English Translation

01 O Mount Abarrane[1], O rot of bones[2] —

02 Whoever deceived[3] you will be deceived by time.

03 Thus were you deceived when the Christian[4] dared enter Temsamane[5].

04 Temsamane is no easy thing — do you take it for a field of poppies[6]?

05 Rejoice, Mimount[7], while your brothers still stand beside you.

06 The apples are not yet ripe and the plums are bitter still.[8]

07 O Mount Abarrane, O rot of bones —

08 Whoever deceived you will be deceived by time.

09 When you launched your bombs and then made camp,[9]

10 Was it Aqarqach[10] who deceived you, or Amar Bouyawzan[11]?

11 Or were you deceived by those girls girded with embroidered cloth?[12]

12 As the ship[13] is deceived upon the face of the water —

13 There the Christians stayed, crashing into one another like rams,

14 Their weapons floating in the water like reeds.

15 Look what the fighter brings from his arsenal:

16 A keen-edged blade and a farmer's rifle.[14]

17 O Mount Abarrane, O rot of bones —

18 Where the bombs thundered and the horses screamed,

19 Where the soldiers lay stretched out like fish,[15]

20 Their helmets scattered like scorched peppers —

21 Where the commandant died and the interpreter died.

22 O Captain Huelva,[16] the noose has tightened around you.

23 Where are your soldiers now? Not one remains alive.

24 The Aït Ouriaghel[17] rose — young and old alike —

25 And caught the frog-eater[18] and handled him like fish.

26 The Aït Ouriaghel rose, twelve hundred strong.

27 When they returned, they were five.[19]

28 O God, what will I do[20]

29 For Khaddouj,[21] my uncle — when she crosses my path?

30 When she asks me: where has Mouh[22] gone?

31 Mouh the fighter — killed by a burning bomb.[23]

32 O God, what will I do,

33 My black lashes heavy with tears,[24]

34 O my dear mother — falling now upon my knee?

35 My son, O Djbel Hamam,[25] my son — we have never known peace.

36 The cool waters quicken the young saplings,

37 But the nations press down upon me and dread has settled in.

38 I swear by God, frog-eater — you will fall into my hands.

39 Spain, O Spain, that has let its hair grow long —[26]

40 Give me your hand and I will count the dead.

41 O Amar son of Oufkir,[27] fallen upon the barbed wire.

42 O Amar el Madani,[28] O brave fighter —

43 You fought with your pistol and finished with your blade.

44 You, Rifians — you have always been fighters.

45 You fought with your bare hands and the girls fought beside you.[29]

46 They carried jars upon their backs and climbed the rocks.

47 They bent under their loads and scaled the mountain.

48 The sugar loaf[30] adorned with a thread of silk —

49 Fatma the Rifian,[31] worthy of such a son,

50 Worthy to have worn a belt of four reals,

51 Worthy to have rocked her child to sleep.

52 The Christian attacked Anoual and Aroui.[32]

53 Mohamed son of Abdelkrim[33] — O pure fighter.

54 The post of Bouymejjan burst into fire.[34]

55 From the post of Tmammachte, wailing rose.[35]

56 When the Christian fled he slung his coat over his arm.

57 When he reached Melilla[36] he let it fall in the road.

58 The Christian is mustering, mustering — O mother.[37]

59 This life is a life worth nothing when it burns.

60 The Christian struck and took Tizi Aezza[38] —

61 He wanted to brew his tea with water from Oulma.[39]

62 O fighters, fight — what is life worth when it wastes away?

63 The Christian struck and took Aroui by force.

64 When he reached Driouch[40] he entered through his informers.

65 Ah, Tafarsit[41] — sold in silence.

66 The Christian rejoiced, wanting it all for himself.

67 He arrived at Tizi Aezza — and there was the rot of his bones.

68 The Christian struck and struck and would not stop.

69 He came to Tizi Idris[42] thinking no one was there.

70 There they killed the captain and cut the commandant down standing.

71 O Moulay Mohand,[43] O our leader and guide —

72 He swore he would drive the French back to their trenches.[44]

73 O my doves[45] that take flight and never land —

74 Go, carry my greetings to the president of France.

75 Tell him: Abdelkrim will bring calamity upon you.

76 O Moulay Mohand — how much longer must we endure?

77 Planes from the sky and frigates from the sea.[46]

78 O my dear mother, how much I have wept

79 Over this great village emptied and ruined.

80 The plane climbs, veering across the sky,

