from universities in Meknes, Rabat, and Tangier, as well as Dartmouth College (TALIM President Dale Eickelman) and Kennesaw State (ASA International Committee member Nina Morgan) in the US, as well as Boris Vejdovsky of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, convened in Tangier.  The workshop heard from representatives of the American Studies Association, who detailed what eventual affiliation with the ASA might offer a Moroccan association.

Moroccans who would form the nucleus of an association - perhaps to be called M.A.S.A. or Moroccan American Studies Association - debated the issues related to possible ASA affiliation, but in the end came to the conclusion that organizing a national association took precedence.

The consensus was that a follow-on gathering would take place in early May, to finalize the shape of a Moroccan association, with nationwide membership and inclusion of the numerous faculty and graduate students of American Studies in Morocco.

Conclusion: our intimate gathering of scholars and interested partners - TALIM received vital help to host this workshop from the US Embassy Rabat Public Affairs Section, as well as from the American Language Center of Tangier - is a promising start to what we hope will be finalized in early May.  How nice it would be to have a Moroccan representative from the new association attend the annual ASA conference in Los Angeles next November...

Gerald Loftus, text and photos

Mediterranean Regional Research Fellowship Program

We're happy to announce that CAORC, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, of which TALIM is, through AIMS, the CAORC/AIMS center for Morocco, has received funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for the 2014 Arab Regional Workshop & Fellowship Program.  Apply at the CAORC site.

All application materials must be received by CAORC by 17 March 2014.

 

- - - - - - - -

 

Purpose: The purpose of this program is to build cooperative networks among scholars from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen, working in the social sciences and allied humanities (including, but not limited to, political science, sociology, anthropology/ethnology, and history). The program will draw on the resources, facilities, and contacts of American overseas research centers located in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen to enable the recipients to further their research and to build professional networks in and among host countries.

 

Fellowships: The fellowships are intended to serve scholars who are currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program, or who have completed their Ph.D. in the past ten years. The program offers up to twenty short-term (six to eight week) research residencies with recipients affiliating with one of the following overseas research centers: American Center of Oriental Research (Amman, Jordan), American Research Center in Egypt (Cairo, Egypt), Centre d’Études Maghrébines en Algérie (Oran, Algeria), Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (Tunis, Tunisia), American Institute for Yemeni Studies (Sana’a, Yemen), Palestinian American Research Center (Ramallah, Palestine) or the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (Tangier, Morocco). Prior to commencing their fellowship, fellows will participate in a research capacity-building workshop in Amman, Jordan.

 

Workshop: Selected fellows will participate in a research capacity-building workshop in Amman, Jordan on 18-21 October 2014. The workshop will bring together international scholars and research fellows to hone the research design of fellows’ projects. Workshop sessions will include the essential elements of research design development, grant proposal writing, and small group and one-on-one discussions of ways to incorporate these essentials to the research design.

 

Award: This two-part award funds participation in the capacity building workshop in Amman, Jordan, and a six to eight week research affiliation with an overseas research center. Round-trip travel, accommodations, and meals will be provided for the capacity-building workshop in Amman, Jordan. A stipend of $700 per week, up to eight weeks, will be provided for travel and living expenses incurred during the research residency. All research must be completed by 1 September 2015. A final report, with one page summary in English, is due no later than 15 September 2015.

They Were Promised the Sea

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) film fest screening in New Orleans of Kathy Wazana's beautiful documentary "They Were Promised the Sea" was my chance to see the film I had missed when it was shown at Tangier's 2012 Moroccan National Film Festival.  There, it was shown under its French title, "Pour Une Nouvelle Séville," which gives an excellent indication of the story line.

The Seville of the French title is that of Moorish Spain, when Muslim al-Andalus was the "Ornament of the World," and home to coexisting communities of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  This convivencia ended when Jews and Muslims were expelled starting in the late 15th century.  For many Jews, Morocco provided refuge for centuries, and it is from this transplanted population that filmmaker Kathy Wazana hails, growing up in Casablanca and moving to Canada as a little girl.

Filmed in Morocco and Israel, Wazana interviews Jews and Muslims about their respective memories of each other.  We are used to imagining urban Jews from Casablanca and Tangier finding new homes from Tel Aviv to Toronto, but They Were Promised the Sea takes us to places like isolated, mountainous Illigh, whose mellah or deserted Jewish quarter is now in ruins.

