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Jemâa-el-Fna’s
thousand and one nights
Juan
Goytisolo, Spanish writer. |
There is no other square like this in the world. Every day, musicians, storytellers,
dancers, jugglers and bards stage new shows to teeming crowds.
Morocco
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Juan
Goytisolo
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| Born in 1931
in Barcelona, Juan Goytisolo lives in Paris and Marrakesh. His numerous essays, short
stories and novels–including in English Marks of Identity, Count Julian, The
Marx Family Saga, Space in Motion, Quarantine: a Novel and Juan the Landless–have
won him international renown. His most recent works published in English are Marrakesh
Tales (Serpents Tail), Landscapes of War (City Lights Books) and Inferno
and Paradiso (Actar Editorial). |
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Marrakesh
was the city where black and white legends crossed, languages mingled and religions
clashed with the immutable silence of the dancing sands.
Fatima
Mernissi, Moroccan sociologist and writer (1940-)
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A public space that invites conviviality. |
The
oral traditions of Marrakesh’s famous square are unique in the world for their richness
and variety. They are also the roots of a new concept: humanity’s oral and intangible
heritage
My first contact with
oral tradition on Marrakesh’s Jemâa-el-Fna square led me to start thinking
about the specific nature of written literature, and the differences between these
two modes of expression. In oral communication, the speaker can refer to the context
at any time: in other words, to a specific situation with which the listeners are
familiar. In written literature, the author and reader have nothing in common aside
from the text written by the former and membership (by birth or learning) in the
same linguistic community. Oral literature establishes a line of communication between
a speaker and a listener, both of whom experience the world in a similar or even
identical way. Reading a novel, on the other hand, establishes communication between
a narrator and a reader; the former is unable to verify whether the latter possesses,
at the time of reading, sufficient knowledge of the context to understand the text.
That is why the reader, distant from the text in space and/or time, needs an intermediary
to recreate the context and fill in the gaps. Hence the presence in translated novels
of the editor’s or translator’s explanatory notes.
In the halca, the circle of listeners and spectators that forms around the storyteller,
none of that is necessary. The storyteller addresses these people directly; they
are his accomplices. The text he recites or improvises functions like a score, leaving
the performer a wide margin of freedom. In the oral tradition, changes in voice and
oratorical rhythm, expressions and gestures, play a fundamental role: even a seemingly
sacred text can be parodied and lowered to a scatological level. In children’s stories
and chansons de geste, the frequent use of para-linguistic devices and cynegetic
sketches (which evoke hunting), stresses the magic, power or dramatic aspects of
the episodes being told.
As my knowledge of darixa (Morocco’s Arabic dialect) improved, I was able to appreciate
the richness and variety of the oral traditions preserved within Marrakesh’s Jemâa-el-Fna
square. I attended performances of classical works like The Thousand and One Nights
and Antaria, legends based on Xeha, Aicha and Kandixa–to mention just three popular
folk heroes–comic improvisations, and a number of sexual pantomimes by highly talented
halaiquis (storytellers), of whom Saruh and Bakchich, both now dead, merit a special
mention. They expressed themselves effortlessly in the spectators’ dialect, using
euphemisms which only those sly folk with long experience of the halca could decipher.
Jemâa-el-Fna is a great melting pot of folk cultures where the Berber and gnawi
traditions converge. The Berber tradition is characterized by songs and recitals
in Tamazight, the language of the majority of Berbers, or in Soussi, the language
of Berbers from the Agadir region. Performances range from love poems to elegies
to works of moral and social criticism. Gnawi are the descendents of slaves who belonged
to a popular confraternity. Their vast repertory includes invocations and prayers
that are part of ritual trance ceremonies. Professor Hamid Hogadem has recently assembled
recordings he has made of present-day halaiquis from the three traditions in a single
volume, which will be soon be published with the support of UNESCO.
Everything
belonging just to the present is doomed to perish with it
As
the years go by, my thoughts on the specificity of literature have extended to the
relationship between oral and written traditions. In the European and Arab cultures
I am familiar with, their interdependence shows that a codified and listed oral tradition
has nurtured the development of written literature, which returned the favour by
seeping into the circuits of oral story-telling. Many lyrical and narrative medieval
texts have been written for public performance, and can only be properly understood
when their acoustic and para-linguistic dimensions are taken into account. It is
highly significant that the 20th century’s most innovative and sensitive narrative
authors, including James Joyce, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Arno Schmidt, Carlo
Emilio Gadda, Guiamaraes Rosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, combined writing with
basic features of the oral tradition. Their novels–featuring a whole range of competing
voices–sound as if they were meant to be read aloud, enabling readers to appreciate
the true value of the underlying literary exploits. For my part, I would point to
how much the square’s oral cross-winds inspired me in writing my novel Makbara. My
work would probably have been different without them. The act of listening–in other
words, the simultaneous presence of the author or storyteller and an attentive audience–gives
a new dimension to poetic and narrative texts, as it did in the time of Chaucer,
Boccacio, Juan Ruiz, Ibn Zayid, and Al Hariri. A buried thread links the Middle Ages
to the literary avant-garde of the twentieth century. As the great Russian theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin subtly showed, a work cannot survive the centuries to come unless
it has been nurtured by the centuries that have gone before. Everything belonging
just to the present is doomed to perish with it.