81 Come to bomb the commandant of Ajdir.[47]

82 Be patient, my heart — be steadfast, my son, do not weep.

83 As the mountains endure the fog and the cloud.

84 O that house up there, built high in the mountain —[48]

85 Where is your master? We no longer see him.

86 Is he sick? Is he standing? Tell me — where is he hidden?

87 O River Amassin,[49] that fights alongside us —

88 It has forced the deer to gnaw upon stone.

89 Abdelkrim is a Muslim[50] — may God's help be upon him.

90 Spain, our enemy, prowls through the mountains.

91 The plane soars and banks like a raven.[51]

92 O God, keep it from the mountains of the Aït Ouriaghel.

93 The Christian came five times five.[52]

94 He said Abdelkrim's life would become a hell.

95 A farmer came and cut them down with gunfire.

96 Not one left alive, not one able to stand.

97 Young and old — he wiped them all out.

98 O tribe of Temsamane, give us passage to cross,

99 That we may reach the Spanish at Tizi Aezza,

100 That we may reach Amzaourou,[53] the place of Jnada,

101 That we may face the Spanish — as for Bouhmara,[54] he is finished.

102 O great commandant, squeezing potatoes for water.[55]

103 O Moulay Mohand, our great fighter —

104 He descended upon the Christians at Dhar Abarrane.

105 Some carried rifles; others carried only sickles.[56]

106 They thought they were going to harvest grass along the riverbeds.

107 They reckoned the Spanish as nothing more than tin cans.

108 O Tizi Aezza, ground of the fighters —

109 There the Christians were caught like chicks.

110 The infidel Christian[57] dug in at Anoual,

111 Drove his tent pegs and stretched the corners taut.

112 The plane took off and reached Tizi Aezza,

113 And left the Muslims mourning one another.

114 The plane climbed into the sky and left a trail of smoke.

115 It was at Ijarmaousse[58] that it made its ruin.

116 It killed Mohamed — still young, still unripe.

117 The plane took off and struck Sidi Brahim,[59]

118 Bombed the fighters, sons of the Companions of the Prophet.[60]

119 O fighter, my son — have you had water to drink?[61]

120 The caid[62] of Tizi Aezza squeezes potatoes for water.

121 He picked up the telephone and called Malaga:[63]

122 Send more soldiers — the ones we had are finished.

123 Where did he put the eight thousand who came from Malaga?

124 The last of them fell in Djbel Hamam.

125 Everything he lost at Anoual has now been reckoned against him.

126 O aunt, have you filled your granary with wheat?[64]

127 Your husband walks abroad without shame —

128 When he does not work, he is with the Christian.

129 The blotched-faced one has gone without showing himself,

130 Hunched under bread and tea across the road.

131 His wife waits, hoping he will provide for her.

132 He loves the drink — he will die like a dog.[65]

133 What have you gained, O spy of the village?

134 Did you earn more than a harvester's wage?[66]

135 O God, guide him — grant us leave,

136 Leave to sing Lalla Bouya[67] and to dance.

137 O Moulay Mohand, why is your heart so hard?

138 Lalla Bouya has been silenced across your land.[68]

Original Tarifit

01 A ya dhar ubarran a ya ssus n yexsan

02 Wi zzayk igharren azzays ighar zman

03 Amen zzayk ighar urumi yudef Temsaman

04 Temsaman ma tehwen ma tghirac d benneεman

05 Nezzah a mimunt maƕend gham ayetmam

06 Tteffaƕ war yenwi rbaquq d’asemmam

07 A ya dhar ubarran a ya ssus n yexsan

08 Wi zzayk igharren azzays ighar zman

09 Rami tawtid rborqi tarni’d ra d tixuzan

10 Ma igharric uqarqac ma d εmar n buyawzan

11 Ma gharrentc tibrighin ibeysen s ifiran

12 Am ighar ugharrabu x waεror n waman

13 Aqqimen days irumiyen ttembarrazen am imuyan

14 Yaqqim sraε nsen g waman am ighunam

15 Xzar ghar wemjahed min’d yiwi zi resnaƕ

16 raƕdida teqδaε d’ufucir afellaƕ

17 A ya dhar ubarran a ya ssus n yexsan

18 Mani inhem rborqi mani nehcen yeysan

19 Mani iqqim rεeskar ised am iserman

20 qqiment ticucay nnes am rferfer yenwan

21 mani yemmut rƕakem mani yemmut utorjman

22 A rqeb τan wilva temži xak rƕerqa

23 manis yekka rεeskar nnec ra d’ijjen ma yeddar

24 ƕarcen’d yat waryigher amežyan ameqran

25 gginas I buyjarwan am netta am iserman

26 ƕarcen’d yat waryigher di tenεac amya

27 umi’d gha εeqben a εeqben’d di xemsa

28 arebbi mamec gha gegh?

29 I xedduj a εemmi xmi day’d gha terqa

30 xmi day gha tini Mmuƕ mani ikka?