From the wilds of the Atlas mountains to... the borderlands of Israel.  The sea that Moroccan Jews were promised was the Mediterranean, perhaps a new home in Haifa.  Instead, many were shunted off to communities exposed to hostile fire from neighboring Arab countries.

Many of the Moroccan Muslims interviewed express regret at the loss of their former neighbors.  The numbers are astounding: Morocco lost upwards of 300,000 of its people to Israel, France, Canada, Venezuela and a number of other destinations in the space of a few years.  Essaouira lost half of its population.

Some of the Moroccan Israelis talk about their departure in terms of "everybody is going," often prompted by the Jewish Agency's enticements.  These are not the sophisticated urban "palace Jews" that Ralph Toledano writes about in his recent novel "Un Prince à Casablanca," but people who provided Morocco with a range of skilled trades and occupations across the entire country.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the film is the commitment of some of Israel's second and third generation Moroccan Jews to maintain links with their parents' and grandparents' homeland.  Moroccan cuisine and music have a home in Israel, and many of these young Israelis embrace their roots.  A visit to a windswept Jewish cemetery in Tetouan provides one of the most touching images, a young Israeli woman conversing with the Moroccan custodian whose care for his charges is evident.

The same young woman gets a political tongue-lashing from the late Simon Levy, then director of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca.  Perhaps the only jarring moment in an otherwise elegiac film, Levy takes strong issue with Zionism, and includes the earnest young non-Zionist in with all Israelis in what he sees as the ending of what had been Jews' home for centuries.

Fortunately, the films closes with another great image, and with some lovely music featuring a Moroccan Andalusian orchestra - with a rabbi providing vocals.  Echoes of convivencia. 

The MESA screening, with filmmaker Kathy Wazana present, was sponsored by AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, of which TALIM is the research center in Morocco.

Gerald Loftus

Libana Lights Up Tarab Tanger

Last night Tangier vibrated to the sound of seven American women performing music from the world over.  Libana, making their inaugural Moroccan tour (Tangier, Tetouan, Rabat), was a rousing success at the 5th annual Tarab Tanger festival.  From the very beginning, with a rendition of Yal Harbaan, an Algerian Berber song from the Aures mountains, the audience knew they were in for a special treat.

This all started last year at Tarab Tanger No. 4, when our annual AIMS conference participants attended a Berber music performance.  Anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodman of Indiana University, a former member of Libana and co-organizer of the conference, mentioned Libana's longstanding dream of performing in Morocco.  A year later, here they were at Tarab Tanger.  And the audience was not disappointed.

Thanks to Jane Goodman's double duty as both performer and - in French, Amazigh, and Arabic - presenter of the group's repertoire, the capacity audience got an even better appreciation for the group's mastery of the music of a variety of cultures.  Sung in languages as wide-ranging as Arabic and Quechua, the women of Libana have an uncanny ability to put themselves in the culture - and even the very register - of the women whose music they have learned through 35 years of performing across the world.

Close your eyes and you will be listening to enchanting music sung by women of India, of West Africa, of the Sephardic diaspora.  Open your eyes and you'll see seven Bostonians at home in the world - and dancing in the costumes of the culture whose music they perform.  Their enthusiasm for their art makes the audience move.

No more so than when they started ululating, their you-yous echoed by the Moroccan audience, young and old, and triggering the traditional wedding chant by women in the stands.  Talk about winning hearts...

But the finishing touch was all-American: "Woke Up This Morning," a spiritual adapted for the Civil Rights struggle, where waking up "with Jesus on my mind" is replaced by "freedom on my mind."  As Libana streamed off the stage to a standing ovation, the audience took up the "Hallelujah" refrain.  What an exit!

So, in one evening in Tangier, seven women from Boston helped to spread their joyous vision of links across continents, and the US as a repository of an incredible diversity of cultures.  Now that Libana has pioneered American participation in Tarab Tanger, the door is open to other performers from the US.

With the strains of "Woke Up This Morning" in his ears, we know that Tarab Tanger impresario Omar Metioui is already thinking about his dream for next year: an American gospel group.  The planning begins...

Gerald Loftus

Moroccans Got Rhythm?

"Arabs Got Talent," the Arabic-language show on MBC-TV, recently featured a Moroccan break dance group that definitely has talent, combining kinetic choreography of scenes reminiscent of Marrakesh's famous Jamaa El Fnaa and moves that would make Michael Jackson proud.  Morocco has its "break dance battles" too.

