Translating and Teaching Tamazgha

Paul A. Silverstein
Reed College

Elevating Amazigh Studies in the academy requires reframing the scholarship on North Africa in the terms of Tamazgha. Understood as both a visceral spacetime and a political chronotope, Tamazgha calls our attention to both the deep and deeply felt history of Amazigh-speaking peoples as well as the present diversity of the Amazigh experience.[1] In the absence of official written or concrete monumental archives, Tamazgha comes to be recognized and revitalized through the arduous labor of artists and activists who have defied the politics of erasure to translate oral genres and material traces into tangible cultural patrimony and engaged in a decades’ long struggle on its behalf.

As academics and allies, our job is not only to center the efforts and achievements of Amazigh artists, activists, and scholars, but to translate their translations for wider audiences and larger platforms. Such a project is necessarily collaborative; it requires working across disciplines, epistemologies, and geographies. It requires navigating both the Scylla of ethnological cataloguing and the Charybdis of romantic primitivism. It requires us to move beyond monological scholarly interpretation and instead platform a polyphony of Amazigh voices, not all of which always agree.

How might we best promote and sustain the project of Tamazgha without bracketing its internal divides, exclusions, and biases along terrains of gender, ethnicity, and race? How might we avoid a destructive deconstruction of Amazigh politics and instead contribute to a productive dialogue among Tamazgha’s differing—and sometimes conflicting—stakeholders? By what criteria do we choose our collaborative partners and decide on which translations to translate? The questions we face in elevating Amazigh Studies are as ethical as academic.

As students and scholars, we are the inheritors of imperial and authoritarian genealogies which have alternately instrumentalized and erased the Amazigh presence. Amazigh studies builds inevitably on French colonial military ethnology which, from Eugène Daumas, Louis Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, Emile Laoust, Maurice Le Glay, Louis Rinn, and Georges Spillmann through to Robert Montagne and Jacques Berque who privileged North Africa’s “Berber” heritage in order to counter the immanence of Islam and legitimize French colonialism. Indeed, such an instrumentalization of Amazigh culture continues in the service of Islamophobia and Arabophobia among some neo-Orientalist academics in the US, UK, and Israel in the lineage of Bernard Lewis. In contrast, more seminal ethnographers and social theorists working during or in the immediate wake of decolonization like Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner, David Hart, and Lawrence Rosen likewise built directly on the colonial legacy even as they generally adopted a more anti-colonial stance and even came to champion the Amazigh cause. If all-too-easily dismissed as “Orientalist” by contemporary academics, the colonial archive serves as a rich source of ethnographic data for Amazigh activists and scholars who mine it for examples of earlier practices, institutions, and linguistic features. For instance, Arsène Roux’s early 20th century recordings of Middle Atlas poetry continues to attest to Amazigh agency in the face of French military occupation and inspire new oral poets and historians today. An activist in Zagora once handed me a tattered copy of Spillman’s 1936 study of the Ait Atta and told me that I could find the answers to all my questions therein. While I do not doubt his seriousness, there was a fair amount of irony and perhaps a little disdain for my own anthropological inquiry in his gesture.

In parallel, contemporary Amazigh studies builds on the work of Amazigh scholar-activists in both North Africa and the diaspora who have courageously combatted the post-independence regimes’ embrace of Arab nationalism and Salafi Islam. Indeed, later scholars like Bourdieu were explicit about how much their work drew on their collaborations with Amazigh writers and scholars like Mouloud Mammeri and Abdelmalek Sayad who championed Amazigh art, culture, and social struggles. The subsequent generation of Salem Chaker, Tassadit Yacine, Abdellah Bounfour, Ahmed Boukouss, Assia Djebbar, Mohamed Djellaoui, Abdellah Hammoudi, and Hassan Rachik, picked up the baton and trained generations of Amazigh anthropologists, historians, linguists, and literary scholars in France, the US, and even informally in Algeria and Morocco. Their students founded key overseas Amazigh cultural associations like the Association de Culture Berbère and Tamazgha in Paris or the Amazigh Cultural Association of America in the US. I recall fondly the amazing events hosted by these venues in the 1990s that brought out multiple generations of Amazigh expatriates, some of whom who had fled the Algerian civil war or the authoritarian repression in Morocco, as well as the lively debates on the Amazigh net list-serv during which a number of colleagues who had come to the US to pursue their advanced literary studies—including current colleagues like Rachid Aadnani, Fazia Aitel, Nabil Boudraa, and Alek Baylee Toumi—among others, were regular participants. In the meantime, many who went overseas for their studies ended up returning to Algeria and Morocco where they became key members in local cultural and political movements which themselves had been built around the salvage anthropological, recording, and documentation work of Amazigh teachers, writers, and artists associated with groups like AMREC in Rabat or various sections of the MCB in Algeria. A number have since pursued their activism and scholarship in their work with the Académie Algérienne de la Langue Amazighe and the  Moroccan Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe, while others have been critical of these state organizations as forms of regime cooptation and folklorization which have failed to address enduring forms of political and economic inequality and marginalization affecting rural Amazigh-speaking areas, and as the September 2023 earthquake in the Moroccan High Atlas patently revealed. Amazigh studies, as we know it today, derives from these entangled histories of scholarship and activism, from the courageous efforts of Amazigh men and women in both Tamazgha and the diaspora.