31 Mmuƕ amjahed tanghit ƕarraqa

32 Arebbi mamec gha gegh?

33 I waber abarcan yebbehba’d s’umeττa

34 Aya lalla yemma x ufud inu iweττa

35 mmi adrar n reƕmam mmi war nufi bu rehna

36 Aman d’iŝemmaδen sserqaƕen taŝeττa

37 ŝugen’d ghari regnus yarsa dayi wamnus

38 Wallah ghar ma teqqimed a buyjawan g fus

39 seppanya seppanya I’d yarxun cεar

40 sighay’d fus nnem adam inigh cƕar

41 A εmar n wefqir x sserk I yewδa

42 A εmar n rmadani a yamjahed ahemmi

43 tjahded s rkabus tεawded s’uxedmi

44 kenniw a irifiyen d’imjahden zi rebda

45 tjahdem s’ufus nwem jahdent ra d tiniba

46 min arbunt d’iqubac gaεdent akd iŝuδar

47 rmunet x waεror arbunt akd wedmar

48 rqareb n ssekwar izeyyen s’ufiru

49 A faδma tarifect cenna mara turu

50 Cenna mara tebyes reƕzam n abεa duru

51 Cenna mara tenna I wsimi hellararu

52 Iŝug’d urumi x wenwar d’uεarwi

53 Muƕend n εebdekrim ay amjahed aƕorri

54 taεessast n buymejjan tekkar days caεrira

55 taεessast n tmammact ghar tŝuδ ameττa

56 Umi yuyor urumi yisi palto deg wghir

57 rami gha yadef mritc iδerqas deg webrid

58 yenyarwe’d urumi yenyarwe’d a yemma

59 tudarta d tudart amin umi teƕra

60 iŝug’d urumi yeττef tizi εezza

61 Yexs ad’iqam atay s waman n warma

62 A yimjahden wtet tudart mayemmi teƕra

63 Iŝug’d urumi yeττef aεarwi s draε nnes

64 Yiwe’d driwec yudfit s’imuddukar nnes

65 Lalla tafarsit atenni yemmenzen s rƕes

66 Ifarƕas urumi yexs atyawi waƕdes

67 Yiwe’d tizi n εezza d tzura n yexsan nnes

68 Iŝug’d urumi war yeqqar ad’ibed

69 Yiwe’d tizi n dris ighir war dinni ƕed

70 Nghin din rqebτan rƕakem gharsenas ibed

71 Aya muray Muƕend A zzaεim aseyyas

72 Yezzudj ƕetta awmi yarra afransis ar dsas

73 Aya rƕmam inu yeττawen war yetrus

74 Raƕ siwδas sram I rrays n wefransis

75 Iniyas teddukre’d εebdekrim d’amenƕus

76 A muray Muƕend! Mecƕar umi gha neŝbar?

77 ττeyarat zeg wjenna fargatat zi rebƕar

78 Aya lalla yemma min rugh d’ameττa

79 x dcar ameqran umi’d yeffu yexra

80 A turi’d ττeyarra tegwor tedderdir

81 Tus’d atewwet rƕakem n wejdir

82 ŝbar a yur inu ŝbar a mmi wir tru

83 Am ŝbaren idurar I tayyut d usinu

84 Aya taddart nni A tin yebnan deg wedrar

85 Mani raƕ bab nnem qa war dayem iδehhar

86 Ma yeƕrec ma yekkar inayi mani yeffar

87 A yeghžar umasin itjahaden ra nneta

88 Yejja ighayden n wežghar ddarraεen I yežra

89 εebdekrim d’amesrem atiεawen arebbi

90 Asppanyu reεdu deg durar itebbi

91 Turi’d ττeyara tzeyyar’d am ubagher

92 Aya rebbi ƕeydit x idurar n yat waryigher

93 Ixecce’d urumi gi xemsa xmas

94 Yennas tudart n εebdekrim anessecmed babas

95 Yekke’d ij ufellaƕ yeqdaten s’uqarτas

96 Ura d’ij ma yeddar ura d’ij ma yekkar

97 Amežyan ameqran s kurci yeqdat

98 A taqbilt n temsaman gganegh abrid aneεda

99 Ad neεda ghar useppanyu gi tizi εezza

100 Ad neεda ghar umzawaru amcan n jnada

101 Ad neεda ghar useppanyu buƕmara aqqa yeqda

102 Aya rƕakem ameqran itžemman baτaτa

103 Aya mulay Muƕend amjahed ameqran

104 Yeƕmer’d x urumi ghar dhar ubarran

105 Ca yisi’d aqarτas ca yisi’d imeyran

106 Tghirasen ad raƕen ad mjaren marru deg ghežran

107 ƕesben arumi amecnaw tiƕujar

108 Aya tizi εezza amcan n yemjahden

109 Din iτfen arumi amcnaw ifidjusen

110 Arumi rkafar deg wenwar yenneghmar

111 Yuta tixuzan ijebdasent tighemmar

112 Turi’d ττeyara tekke’d tizi εezza

113 Tejja tamesrent qaε ttemεezza

114 Turi’d ττeyara deg wjenna tegga ghidu

115 Deg jarmaws I di tegga ghezzu

116 Tengha muƕammed tqeδwit εad d’agheddu

117 Turi’d ττeyara d sidi brahim I tewta

118 Tewta lmujahidin tarwa n ŝŝuƕuba

119 A yamjahed a mmi ma teswid maruxa

120 Rqayed n tizi εezza itžemma baτaτa

121 Yewta di ssenyan yežwa ghar malagha

122 Arni’d rεeskar ma wa qa yeqδa

123 Mani yegga temnaraf zi malagha težwa

124 Aneggaru nsen di rƕmam I yewδa

125 Mmarra min yessexsar deg wenwar itiweddar

126 A tasraft imendi ma teεmar a εenti?

127 Aqqam aryaz nnem yegwar war yetsedƕi

128 xminni war ixeddem netta akd urumi

129 Aqarqac ughembub iruƕ war’d yeδhar

130 S weghrum d watay ittummes deg weεror

131 Tamghart tεayanit ƕuma xas idebbar

132 Tεejbas tziyyat ad yemmet am uheggar

133 A min ac i ŝeƕƕen ay axbarji n dcar?

134 Ma turyac ccehria x waddud ucewwar?

135 Aya rebi ad tehdid anex yewc ttesriƕ

136 Anex yewc ttesriƕ x lalla buya d cδiƕ

137 A muray mƕend ma war iƕin wur nnec

138 Aqqac lalla buya teqδa zi tmort nnec

Endnotes

^1 Dhar Abarrane: a ridge in Temsamane territory, occupied by Spanish forces on 1 June 1921. The name is a compressed Tarifit toponym: dhar (from Arabic, "mount" or "ridge") + abarran (adjectival form of barra, "outside" or "wild"), which originally qualified asekkur (a male partridge living in the forest rather than domesticated), giving the full form Dhar n usekkur abarran — "Ridge of the Wild Partridge." Ellision reduced this over time to Dhar Ubarran/Abarrane.

^2 "Rot of bones": Tarifit ssus n yexsan, rendered by the French translation as carie des os (bone cavity/dental decay). The image is deliberately organic and irreversible: a site that hollows out whatever occupies it from within. The choice of this biological metaphor — not fire, not flood, but slow internal destruction — prefigures the poem's sustained attention to environmental agency against the colonizer.

^3 The verb ighar (to deceive, to trick) is the master-word of the poem's opening movement, appearing six times in the first twelve verses across four uses of the root. Its repetition establishes a moral physics: deception circulates, returns, and is settled by time rather than by a single act of revenge. The Spanish were tricked by their own confidence; that confidence will trick them out of the territory.

^4 Tarifit urumi, the poem's consistent term for the Spanish colonizer. It carries religious and racial-colonial weight that "Spaniard" alone cannot hold: it marks the other as definitionally non-Muslim and therefore as a violator of Muslim territory. Distinct from the intensified double designation arumi rkafar (the infidel Christian, verse 110), urumi operates as a taxonomic exclusion — the outsider is named by what he is not. The Rifians also maintained other derogatory terms for the Spanish: butnaqqi (the ragged one), butnaqqitc (the stitched-together one), and iεaryanen (the naked ones, for allowing women to appear unveiled in public).

^5 Temsamane: one of the major Rifian tribal confederacies, whose territory encompassed the ridge of Dhar Abarrane. The Temsamane were among the first tribes to resist the Spanish advance in 1921 and are addressed directly in verse 98, where the poem requests safe passage through their land for the wider Rifian force. The tribe's name in the poem functions as both geography and collective moral actor.

^6 Tarifit benneεman — the poppy (Papaver sp.), abundant in Rif meadows and associated with fragility and transience. The comparison condenses the Spanish miscalculation: they assessed Temsamane the way a careless hand might pluck a flower — easily, without consequence. The poppy is also implicitly feminine and seasonal, reinforcing the poem's fusion of female vulnerability and territorial availability as the colonizer's fantasy.

^7 Mimount: a woman's proper name, but immediately also symbolic. The girl symbolizes the land of Temsamane itself — the woman and the territory are, in Rifian poetic culture, inseparable objects of protection. The man who defends his sister defends his earth; the man who loses his sister has lost his land. Mimount's presence here, while her brothers stand beside her, is the poem's first assertion of a defense that will hold.

^8 Apples (tteffaƕ) ripen in spring; plums (rbaquq) ripen in summer. Their simultaneous unripeness is not natural — it is a statement of permanent unavailability. The verse exploits the gap between the two seasons to say: there is no moment at which Temsamane is ripe for taking, no window in which the territory softens. Mimount (the land) is also, implicitly, this unripe fruit — virginal, bitter to any uninvited hand.

^9 Spanish forces under General Manuel Fernández Silvestre had been advancing through Rifian territory throughout the spring of 1921, establishing a chain of exposed forward positions. The garrison at Dhar Abarrane was occupied on 1 June 1921 — the battle described in the poem's central stanzas took place the same day. Silvestre's overextension of his lines, driven partly by intelligence from collaborating tribal leaders, was a central factor in the catastrophic Spanish defeats that followed throughout June and July.

^10 Aqarqach: a named local collaborator, one of the moros amigos (friendly Moors) or moros pensionados (pensioned Moors) whom Spain employed across the Rif as paid informants. By naming Aqarqach publicly in an oral poem that circulated through every market and field in the region, the poet enacts a form of extra-judicial shaming — the izri as an instrument of collective memory and social punishment that barbed wire and coin cannot dissolve.

^11 Amar Bouyawzan: a second named collaborator. The poem's strategy of embedding individual names within the epic form serves a double function: it testifies to the eyewitness specificity of oral history (these are real people, not types), and it ensures their infamy outlasts them. The poem at verse 133 returns to the collaborator as a figure — and asks him, directly, what he earned.

^12 "Girls girded with embroidered cloth": the sash or belt (ifiran, embroidered textile strips) is a marker of Rifian female beauty and elegance. The verse insinuates that the Spanish allowed desire — the land's apparent docility, its inhabitants' hospitality — to corrupt their military intelligence. The beautiful girl who seems to welcome you is the trap. This is one of the poem's most compressed ironies: the colonizer's orientalist fantasy of feminine submission is the very thing that destroys him.

^13 The ship metaphor (Tarifit ugharrabu — boat, vessel) operates on several levels. It is the actual vessel that transported Spanish troops across the Mediterranean to the Rif coast. It is a figure for the hubris of massive, armored, institutionalized power that is nonetheless helpless once committed to open water. And it anticipates the coastal landing scenes in which Spanish soldiers, disembarking under fire from Rifian fighters positioned in the surrounding hills, were caught between water and mountain with no cover.

^14 Tarifit ufucir afellaƕ: literally "the rifle of the farmer" or "the farmer's gun" — a single-shot agricultural rifle or hunting weapon, as opposed to the Spanish military-issue repeating rifle. The contrast is central to the poem's heroic economy: Rifian fighters improvised with what they had (farm tools, hunting weapons, blades stripped from the dead) and defeated a colonial army equipped with artillery, aircraft, and military-grade firearms. Verse 105 will sharpen this into its starkest form: some fighters arrived at Abarrane carrying only sickles.

^15 The comparison of dead Spanish soldiers to fish — lying outstretched, passive, available for collection — is part of the poem's systematic satirical demotion of the enemy. Fish do not fight back; they are caught, handled, and consumed. The same image returns in verse 25, where the Aït Ouriaghel "handle the frog-eater the way you handle fish." Death here is not tragic but contemptible: the enemy is reduced from soldier to catch.

^16 Captain Huelva (Tarifit rqebτan wilva): a named Spanish officer killed at Dhar Abarrane. His singling out by name in the poem confirms the oral tradition's claim to documentary accuracy — this is not a generic "captain" but a specific man encircled on a specific ridge. The word rƥerqa (the noose, the circle) applies to both the military encirclement and a physical tightening around the neck: the captain is caught.

