Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki


Introduction

Any discussion of “world literature“ (or, by extension, world culture), as Mohanty points out in his interview, will involve a reconsideration of the conventional hierarchy between written and oral cultures. In this essay, drawing on my own ongoing research in Morocco, I focus on one particular case where orality is a central feature of culture. My account is intended to help us understand how complex orality is and how it functions in relation to religion, ritual, and art. Berber women, generally rural and illiterate, express religion and other aspects of their life experiences through channels that are very close to their daily activities and that make sense for them: orality, rituality and art. These ancestral means of expression have been used by Berber women throughout the history of Morocco to record individual, but also national and universal, dreams and concerns. Although these expressions fall outside the realm of conventional knowledge, the various individual, communal and social functions they have had challenge received ways of thinking about women’s orality and cast doubt on (to borrow Mohanty’s words) our “babu-like faith“ in the inherent “superiority of writing over orality and urban perspectives over rural ones.“

I would like to analyze Berber women’s orality as a form of female knowledge. In so doing, I aim to point to the “exclusive“ nature of what we understand as “knowledge“ and call for a redefinition of knowledge that would make it more flexible and inclusive by transcending the socioeconomic realm of urban spaces.

Supremacy of Orality in Moroccan Culture

The medium of orality (as opposed to that of writing) is a fundamental component of Moroccan culture, which differentiates it from the mainstream cultures of the Global North. For example, oral blessings, curses, insults, and profanity are more consequential in Moroccan culture than in Western cultures, and conversation is perceived as a means of bonding between people at both the affective and transactional levels.1 Further, the Qur’an is learned by rote, and the call for prayer is publicly announced five times a day orally. Indeed, the power of lkelma/awal (the oral word in Moroccan Arabic and Berber, respectively) is evident in many deep aspects of Moroccan culture, such as marriage and business contracts, and legacies after death. Up to the 1950s, such contracts and legacies were concluded orally.

Since Morocco’s independence in 1956, a growing number of Moroccan writers and intellectuals have started to reclaim orality as a necessary nourishing component of written literature. Two important texts are Driss Charibi’s novel La Civilisation, Ma Mère!…(1972) and Mohamed Khair Eddine’s novel Légende et Vie d’Agoun’chich (1984). Both novels highlight orality as a defining substratum that characterizes Moroccan postcolonial Arabophone and Francophone literature.
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Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred

by Fatima Sadiki