My own journey into Amazigh studies was quite unplanned, and whatever modest contributions I have been able to make have come at the exhortation of my Amazigh friends and interlocutors in France, Morocco, and the US. I initially went to France in the mid-1990s to study the cultural productions and identity politics of younger generations of Franco-Maghrebis in the wake of the so-called “Beur” civil rights movement of the early 1980s, in which those of Amazigh background played a central role. Those I ended up in conversation with saw such a project as quaint, perhaps intellectually interesting, but nowhere near as pressing as the existential threat to Amazigh life posed by the Algerian civil war, during which Kabyle artists and intellectuals were being assassinated and entire villages massacred by some unclear concatenation of an Arabophone military regime and an armed Islamist insurgency. I recall Malika Matoub calling me out as an American for the US sheltering members of groups who kidnapped and would eventually assassinate her brother Lounès. Another brilliant Kabyle activist Gaia, with whom I have sadly lost touch, encouraged me repeatedly to use the term “Amazigh” at a time when this was nearly unknown in rural North Africa and a hotly contested term even among activists based in France. Masine Ferkal and others faced an uphill struggle to organize an Amazigh World Congress, and I often found myself mediating dialogues between activists associated with ideologically opposed factions of the transnational MCB and its associated Algerian RCD and FFS political parties, which was mirrored in similar divides between Marxist, culturalist, and royalist tendencies among Moroccan activists. These were fabulous lessons not only about the complexities of political organizing and big-tent social movements, but also about the diversity and plurality within Tamazgha which complicated simplistic Orientalist divisions between so-called “Berbers” and “Arabs.”

In the early 2000s I expanded my research on Amazigh activism to North Africa, and while my initial plan was to go to Kabylia, the ongoing insecurity around the counter-insurgency and Black Spring made obtaining visas and research permits nearly impossible, forcing me to relocate the research in Morocco. In Rabat I interviewed key activists like Brahim Akhiyat and Hassan Id Belkassem and presented my research project at Tamaynut, where I met a brilliant younger scholar and activist Hamid Lihi who had been one of the seven Tilelli (Freedom) militants who had been arrested and tortured in Errachidia in 1994—an event which set off the process that established the IRCAM and recognized the national and eventually official status of the Amazigh language. Knowing of my research background around Kabyle politics, he invited me to Goulmima, in southeastern Morocco, which was more ideologically oriented towards Kabylia than, say, the Sous, and which had sent a disproportionate number of representatives to the Amazigh World Congress. I was and remain curious about why that was the case, why in this valley in particular the Amazigh language and culture would become an object of contentious politics. But the local activists and residents quickly taught me that language and culture were but the symbolic tip of a larger iceberg in the long struggle for self-determination, which at the moment was centered there on securing land, infrastructure, and resources. The fights were over the state declaring eminent domain over collective grazing land, some of which was being used for infrastructural projects, others which were being sold to private developers to build housing or tourism complexes. At the heart of these struggles was a general sense of resource inequality and hogra (regime disdain/humiliation), but it also involved an internal fight for local control between formerly dominant tribal and sharif nobilities and those from subdominant castes of former sharecroppers and slaves—all of whom had competing claims to Amazighité. The plurality of Tamazgha operated at multiple scales of belonging, and it was crucial, my local activist-scholar interlocutors like Hamid Lihi or Ali Harcherras or Omar Taws insisted, that I recognize these multiple and often non-aligned perspectives. As I write about Amazigh life and struggles in Goulmima, I have tried to heed their advice and give voice to these multiple positionalities while recognizing how they all contribute in different ways to the Amazigh struggle. If at times in my scholarly writing I have had to unpack the public Amazigh activist discourse and trace out some of its secularist or exclusionist tendencies, I try to avoid what Richard Handler called a “destructive analysis” and instead present such tendencies as always in conversation with others.[2] My goal is to be a collaborator and ally, not external critic, and to help build an Amazigh studies that is attuned to these multiple ways of being and doing Amazigh.

