More than Arabic or French:
Language, Land, and the Making of the Postcolonial Novel in Tamazgha 

Matthew Brauer
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Abstract: This article develops an approach for resituating the well-established literary and scholarly fields of North African literature in Arabic and French on the linguistic and cultural horizon of Tamazgha. It discusses the postcolonial novel, whose initial emergence in French occasioned immediate and sustained debate over the need to transition from the former colonizer’s language to a national language, assumed to be Arabic to the exclusion of Amazigh languages. How may scholarship in Maghrebi/Maghribi literary studies read Arabic and French-language literature as speaking to and of the exclusion of Amazigh languages? Moreover, what would it mean to read Arabic and French as Amazigh languages that manifest Tamazgha in ways other than absence? Here, I propose Tamazgha French, literature in French as a space where Tamazgha persists and survives its exclusion from hegemonic political and literary modernity. Through the work of three contemporaneous Moroccan scholars and writers, I connect sociological analyses of cultural and economic transition by Abdelkébir Khatibi (Le roman maghrébin, 1979) and Paul Pascon (Le Haouz de Marrakech, 1977) to the transformations of Tamazgha lands, Amazigh languages, and their persistence within French in the novels of Driss Chraïbi’s Amazigh trilogy (1981–1986). Persistence, I argue, offers a vocabulary of postcolonial culture that reframes the exclusive discourses of transition, whether from French to Arabic or from underdevelopment to modernity..

Keywords: postcolonial novel, literary language, transition, persistence, landholding.

On the literary horizon of Tamazgha, the postcolonial novel converges on the vanishing point of Amazigh languages. The question of literary language that has preoccupied writers and critics in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia since the 1950s has always begun and ended with Arabic and French, not Taqbaylit, Tashelhit, or any other form of Tamazight. The resulting terms of al-riwāya al-maghribiyya/al-Maghrib and le roman maghrébin/le Maghreb define novelistic configurations of narrative, language, and territory rooted in the geopolitics of anticolonial nationalism and the postcolonial nation-state, where Tamazgha does not seem to have a place (Laroussi 2003:84). Instead, the linguistic transition from French to Arabic was the basic premise of foundational debates regarding the construction of new national cultures.

The exclusion of Tamazgha and Amazigh languages is constitutive of the postcolonial novel. Their absence is not a mere contingency, owing to a supposed shortage of literary production in Amazigh languages, or a lack of political recognition of Tamazgha. It is because the non-national form of Tamazgha and the genres, forms, and modes of production and transmission of Amazigh literatures—at the time, primarily (though not exclusively) oral, poetic, and collective[1]—did not align with the critical discourse of modernity that emerged alongside the novel in the anticolonial and independence periods of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which structured the postcolonial literary corpus according to the homology of language, novel, and nation.[2] In this sense, postcolonial literature, premised on a false choice between Arabic and French, is founded on the dispossession of Tamazgha by the national boundaries within al-Maghrib/le Maghreb.[3] Consequently, for scholars of Maghrebi/Maghribi literary studies, the perspective from Tamazgha imposes a critique of the prevailing understanding of geopolitical and literary forms. Such a reevaluation entails reading Arabic- and French-language literatures as speaking to and of the exclusion of Amazigh languages. Moreover and more radically, this also means reading Arabic and French as Amazigh languages that manifest Tamazgha in ways other than absence.

In this essay, I reconsider the relationship between language and land that has undergirded French-language Maghrebi literary studies by examining the possibility of Tamazgha French—of literature in French as a space where Tamazgha persists and survives its exclusion from hegemonic political and literary modernity. I consider that the possibility of Tamazgha French has been present from the outset; when Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine famously declared French to be “notre butin de guerre” (Chaulet-Achour 2016:30), what he summoned as the collective subject of this appropriation was “Tamazgha,”[4] Thus, Tamazgha French also reframes the persistence of French-language literature beyond the call for a transition to Arabic. Persistence thus offers a different vocabulary of postcolonial culture than transition, whether from French to Arabic or from underdevelopment to modernity.