^17 The Aït Ouriaghel (Tarifit waryigher): the dominant tribe of the central Rif and the tribe of Mohamed Ben Abdelkrim el Khattabi himself. Their participation in the Abarrane battle was decisive, and the poem addresses them specifically twice (vv.24 and 26) to mark their sacrifice: 1,200 rose; 5 returned.

^18 Buyjarwan: "frog-eater," a Rifian derogatory epithet for the Spanish that recurs at verses 25 and 38. It marks culinary foreignness (frogs are not eaten in Rifian culture) and by extension moral otherness. By the early twentieth century the Rif had developed a rich vocabulary of contempt for the Spanish occupier that operated across registers: economic (butnaqqi, the ragged/broke), moral (iεaryanen, the naked — for allowing women to appear unveiled), and dietary (buyjarwan, the frog-eater).

^19 The ratio of 1,200 to 5 is one of the poem's most devastating uses of arithmetic. Whether historically precise or a poetic intensification, the two-line sequence refuses consolation: the Aït Ouriaghel won — and at catastrophic cost. The poem does not resolve this tension into triumph. It records it, and moves on.

^20 Verses 28–34 mark the poem's most significant register shift: from collective epic voice to intimate dramatic monologue. The "I" here is a returning fighter who cannot find words adequate to the death he must report. The passage anticipates what might be called the rhetoric of inadequacy — the impossibility of speaking loss — that runs through elegiac traditions from Homer to the modern war lyric. The poem does not spare the speaker: his body fails (lashes heavy, knees giving way) before he has uttered a word.

^21 Khaddouj: a woman's name, wife of the fallen Mouh. She is not present in the scene — she exists entirely as a dread anticipation, a question the speaker cannot yet answer. Her function in the poem is to make the abstract count of the dead (1,200 to 5) into a specific domestic grief that must be looked in the face.

^22 Mouh: a common Rifian affective diminutive of Mohamed. The poem's use of this intimate form rather than the full name signals community membership and closeness — Mouh is not a hero in the distance but a neighbor, a kinsman, someone the speaker would have passed on the path every morning.

^23 Tarifit tanghit ƥarraqa: "the burning/scorching projectile." The detail of the bomb burning — as opposed to fragmenting — has been read in connection with Spain's documented use of chemical weapons in the Rif War, specifically mustard gas (yperite) and other vesicant agents deployed from aircraft and artillery from approximately 1921 onwards. Chemical agents produce chemical burns, not the impact wounds of conventional ordnance. Whether this verse encodes a specific recollection of vesicant exposure, or uses "burning" as a general intensifier, cannot be settled from the text alone; but the poem's later aviation verses (112–118) record aerial bombardment of civilian settlements in terms that historians have linked to the chemical weapons campaign.

^24 Tarifit waber abarcan: "the black eyelash." The image is physiologically specific and emotionally precise: tears have weighted the lashes until they hang dark and drenched. The speaker's body is crying before his mouth can speak. Verse 34's falling-on-the-knee completes the collapse: grief passes through the eyes, down to the hands, to the knee that will not hold.

^25 Djbel Hamam: a mountain in Aït Ouriaghel territory long believed — by both Rifians and European observers — to contain deposits of gold and silver. E. Biarnay recorded a traditional izri centered on Djbel Hamam in the early twentieth century: "O my son, O Djbel Hamam / You are the cause that we are not at peace / Your waters are cool, / They make the trees grow thick on your slopes." The mountain's mineral wealth was one of the primary triggers of Spanish colonial interest in the region. Its appearance here in a lament (v.35) links maternal grief to the resource extraction that produced the war.

^26 "Let its hair grow long": Tarifit i'd yarxun cεar. In Rifian culture, allowing the hair to grow can connote mourning (when one stops cutting in grief), but also arrogance and impunity — the man who lets his hair grow wild because he answers to no one. The following line — "give me your hand and I will count the dead for you" — demands an accounting that Spain has so far refused to give. The hair is Spain's uncut, unconfessed debt.

^27 Amar son of Oufkir (Tarifit εmar n wefqir): a named fighter who died on the barbed wire (sserk) surrounding Spanish fortified positions. The assault on Abarrane required breaching wire perimeters, a tactic that cost significant Rifian casualties. His death is commemorated here by name — the oral epic as war memorial, recording what no official register would acknowledge.

^28 Amar el Madani (Tarifit εmar n rmadani): a second named fighter celebrated for the sequential arc of his combat — pistol first, then blade when the ammunition ran out. The sequence is historically specific: Rifian fighters often exhausted their limited ammunition quickly and closed to hand-to-hand combat with blades stripped from the dead or carried from home. The poem honors both phases equally.

^29 Verses 45–47 document the active logistical role of Rifian women in the 1921 campaign. Rifian women carried water and provisions to fighters on the ridgelines — a role that was not merely symbolic support but militarily decisive. The Spanish in besieged positions at Abarrane, Ighriben, and Anoual suffered catastrophic thirst because Rifian fighters, supplied by women from the valleys below, controlled every accessible spring and denied them to the enemy. The women's labor is what made the Spanish siege possible and the Spanish dehydration fatal.

^30 The sugar loaf (rqareb n ssekwar) is a conical block of refined sugar, a luxury in the early twentieth-century Rif, present at weddings, feasts, and gatherings of honor. Adorned with a thread (of gold, silk, or cord), it marks a moment of collective celebration: the fighter, having survived, sits with his people and drinks sweet tea. In Amazigh culture, sugar is the medium of hospitality and reunion — the substance around which community coheres. The image, placed immediately after the battle and women-carrying verses, is a breath of peace within the epic.