One way I have tried to be a collaborator and ally is through translation work, both in the broad sense of ethnography as a form of translation of a lifeworld for readers distant from it, but also in the more narrow sense of translating the written work of Amazigh scholars and authors into English. One project involved bringing out an English language version of Bourdieu and Sayad’s Le Déracinement (Uprooting), their brilliant ethnography of wartime concentration camps set up by the French military to forcibly resettle Kabyle (and other) villagers as part of their counterinsurgency campaign against the FLN and to destroy its rural base of operations. In addition to making their anti-colonial critique and insights into Kabyle concepts of time, space, and personhood accessible to Anglophone readers, the project involved building a glossary of Algerian Arabic and Amazigh terms which Nabil Boudraa and I put together in consultation with others.[3]

A second translation project is the wonderful Francophone Amazigh novel, Le Sacrifice des vaches noires, written by Moha Layid about his native Tinejdad in late-colonial southeastern Morocco.[4] While very much a story about the Moroccan nation, and even more broadly about human existential and ethical dilemmas, it is also an ethnographic portrayal of marginalized Amazigh villagers seeking desperately to keep their sociocultural world together in the face of ecological and political crises, and as such allegorizes the broader Amazigh struggle. While the author has passed, it has been amazing working with the author’s son Tarik to bring his father’s work back in print and to a larger audience, as well as with a number of Moroccan Amazigh colleagues to verify some of the novel’s details—like how local women previously used the red labels from sugar loaves to blush their cheeks—or to understand some of the novel’s particularities, like a seemingly purposeful mis-paraphrase from the Qur’an which reveals the novel to also be a commentary on the sura al-baqarah. And I even got to get to work with a local artist from Tinejdad for the cover art. I taught the book recently as part of an anthropology junior seminar course on Morocco, where I used it as an example of an ethnography written in the form of fiction, in contrast with classic ethnographic monographs of Amazigh societies by Robert Montagne, Ernest Gellner, Lawrence Rosen, and Abdellah Hammoudi we were also reading. Students appreciated not only that Layid was writing about his own sociocultural world, but that he made that world come alive through individual characters and their everyday struggles rather than through analytical categories and ethnological generalizations. The novel became the basis for their junior qualifying examination in which they had to choose particular scenes to closely read through different anthropological theories.

In the years ahead, I look forward to working with Brahim El Guabli and Aomar Boum on other translation projects commissioned by their Amazigh Studies book series at Georgetown University Press, to help bring a younger generation of authors and poets writing directly in the Amazigh language to Anglophone readers. Doing so will help build the basis for a robust Amazigh studies curriculum in the United States and elsewhere. Such a curriculum would be centered not on the external gaze of scholars like myself, the inheritors of colonial ethnology, but rather on the polyphony of works and perspectives of Amazigh writers, scholars, and activists who have taken it upon themselves to translate an endangered way of indigenous life. My dream would be to one day teach a course on Tamazgha in which all the works we read are akin to Layid’s novel, written by Amazigh authors in an Amazigh idiom now made available to my American students.

Bibliography

Bourdieu., Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria. Edited by Paul A. Silverstein (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2020 [1964]).

Handler, Richard. “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Journal of Anthropological Research 41(2) (1985), pp. 171–182

Layid, Moha. The Sacrifice of Black Cows. Translated by Paul A. Silverstein (New York: MLA, 2024)

Silverstein, Paul A. “The Productive Plurality of Tamazgha: Boundaries, Intersections, Frictions.” Tamazgha Studies Journal 1(1) (2023). 

Footnotes

[1] See Paul A. Silverstein, “The Productive Plurality of Tamazgha: Boundaries, Intersections, Frictions,” Tamazgha Studies Journal 1(1) (2023), pp. 23–34.

[2] Richard Handler, “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Journal of Anthropological Research 41(2) (1985), pp. 171–182.

[3] Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria. Edited by Paul A. Silverstein (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2020 [1964]).

[4] Moha Layid, The Sacrifice of Black Cows. Translated by Paul A. Silverstein (New York: MLA, 2024).