I argue that writing in the register of persistence dissents from state-centric conceptions of national culture, as well as from the nation-form as the base unit of cultural production and monolingualism as its mode of expression. Whereas in discourses of transition these norms defined a prescriptive and evaluative approach to decolonization, persistence offers a descriptive and pragmatic mode of decolonial knowledge.

For scholars, re-reading what has come to be known as francophone Maghrebi literature in the analytical register of persistence enables two important methodological shifts, which may be extended to the other literary languages of the region. First, the Arabic-French bilingual framework, whether treated as a conflict between rival monolingual paradigms or as a generative cultural practice, gives way to complex and variable dynamics of plurilingualism that define the literary space of Tamazgha that Brahim El Guabli dubs “Maghrebography” (El Guabli 2024:9-12).” This capacious literary field is characterized not only by a multiplicity of languages—not only Tamazight, in addition to modern standard Arabic and French, but also the regional Arabics known as darija and Judeo-Arabic, as well as the many other languages of Tamazgha and its diaspora (Catalan, Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, and so on)—but moreover by its fluid access to multiple linguistic and cultural repertoires.

Second, to read for persistence is to identify the plurilingualism already present, virtually or otherwise, within the ostensible unity of the individual work and its literary language. Persistence thus draws on and refashions the integrative impulse that drives Karima Laachir’s comparative practice of “reading together” works in Arabic and French as part of a unified Moroccan literary field (Laachir 2016:32). Finally, reading languages together within ostensibly monolingual works and fields, as Mohamed Zahir suggests with the “palimpsestic” presence of Tamazight in the French-language transcriptions and translations of Amazigh folktales and poetry (Zahir 2023:314), disrupts the identities that establish literary languages and corpuses, and that bind them to places. Persistence provides writers and scholars with the means to describe continuity without identity and change, without transition. I read Tamazgha French through the linguistic conditions of the literary field (Part I) and the material transformations of the Tamazgha landscape (Parts II and III). I connect the exclusion of Amazigh languages from the developmental discourses of the postcolonial novel to the changing concepts of territory (emergence of the nation-state) and practices of landholding (colonial expropriation and postcolonial land reform). Through the work of three contemporaneous Moroccan scholars and writers, I connect the sociological analyses of cultural and economic transition by Abdelkébir Khatibi (Le roman maghrébin, 1979) and Paul Pascon (Le Haouz de Marrakech, 1977) to the transformations of Tamazgha lands, Amazigh languages, and their persistence within French in the novels of Driss Chraïbi’s Amazigh trilogy (1981–1986).

These works coincide with the emergence in Moroccan civil society of individual efforts and community initiatives that scholars have grouped together under the heading of the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement. Faced with a state and an elite that insisted on Morocco’s Arab identity, these movements engaged in scholarship, community organization, cultural preservation, and political action in favor of the full recognition and participation of Imazighen in the Moroccan public sphere, of which linguistic research and literary creation were major components (Aboulkacem 2023:365–72). Decades of activism which began in the 1960s and 1970s culminated in major institutional reforms in the 2000s, with the creation of the Institut royal de la culture amazighe (IRCAM), charged with developing linguistic and alphabetic standards of Tamazight and promoting Amazigh language and culture. It was followed by the incorporation of Tamazight into public education and its constitutional recognition as an official language of Morocco” (El Guabli 2024:27-31). The works I study in this article, however, do not come out of the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement. What they therefore demonstrate is that the persistence of Tamazgha was not confined to explicitly engaged activist circles. They enable us to read for this continued, changing presence where it has otherwise been presumed not to exist. In this way, they expand the Amazigh “other-archives” that constitute history in cultural production rather than in the disciplined, institutionalized space of traditional historical archives (El Guabli 2024:1). Moreover, they allow a theoretical reckoning with the non-identities of literary form, language, and nation that activates anew the revolutionary potential that writers of both Arabic and French ascribed to literature in decolonization.