^31 Fatma the Rifian (Tarifit faδma tarifect): in some versions of the poem, this figure is specifically identified as a woman of the Aït Ouriaghel (fadma tawaryighecht); in others, she is generalized to the whole Rif. She is the mother of a fighter, and the three cenna mara ("worthy of") verses that follow constitute a formal act of public praise: she is honored not for beauty or piety alone, but for the specific material and affective investments she made in producing a courageous man — the sugar loaf (wealth), the belt of reals (economic dignity), the rocking of the child (maternal labor).

^32 Anoual (Annoual): the site of the catastrophic Spanish defeat of 22 July 1921, in which an estimated 8,000–12,000 Spanish soldiers were killed within days — the worst military disaster in modern Spanish colonial history and one of the worst in Spain's history overall. The disaster at Anoual triggered a constitutional crisis in Spain, a parliamentary inquiry (the Picasso Report), and was the direct political cause of General Primo de Rivera's coup d'état in 1923. Aroui (Aεarwi) was a fortified Spanish position in the same zone. Both appear in the poem as markers on the arc of Spanish advance and Rifian reconquest.

^33 Mohamed Ben Abdelkrim el Khattabi (c.1882–1963): founder and president of the Republic of the Rif (1921–1926) and supreme commander of the Rifian resistance. Educated in Fez and at the Spanish school in Melilla, where he worked in the colonial administration for twelve years, Abdelkrim returned to the Rif in 1919 following his father's death and organized the resistance into a modern military and political entity. The poem addresses him under multiple titles: amjahed aƥorri (pure fighter, v.53), zzaεim aseyyas (leader and guide, v.71), amjahed ameqran (great fighter, v.103) — and also criticizes him, in the poem's final stanzas, for banning traditional song (v.137).

^34 Bouymejjan (buymejjan): a Spanish military outpost in the Temsamane zone, part of the chain of forward positions established by General Silvestre's advance. Its burning marks the opening of the Rifian counteroffensive that would culminate at Anoual.

^35 Tmammachte (tmammact): another Spanish outpost from which wailing (ameττa) rises. The ambiguity of whose wailing — Spanish survivors, Rifian women nearby, or both — is probably deliberate. The poem does not parse suffering by nationality at this moment; it records the sound of a position breaking.

^36 Melilla: the Spanish presidio on the northern Moroccan coast, the administrative and military hub of Spain's Rif operations. The retreating soldier's coat — slung over his arm in the haste of flight, dropped in the road upon arrival — is one of the poem's most precisely comic images of defeat: he left so fast he had no time to dress, and arrived without the dignity of his uniform. The coat is not merely clothing but the insignia of colonial authority, shed in the dust.

^37 Tarifit yenyarwe'd urumi yenyarwe'd: the verb is repeated twice, back to back. This doubling is a formal oral device — it amplifies the scale of the threat while also, in its repetition, conveying the speaker's fear. The address a yemma (O mother) at the line's end is the poem's most intimate apostrophe: an aside in private dread, a crack in the collective voice of the epic.

^38 Tizi Aezza: a mountain pass in the Rif, the poem's most obsessively repeated geographical name, appearing in verses 60, 67, 68, 99, 108, 112, and 120 — more than any other location. The poet transforms it into a prophecy: "there was the rot of his bones" (v.67). The pass functions as trap, threshold, and graveyard throughout the poem's second half.

^39 Oulma: a spring or water source near Tizi Aezza. The image of the Spanish commander wishing to "brew his tea" with Oulma's water is contemptuous and precise: he has arrived with the presumption of domestic comfort — as if on an excursion — in a territory that is actively denying him water. The spring also prefigures the siege verses (vv.120–121), in which the same command is reduced to squeezing moisture from potatoes.

^40 Driouch (Tarifit driwec): a town in the eastern Rif. The poem's moral taxonomy of territorial loss is deliberate: Aroui was taken by force (draε, force/arm), while Driouch was entered through collaborators (imuddukar, informers/allies). Different kinds of loss require different kinds of accountability. The poem tracks both.

^41 Tafarsit addressed as Lalla (a term of feminine honor) and described as having been sold in silence (yemmenzen s rƥes, sold quietly/softly). Personification as a woman sold without her consent — trafficked, effectively — maps the vocabulary of female dishonor onto territorial surrender through collaboration. The poem's consistent fusion of women's bodies and territorial bodies is here made explicit.

^42 Tizi Idris: a mountain pass distinct from Tizi Aezza, where the Spanish commander assumes — war dinni ƥed, no one was there — and finds the Rifian fighters waiting. The assumption of emptiness is the poem's repeated colonial error: Dhar Abarrane (v.3), Temsamane (v.4), Tizi Idris (v.69) — again and again, the colonizer reads the landscape as vacant and is corrected by violence.

^43 Moulay Mohand: the honorific title given to Abdelkrim — Moulay (Lord/Master, a title of religious lineage) combined with the familiar Mohand (Mohamed). The double title acknowledges both his religious descent and his popular intimacy; he is simultaneously exalted and addressed as a kinsman. The poem uses both respectful and critical registers toward him: he is praised (v.71, 103) and also upbraided (v.137) for banning song.

^44 By 1924–1925, Abdelkrim had opened a second front against French forces occupying the southern Rif border zone. His oath to push the French back to their trenches (ar dsas, literally "to their foundations/trenches") proved historically tragic: France entered the war in force in 1925, forming a joint Franco-Spanish military campaign that ultimately crushed the Republic of the Rif in May 1926. The oath is not ironic in the poem's own voice — it records Abdelkrim's pledge faithfully — but history has since inflected it.

