The Berber Question And (Re)Imagining The Nation In Contemporary Morocco

Abstract

This paper aims to emphasize that the French colonial intervention in Morocco represents a metamorphic historical turning point that should not be bracketed from the general process of revisiting the teleological assumptions about what constitutes the contemporary Moroccan Identity. It sets the challenge of problematizing the Nationalists’ cultural agenda whose insistence on a fetishized continuity with the precolonial history has eclipsed the disruptive effects of the colonial configurations and symbolic struggles of groups who were cast aside though they were at the center of anti-colonial resistance. Telling Morocco’s colonial history from a third perspective would bring hitherto neglected and silenced actors, in our case the Berber tribal groups under the spotlight, and draw together both elite and not elite actors into the scope of analysis. The premise behind analyzing the Berber oral poetry which was composed and sung on the eve of colonial expansion, is to understand the standpoint of these “peripheral groups” over matters of political allegiance and Jihad, away from the totalizing narratives of the official historiography. These artistic outlets are primary sources of a significant importance because they provide unexplored details of how Berber groups endured living at the center of the struggle between the colonial administration and the Arabophone nationalist elite. They demonstrate also the complex adjustments and inter/ intra- tribal negotiations these groups have to go through to reconfigure those mechanisms of power that sought to annihilate their subjectivities as agents of change