"Movement is a language," according to AIMS researcher Karima Abidine of Northwestern University, whose presentation yesterday at TALIM covered "Talk From the Body: Contemporary Dance and the Negotiation of Social Change in Urban Morocco."  What the audience lacked in quantity we made up for in quality; we had several people involved in performance and dance, including Leila Chellabi, author, lecturer, and jazz and classical dancer, and Natasha Pradhan, researcher in Moroccan music and performance from Brown University.

Karima Abidine showed us several clips of televised performances, but for most young Moroccan contemporary dancers, space is at a premium.  Modern dance, especially for young women, is caught up in a number of cultural taboos, making it more of a male domain.  And even for the young men, much of Moroccan modern dance is an outgrowth of athletics, acrobatics, and of course break dancing.

In Tangier, groups like Darna and shows like Chouf Ouchouf and Taoub have built on this acrobatic tradition, performing pageants depicting Tangier's long history, and using site-specific performance to link with the city's past.

But as Karima Abidine points out, much of what is performed is for Western audiences, whether resident expats or while on tour outside Morocco.  Moroccan publics might, as one audience member witnessed, smile on their daughters miming Rihanna during a recent appearance at the Mawazine Festival, but would never countenance them appearing on stage to dance in front of non-family members.  Dance, for many, is "elite," and in any case, "non-Moroccan."

Dance, Karima Abidine believes, "pushes boundaries, in order to collapse them."  Within the regional context of both the Arab Spring and the increasingly prevalent currents of religious conservatism, dancers are challenged on a number of fronts.  All this in an atmosphere of few resources, other than aid from largely European sources, devoted to dance.  The recent Morocco tour of Chicago's Hubbard Street Dance group gave a number of young dancers a taste of what they rarely have a chance to get - professional training.

Our thanks to Karima Abidine - and YouTube - for giving us a glimpse into the world of Moroccan dance.

Gerald Loftus

World Heritage Day: Morocco's Rural Treasures

18 April, World Heritage Day.  How serendipitous, then, that AIMS grantee Cloe Erickson presented her work on preserving Morocco's rural architectural heritage at TALIM.  Even though we at TALIM are housed in America's only National Historic Landmark located overseas, and Cloe too lives and breathes historic preservation, we were both blithely unaware of the coincidence in timing.

An audience which included architects, anthropologists, and just plain interested citizens got the benefit of Cloe's very humane approach to architecture, to community development, and to life in one of Morocco's most inaccessible villages.  Beautifully illustrated by husband Chris, a photographer and mountain guide, Cloe Erickson's work is truly inspiring, leading one prominent Tangier architect - herself an experienced restorer of historic monuments - to comment that Erickson's work should be taken as a model.

Cloe's Atlas Cultural Foundation is active in a number of areas, all of which have human development at their core.  Counterintuitively, it is Cloe the American who counsels urban Moroccan officialdom that slow is better, that time in Zawiya Ahansal cannot be measured in fiscal years or quarterly targets.  When it snows, roads (such as they are) are closed, and work stops.  Simple as that.  An architect's calculations might not translate to local workmen's ideas of quantity.

"Translation" is a concept that Cloe knows well, and it's not just language.  She often finds herself the third party in negotiations between Moroccan officialdom - often mistrusted and feared - and the untutored rural people among whom she, her husband, and little daughter live.  In fact, they are the only expatriates for miles around.

"It's too far away" is an objection that some officials have made to explain why development aid hasn't been forthcoming, though a road is being built to cut access time down from days to hours from the nearest city, Marrakesh.  Soon local children won't have to devote four hours daily for the "commute" to school.

So what are these structures, in Berber igherm, that Cloe and the ACF are helping restore?  Grain storage on the lower floors, and dormitories for pilgims on the upper levels.  The village is a zawiya or shrine to a local saint, with a charming back story:

Zawiya Ahansal was founded in the 13^th century by Sidi Said Ahansal, a traveling North African Islamic scholar.  Local legend states that Sidi Said Ahansal’s mentor told him to stop his travels and establish a religious school where his cat jumped off of his donkey.

So, thanks to a grant from AIMS, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Cloe Erickson is working to help mitigate the impact of breakneck development that has sometimes seen Morocco's urban built heritage fall under the bulldozer.  "Built heritage is a non-renewable resource," says Cloe Erickson, and she is doing her level best to ensure that these 500-year old rural structures live to see a few more centuries.

