the west of the Orient, the south of the Mediterranean

At the south-western frontier of the Mediterranean world, at the crossroad of Islam and Francophone influence, Maghrebian and West African studies deserve special treatment. The region composed by such countries as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad is marked by great cultural complexity: that of the Arab-Berber dualism, that of the Mediterranean, Saharan, and sub-Saharan worlds, of sedentarism and nomadism, of blet al-makhzen and blet as-siba, of Sufi movements and orthodox Islam. It produces an abundant literature both in Arabic and French, without mentioning its vernacular expression in such tongues as Amazigh or Wolof. As an area of studies, it presents the apparent facility of reading Francophone novels and the profound difficulty of understanding the cultural idioms born at the crossroad of Africa and the classical, majoritarian Sunni Islam.
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selected essays

Limes. Une enquête au pays de Driss Chraïbi lue dans le cadre des études des frontières

La littérature et la carte géographique, Dorota Chłanda, Małgorzata Kamecka, Małgorzata Zawadzka (eds), Białystok, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2022, p. 17-30.
​ISBN 978-83-7431-732-0

Limes, an ancient term signifying the border of the Roman Empire, indicates not only the natural frontier of the Euro-Mediterranean oikumene, but also that of the “civilized” world of states, governments, official policies and law enforcement. Growing actuality of the topic at the time of mass migrations justifies a glance back to Driss Chraïbi’s novel Une enquête au pays, published in 1981. The heroes, a couple of policemen, penetrate the wasteland interior of the country not to investigate any crime in particular, but rather to establish their presence in the otherwise uncontrolled territory – bled es-siba (“region of anarchy” in contrast to the civilized, tax-paying and law-abiding bled el-makhzen according to a categorization first established in the 14th c., yet valid throughout the colonial era, and apparently till the present day). The policemen are forerunners of modernity and “civilisation” (an important key word of the Chraïbian writing), penetrating a world that refuses to let itself be governed, submitted to taxation, and policed – a Zomia in the conceptualisation of Willem van Schendel.

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Officiellement, le limes saharien n'existe pas, parce que la modernité ne reconnaît ni l'existence ni la souveraineté des territoires d'anarchie. En dehors du contrôle étatique, de l'économie basée sur la circulation de l'argent et la fiscalisation, de la vie sociale balisée par un code pénal écrit, il ne peut y avoir aucune autre vie. L'état postcolonial ne laisse aucune marge à cette « vie terrienne des hommes » [...].
Le roman de Driss Chraïbi, publié au début des années 80. du siècle passé est un témoignage précoce d'un processus de la détérioration des modes de vie millénaires au sud de la Méditerranée. Les communautés jusqu'ici autonomes viennent de s'effondrer dans le chaos des conflits armés [...]. Les populations en migration qui arrivent aux côtes de l'Europe sont le résultat de la fin d'un monde dont l'existence se dessinait très mal dans notre conscience. Un aspect est toujours à accentuer. L'anarchie ou dissidence (siba) dont Ibn Khaldoûn parlait déjà au 14e siècle doit être vue sous un certain éclairage positif, comme un mode de vie soutenable, adapté aux circonstances naturelles, à sa manière harmonieux. La fin de cette anarchie au sens positif éclaire aussi la violence subjacente à ce qu'on appelle la civilisation – avec ou sans guillemets. Grâce à l'outillage théorique lié au concept de Zomia, les chercheurs sont maintenant en mesure de captiver les éléments positifs de ce contrepoint à la modernité que les communautés en marge des états représentaient. Aujourd'hui, on apprécie la structure sociale basée sur l'égalité relative des membres, le respect pour les ressources naturelles qui ne sont jamais surabondantes, un certain esprit de contestation qui rend ces communautés attrayantes aux yeux de ceux qui s’efforcent de trouver des alternatives à la modernité. Mais, comme Jean Baudrillard a remarqué, « c'est quand une chose commence à disparaître que le concept apparaît ». La notion de Zomia qui contribue à la définition et à l’appréciation d'une communauté est née justement quand son monde, une permanence apparemment atemporelle en marge de l'Histoire, s'est effondré. Une lecture attentive et suffisamment informée du roman de Chraïbi permet d'entendre le monde des nomades et de se rendre compte du fait que ce n'est pas leur anarchie et leur insurgence qui menace le monde « civilisé », mais bien au contraire. C'est la « civilisation », dont Chraïbi était un critique perspicace, qui cause la catastrophe des Zomias et transforme des communautés entières en fugitifs, en migrants et en réfugiés.
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"Written exercises. Ancestral magic and emergent intellectuals in Mia Couto, Lhoussain Azergui and Dorota Masłowska", Colloquia Humanistica, nr 5/2016, s. 143-156. ISSN 2081-6774