^45 Pigeons (rƥmam) were used as carrier messengers in the Rif War. The image here is simultaneously literal (an actual courier dispatch) and metaphorical: the poet's song itself is the dove, flying to deliver a warning to the French president. The dove that never lands (war yetrus) is also the voice of the poem — restless, unhoused, unable to find a place to settle in a world at war.

^46 Verse 77 is the poem's most compressed reference to the technological asymmetry of the Rif War. Spain deployed aircraft — Breguet 14s, De Havilland DH.4s, and other models — for reconnaissance and aerial bombardment from 1921 onward. More critically, Spain was among the first powers in history to use chemical weapons from aircraft on a civilian population, deploying mustard gas (yperite), phosgene, and diphenylchloroarsine in aerial bombardment of Rifian villages, fields, and water sources from approximately 1921 through 1927. The Spanish government suppressed this evidence for decades; it has since been confirmed by historians including María Rosa de Madariaga. The frigates (rebƥar, the sea) refer to Spanish naval gunboats shelling the Rifian Mediterranean coastline.

^47 Ajdir: Abdelkrim's capital and the seat of the Republic of the Rif, located on the coast of Aït Ouriaghel territory. The plane coming to bomb rƥakem n wejdir (the commandant of Ajdir) targets Abdelkrim himself — the aerial war reaches to the political head of the resistance.

^48 The empty house is one of the poem's most lyrical passages — a sudden stillness after aerial bombardment. The house built high in the mountain functions as synecdoche for the entire emptied Rif: men gone to battle or dead, women carrying provisions up the slopes, children scattered. The apostrophe to the house — as if it might answer — is the poem's version of the elegiac address to the absent, the space where the voice reaches and finds nothing.

^49 River Amassin (Tarifit ighzar umasin): a real river in the Rif. The poem personifies it as a combatant — itjahaden ra nneta, "it fights alongside us" — which is not entirely metaphorical. Rifian fighters opened irrigation channels to flood terrain at key moments, making it impassable for Spanish cavalry. The river that "forces deer to gnaw on stone" (v.88) has also, literally, been weaponized: a waterway converted into an ally.

^50 "Abdelkrim is a Muslim" (Tarifit εebdekrim d'amesrem): the declaration grounds his political authority in religious legitimacy. This is a point of historical complexity: Abdelkrim himself consistently insisted the war was modern and nationalist, not a jihad, and banned the proclamation of holy war in the trenches. Yet for most of his fighters, and for this poem, the war against Christian colonial power was self-evidently sacred. The declaration is both true and contested.

^51 The raven (ubagher) is a bird of ill omen in Amazigh culture, associated with death and misfortune. Comparing the airplane to a raven strips it of its modernity and places it within an older symbolic vocabulary — not a marvel of European technology but a carrion bird the mountains have always recognized. The plane is not new; it is ancient death in a new form.

^52 Tarifit gi xemsa xmas: "in five fives" — a formulaic expression for a large force arriving in multiple waves. The reference is to the Spanish reinforcement strategy: as each position fell and the garrison was destroyed, Spain dispatched fresh troops from the mainland port of Malaga. The formula also captures the mechanical, industrial character of colonial war — men sent in batches, like supplies.

^53 Amzaourou (amzawaru): a place in the Jnada area, in Spanish-controlled territory toward which the Rifian force is advancing. The three parallel "that we may reach" verses (98–100) mark the transition from defense to offense — the poem's geography shifts from places lost to places about to be reclaimed.

^54 Bouhmara ("the man of the she-ass"): Jilali Mohamed el Yousfi ez-Zarhouni, a pretender to the Moroccan throne who ruled much of the eastern Rif between 1902 and 1908, allying himself with Spanish mining companies and granting them access to mineral deposits in the Aït Bouyafrour mountains. His collaboration with Spanish capital — placing a "protector" in the Aït Bouyafrour mines while extracting payment — made him a figure of deep contempt in Rifian oral poetry, which caricatured him repeatedly. By 1921 he had been dead for years (executed by Sultan Moulay Hafid), but his name remained a live charge of treason, a warning about what collaboration looks like.

^55 One of the poem's most devastating satirical moments — and one grounded in documented historical fact. Spanish soldiers besieged at Abarrane, Ighriben, and Anoual suffered extreme thirst because Rifian fighters had cut off supply routes and controlled the springs. Soldiers resorted to compressing potatoes and other vegetables to extract moisture, and some drank their own urine. María Rosa de Madariaga's archival research confirms both practices. The poem transforms this desperation into grotesque comedy: the "great commandant" of the most powerful colonial army in the region is reduced to juicing root vegetables. The same image is applied (v.120) to the caid of Tizi Aezza — the humiliation spreads through the chain of command.

^56 Ca yisi'd aqarτas ca yisi'd imeyran: "some carried rifles; others had only sickles." The sickle (imi, pl. imeyran) is a harvesting tool. The verse confirms that some Rifian fighters arrived at Abarrane armed with farm implements — either as a ruse to disguise military movement, or because they received the call with too little time to arm properly. Either reading speaks to the improvised, spontaneous urgency of the uprising. The following verse makes their assumption explicit: they thought they were going to harvest grass.

^57 Arumi rkafar: here the poem adds rkafar (the unbeliever, the infidel) to the standard urumi (the Christian), doubling the religious condemnation. This intensified designation appears only once in the poem, at the moment of the enemy's entrenchment at Anoual — the site of his most catastrophic defeat. The double naming marks the poem's moral apex: the infidel is most infidel at the moment he is most exposed.

