Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki


 Orality is also a medium of expressing the self and its reactions to its immediate and larger contexts. As such, orality becomes “oral literature,“ a genre that is strong and alive in Morocco. For example, oral storytellers are often seen in the market places, cafes, but also in homes; and centuries- old poetry is still recited among literate and illiterate people. These “social writings“ (Ong 1982; Henige 1988, Folley 1991) are receiving more and more attention within the trend of the new historicism, which is closely linked to realism and supported by psychological and sociological accounts of everyday facts. These “writings“ reflect genuine skills that are no less powerful than writing skills, as Chetrit (to appear) states:

[...] Orality displays complex cognitive processes skills in the minds of the illiterate as well as of the literate, and that it is central in every kind of knowledge, because of the elaborating and retrieving skills it requires. It also necessitates cognitive and personal skills, which are not totally innate but are acquired from formal and informal training.

Oral literature is full of the mysteries that are dismissed by Western mo- dernity: demons and other supernatural agents intervening in the lives of humans, ecstatic dreams, miracle cures, and superstition. This literature is continually presented, represented, and exhibited in a recursive way as the images and symbols constituting the core system of Moroccan cultural themes tend to recur in an infinite number of distinct and original expres- sions, exhibitions, and texts. The representations in oral literature are often combinations of these cultural themes. The symbolic formations and the systems of representations that are transmitted by oral literature are so re- vealing that they may be qualified as a new subversive genre (Sadiqi 2003).

Oral literature falls outside the “official“ literature in Morocco and is both more complex and less accessible than it. This literature is in most cases produced by poor illiterate men and women who do not have an official voice. It is marginalized because it does not meet the “modern“ needs of Moroccan society, among which using the written medium.

Attitude to orality in Morocco is ambivalent. Orality is perceived as both a “degenerate,“ “vulgar“ and “lower class“ medium of expression, as well as a powerful symbol identity and “authenticity.“ The negative attitude to orality originates in the fact that it is transmitted by non-prestigious mother tongues (Berber and Moroccan Arabic), and the positive attitude originates in the fact that orality is what distinguishes Moroccan culture from Western literate cultures in cross-cultural encounters.

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Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki