Review of Middle East Studies最新文献

Taskla means literature in Tamazight. A neologism, taskla has been used since the 1980s by a group of Kabyle cultural activists, who had joined together in the academic association Imdyazen, to refer to modern literary genres that have been emerging in the field of Amazigh creation since at least the 1960s. Members of the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange (AMREC) also adopted the term to encapsulate the work they were doing to construct the new Amazigh literature. This article reconstructs the choices that Moroccan Amazigh activists undertook to establish a full-fledged literary field between 1967 and the early 2000s. Contextualizing this new literature in a longer history of lmāzghī (Amazigh writing in Arabic script), the article reveals how a process of intentionality and active construction of the field has led to the development and current flourishing albeit changing, landscape of Amazigh literature.

Racism is a scourge that has not spared any society or community. Moroccan society is not different in its grappling with the legacy of the complex history of slavery and racialization in North Africa. Although social scientists have dedicated much scholarly attention to the study of race in Morocco, they have not accounted for Amazigh language's rich documentation of and grappling with race and racism. Ethnographic work has emerged to explain racial dynamics between Imazighen and isuqiyn (Blacks) or Haratines, but these crucial interventions fall short of examining primary sources in Tamazight to explain how Amazigh communities negotiated racism openly in the public sphere. This article draws on the experience of the Black Amazigh poet Mbark u-Ms‘ud Ben Zayda to demonstrate that racism was not, and is not, entirely silenced in Amazigh-speaking Morocco. In fact, Amazigh sources and terminology reveal that poetic performances in this social environment have not only unsilenced racism but actively grappled with its multilayered dimensions. Adopting a close reading methodology, the article interprets portions of Ben Zayda's poetry and its response to the explicitly racializing compositions of his contemporaries.

A pioneer of the Amazigh Cultural Movement and modern Amazigh poetics, and one of the first intellectuals to interrogate – from the margin – Moroccan official historiography, Ali Sidki Azaykou has produced two collections of poetry, Timitar (Signs) and Izmuln (Scars), in addition to a posthumous collection, Indguiguen Aghaman (“Eternal Sparks”), appearing in 2019. The present article examines “Taketbiyt” (1971), a poem about the Koutoubia Tower in Marrakesh. While considering the poem, I use Pierre Nora's notion of “site[s] of memory” and Paul Ricœur's “trace of memory” to probe the significance of this centuries-old tower in Azaykou's poetry. I argue that Taketbiyt is evoked as a “site of memory” or a “trace of memory” to both remember and celebrate the forgotten Amazigh ancestry and history. I demonstrate that Azaykou's central concern, through such an act of remembrance, is to interrogate the biased representation of the Moroccan past in the present. As such, the poem complicates Amazigh cultural identity vis-à-vis the hegemony of Moroccan official historiography. Along with an abundance of metaphors, the poem displays an unparalleled allusive diction and a copious array of historical and geographical symbols. I conclude that, with its intellectually-informed theme and its self-consciously weaved form, “Taketbiyt” is a quintessential architype of modern Amazigh poetry.