The Discourse of Linguistic Transition

The relationship of literary language and form to national culture was an urgent decolonial concern for the literatures that emerged amid the anticolonial movements of al-Maghrib/le Maghreb in the mid-twentieth century. Developing a new novel tradition was considered necessary to overcoming the ambivalent prospect of a national literature written in a foreign language, an incoherency associated with a state of cultural and economic underdevelopment. Many writers and scholars who became major figures of anticolonial struggle while working in French, thanks to their education in colonial schools, readily predicted their own obsolescence. They called for a transition away from the language of the former colonizer, which remained linguistically and economically inaccessible to many of their compatriots, to an idiom better suited to a decolonized national culture. For most proponents of linguistic transition, the new language of national culture had     to be Arabic.

To lay the groundwork for an inquiry into Tamazgha French, I focus here on French-language Maghrebi discourses about linguistic transition. Tunisian writer Albert Memmi is exemplary in this regard. Memmi exerted a foundational influence on postcolonial literary studies in Tamazgha. As early as in 1957, then again after Algeria’s independence put a definitive end to French rule in the region, Memmi anticipated a shift away from French, employing the language of transition common to decolonial and developmental discourse. Writing as the director of the Groupe de recherche sur la culture maghrébine at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris, Memmi declared in his introduction to the field-defining Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française that “l’ensemble des œuvres à naître en Afrique du Nord appartiendrait à la langue du plus grand nombre, c’est-à-dire l’arabe,” thanks to “l’heureuse marche de l’histoire, l’arabisation progressive, [et] la scolarisation de plus en plus étendue des enfants” (Memmi 1965, 17). Linguistic transition supposes that Arabic was already a national language, but must have been given the chance to assume its full role. Yet this discourse passes over the fact that the languages most North Africans speak either diverge from classical and modern standard Arabic, as in the case of darija, or, as in the case of Tamazight, are not Arabic. Memmi’s later writings, which acknowledge the violent marginalization of Amazigh speakers, still focus on Arabic as the vehicle of national culture (Memmi 1996, 12).

Subsequent works by Memmi’s students and colleagues extended the anthology’s perspectives on the corpus, themes, and sociocultural functions of francophone Maghrebi literature. Their influence is such that although French, contrary to predictions, has not given way to Arabic, writers, critics, and scholars maintain the bi-polar schema of linguistic transition, even as they acknowledge its instability and simplifications (Talbayev 2012:10).

Contemporary scholarship demonstrates a more complex understanding of Maghrebi literary plurilingualism. What looks like French in Maghrebi literature often encodes and transforms Arabic vocabulary, syntax, and style (Mehrez 1992:121), in some cases to the degree of becoming “postfrancophone,” or not in any French language at all (Elhariry 2017:197). It remains to account not just for Arabic(s), but also for Amazigh languages and for Tamazgha. Rereading francophone Maghrebi literature for Tamazgha French will bring out neglected, suppressed, or unrealized dimensions of decolonial literature and scholarship through writers who seek, consciously or not, openly or not, to circumvent the hegemonic logic of a French-to-Arabic transition (Jarvis 2021:117-118).

Rethinking Transition in Postcolonial Sociology

The French-to-Arabic transition implies a modernizing conception of language, narrative, and territory: a single standardized language, epitomized in literary form, as an expression of the nation. One way to read outside this framework is to bracket the defining form of the nation by reconsidering the relationship between language, literature, and land. To do so requires drawing lines across domains that raise different questions about the nation.

To establish cues for reading Driss Chraïbi’s Tamazgha French, I draw on two brief examples of work by his contemporaries associated with the short-lived but influential Institut de sociologie (1960–1971) in Morocco, where literature and sociology were both seen as important arenas for decolonial work (Stafford 2020, 45-48), and where Tamazight was briefly taught before the monarchy closed the Institut, presumably due to the leftists and opposition leanings of many intellectuals associated with it (Madoui 2015, 104-5). Although the two studies I will discuss by Institut colleagues and friends Abdelkébir Khatibi (Le roman maghrébin, 1979) and Paul Pascon (Le Haouz de Marrakech, 1977) differ in their subjects, dealing respectively with the francophone Maghrebi novel and colonial land reform, they share a core concern with the persistence after independence of phenomena—the novel, the French language, property law, and land use—first experienced as instruments of colonial domination. Khatibi and Pascon both consider how persistence relates to transition, especially the capitalist integration of a colony into an empire, then of an independent state into a global economy.