Gerald Loftus

Etched in Memory: Historic Glass Negatives

Scanned glass negative from the Tangier American Legation Donald Angus collection

Resolve to keep those shoeboxes full of negatives from your grandmother's attic.  Even if they're not worth a few hundred million dollars, they just might contain some historic treasures, like the glass negative collection at the Tangier American Legation.  The gift of philanthropist Donald Angus, who lived in Tangier for many years, and whose generosity provided our museum of many of its historic maps and prints.

Who today can tell us about the "Club Elixir" of Tangier's old days, pictured above?  "Elixir" - الإكسير - or Al-kisir, the alchemist's stone, perhaps an appropriate name for a late 19th century emporium where you could mix your absinthe with whatever you fancied.  If only they had identified those negatives...

The 2,000 glass negatives tell many stories, and we hope to tell some of them through scans done by Dr. Beatrice St. Laurent of Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.  Dr. St. Laurent, in 2004, continued under an AIMS grant

a project of the conservation and identification and analysis of the collection of glass negatives dating from the late 19^th century to the 1930’s housed in the Tangier American Legation Museum. This collection documents an important period in the region’s history from pre-colonization through to the 1930’s domination by the French and Spanish.

Dr. St. Laurent reported on her work at the 2005 World History Association conference at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and presented a display of prints from the Legation glass negatives in 2006 in Massachusetts.

Glass negatives document some of photography's earliest work; the Library of Congress collection, available online, has more than 100,000 images, many of which are painstakingly identified.  George Eastman House - the International Museum of Photography and Film - also has collections that can be accessed online.

Someday, we too would like to make the TALIM glass negative collection available online in a similarly systematic fashion.  In the meantime, we'll post some of these photos randomly, in this blog, and perhaps set up a page on the Legation website.  Some 200 negatives were scanned, meaning more funding will be needed to clean, preserve, catalog and scan the remaining 1,800.  Maybe we can interest Lebanon's Arab Image Foundation, dedicated to preserving the photographic heritage of the entire region.

Finally, thanks to Beatrice St. Laurent, Simona Schneider, and Michael Toler for helping to "repatriate" these valuable scans back home to Tangier.

Gerald Loftus

Saharan Crossroads: Views From the Desert-Edge

Herein we broadcast the Call for Papers (CFP) from the joint AIMS (American Institute for Maghrib Studies, of which TALIM is the research center in Morocco) WARA (West African Research Association) conference for June 2013.  Please note that the deadline for submission of applications and abstracts is December 30, 2012.

- - - - - - -

CALL FOR PAPERS

Saharan Crossroads: Views from the Desert-Edge

An AIMS-WARA-CRASC Conference

22-24 June 2013 - Ghardaïa, Algeria

This conference is part of a series of activities organized by the West African Research Association (WARA) and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) aimed at strengthening the cultural, artistic and historical links among the peoples living within and across the Sahara Desert.

The 3rd international conference « Saharan Crossroads: Views from the Desert-Edge » is planned to be held in Ghardaïa, Algeria June 22-24, 2013.  The Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines en Algérie (CEMA) is partnering with the Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle (CRASC) in planning this conference to be held at the University of Ghardaïa.

This conference’s theme is “Mapping information flows within and across the Sahara.” Throughout the ages, Africans circulating in Saharan regions engaged in cultural, intellectual, religious and political exchanges. Through oral and scriptural media, and by way of foot, caravan, truck and other traffic, people conveyed information and ideas that transformed and connected societies across distances. The committee is interested in studies focused on Saharan and trans-Saharan exchanges of information and ideas, past and present. Ghardaïa, in the heart of the Mzab region, is a propitious locale to hold this conference. This ethnically and religiously diverse oasis town was once a major center of exchange, and a northern terminus of caravans originating from markets such as Timbuktu, Agadez and Kano.

Proposals for papers and panels are invited for the following suggested themes:

1.       Circulation routes and information nodes

2.       Art, music and stylistic trends

3.       Cultures and ritual traditions

4.       Centers of learning and scholarly circuits

5.       Religious and Sufi networks

6.       Legal opinions and jurisprudence

7.       Political movements and ideological waves

8.       Evolution of communication technologies

9.       Migration and information flows

10.    Water management technologies and oasis agriculture

11.    Urban and architectural design

12.    Comparative Saharan archaeology

Applications and Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted by December 30^th, 2012 at the following website: http://fs9.formsite.com/westafricanresearchassociation/form10/index.html.

For further enquiries, you may contact the conference organizers at [email protected].

Conference Organizers:

Ghislaine Lydon (University of California, Los Angeles)

Robert Parks (Director, CEMA-Oran)

Jennifer Yanco (Director, WARA)

Aomar Boum (Vice-President AIMS, University of Arizona)

Sidi Mohamed Trache (Université d’Oran et associé CRASC)

This conference is partially funded by a grant through the US Dept of State Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.