​The article consists in a comparative reading of three novels: Um rio chamado tempo by Mia Couto, Le pain des corbeaux by Lhoussain Azergui and Paw królowej by Dorota Masłowska. In spite of the difference of the historical circumstances of Mozambique, Morocco and Poland, these three books meet at an intersecting point: the emergence of an intelligentsia that uses literacy and writing as an instrument to deconstruct the post-colonial concept of nation and to operate a trans-colonial renegotiation of identity. By the notion of trans-colonial, I understand the opposition against new kinds of symbolic violence that emerged after the end of the colonial period; here this new form of oppression is related to the concept of national unity – an artificial construct that leaves no place for the dualism or pluralism of cultural reality (two shores of the Zambezi river, Arab and Berber dualism in Morocco, “small homelands” in Poland).
The young heroes of the novels grasp the pen in order to break through the falseness or the taboos created by the fathers, establishing, at the same time, the relation of solidarity with the world of the grandfathers. The act of writing becomes an actualization of the ancestral universe of magic. The settlement of accounts with the parental generation concerns the vision of nation built upon the resistance against the colonizer (it also refers to the Polish cultural formation, based on the tradition of uprisings and resistance against the Russians).

"Asgudi i taskla: przejście od oralności do pisma i nowa literatura w poszukiwaniach tożsamości marokańskich Berberów" ["Asgudi and Taskla. The transition from orality to literacy and the emergent literature in the search for Amazigh identity in Morocco"], Przegląd orientalistyczny, nr 1-2/2014, p. 89-98. ISSN 0033-2283

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“Désert: une métaphore absolue de J.M.G. Le Clézio. Entre l'exotisme et l'écriture de la solidarité” [“Desert: an absolute metaphor of J.M.G. Le Clézio. Between exoticism and solidarity writing”], Le Maroc dans l'oeuvre de J.M.G. Le Clézio, Claude Cavallero et Ijjou Cheikh Moussa (eds.), Rabat, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Rabat, 2014, p. 115-125; [Série: Colloques et Séminaires, n°177].

"Is there Tunisian literature? Emergent writing and fractal proliferation of minor voices", Colloquia Humanistica, nr 2/2013, p. 79-93. ISSN 2081-6774

The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared with the Moroccan one. What is more, this comparison helps to understand the consequences of some choices made by the Tunisian writers, choices that established diverging directions of literary quest and the ambivalent aspiration of belonging both to the Arabic and the French linguistic and cultural zone. This basic ambivalence is treated in the article as essential fissure and a kind of fractal principle, conducing to the proliferation of minor voices, instead of synergistic pattern of development leading to the synthesis of cultural contradictions. Some of these voices, such as Abdelwahab Meddeb, try to inscribe themselves in the universalist, gallicized context, while others, such as the emigrant Arab-speaking writer Hassouna Mosbahi, find in the translation a chance of reaching new readers and the promise of escaping the status of minor or emergent writers.

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"L'identité amazighe et la langue française. Autour de l'auto-traduction du roman Le Pain des corbeaux par Lhoussain Azergui" ["Amazigh identity and French language. On auto-translation of the novel Le Pain des corbeaux by Lhoussain Azergui"], Romanica Cracoviensia, nr 13/2013, p. 207-216. ISSN 1732-8705; ISBN 978-83-233-3479-8 e-ISSN 1689-002
​http://www.ejournals.eu/Romanica-Cracoviensia/Tom-13/Numer-3/art/1629/

The main problem discussed in the article is the meaning of the decision taken by Lhoussain Azergui who, after having engaged in the process of revitalization, finally opted by translating into French his novel originally written in Amazigh. The phenomenon of the emergent Amazigh literature can be understood in the perspective of transcolonial renegotiation of Maghrebian identities. With Azergui, it enters a new field of experimentation, when the linguistic fidelity is broken to let the writer confront himself with a major literary language. It is a “betrayal with a promise of return” that can lead to a new stage in the development of Amazigh culture. Azergui’s novel justifies internally the option of translation. Its main subject is the necessity of crossing the borders of traditional mentality. The hero, a journalist leaving the prison, finds no place in his own community due to the ancestral believes considering writing as a magical gesture. The traditional culture finds the hero guilty of supreme transgression, which is punishable by death. The intellectual rejected by his own community has no other option than to seek alliances in the outside world, hoping to efface the frontiers between the local and the global.  