Khatibi’s study argues that the French-language novel is out of step with Maghrebi society. Referencing Lucien Goldmann’s proposed homology between the development of capitalism and the formal evolution of the novel in Europe, Khatibi asserts that the Maghrebi novel was abruptly imported into a context where the socioeconomic forces that conditioned its formation are absent. As a student and collaborator of Albert Memmi, Khatibi calls for the development of a novel suited to postcolonial national culture by transitioning from French to Arabic, “l’instrument culturel premier en vue d’une édification nationale authentique qui consiste à remplacer les cultures satellites par des cultures intégrées et pluralistes” (Khatibi 1979, 14). Authenticity designates hoped-for modes of cultural production that will resolve the mismatch of the novel’s foreign orientation with the internal aesthetic, social, and political needs of Maghrebi societies. To this end, Khatibi’s vision of integration results in plurality, rather than homogeneity, dissenting from a monolithic vision of the nation.

Whereas Khatibi imagines a form of cultural transition through which plurality may survive, Pascon retheorizes economic transition to account for the persistence of seemingly incoherent or archaic elements as “composition,” or the coexistence of multiple modes of production. Pascon’s study examines the Protectorate and postcolonial states’ attempts to transition to capitalist agriculture through land reform.

Protectorate policy saw collective landholding as part of an archaic mode of production that had only persisted because, they believed, the precolonial Moroccan state had been too weak to secure private property rights. The Protectorate centralized control of collective, state, and domanial lands and declared all water sources to be state property—crucial in a semi-arid country. The bureaucratic registration of property and water rights on a written contractual basis attempted to transform the predominantly oral archive of heterogeneous customary land and water rights into a universal private property regime. However, a total transition to capitalist agriculture did not occur, neither under Protectorate nor postcolonial reforms. Such measures only created enclaves of capitalist production, outside of which existing land uses continued, albeit often with poorer land and less water.

Whether in the persistence of French-language literature or of different property and land use regimes, the ideology of transition is belied by the reality of what Pascon calls composition, wherein state and social actors “articulate among diversified instances that differentially frame the social order” for want of meaningful “national integration, independence, and ideological mobilization” (Pascon 1986:213-214). In one sense,  integration, or the resolution of contradictions confronting decolonization—of national political economy for Pascon, or of culture that Khatibi projected would come with a transition to Arabic that never occurred—is deferred to an indefinite future, because it demands a transition made impossible by the very circumstances it seeks to modify. More radically, though, composition unlinks transition and integration. The composite present foregrounds its own heterogeneity as such, not merely as an anticipation of its future resolution into homogeneity.

Composition thus affords a place for the persistence of different ways of writing and dwelling within, below, and beyond the discourses and projects of cultural and economic transition. Not only, then, does French persist alongside Arabic, but so too do Tamazight and Tamazgha within and without the nation in al-Maghrib/le Maghreb. These are not moments of transition that must pass because they contradict the conditions of production; they are elements of a composite mode of production.

Persistence in the Tamazgha French Novel 

Through the shift from transition to persistence, I read for Tamazgha French in Moroccan writer Driss Chraïbi’s Amazigh trilogy. For many critics, Chraïbi represented exactly the kind of French-language literature that should be left behind in a transition to Arabic (Jay 1966:39). Although one of the first and most influential Moroccan novelists, Chraïbi quickly came to be seen as an outsider. Some perceived the scathing portrait of the Moroccan bourgeoisie in his debut novel Le passé simple (1954) as harmful to the anticolonial cause (Harrison 2001:31-32). Other compatriots, including Khatibi, later came to his defense, while gently remarking on his political naïveté (Khatibi 1979:26-27; Laâbi 1967). Subsequently, however, his prolonged residence in France and expansive literary treatment of themes ostensibly unrelated to Morocco were received as further signs of his status as an “uprooted” writer seeking a place in universal, rather than national, literature (Arnaud 1986:19).

