The Ancestors We Were Taught to Forget

At the weddings of my childhood, more people seemed to belong to the celebration than any one family could contain. There was the singing, the call answered by another voice, the music carrying across the night, the dancing that did not need to be explained because your body learned something of it before your mind asked for an explanation. The person singing, the person dancing, the aunt preparing food, the neighbor moving chairs, and the child falling asleep in the middle of it were making the same thing together.

I was born in the south of Morocco near Agadir. Amazigh was not a political position in my childhood. It was simply the temperature of the room. Tachelhit was how people around me spoke, how a joke arrived, how a song could belong to everyone within hearing distance. You did not attend the culture. You stood inside it.

Nothing about this felt like heritage. Heritage is what adults call a living thing after they become afraid it might die. The wedding did not announce that it was preserving Amazigh identity. People were living. A child could receive the rhythm long before he could follow everything the words were doing.

That difference matters to me now. Being inside the celebration did not mean understanding the whole inheritance. Familiarity can make a thing feel safe from disappearance. The voices are there, the next wedding will come, somebody older knows the line. It is easy to assume that what surrounds you will always be available when you are ready to listen properly.

But a song can survive as audio and die as meaning.

A child can recognize the chorus and miss the image inside it. He can dance to his grandparents’ language while needing help to understand what they said. The metaphor may depend on a word no longer used around him, a farming practice he has never seen, a proverb nobody has completed for him. The poem remains beautiful. Gradually it becomes a beautiful wall he cannot find the door through.

I know this inheritance first as a feeling. My fear is that the familiarity can remain after the understanding has thinned: we still recognize what belongs to us, but have less and less to say back. That loss is larger than nostalgia for the weddings.

The Souss has a word, amarg, that holds poetry close to longing. In Abdallah El Mountassir’s account of its meanings, poetry, heartache, regret and the pain of distance belong to the same field. Love and being far from home are not separate from the art that gives them a voice.

The meanings belong together because the poem was never only a decorated sentence. A person leaving home carries more than a location in his memory. He carries the words in which home could answer him. The song gives absence a form other people can recognize, and then the person who has left discovers that somebody else has already found language for the thing he thought was his alone.

The rrways and tarrwaysin, the men and women poet-singers of the Souss, belong to that work. The recording notes for Fatima Tabaamrant’s Taghlaghalt describe an itinerant art accompanied by the ribab, lutes and percussion, addressing love and death as well as politics and social change. The poet arrives with an instrument and something to say about the world the audience is living in.

Calling that entertainment does not offend me. Pleasure is not a lesser human need. What offends me is the assumption that entertainment exhausts what the poet knows. A song can make an argument without becoming a lecture. It can remember a wound without becoming an official history. It can make an accusation difficult to forget precisely because people want to hear it again.

The words have to survive the audience. A page can wait for a reader to return. A performed line must earn another hearing, find a place in somebody’s memory, remain available when the singer has gone. Metaphor, rhythm, wit and the pleasure of a reply are part of that work. The thought was sung because singing gave it legs.

Lhaj Belaid and Mohamed Demsiri are among the names that keep this inheritance from becoming an anonymous cloud called tradition. So are Rkiya Talbensirt, Fatima Tihihit and Fatima Tabaamrant. I want the names there because a culture does not produce its poetry by itself. People make it. Women are not scenery inside the memory of that making.

Tabaamrant’s recording credits name her as writer, composer and singer. Those are ordinary artistic credits. They should be ordinary here too. An Amazigh woman should be able to appear as the author of what comes out of her mouth without anyone treating that authorship as a surprise. Yet the difference between an author and a picturesque bearer of tradition changes how we listen. One can have an intention, make a choice, change her mind. The other is asked to stand still while we admire what she represents.

Ahwach asks us to hear another kind of authorship. It is collective before it is spectacular. Bodies make rhythm together. Drums organize the space. Voices answer voices. The details vary from place to place; there is no single performance that can stand in for every community. In Bernard Lortat-Jacob’s study of High Atlas ahwash, a poet’s opening couplet passes into alternating choruses of men and women, carried by the drums into the movement of the dance. The words and the people doing something with them are inseparable.

A wedding can become a place where language is made public, where a line is offered and a community knows how to receive it. That is more than an audience consuming a finished object. It requires an ear formed over time. The people listening must know enough to recognize what has been done with the words.

To watch for ten minutes and file the whole thing under folk dance is to remove the intelligence and keep the costume.

I think back to the child inside the wedding. The child was not being given a syllabus, but he was being given occasions to hear. He could learn that a phrase could make people laugh, that a voice could hold their attention, that words could belong to an ordinary gathering and still deserve care. Understanding did not have to arrive all at once. There were people to hear again.

That is what I mean when I say the Souss carried its library in the throat. A poem could live across several memories. Someone might know the line; someone else might know when to use it, whose version it was, what made a reply sharp instead of merely loud. Losing one person could mean losing a connection between things that remained separately available. We might still have the words and no longer know what brought them together.

Artists are still making it, and their work deserves better than a premature funeral. Anya’s account of its Anthologie des Rrways describes a collection of one hundred recordings by more than eighty artists, accompanied by books about the music and its makers. That is work, not a miracle performed by an abstract culture. Somebody has to find the artists, make the recording, identify the words and give a listener a way into them.

Nor does leaving a village automatically end the practice. Ghadir Elidrissi Raghni’s research on ahwach, following performers between the Anti-Atlas, Casablanca and the Paris region, describes transmission through movement and new associations. The city can be a place where people remake the connection. I want to leave room for that, because a story in which every departure is a betrayal would misunderstand the people it claims to defend.

Still, an available recording is not an inherited understanding. You can keep the file perfectly and lose the occasions on which somebody would have explained it. You can turn the volume up without bringing the meaning any closer. Recording saves something precious. It does not relieve us of the work of listening with someone who knows more.

The south also wrote.

The Tachelhit manuscript tradition documented by Nico van den Boogert includes texts going back to around 1580, written in vocalized Arabic script. His study includes an edition and translation of Muhammad Awzal’s Bahr al-Dumu’, The Ocean of Tears, a work in verse. Here are pages where the language did not wait for somebody else to decide it was capable of literature.

Awzal’s Al-Hawd, The Reservoir, is a versified handbook of Maliki law, as Mohamed Saadouni and Harry Stroomer’s survey of the manuscripts explains. The subjects were not confined to the picturesque. Worship and relations between people could be taught in Tachelhit. A language that carried a wedding could also carry the obligations of a religious life.

The script was Arabic. The language was Tachelhit. That fact breaks several of the false walls we inherited. An Amazigh scholar could use Arabic letters to write Islamic teaching for people of the Souss. Faith did not require him to stop making knowledge in his own language. Receiving something from elsewhere did not mean that everything already here had to disappear.

Awzal matters to me because he makes continuity harder and more interesting than a story of untouched origins. A living culture takes what arrives, argues with it, translates it, changes its sound, makes it answer local questions. The proof of continuity is not purity. It is the ability to transform without disappearing.

The manuscripts also change the question I ask about forgetting. If a language has written works, and people can still believe it never had them, then making a page was only part of the struggle. Who gets to encounter the page? Who is taught enough to read it? Whose writing becomes literature a student is expected to know, and whose becomes an obscure specialist interest?

There is a particular cruelty in using unfamiliarity as proof of absence. You have not been shown the work; therefore the work must never have existed. You have not been taught to read it; therefore the language must never have been suited to thought. The wound is presented as anatomy. What was kept out of sight becomes evidence that the people had nothing to show.

I am angry at that judgment. I am also wary of answering it by making every old text innocent or every ancestor wise. A manuscript deserves to be read, which includes the possibility of finding something in it we reject. A poem deserves more than reverence. It deserves the attention that can discover a bad line beside a good one. If we allow our ancestors only to be glorious, we have found another way to keep them from being human.

That danger becomes especially clear with Dihya, the North African leader remembered as al-Kahina. Her resistance to the Arab conquest belongs to the end of the seventh century, but the surviving written accounts are later. Abdelmajid Hannoum’s study of the making of her legend traces the gap between the events and their narration, and the changing uses of the story. We do not receive an unbroken transcript of her life.

Even the names need care. Al-Kahina means the diviner; Yves Modéran’s historical account notes that the name Dihya enters the surviving accounts much later, with Ibn Khaldun. Her religion, genealogy and the chronology of her campaigns cannot all be stated with the confidence of a schoolbook sentence. I cannot recover her own voice simply by preferring one version of her to another.

What stays with me is the difficulty of meeting a woman through accounts to which she cannot answer. I want to know what she called herself, what her people believed they were defending, what they said when they buried their dead. Wanting those things does not make them recoverable. Nor does the surviving epithet, on its own, prove a single intention shared by every person who repeated it.

But the gaps matter. They remind me to ask who is speaking and whose speech has not reached us. Recovering a past cannot mean filling every silence with the flattering story we wish had survived. It means refusing to mistake the silence for proof that nobody was there.