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amazigh cultural emancipation

1. Historical background 

First thing we should keep in mind is that Amazigh identity is something extremely old. It can be conceptualized as an aboriginal identity of the south-western Mediterranean. The history of Imazighen is contemporary to ancient Egypt, Carthage and the Roman Empire. The beginnings of the scriptural tradition are equally ancient, starting with so called libyco-berber script, which was originally an abjad used by the peoples of the desert, such as the Tuaregs. Such is the origin of the contemporary tifinagh or rather the neo-tifinagh considered by many as the “proper” way of writing in Amazigh today (I will return to this point later on).

This is thus an identity that  had already well established traditions at the moment of the Islamic expansion in the 7th century A.C. In spite of the frictions, one might claim that overall the Berbers found their due place and their cultural expression in the Islamic state organisms of the region. The acme of the Berber culture may be identified with the reformist movements in Islam finding their political expression in the Almohad Empire (1121-1269). The next centuries brought a progressive arabization and the ossification of the Berber peculiar religious culture. Nonetheless the Berber separatism survived and was actively exploited by the colonial rulers of the Maghreb, using the well-known strategy of Divide et impera (“divide and rule”).

The post-colonial state of the king Muhammad V searched for the national identity connected to the unifying power of the Arabic language. The Berber identity was thus placed at the margin of the process and the political dangers of the Berber separatism had been overestimated,  which can be easily understood in view of the unstable situation in Algeria. This is why the demands for cultural emancipation during the last decade of the 20th century encountered extremely inflexible response of the government and the king. The situation changed with the advent of the new ruler, Muhammad VI, who recognized the legitimacy of the Berber claims. 

2. Political solutions

In the new constitution, Amazigh was recognized as the 2nd official language of the state. During the first years of the new millennium, the Berber language found its place both in the educational system and the Moroccan academia. To a certain degree, we could admit that all the necessary steps have been done in order to guarantee the linguistic normalization. Amazigh, as the official language, is taught to all the inhabitants, including those without direct Berber ancestors. A special institution (IRCAM) has been created under the royal patronage to promote research concerning all the aspects of the Amazigh culture and to foster its development.

Nonetheless, the existing situation is not the ideal one. Still, there is a lot of widespread resistance towards the cause of the Amazigh language. People, including the parents of the schooled children, see the class of Amazigh as a useless chore, diverting the attention of their children from more useful subjects, including French and English. In context of the Moroccan educational reality, leaving no margin for improper allocation of the scarce resources, Amazigh is seen as a useless expenditure offering no future to anybody, including the students of the first curricula in Amazigh culture that has been created in all or nearly all universities of the country (many of them encountered no employment). Seemingly, the revitalization process has led to a stalemate.  

3. Revitalization as a modernizing project

In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the ongoing process is the response of the activists and the promoters of the Berber identity to this stalemate. Here I pass to the examination of the main corpus of my research, i.e. the essays of cultural criticism published in French during the last 3-4 years. In my opinion, the choice of French as the language of expression is not accidental in this context. To some degree, it is a language of the battle, supporting the Berber identity at the moment in which the Amazigh prose is still incipient (majority of the adult population simply don't read it, even if some may communicate in Amazigh orally at the everyday life level). The main advantage of French is simply that of not being Arabic. Significantly, it is no longer a “post-colonial” language, rather a neutral one that appears as a useful instrument of support for the identity cause and a tool of communication with the external world. That is an important aspect, preventing the isolation of the Berber cause. A limited usage of Spanish is also to be noticed, for  quite similar reasons; the linguistic normalization that took place in Spain after the end of the dictatorship of Franco is also a ready-made paradigm. On the other hand, the Berber identity movement relies in an important way on the Moroccan diaspora and on the inspirations coming from different European countries in which the linguistic questions had been solved.

The essays of cultural criticism I've studied accentuate first of all the necessity of creating a new Amazigh culture. The proposal is to go beyond the first steps that consisted mainly in collecting the oral patrimony. Two key terms in Amazigh, treated by the authors as untranslatable, call my attention: asgudi and taskla. The first term, meaning literally “accumulation”, refers to the process of gathering the patrimony of the oral culture. The stability of the written text is meaningfully contrasted with the perishable condition of the spoken word. The writing brings thus the promise of enrichment by gathering and the accumulation of the cultural content, just as the cereals or other provisions are stocked in a cellar.  