In this light, Chraïbi’s Amazigh trilogy appeared to be a literary attempt at a return to the author’s estranged homeland.[5] I argue, however, that Chraïbi does not evoke indigeneity to assert his Moroccan roots, nor to signify Moroccan cultural authenticity in general. Rather, the Amazigh trilogy asks how French-language Maghrebi literature may approach what has been excluded in the construction of the postcolonial state and national culture.

These are novels about the reorganization of land, society, and religion, told through fictionalized accounts of Amazigh conflicts with Arab-led Islamic conquest, French imperialism, and national bureaucracy. Through literary representations of the language acts and written instruments that reorder life in Tamazgha by transforming it into al-Maghrib and le Maghreb, the trilogy asks whether the novel may also be an instrument of dispossession, as well as of survival.

The national novel, as envisioned by Memmi or Khatibi, is a written instrument for enacting the identity of nation and culture by resolving the linguistic and economic contradictions of the novel’s importation to the Maghreb. Studies of Chraïbi’s Amazigh trilogy have examined the way these works intervene in representations of Moroccan national identity, asserting the historical and cultural primacy of Morocco’s Amazigh component (Civantos 2017:132-135) and denaturalizing the link between Islam and Arabness (Calderwood 2023:90-91), albeit in a fashion that risks accusations of essentialism (Bentahar 2014:28-30). My approach differs in that I read these novels as imagining non-identitarian forms of communal and cultural continuity (including their often-humorous pastiches of essentialism). Instead, I recover from Chraïbi’s text a Tamazgha novel by reading through the gaps in identities posited by names, places, and the instruments used to record, transmit, or contest them. These non-identities introduce strangeness into the identity of the nation, the national writer, and the national novel.

The fictional Aït Yafelman Amazigh community is the subject of the trilogy formed by Une enquête au pays (1981), La Mère du Printemps (L’Oum-er-Bia) (1982) and Naissance à l’aube (1986). These novels present a composite image of Moroccan society by reversing the relationship of futurity implicated in discourses of transition. Instead, the trilogy begins in the postcolonial present in Enquête, which returns in the guise of “Epilogues” that begin the latter two novels before flashing back to the years of Islamic conquest in northern Africa and southern Iberia, respectively, between the seventh and ninth centuries.

The persistence of the Aït Yafelman across these novels, despite their repeated geographic displacement, traces modes of dwelling in Tamazgha, rather than in Morocco, le Maghreb, or al-Maghrib, alongside shifts from the predominance of oral literature to writing, and from Amazigh languages to Arabic, French, and then Arabic again.

Chraïbi’s novels, themselves participating in the cultural transformations effected by the rise of the postcolonial novel, foreground the use of linguistic instruments—first oral, then written—to transform territories and languages. The first of these instruments, chronologically speaking, is the oral account of the Aït Yafelman’s history presented in La Mère du Printemps. More specifically, what the storyteller Oumawch recounts is the history of the land the Aït Yafelman inhabit on the banks of the Umm al-rabīʿa river (which also gives the novel its title), told as a creation story of the whole world. Human history, Oumawch implies, is merely the “legendification” of the only true history: that of the Earth (Chraïbi 1982:16). By extension, human concepts and practices of territory, like property and borders, are merely ephemeral calques on the enduring presence of the land.

This understanding of society constituted in relation to its environment defines Tamazgha communities in Chraïbi’s novels. For this reason, literary accounts of the Aït Yafelman’s relationship to the land change as that relationship shifts, as already indicated by the fictional transcription of Oumawch’s oral account in the text of a novel. Three more examples from the trilogy will trace the development of that material context in the postcolonial novel itself.

The first example comes with the transformation of Tamazgha into al-Maghrib. In Mère, the protagonist Azwaw seizes leadership of the Aït Yafelman community as Islamic conquerors approach. Recognizing the power of the invaders’ scriptural monotheism, Azwaw realizes the Aït Yafelman’s bond with the land will be transformed by both territorial conquest and the transition to writing. Azwaw thus chooses language as his battlefield. Rather than meeting the invaders in combat, he anticipates their arrival by learning as much of the Arabic language and the Qur’an as he can. He negotiates with the conquering general Oqba ibn Nafi by using the latter’s own terms. Far from a simple transition, however, what Azwaw seeks is to inhabit Arabic and Islam from within and make them means for Amazigh transmissions. By the end of the novel, Azwaw has become an imam who encodes within the call to prayer messages of resistance to still-independent tribes.

Azwaw’s transmissions speak to Tamazgha as a relationship to the Earth. Calling back to Oumawch’s affirmation that human history is subordinate to that of the Earth, Azwaw conceives of his tribe’s survival on a geological timescale:

C’est simple. Nous aurons le temps du temps. Rien, ni misère, ni opulence, ne nous fera perdre de vue ce que nous nous proposons: leur survivre. […] Quant à notre terre […] Elle leur sert de cimetière. Un jour, bientôt, dans quelques siècles, les Arabes l’engraisseront de leurs cadavres et du cadavre de leur islam (Chraïbi 1982:140).

Azwaw’s cemetery image envisions a secular end to the eschatological time of Islam. Because earthen history will never run out of time, the land already appears as a cemetery for would-be conquerors. Their decomposing bodies will fertilize the land (engraisser) to the benefit of a people who persist with the earth.

In this way, the Aït Yafelman survive conquest, but their survival implies change and composition, not identity. Azwaw’s plan radically reorders their institutions, even before conquest, submission to Islam, and the integration of Arabic language and script. By the time of the opening Epilogue to Mère, the tribe had long since been displaced from the Umm al-rabīʿa to a tiny village called Tselfat, hundreds of miles away in north-central Morocco.

There, Azwaw’s distant descendant Raho Aït Yafelman faces another written instrument of linguistic and social change: the introduction of livrets de famille and identity papers by the colonial and postcolonial states. Though the administrative form fields denoting given and family names, households, and occupations do not align with their social fabric, the Aït Yafelman again recognize these documents’ power and creatively comply with the state’s demands in the manner that Pascon calls composition, harmonizing what otherwise seem to be mutually incompatible understandings of bureaucratic transactions and records. They humor the befuddled officials while dealing with the resulting papers in their own manner. Suffering the government its superstitions, they treat the livrets as objects sacred to the state, entrusted to them for safekeeping, which they bind together and hide in a well. Their history, the community agrees in its democratically-taken decision, is not one that can be written from the archives of livrets and cartes d’identité. Words are only words, Raho reflects, and “ils finiraient par s’effacer de toute mémoire. Tous. Resteraient les montagnes, le désert et les plaines dont la civilisation de tous mots n’avait gratté que la croûte. Resteraient la terre et son people (Chraïbi 1982:16).” What written words cannot capture, what ensures the community’s continuity, is the land itself.

The corresponding opening Epilogue to Naissance à l’aube questions the linguistic transition from French “back” to Arabic. In this episode, Raho and his grandson Bourguine do informal work in the Sidi Kacem Bou Asriya train station. Each day, they walk from their village into town across an arid, sun-burnt landscape marked by deforestation and desertification.

On the road one day, Bourguine remarks on the restoration of the town’s precolonial name after Moroccan independence:

La ville est redevenue la ville […] Avant, elle s’appelait Sidi Kacem Bou Asriya, du nom du saint qui y avait vécu. Et puis, les Nazaréens sont venus, je n’étais pas encore né. Ils ont pacifié les tribus et ils ont perdu un captine […] Alors, forcément, ils ont appelé la ville Petitjean, du nom de ce vieux cadavre. Maintenant qu’ils sont partis, puisque tout est pacifié, en ordre et comme il faut, eh bien! La ville est redevenue Sidi Kacem Bou Asriya, comme autrefois (Chraïbi 1986a:31-32).

Linguistic transition manifests here in the town’s changing name. For Bourgine, restoring the precolonial Arabic name reflects the restoration of Morocco’s proper national self-identity through decolonization. Yet Bourguine, born after the establishment of the Protectorate, fails to see the traces of the colonial encounter etched in the state of the land, his own community’s displacement, or the fate of their language.

In response, Raho instructs Bourguine to direct his gaze elsewhere, beyond the appearance of identity, with a sweeping gesture:

Je ne connais pas cette ville. Ni de ce nom-ci ni de ce nom-là. Tout ça… (Il pivota lentement sur ses talons, le bras tendu. Il désigna tous les horizons, les deux levants, les deux couchants, toute la terre circulaire)… ici, et ici, et là, et là, et puis là-bas, tout appartient à la tribu des Cherarda, nos frères et nos cousins. Bien sûr, ils n’ont que les chardons et les cailloux, mais ceci est leur territoire depuis la création et jusqu’à la fin des siècles (Chraïbi 1986a:32).

Raho displaces the question of choosing a suitable national language between a name in Arabic or French with an embodied narrative performance, projecting his voice and stretching his hands out toward a “here” and a “there” labeled not by names, but by gesture and deixis. His movements invoke a communal bodily familiarity and customary oral consensus about these places, their boundaries, and their ownership.

Raho’s gestures enjoin Bourguine to see dispossession in the high hedges and barbed wire that, amid the degraded landscape, enclosed watered lands, and verdant oases that are “la propriété privée des autres—autant dire qu’elles ne faisaient pas partie du paysage [….] C’était un autre monde. Pour eux, il n’existait pas” (Chraïbi 1986a:31). This pattern of private enclaves produced by the enclosure of collective lands represents the same transformations that Paul Pascon identified in Protectorate and postcolonial land reform. Indeed, nearly twenty thousand hectares of Cherarda’s best, most irrigable lands were expropriated in the first decade of the Protectorate, almost all of which fell within the zone that would be irrigated by a planned dam (Swearingen 1987:49-50). These concessions were allotted to well-placed corporate interests and speculators. At independence, a new Moroccan elite consolidated its privilege by taking over the lands expropriated for French colonization.

In the Aït Yafelman’s diverse modes of reckoning with the forces reshaping their relationship to the land they inhabit, in Raho’s refashioning of identity papers, and in Raho and Bourguine’s mode of observing and moving through the landscape, the persistence of Tamazgha manifests in the French language that also dispossessed it. 

Conclusion

In the postcolonial Maghrib/Maghreb, the literary transition from French to Arabic was meant to align with the emergent nation. The modern Maghrebi/Maghribi novel thus developed through the exclusion of collective and oral cultures in Amazigh languages. Projected onto the literary horizon of Tamazgha, however, works like Chraïbi’s reveal dissenting accounts of the relationship between oral and written literatures, law, custom, and governance. In the Amazigh trilogy, the Aït Yafelman negotiate with and within the written instruments that integrate them into Islam or identify them with the French and Moroccan states. In each case, what a conquering, national, or literary language attempts to surpass nevertheless survives and transmits through it.

Methodologically, non-identity is the central dynamic of this reading of Tamazgha French. In Chraïbi’s trilogy, it is the non-identity of the Aït Yafelman’s utterances with the sacred and national grammars that claim to regulate their speech, or the kernel of étrangeté, foreignness or strangeness, within the nation-state and within Islam that Chraïbi foregrounds in the epigraph to Mère, paraphrasing a well-known hadith: “L’islam redeviendra l’étranger qu’il a commencé par être.”[6] To become a stranger again: étrangeté transforms the restoration of identity implied by the future-tense verb redevenir, to become again, into persistence through difference.

In this sense, Tamazgha French mobilizes une pensée autre, an other-thought, to use the term that Abdelkébir Khatibi was elaborating contemporaneously with Chraïbi’s trilogy. Khatibi’s other-thought was premised on the term “Maghreb” as “le nom de cet écart, de ce non-retour au modèle de sa religion et de sa théologie (si déguisées soient-elles sous des idéologies révolutionnaires” (Khatibi 1983:12). In turn, Tamazgha French shifts the grounds of other-thought by reactivating the non-identity of Maghreb/Maghrib and Tamazgha. Reading for Tamazgha French means redoubling Khatibi’s method of double critique, premised on the Maghreb’s dual European and Arabo-Islamic heritage, on the literary horizon of Tamazgha.