And a people’s history cannot consist only of resisting someone else’s arrival. Otherwise the invader still decides when the people become visible. The Almoravids and Almohads were Amazigh dynasties at the center of Islamic state building and artistic life, ruling from North Africa into al-Andalus. There is no contradiction in that sentence for me. Imazighen helped make Islamic civilization. Neither half of the inheritance cancels the other.

The same is true on the smaller scale of Awzal’s page. I do not need an empire to prove that the language belonged to thinking people. I do not need a queen to give dignity to the people singing at a wedding. The rulers matter, but recovering a few famous names cannot substitute for recovering the ability to hear ordinary human thought. A people should not have to keep producing a great monarch to be allowed a past.

This is where the question comes back to the room I knew as a child. There was so much already there, and then there were institutions that seemed to have little use for it. School asked us to understand the world through Arabic. Alongside the work of crossing between languages came another lesson about what belonged where. The person singing, the elder speaking, the words already familiar to us could stay at home. What they knew seemed to have little place in the world we were being prepared to enter.

One language could be loved while another was trusted with the future. A language cannot survive on affection alone.

I do not imagine every parent choosing a more powerful language for a child as an enemy of the old one. The wish is often painfully ordinary: let the child have an easier life. I cannot blame that wish and then pretend the opportunities were equal. The question is why getting ahead should ask a family to make so much of itself harder for its children to receive.

That is one of the lasting injuries I associate with conquest and colonial rule: making people doubt the value of what they already carry. But Morocco’s different conquests, colonial regimes and later language policies are not one event with one author. I do not need to collapse them to be angry at the hierarchy that leaves a child proud of a distant origin and embarrassed by a familiar voice. The embarrassment can be taught without a person ever being told, in those exact words, to forget. By the end, nobody has to burn the archive. The archive is alive, walking around, embarrassed by itself.

Nor do I want to decide somebody else’s identity for them. Arabness is a real cultural identity. Calling oneself Arab is not an admission to be disproved by a family tree. Identity is not a lab result and no strand of DNA gets to overrule a life. What I want is room to acknowledge an Amazigh inheritance without treating it as a threat to every other part of being Moroccan.

Remembering cannot mean inventing a clean Amazigh past to replace an invented clean Arab one. Purity is useful for deciding who belongs and who does not. I do not want it, even when it is offered in my favor.

What I want is continuity without shame.

There have been changes that deserve to count. Article 5 of Morocco’s 2011 Constitution recognizes Amazigh as an official language and the common heritage of all Moroccans without exception. People worked for that recognition. I do not want my anger to erase their work, or the teachers and artists trying to make the recognition mean something.

The 2024 census report records 24.8 percent of the population using an Amazigh language. Separately, among literate people aged ten and older, 1.5 percent reported being able to read and write Amazigh in Tifinagh. These are different measures with different denominators. Neither is a count of how many Moroccans are Amazigh. The Tifinagh figure also does not measure reading in the Arabic script of Awzal’s manuscripts.

I keep the distinction because confusing the numbers would hide the very thing I care about. Speech, identity and writing are connected, but one cannot stand in for all the others. A Constitution can recognize the language while the conditions for learning and using it still need work. A census can count reported use without telling us whether a listener understood the image in a song.

So I want more than a sign above a ministry door, and more than a festival that applauds a performance while making no place for the next person who might compose one. I want the people doing that work to have time, audiences and a livelihood. I want manuscripts available with editions and explanations. I want recordings that name the artists and help listeners follow the words. Translation belongs in this work too; it can open a door without pretending to replace everything on the other side.

I also want the ordinary occasions that no archive can supply on demand. Someone willing to explain the proverb. Someone with time to repeat the line. A younger person allowed to ask what a word means without having the question treated as proof that the culture has already failed. Shame will not repair the break that shame helped make.

None of that should require a child to stay where I grew up, or to live the life of an ancestor in order to deserve the language. He should be able to carry it into a city, another country, a subject the old songs never named. He should be able to make new jokes in it, new science, new love poems and bad songs and political arguments. An inheritance that allows only repetition gives the young very little reason to keep it alive.

Preservation should not mean teaching the young to imitate the dead. It should mean giving them enough memory to disagree with the dead in the same language.

When I think back to those weddings now, I do not want to put them under glass. I want to leave room in the gathering for someone whose line nobody has heard yet. The older voices are still moving through weddings, taxis, phones and mouths. Awzal’s words are still on the page. The next voice should not have to begin by proving that any of this was ever worth hearing.