For many reasons, the fragility and precariousness of Jemâa-el-Fna causes me
ongoing concern. The spectacle offered by the square is the product of a fortunate
combination of circumstances (some documents indicate that it existed as far back
as the mid-16th century), but it may vanish, swept away by the assault of unbridled
modernity that jeopardizes our lives and our works. Considered until recently as
a vestige of the Third World by a large part of Morocco’s Europeanized elite (causing
the square to be temporarily closed after independence before popular pressure compelled
the authorities to re-open it), it is paradoxically appreciated for its very anachronism.
Urban planners and technologically-advanced societies from “developed countries”
even consider it a desirable model, worth emulating as a site where people from all
walks of life come to meet and talk with each other, as well as eat, shop and stroll,
enjoying the richness and variety of a place that is continuously in motion. As I
wrote in these pages years ago, the square may be destroyed by decree, but not created
by one. Becoming aware of that will probably help to save it.
Ever-increasing traffic, environmental deterioration and, above all, certain building
projects that flagrantly violate a law passed in 1922–projects which, if they are
actually built, will disfigure the environs of Jemâa-el-Fna forever–are serious
enough to merit a worldwide campaign to save the square’s endangered oral and intangible
heritage. Since the meeting of experts from many different and sometimes very distant
regions organized by UNESCO in Marrakesh in June
19771, we have been acutely
aware that this is the only place on the planet where musicians, storytellers, dancers,
jugglers and bards put on a new show before large crowds every day of the year. The
square offers us an ongoing spectacle in which the distinction between actors and
spectators fades: everyone can be one or the other if he or she desires. We live
in a world where the information technology juggernaut is homogenizing and impoverishing
our lives by bottling them up in the remote-controlled darkness of privacy. Jemâa-el-Fna
offers the exact opposite: a public space that fosters social life through a mixture
of humour, tolerance and diversity created by its poets and storytellers.
In 1997, UNESCO’s general conference
adopted the concept of humanity’s oral and immaterial heritage, giving vital backing
to plans to protect a vast number of oral and musical traditions, crafts and knowledge,
not to mention the “living human treasures” who possess them.2
Today, it is no longer possible to deny that all cultural richness, which sowed the
seeds of what we call “high culture,” will be swept away if we do not rush to its
rescue.
1. During
this international consultation of experts focusing on the preservation of places
where folk culture thrives, a new concept of cultural anthropology, the oral heritage
of humanity, was defined.
2. The individuals who embody the skills and techniques necessary for carrying out
certain aspects of a people's cultural life and ensuring the long-term survival of
its tangible cultural heritage. |
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UNESCO
to the rescue of the halaiquis
Languages,
oral literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rites, customs and craftsmanship
are among the “cultural expressions” that UNESCO has been committed to protecting
since 1997. At of the source of this innovative undertaking was the Jemâa-el-Fna
square and the commitment of one man, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who spends part
of each year in Marrakesh. “It all started a few years ago, when I wrote an article
against the plan to build a 15-story glass tower on the square,” he says. “I fought
the project, because I’m convinced that any change in the layout of Jemâa-el-Fna
would endanger the miracle that has taken place there every day for five centuries
[see article]. I think the authorities were receptive to my argument, especially
when I told them, ‘What would happen if they cut 60 metres off the Eiffel Tower?
Such a decision involves not just the Paris city government, but humanity as whole!’
The project was abandoned.”
Not much later, another project was born: creating a list of humanity’s masterpieces
in the fields of oral and intangible heritage. Oral traditions and other forms of
expression of folk culture, as well as the places where they flourish, could soon
boast that new title. UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura has named a
nine-member jury that will be renewed every four years. The earliest applications
can be filed by December 31, 2000, and the first gems on the list of humanity’s oral
and intangible heritage will be named in June 2001. New works will be added every
two years. “UNESCO’s backing,” says Juan
Goytisolo, “can be used to change the minds of the authorities and opinion-leaders
and to encourage many people to take a fresh look at certain cultural phenomena.
It is important to understand that the loss of a single halaiqui (storyteller) is
much more serious for humanity than the death of 200 best-selling authors. UNESCO cannot save the halaiquis alone,
but it can help. We have recorded their voices and their tales are going to be published,
but even that is not enough. We must avoid turning something which is living into
a museum piece, but help to keep it alive. We must see to it that storytellers do
not end up begging on the streets at the end of their lives. It is not hard to imagine,
for example, schools taking their student to listen to the halaiquis, introducing
them to their own culture and teaching them that not all tales belong to Walt Disney.”
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