The persistence of French is not a sign of unrealized social integration or a lack of political coherence—narratives that retain the exclusionary premise of transition from French to Arabic, from colonization to independence, or from under-development to modernity. Tamazgha French is a way of reading for other kinds of persistence within French, with radical potential for rethinking Maghrib/Maghreb studies as a non-identitarian, non-ethnonationalist Tamazgha.

References:      

Aboulkacem, El Khatir. 2023. “Taskla, or the Creation of a New Literature.” Translated by Tegan Raleigh. Review of Middle East Studies 56:362–73.

Akounad, Mohammed. 2021. “An Attempt at a Genealogical Study of the Short Story and Novel in Modern Amazigh Narrative.” Jadaliyya, November 1. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43438.

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Footnotes:

[1] Written literature in Tamazight, almost exclusively of a religious vocation, has existed since the eleventh century, using Arabic script. Apart from isolated instances dating to the 1940s, novels emerged in the 1990s and have continued to develop significantly in recent decades, including notably among women writers who were previously absent from the genre. On the pre-modern and modern history of Tamazight writing, see El Khatir Aboulkacem, “Taskla, or the Creation of a New Literature,” trans. Tegan Raleigh, Review of Middle East Studies 56 (2023): 362–73. On the modern Amazigh novel, see also Mohammed Akounad, “An Attempt at a Genealogical Study of the Short Story and Novel in Modern Amazigh Literature,” Jadaliyya, 1 November 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43438 (accessed 19 December 2024); Mohamed Zahir, “The Amazigh Novel, Mythology of Origins, and Return of the Repressed: A Titrological Approach,” trans. Tegan Raleigh, Review of Middle East Studies 56 (2023): 313–15. On recent novels by women, see Fadma Farras, “Ecriture du corps et de l'espace dans le roman féminin en amazighe tachelhit,” Tamazgha Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2023): 65–79.

[2] Brahmi El Guabli, “Tankra Tamazight: The Revival of Amazigh Indigeneity in Literature and Art,” Jadaliyya, November 1, 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43440 (accessed 19 December 2024).

[3] My argument here is about how the literary field became structured by associations between specific languages (official and standard versus vernacular), mediums (writing versus orality), and forms of literature (canonical and popular) and politics (nation-state and non-national communities. In this, it parallels but is distinct from the foundational political contestation posed by Ali Sidqi Azaykou, the trailblazing Moroccan Amazigh activist, historian, and poet. Azaykou argued that Tamazight language and Amazigh society, rather than French, were the real targets of official Arabization policies in Morocco, contrasting the national pursuit of Arabization in the public sphere with the elite’s continued use of French for personal gain in their private lives. See Ali Sidqi Azaykou, “Fī sabīl mafhūm ḥaqīqī li-thaqāfatinā al-waṭaniyya,” in Maʿārik fikriyya ḥawla al-amāzīghiyya (Rabat: Markaz Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād), 38–40.

[4] “On parle de l’arabe, on parle du français, mais on oublie l’essentiel, ce qu’on appelle le ‘berbère’. Terme faux, venimeux même, qui vient du mot ‘barbare’. Pourquoi ne pas appeler les choses par leur nom? Ne pas parler du tamazight, la langue, et d’Amazigh, ce mot qui représente à la fois le lopin de terre, le pays et l’homme libre?” (Yacine 1994:30; 102).

[5] Contemporary reviews of these novels by notable scholars of Maghrebi literature of the time link the emergence of Chraïbi’s Amazigh theme to the author’s first return visit to Morocco after many years residing abroad in France, and to a desire to reclaim a storied history at risk of being forgotten. Another reviewer likens Mère to Alex Haley’s Roots. See, respectively, Marx-Scouras, 1991; Mortimer, 1987; Gauthier, 1983.

[6] “Badaʾa al-islām gharīb wa-sayaʿūd kamā badaʾa gharīb fa-ṭūbā- li-l-ghurabāʾ.” Saḥīḥ Muslim, Kitāb al-īmān.