Berber Societies: AIMS Conference 2012 at TALIM

After three days of conferencing, the Legation's fountains and birds are again audible in the relative calm of the medina.  Not that we're complaining: a better group of participants couldn't be found.  We have just hosted an illustrious group of experts on Berber Societies, the theme of this year's AIMS - American Institute for Maghrib Studies - conference.

Subtitled New Approaches to Space, Time, and Social Process, the conference organizers sought to provide a voice to

Recent scholarship on Amazigh populations [which] provides important correctives to the nationalist narratives that have long shaped understandings about both the region's populations and their relations to the nation-state.

Academic organizers Jane Goodman of Indiana University and Katherine Hoffman of Nortwestern University devised a lively format for discussion, where conference participants read each other's submissions in advance, and each session was presented in pairs.  This allowed for maximum give and take, and avoided dry reading of papers or endless Powerpoint slides.

More than one participant noted the truly pan-Maghrib nature of the program.  Though Morocco and Algeria, with their large concentrations of Berber-speaking populations and web of state institutions (Morocco's IRCAM; Algeria's HCA) devoted to Berber matters, provided the bulk of the participants, what particularly enriched the proceedings was the presence of scholars from Libya, Tunisia, and Mauritania, who are less frequently heard from in Berber studies fora.

One Tunisian Berber is constantly challenged by her fellow citizens' incredulity; for them, Berbers are in Algeria and Morocco, or if they acknowledge a Tunisian link, place it in a distant past.  "You're Berber?  Prove it!" - daring her to say something in her language, which in some southern Tunisian villages is all children under five can speak.

Berber identity in Algeria has had its political manifestations - parties like the FFS and RCD are largely populated by Kabyles - which has not necessarily been the case in Morocco, where Amazigh culture and language has been the focus of Berber associations.  Even Morocco's important independence movement in the 1920s, the Rif War, led by Abdelkrim el Khatabi, was not necessarily for Berber freedom, but rather to rid northern Morocco of Spanish and French occupiers.  But that hasn't kept some modern Berber activists from canonizing Abdelkrim as a Berber icon.

Pan-Maghrib Berberism is made difficult by the incredible multiplicity of language variants, where Algerian Berbers in the eastern Aures Mountains might have an easier time of understanding the language of the Moroccan Rif than that of their neighboring Kabylie.

In Libya, where under Gaddafi their language and culture were suppressed, Berbers joined the struggle early on, and their intervention was often decisive in the west of the country.  In newly-liberated areas, Tamazight language media began to flourish, and people were finally free to give their children Berber names.

Language was central to our discussions.  In the area around Agadir in south-central Morocco, communities might promote use of their Berber language Tashelhit, without necessarily feeling part of some wider Amazigh movement.  Some experts are concerned with the effect of homogenization of Berber, with the centralizing tendency to create a sort of "modern Berber," a standardized hybrid that may be rootless and ignore the rich variety of Berber across this huge expanse of North Africa.  

We included several cultural events as part of the program.  By a stroke of good luck, this year's Tarab Tanger festival - dedicated to Moroccan and world traditional music - featured Moroccan Berber ensemble Inouraz from Agadir, led by singer Khalid El Berkaoui.  This Amazigh spiritual music - El Berkaoui's lively vocals accompanied by a quartet playing traditional instruments - got the crowd going, with lots of young fans exhibiting their three finger salute.  This was even a revelation to some of the experts: it's a Berber symbol of akal, awal, afgan - land, language, man.

We were also treated to a showing of short film "The Red Apple," whose "making of" and analysis by graduate student Tilila Baida led to a lively debate over Berber symbolism and the meaning of what it is to be Berber to the youthful filmmakers.  Though the brief dialogue and voice-over, as well as the on screen text, were all in Berber, the filmmakers didn't hide the fact that they spoke to each other in Moroccan Arabic while shooting the film.  But the film is still a Berber film.

It hasn't always been easy to be Berber, whose language has often been suppressed, and whose communities have been subdivided by administrative boundaries, under both colonial rule and after.  But after years of Arabization and centralization, the recent flourishing of Berber languages, of cultural movements, of young people experimenting with new media, show a sort of "Amazigh Spring" that doesn't have to be political to make its impact.  In many parts of the Maghrib, it's okay to be Berber again.

Gerald Loftus