Blog Post One

Preliminary Notes on Amazigh-Americans and Tamazghan-Americans

Brahim El Guabli
Williams College

In her captivating novel, The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami crafts an autobiographical work in which Estevanico, aka Muṣṭafā al-Zammūrī, a native of Azemmour in nowadays Morocco, retells his own reimagined life story. The Moor’s Account sheds light on this former slave’s little-known life as it recreates his feats as an enslaved participant in the early conquests of the Americas. The novel revivifies Estevanico, humanizes him, takes us inside events that could have happened, and decolonizes his narrative by empowering him to narrate it himself. As one reads The Moor’s Account, they realize that it is not only Estevanico whom Lalami resuscitates aptly in her imaginative plot but also an overshadowed relationship between Tamazgha and the Americas. One cannot but wonder how many Estevanicos there were but whose existence was never recorded. Eight years after the publication of The Moor’s Account, poet Abderrahim El Khassar published his debut novel entitled Jazīrat al-bukā’ al-ṭawīl (The Island of Long Weeping), adding The Island to Estevanico’s literary afterlife. Between The Moor’s Account and The Island, Estevanico’s feats and failures have reached a wide audience across languages and cultures. I am aware that Estevanico’s adventurous life could use up much more space than a couple pages, but I wanted use his story as a segue into a short discussion of Amazigh-Americanness and Tamazghan-Americanness.

Novels are the realm of fiction, but some of them do more than just imagine possible worlds. They create “other-archives” and establish possible historical records where absence has taken the place of history and where memory replaced written records. Novels can speak to questions that have broader implications for their readers in the present, and thanks to Lalami and El Khassar’s novels, American-North-Africans could learn—independently of how they feel about the conquest and its aftermath—that one of theirs was among the first foreigners who made it to Americas. This Amazigh person endured and survived almost all the scourges of his time. As the novels unfold, the reader appreciates his survival skills, his multilingualism, and his willingness to reach out to those who were being subjected to conquest. Estevanico’s story is all the more important to recover as a marker of an early Amazigh presence in the Americas, now that Amazigh-Americans are slowly establishing “Amazigh enclaves” for activism and academic endeavors in the United States and Canada. Particularly, Lalami’s depiction of Estevanico’s relationship with Native Americans portrays a level of intimacy that could be read as an early gesture towards an inter-Indigenous dialogue that is even more relevant today than ever before.

After years of local struggle to claim linguistic and cultural rights, Amazigh activists started to think supranationally starting in the mid-1990s. The use of Tamazgha to refer to the Amazigh homeland in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa has been one of the consequential results of this shift, which also happened in a context where human rights became central in international relations. Encompassing the vast territory extending from the Canary Islands to the Amazigh oases in the Egyptian-Libyan borders and extending further south to Burkina Faso, Tamazgha, albeit a neologism, complicates the notion of Amazighity between Amazigh-Tamazghans, who consider themselves Amazigh whether they speak the language or not, and other non-Amazigh-Tamazghans, who belong to the larger territory of Tamazgha without necessarily thinking of their identity as being Amazigh even if they speak one of the varieties of Tamazight. Although both hail from the same territory, not all Tamazghans are Imazighen. Thus, Tamazghans are not all speakers of Tamazight, and their existence straddles different nation-states. These differences have tremendous implications for the distinction between Amazigh-Americans and Tamazghan-Americans, particularly among the second and subsequent generations, who are increasingly expressing interest in their Amazigh or Tamazghan identity.

Amazigh immigration to North America is very recent. Some Imazighen may have emigrated with the Spanish and the Portuguese in the earlier centuries, but what is certain is that thousands of Tamazghans were violently dislocated from their homes and shipped to the Americas to work as enslaved labor, counting Tamazghans among the victims of the Middle Passage. Voluntary Tamazghan immigration, however, dates back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Available fragments of information reveal that some temporary immigrants arrived from the Moroccan Riff via Gibraltar, Manchester, and other European cities. There is also information that the United States imported one or several Algerian camel trainers in the nineteenth century as part of a scheme to create a camel force to fight Native Americas and the Mormons in Utah. It is not far-fetched either to think that several people had arrived from the French colonies in North Africa as part of the then ongoing Franco-American expeditions that focused on plants and agriculture between the American southwest and the Sahara. Quite a few Moroccans came to the United States as acrobats thanks to entrepreneur Hassan Ben Ali. Even the polymath al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī records in his book Kilhāl jāzūla (Throughout Jazūla) the time he spent  with one of these master acrobats in Tiznit in the WWII period. Named Ahmed, this man is described by al-Sūsī as “the master of games who traveled through the horizons of Europe and America.” Al-Sūsī shares that during his walks with Ahmed and others, they “traveled through North America between New York and Chicago on the east and San Francisco on the west, then Canada as we also travel[led] through Britain, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Central and Western Europe.” Al-Sūsī even goes on to enumerate the languages that Ahmed spoke, highlighting, in the meantime, the fact that he returned back home during WWII. Unlike the thousands of Amazigh migrants who were recruited through bilateral agreements with North African states to export the manpower necessary for post-WWII Europe’s reconstruction, the immigration systems in the United States and Canada have not favored this type of emigration en masse. This said, thousands of Tamazghans have moved to these two countries as a result of the American Diversity Visa Lottery and the subsequent increase of Algerian refugees during the civil war in the 1990s.

Statistics about these immigrants remain elusive. Laura Harjanto and Jeanne Batalova have reported that there were some 381.000 North Africans in the United States in 2019, including immigrants from Egypt and Sudan, which further complicates the task of disentangling the multilayered aspects of Amazighness in the North American diaspora. Hence, it is important to distinguish between Amazigh-Americans, aka Berber-Americans, who are speakers of one of the varieties of Tamazight, and Tamazghan-Americans, who hail from the countries that Amazigh activists subsume under the territory of Tamazgha. Amazigh-Americans themselves can be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there are those Amazigh-Americans who have achieved the  state of Amazighitude—that is consciousness of their Amazighity and have been involved in civil, grassroots work to preserve their culture in North America. On the other hand, there are those for whom Amazighness is a latent identity, which means that they are aware of their Amazigh descent and even understand the cultural politics of their identity, but do nothing to carry it forward in the public sphere. The members of this category accept the erosion of their ancestral language and culture as a given, resigning themselves to accepting the dominant language or culture. This category may also participate in Amazigh-centered events, but its members prefer not to lead the Amazigh civic work. Obviously, it is the “Amazighituders,” those who reached Amazighitude, who wed consciousness with action to harness all the resources that North America offers for the preservation of their Indigenous language and culture. These Amazighituders are the driving force behind the Amazigh enclaves in Boston, New York, and Montreal, among others.

If Amazigh-Americans form a clearer category today, Tamazghan-Americanness is a work-in-progress. Until the term Tamazgha becomes routinized and widely-used in all mundane activities, Tamazghan-Americanness’s potential remains to be constructed. However, it is possible to imagine the myriad synergies Amazigh-Americans and Tamazghan-Americans can harness for social, linguistic, and cultural collaborations centered on Tamazgha. Research on Amazigh-Americans will also benefit tremendously from the examination of these categories and refining their meaning among the small groups that are conscious of their existence.

As Amazigh enclaves emerge in North America, it is crucial that we pay attention to the nuanced ways in which Tamazgha can help reshape the parameters of belonging between different nation-states, Tamazgha, Amazighity, and North-Americanness.