It's clear that in the first moment, the fascination with writing as such was intense, sometimes even excessive and grotesque. Apparently, the blatant lack of an established norm and orthography was not considered as an obstacle. The problem of the Amazigh script is still unsolved. At the level of declarations, as it seems, the tifinagh is considered as the most appropriate form of writing. Nonetheless, I could find no book written entirely in tifinagh. Most publications have just the title and eventually the name of the author written in the traditional script. The content of the book is printed either in Latin or in Arabic characters. The tifinagh, as it seems to me, have a representative function of a monumental script. Its characteristic graphic form appears in trilingual official inscriptions in institutions or public buildings, and other similar contexts. The tifinagh script seems to be rather an insigne of identification than a practical way of writing. Which is also a quite curious cultural function that I associate to the ancestral understanding of writing as a form of magic. 
Nonetheless, the core of the Amazigh cultural project seems to be quite reverse in relation to all forms of ancestral culture. What is postulated with insistence is the creation of a “taskla”, sometimes translated by such expression as “emergent literature” or “neo-literature”. The word is a neologism defined in opposition to the ancient Amazigh word for literature, “lmazghi”.

The aim of this new Amazigh literary creation is, as I suggested, that of breaking the stalemate between the dominant Arabness and the Berber culture that received political rights but remained nonetheless in a minor condition. The Amazigh language and culture are taught at school and at the university, but as the Berbers themselves recognize, there is nothing in them that would really justify the discussion and the scholarly analysis. This culture is seen by the Imazighen themselves as nonexistent. It exists potentially, as a project that requires a realization. Somehow, as they see it, the proper Berber culture is located in the future.

As a foreign observer, I must recognize this may be an extremely mobilizing prospect in which the minor community establishes itself indeed as an important element of the national cultural landscape. At the present moment, Imazighen feel they are just a burden for the national educational system. But there is an idea how to pay back this investment transforming the Berber element into one of the leading forces of the nation. Arguably, such a prospective Amazighity is indeed orientated towards the future in a better, more energetic way than other elements of the Moroccan cultural landscape. Amazigh identity, instead of looking back into the glorious past, is transformed into a motor of change. This is a very positive style of solving the problem of a minor identity.

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Circumstances

My research concerning Amazigh (Berber) culture and identity started from a research trip to Morocco realized in the spring of 2013. Later on, the results of this quite a serendipitous encounter found a propitious place in the framework of the current research projects at the Faculty of "Artes Liberales", coordinated by dr Justyna Olko. 
The main focus of my attention has been the emergent phenomenon of the Amazigh literary creation, expressed both in the ethnic language and in French. What I consider as a crucial research problem in this domain is the relationship between language revitalization and the necessity of literary creation. No language, as I believe, can survive as a patrimony in itself and for its own sake; languages survive only if there are texts worth reading had been written in them. The urgency of Amazigh literary creation has become patent after the successful introduction of the language into the Moroccan educational system. This is when numerous voices has been heard, questioning the absence of cultural message to be transferred in the Amazigh classroom. The conclusion that only an original literary creation can fill this void has recently given rise to an emergent literary phenomenon I appreciate in the perspective of transcultural studies.

Polish traditions in Berber Studies

Polish contribution to Berber studies is connected with the figure of the eminent philologist Tadeusz Zielinski (1859-1944). Berber studies were for sure a marginal topic among his many interests, that concentrated on the development of the European epic traditions, he was first of all a classicist. Nonetheless payed some attention to them on the occasion of his archaeological and philological works in North Africa. 

Other resources

Le pain des corvbeaux - page dedicated to the reception of the novel. https://lepaindescorbeaux.wordpress.com/

ongoing research & book projects

(Il)legibility of Morocco

A BOOK PROJECT

This research project leads to a book characterizing the recent developments of the Moroccan literature, marked by linguistic divergence. The idea appeared as a consequence of a research realized in Casablanca and Rabat in March/April 2013. The materials brought from the book fair at that occasion form a first "pack" that will be contrasted with another lease in two or three years in order to produce a publication that might conjugate novelty and insight into the becoming of the country and its reputed literary market.

A LIMITED VISIBILITY

My contribution to the Mediterranean studies obviously takes for the starting point my competence as a Romanist. It is thus a vision filtrated through French. Nonetheless what attracts me in this area is exactly its complexity and irreducibility to the domain of a single language and culture, its diagrammatic character - the necessity of considering this cultural reality as a complex diagram of connections.
A single key must do, together with a category of translucent that I treat as a specific esthetic concept. A French text written by a Maghrebian author - or intellectual, because essays interest me more than novels in this context - is in fact supported by a complex "plumbing" of concepts, conditions of their translatability and intranslatability, their presence and significant absence on the surface. The interplay of these elements builds the dimension of emergence - a completely new level of complexity that interests me so vividly. In these terms I read, as I just mentioned, first of all the intellectuals: Laâbi, Meddeb, Benzine, in fact any I can put my hands on. The transparencies of their French formation and persuasions show me novel intellectual landscapes, going very far beyond anything that we could actually call "French", deconstructing the very sense of Europeanness and enriching it in new meanings coming from the peripheries, in what I once called intrusive spirit of the Desert.

international journals in Maghrebian & West African studies

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