^58 Ijarmaousse: a settlement or location bombed by Spanish aircraft. The aerial bombardment of Rifian civilian settlements was systematic from 1921 onward. Spain's use of chemical weapons from aircraft — mustard gas, phosgene, diphenylchloroarsine — on Rifian villages, water sources, and market areas has been documented by historians and confirmed through archival research, though Spain suppressed acknowledgment for decades. The bombing described in verses 112–118 thus carries a double historical weight: aerial bombardment in general, and the specific horror of vesicant chemical attack.

^59 Sidi Brahim: a location, possibly associated with a local saint's shrine. The bombing of places near shrines or mosques was experienced as a particular sacrilege by the Rifian population. The poem marks this through the following verse's genealogical claim: those bombed are "sons of the Prophet's Companions" — which is both a statement of spiritual descent and a measure of what the planes have done.

^60 Tarifit tarwa n ŝŝuƥuba: "sons/children of the Companions" (sahabas) — the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad. To name the fighters as their descendants is to inscribe them within the founding generation of Islam: they are not merely soldiers of 1921 but heirs of an originary righteousness. The plane that bombs them bombs not just bodies but a genealogy.

^61 A verse of startling intimacy after the aerial bombardment stanzas. The question — ma teswid maruxa, "have you drunk any water?" — is addressed to a fighter or a son, and its plainness cuts through the epic register. In the sustained context of the poem's attention to water (its control at v.36, its denial at v.61, its strategic centrality throughout), the question is also a political one: have our women been able to bring you water? Has the siege held? Is the water still ours?

^62 A caid (Tarifit qayed) is a local chieftain or Spanish-appointed administrator. The caid of Tizi Aezza is a collaborating or Spanish-installed figure — hence his presence in a besieged Spanish position. His humiliation (squeezing potatoes) represents the collapse of the collaborative administrative apparatus Spain had constructed in the Rif: the local intermediary is as destitute as his masters.

^63 Malaga: a major southern Spanish port and the primary embarkation point for military reinforcements sent to the Rif. The image of the besieged commander telephoning Malaga — using the technology of modernity — from a position so desperate he is squeezing root vegetables for water is a compressed study in colonial overreach: the telephone connects him to metropolitan power, but that power cannot arrive fast enough, in sufficient numbers, or with sufficient water to save him.

^64 Verses 126–134 constitute the poem's formal denunciation of collaborators. The specific target is a man (the poet's aunt's husband), but the passage addresses the entire class of Rifian moros amigos and moros pensionados — the paid Spanish intelligence network. The poem's denunciation operates through the domestic: his wife's granary, his shameless walk, his drinking. The collaborator's crime is not merely political but cultural — he has abandoned the labor (ucewwar, the harvester's honest work) that gives a Rifian man his social standing, and replaced it with informing and alcohol. He has also abandoned his wife, who waits for provision that will not come.

^65 "He will die like a dog" (Tarifit ad yemmet am uheggar): among the harshest available imprecations in Rifian oral culture. The wild dog (aheggar) dies without community, without mourning rites, without burial according to Islamic law, without anyone to wash the body or recite the prayer. The collaborator, if he dies like a dog, dies unrecovered — his name remembered only as a byword for cowardice. This is the opposite of the honored dead whose names the poem has carefully preserved.

^66 Tarifit ccehria x waddud ucewwar: the ccehria is a stipend, a monthly payment. The waddud ucewwar is the labor of harvesting — physically demanding, seasonal, but honest. The question is rhetorical and devastating: the collaborator sold his community's secrets to the Spanish, and for what? Probably less than a farmhand earns in a season of honest work. The poem measures betrayal not in moral absolutes but in agricultural wage.

^67 Lalla Bouya: a traditional Rifian izri (lyric poem/song), associated with celebration, festivity, and dance. Abdelkrim banned it — along with other songs and dances — during the Rif War, on the grounds that mourning families throughout the Rif made celebration morally inappropriate. The ban applied specifically to married women, widows, and divorcees. He also banned the singing of the shahada in the trenches, reserving it for mosques. The verses here (135–138) represent the imdiazen (the bard-poets) requesting the ban's removal — a reminder that the poem is both a war document and a cultural one, and that resistance to colonial occupation did not exempt the Rifian leader from his own people's critique.

^68 The poem's final verse is not a triumphant close but an unresolved complaint. The war has not only silenced the Spanish guns — it has silenced Rifian song. The image of cultural suppression by the Rifians' own leader as the poem's last word is one of the most complex gestures in the epic: it refuses the consolation of pure victory, and insists that even a just war extracts a cost from the community's own expressive life. The poem ends where oral culture must: not with the enemy's defeat, but with the unanswered demand for the right to sing — the right to be the kind of people who make poems like this one.

Bibliography:

Balfour, Sebastian. Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. Oxford University Press, 2002.

El Guabli, Brahim. Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence. Fordham University Press, 2023.

Kunz, Rudibert, and Rolf-Dieter Müller. Giftgas gegen Abd El Krim: Deutschland, Spanien und der Gaskrieg in Spanisch-Marokko, 1922–1927. Rombach Verlag, 1990.

de Madariaga, María Rosa. España y el Rif: Crónica de una historia casi olvidada. 3rd ed., Ciudad Autónoma de Melilla, 2008.

Moroccan Centre for Common Memory, Democracy and Peace (Markaz al-Dhakira al-Mushtaraka lil-Dimuqratiya wa-l-Salam). Documentation reports on the health legacy of chemical warfare in the Rif region. Nador, ongoing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted with the support of the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (CNRST), through the PhD-Associate Scholarship (PASS) program (2023–2026). I also acknowledge the generous support of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which awarded me an African Fellowship for the 2025–2026 cycle, contributing significantly to the completion of this project.