Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki

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Storytelling is also perceived by women as a strong means of maintaining and perpetuating power inside the family, especially in rural extended family households. Grandmothers reinforce their status in the family by establishing strong ties with the younger generations through deliberately postponing the end of a story until the following night, thus creating continuous suspense. These storytellers create rapport through stories and often give the impression that what they do not say is as important as what they say. In a sense, these women create their own power. This shows that women’s language is not powerless. Moroccan women’s storytelling strategies are understandable in settings where older women feel that younger daughters- in-law are exceedingly gaining power through having children and, thus, seek to have some control over the parents through their children. Older women, usually grandmothers, telling long tales, are far from being simple-minded entertainers. They have strategy, exhibit powerful thinking and memory, as well as a skillful use of psychological knowledge of human beings. Through storytelling, women generally make the possibility of transforming the world easier to grasp.

On a more abstract level, storytellers fight oppression and resist patriarchy in their own ways. They often create a world of their own and use the linguistic resources that are available to them to express women’s (their own) intelligence, wit and victory over men in stories. In this way, storytelling may be perceived as a reaction to marginalization through the use of intelligence and cunning. This intelligence is often referred to as kayd “cunning,“ “deceit,“ “deception,“ “’treachery,“ or “raft.“ It is both admired and feared in Moroccan society. In sum, storytelling is used by Berber women to produce a specific type of oral knowledge that stretches the boundaries of acceptable gender roles in the Moroccan socio-cultural context.

ħalqa (market place public oratory)

ħalqa (market place public oratory) is a site where gender is performed in the literal sense of the word (Kapchan 1996). It usually takes place in specific public rural and urban marketplaces. Although the ħalqa oral genre of literature is dominated by men, women have started to appropriate it. The ħalqa discourse is loaded with mysogynistic ideology: women are usually portrayed as agents of “social pollution“ and fitnah “social chaos.“ This discourse is also characterized by the frequent use of taboo words and expressions which are legitimized by frequent reference to religious sanctioning expressions like la ħya f ddin (there is no shame in religion). This makes the ħalqa discourse a curious hybrid combination: it is both religious and obscene. This discourse is also characterized by a frequency of oaths, testimony, curses, monologue, and blessings, and is often geared towards involving the audience in the various oral performances.

Moroccan female marketplace public orators are doubly marginalized in the Moroccan culture: as women and as low class. These women are usually poor, illiterate and old. They usually address an audience of men and deliberately hold the same type of misogynistic discourse as male orators to gain acceptance in a place which is alien to them but where they have to survive. Although using a misogynistic discourse is not feminist, the very presence of women orators in Moroccan marketplaces certainly is. Kapchan (1996: 165) says in this respect:

This [ħalqa’s] feminized discourse, although full of patriarchal traces, nonetheless spins out from itself aetiolating its own boundaries, feeding on its own excess and metamorphisizing into other forms.

Like female poets and storytellers, female market place orators are survivors in a socio-cultural context which denies them rights. They fight exclusion in the alien public sphere and assert themselves by having and holding attention in contexts which call for a great amount of courage, self-confidence, and self-control. In so doing, these women transgress the gender roles that the Moroccan culture assigns to them and endeavor to make their voice heard, albeit at the price of facing more marginalization.

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Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki