Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki

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A beautiful genre of Berber female lyrics is called thamayayt which is mainly sung in the Middle Atlas mountains in Morocco. Thamawayt is usually sung (or improvised) by a man and a woman as some kind of ’question-answer’ dialogue:

Woman: Life has given me no luck
Maybe something bad happened to him, or maybe my life companion does not wish me any good things
He does not wish me any good fate
Therefore life has given me no luck.
Question: Why? And why? O you that my heart has chosen to love Departed so far without we could say farewell?
The burn of separation still inhabits me.
Why and why? Have you been short of paper?
Or if I am out of sight, I become out of heart?
Answer: More than an orphan weeping over his mother, I did weep So unbearable to live with an enflamed leaver
And almost unbearable an enflamed heart.
I weep as clouds do over the mountains
Till the grass has grown under my eyes.

Folktales

Female folktales or tales of wonder are told by women, to women, and may describe the lives of women. Although they uphold the values of the dominant patriarchal culture, they are genuine social engines that mix the supernatural, miracles, and the metaphysical. Folktales do not generally have a unifying topic; they constitute a set of “sub-topics“ loosely held by theme rather than by time. Overall, the structure of Berber women’s folktales is highly complex and exhibits specific external and internal characteristics. So far as external aspects are concerned, these folktales are characterized by three aspects: a beginning, a variable set of connected episodes, and an ending. Internally, the narratives are both non-chronological and atemporal. The most salient information in Berber women’s folktales is generally encoded in a distinctive way from the rest, that is, in the most relevant way from the storyteller’s point of view. For example, in the Fadma mzel aytmas folktale (reported in Peyron 1997), the storyteller focuses on the virtue of persistence and keeps returning to it in various forms through the use of suspense until the story ends with the victory of the persisting woman. The tales generally develop in a cyclical fashion in the sense that sometimes the details of events do not relate to the preceding or subsequent events.

When actually telling a story, women generally show an eagerness to provide the maximum background to their folktales. Further, while telling the stories, women sometimes intervene before each major event of the tale. The importance of background information resides in the fact that it situates the tale in physical, as well as psychological, time and place. Storytellers also pay attention to small and accurate matters of details which lead to the major events. Moroccan women’s strategies in storytelling may be qualified as digressive in the sense that they repeat and often shift quickly to new topics.

As in the tale of Fadma mzel aytmas, the descriptions in Berber folktales generally center around events and main characters. However, in the actual telling of the stories, glimpses of the storyteller’s life experiences may be “projected“ onto the story; the story is never repeated in the same way even by the same woman. These insertions are used by the storyteller as an empowering means of self-assertion. Events in the tales are not always described in the sequenced way in which they took place. Furthermore, the storytellers do not concentrate on a particular event which they take to be essential; they usually stress the characters’ role in the family and the culture of the village. In other words, they stress the cultural identity and specificity of the social group they belong to. Further, storytellers include a considerable amount of non-verbal behavior. They use paralinguistic features like articulation features, increase in voice volume, laughter, variations in intonation, change of pitch volume, change of tempo, encouraging minimal responses, as well frequent touching, hand holding, hand gestures, facial expression, tilted heads, sustained gaze, locked-eye gaze, and nodding. Given the oral nature of storytelling, body language and non-verbal behavior have the function of supporting women’s storytelling and highlighting its centrality for the audience. Female storytellers take folktales so seriously that they tend to dramatize events and overemphasize actions. When describing events or characters, the storytellers do not respond easily to back-channeling by the audience with the aim of stressing the “seriousness“’ and “importance“ of their tales. The significance of folktales for these women is taken for granted; they perceive the tales as vehicles of values that often happen to be theirs. For storytellers, there is always a morale to every story. A way in which female storytellers highlight the significance of a tale is by generously giving information about themselves. In involving themselves, Moroccan women attribute vision to themselves as “anticipators“ of events and actions, without, however, overtly committing themselves. They make frequent use of reported speech, as well as of moral judgments and critical evaluation.

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Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki