The Racial Question in Tanddamt

I propose to examine a race-performing song on which the dynamics of power are foregrounded. I look into sites where the white-dominant discourse of power occurs, along with the invocation of long-standing legacies of racism and slavery. While the white rrays’ (“the main singer and musician who plays ribab”) sends out a speech premised on the discourse of power, domination, and humiliation, the black singer's lyrics adopt a resistive position. The art of tanddamt has not extensively tackled the racial question; only two tindammin (pl. of tanddamt) are mentioned to have occurred in history: Lhaj Belaid vs. Lhaj Boudraa and Demsiri vs. Benmbark.Footnote ⁴ The first exchange by the white-skinned rrays Brahim Afroug is loaded with insinuations to historical memories of slavery and bondage:

Figure 1.

Ahmed Boulayad and Rrays Brahim Afroug.

Open Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_p7bCt2vls&t=747s, Warda Production.

Since the abolishment of slavery in the nineteenth century, offensive discourse about blacks and blackness has been placed beyond the pale. Later, with social progress, racial slurs against black-skinned people became considered pejoratives and intolerable to any courteous person. Slavery was deeply rooted in Moroccan society and it was even thought to be part of the Islamic Law. El Hamel claims that the then-Sultan of Morocco Mawlay ʾAabd Ar-Rahman was not annoyed by the British Consul's inquiries on the status of slaves in Morocco.Footnote ⁵ Regardless of how the British diplomatic authorities campaigned for the abolishment of slavery in Morocco, this latter's slave market flourished, generating significant octroi for the makhzen (“the elite”). Daniel Schroeter compiled detailed statistics on slaves in Morocco during the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁶ describing trading hotspots, prices, taxation, domestic chores, and the number of slaves coming in at different periods. This history is echoed in Afroug's lyrics when he reminds his black opponent of the price paid to own a slave. He states in the second exchange:

Schroeter reported that slave prices varied depending on the criteria of the market and age, gender, and skill of the person being sold. He reported, for instance, that “[i]n 1831, a pretty slave girl of about 14 was sold for around £8 sterling in Tangier.”Footnote ⁷ Afroug's use of the expression “5 cents” is extremely ironical because it reflects a comic twist in daily Moroccan conversations. ‘Five cents’ connotes the cheap value of a person or thing. The whole song is framed within a work of memory as the singer indulges into a process of historical awakening. It seems that Afroug's exchange in this tanddamt poem celebrates the past system of slavery. The singer gives vent to his tone by expressing not only his excitement to consciously recall into memory the subjugating relationship that once bound the whites and the blacks, but also his incitements to inflame both the opponent singer and the (black) audience. The white rrays uses the word rsoum (“legal purchase license”) as an object of testimony and memory on which a master–slave linkage was scripted to affirm an everlasting social and cultural phenomenon of subjugation and superiority (“we refer back to the Rsoum at our hands”). He is reminding the audience that his musical opponent, a black slave in origin, is expected to go through hardship again by listening to what the slave letter reads: “To read them [pamphlets]! this slave shall go through [our] hardship).” In Morocco, oral history records that slavery took place even after independence, and various stories are narrated of use in the very recent past of slaves in Moroccan homes. The poem describes the kind of household tasks slaves performed:

Cooking, serving, fetching water, and doing laundry are common menial chores and orders in the Moroccan households to which slaves must stay always attuned. The white rrays recounts these domiciliary commitments with relish. The song is accompanied with gestures and body movements that look simultaneously facetious and provocative. Rrays Afroug's performance is replete with satire and mockery. He is fully engaged in elucidating his verses with corresponding bodily gestures not only to impart a comprehensive image to the audience, but also to spur his opponent in a heated debate on the nature and culture of white–black relationship during the history of Moroccan slaveholders. The white rrays adds:

This is an especially significant verse that informs us about the frequent common names for the slaves. The white rrays confidently reports on how the slaves would respond very promptly once they hear their names. Berka is a synonym for black skin. In this song berka and isemg (“slave”) are often interchanged. While obviously derogatory, these words pose less offensiveness than other racial slurs like azzie, kahlouche, or al-hartani do in the larger social context. These words, Stephen King notes, are used by Moroccans at “the most basic level of daily life,” especially against today's sub-Saharan immigrants. The racist paradigm they imply, however, is intensified to the extent of animalization via the use of other words such as qird (“monkey”) and hayawan (“animal”), for instance. “Slave” or “black,” while extremely offensive themselves in the context of this tanddamt, do not outweigh the abuse and more incendiary offensiveness of such words as azzie (negro) or qird (monkey).

Nonetheless, a variety of racist images are still employed by the white rrays to ridicule the black opponent. In the fourth exchange, reference to “blackness” is explicitly insulting. Pointing to his opponent Boulayad as santaffa,Footnote ⁸ he describes his face as a “tire” that has been burned to ashes, an image to which the black man responds wisely:

This portion of the exchange is replete with derogatory metaphors. Reciprocal accusations of “darkness” occur between the two inddamen (“jousters”). Boulayad deftly flips the glib racism of his opponent by applying the metaphorical meaning of “white heart” and “darkness” to expose his opponent's moral inferiority. For Boulayad, it would be senseless to boast about virtue if it does not translate into words and actions.

The white rrays continues to denigrate his black opponent associating his daily life chores with donkeys, flies, amazzir (“Donkey's poo”), etc. The entire derogatory performance demonstrates how even if slavery has been officially ended at the institutional level, it does not mean the ugly cultural attitudes and moral beliefs underlying that system have been erased. Significantly, the opening and the closing verses of the first exchange raise the theme of violence. The white rrays explicitly threatens violence against the black singer:

The black rrays retorts: Nighd Ousigh Akourayi / (“Or I shall use my stick!!”) The stick is a symbol of the violence that was central to the slave trade's existence.

Boulayad: Debunking Documented Slavery

Using lyrics laden with self-confidence, resistance, and wisdom, the black-skinned rrays Boulayad toys with his opponent. Boulayad's response is an ironical and contemptuous rebuke to the white rrays for his abusive address. He reminds his white opponent that the rsoum (slavery purchase certificate) of the past are of questionable reliability. The rsoum attest to an era of debasement and dehumanization. Boulayad notes:

Boulayad contends that the slave ownership certification reflected the depravity of any judiciary system that took human beings for properties. He points out that slavery is haram. This echoes a larger debate around slavery in Islam, whereby the treatment of slaves is conditioned by a number of regulations. Schroeter points out to the confusion foreign authors make in comparing between slaves in Muslim societies and the exploitation of black laborers in American plantations.Footnote ⁹ In Islam, slaves had rights and obligations. Slaves could buy their own freedom, file a lawsuit against a tyrannical master, and request resale.Footnote ¹⁰ It is in this logic that the black singer attempts to locate his relationship with his white opponent.

Boulayard's line “The (former) era you wish for, I myself long for it” is an exceptionally striking verse because it alludes to the concept of “return.” The black jouster is eager for returning to the epoch of slavery on the condition that the whites should be the ones to struggle this time. Tawala noun ayad ilkmen a trfoufnmi / (“It is your turn to struggle now!”) By reversing the roles, the whites should be subjected to the ravages of slavery now. Boulayad's reactive verse is prefaced with a more noble intention:

The black singer utilizes the plural “we” to refer to a collectivized experience as a common saga that binds all the blacks of the world. As a universal issue, they share similar worries and miseries due to racism. However, the black rrays continues teaching moral lessons to his opponent and feels relieved, especially when he resorts to his belief in the supreme power of God, as the source of all mercy. Boulayad calls tiwiwin (“female slaves”; sing. tawaya) to join his alleviation from the burden of white wrath. Along with God's grace, Boulayad also reminds his opponent that the blacks have become independent, which would allow them to fend for themselves.

Boulayad uses tanddamt as a powerful space for contestation. Tanddamt, hence, constitutes an enabling arena for resistance against stereotypical and harmful clichés. Boulayad contends that there is an obvious shift in the lives of the blacks, from access to nourishment, to freedom of travel, to career opportunities, to Frederick Douglas's famous quote that “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.”Footnote ¹¹

Probably, Boulayad refers to the success stories penned by the black diaspora as an experience that is transposable on the marginalized slaves everywhere. In the last exchange, he develops a counter-discourse, or in Aimé Césaire's words, a “reverse shock,”Footnote ¹² whereby the whites become the current receptacle of their own moral germ, racism: Attan an yad liguingh iwrri sitouni / “this germ/pain we have has turned against you!!” The germ of racism has turned against the whites, redolent of the history of the colonial germ and its reverse effect on the colonizer. The term Attan (germ/pain) is of multifarious significance in this context of racial discourse as it alludes to physical, psychological, and moral pain. This verse backs up Boulayad's diverting assertion that this disease is definitely infiltrating back into the psyche of the former enslavers. Addressing this message to his white opponent, the black Anddam warns white enslavers of the risk of infection in the sense that damage inflictors must be subject to an everlasting trauma. While tanddamt offers the blacks a considerable space to develop a counter-discourse, it also provides grounds for women to develop images of equity, justice, and even gender emulation.

The Gender Question in Tanddamt

Unlike race-performing tanddamt, the presence of gender in this artistic genre has been frequent and abundant. Ample songs have been recorded in which lyrical opponency takes place between male and female singers. Similarly, many studies have been conducted with the question of gender in music as a central argument.Footnote ¹³ Female singers have resorted to music as a defense mechanism to subvert both patriarchal and masculinist ideologies. While music was an accessible field of artistic expression to both males and females whether in solo or group, the emergence of tanddamt where female Amazigh women took part was especially significant by virtue of the preeminence they enjoyed in the conversation. Moisala provides an analytical concept she calls “Musical Gender,” in the sense that music is “a specific site for gender performance and analysis.”Footnote ¹⁴ Through this framework we may deconstruct gender dichotomies with the aim of appreciating differences and variations of gender. In tanddamt, Amazigh female singers seek to churn up the intricate composite of authority and power in a gendered society whereby social and cultural perceptions and practices devalue women and their achievements. This genre contains different performance levels. In the background, instrumentalists are all men; women perform dancing and constitute the object of multiple gazes. At the forefront, as is the case of tirruyssa in general, the scene is dominated by a male singer, the maestro, who is also usually the main composer of the song. With the appearance of male-female tanddamt, the two singers share the same space whereby scoring points over the adversary becomes the primary mission. By adopting the role of a prima donna at the stage, the Amazigh tarrayst contributes to the gains of Moroccan women in different socioeconomic spheres in a society where male authority is, to borrow Fatima Sadiqi's words, “the instrument par excellence of [its] patriarchy.”Footnote ¹⁵ In what follows, I propose to delve into the fabric of a musical piece sung by rrays Mhand Ajoujguel and rraysa Mina Talloubante.

Figure 2.

Tanddamt between Rrays Mhand Ajoujguel and Rraysa Mina Talloubant.

Open Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ4NliUbtEM&t=408s, Warda Production.

Ajoujguel begins this exchange with his need to overcome and appease his psychic burden by soliciting “Jacob's” help. Whether he means a prophet or saint, the poet engages in a spiritual and romantic imploration seeking alleviation, which hints to an alignment of “poetry and prophecy.”Footnote ¹⁶ Ajoujguel, in this respect, starts off this poetic journey alluding to his opponent, the Amazigh female singer, as the haven to host his inner woes. The first four verses are enveloped in spectacularly metaphorical images comparing the woman to a little teapot beautified with golden eyebrows and a talloubante.Footnote ¹⁷ In this poetic context, the male singer addresses Mina as a beautiful talloubante whose company would offer delight to his burdened self. In his metaphorical lyrics, Mina incarnates a precious and scented frankincense stone that is capable of satiating the poet's thirst. Getting hold of talloubante or, in the poet's words, ingesting her, would be the panacea for his psychic gloom. All the same, Moisala claims that “music and its performance could serve as a fruitful site for investigating the complex relations between gender and sexuality.”Footnote ¹⁸ The term nchha (“eat/ingest”) is indicative of sexuality and eroticism. Food and sex are based on appetite, desire, and the pursuit of gratifying biological needs. D. C. Sergeant and E. Himonides affirm that “the association of music and gendering extends beyond gender to sexuality and sexual identity”Footnote ¹⁹ and McClary ties music with the “channeling of desire . . . and competing images of sexuality.”Footnote ²⁰ Sex-insinuation in the dialogue between Ajoujguel and talloubante begins when he initiates his requests, or rather, demands, to possess her body, and metaphorically “eat” her flesh. Such images are expressive of early conservative tribes where phenomena like polygamy are a notorious cultural practice.

Mina herself conflates between ageing and social class as two drawbacks that would prevent her from accepting Ajoujguel's romantic and erotic pleas. She may be speaking for the category of young virgins whose fate is doomed by the sheikh of the tribe in patriarchal societies. Our female poetess is, thus, confirming Moisala's following assertion:

Hence, the tips the female singer uses constitute a counter stratagem against objectification, containment, and subjugation. She believes that men at the age of her courter must devote the rest of their life to religious litanies in the mosque; Mina sets ageing as a barrier to emotions:

Allusion to this irresistible desire to possess the woman is recurrent throughout the poem, signaling an odyssey in which Mina seems unattainable, as in the plot of a romance. In Berber villages, the topics of love and romance occupy a major portion in the songs performed at public festivals. This tradition is part of a larger festive culture particularly in less conservative rural areas. Tanddamt hails from this tradition with a shift in focus. While jousting occurs at the level of groups jovially exchanging collective choral chants in ahouach and ahiddusFootnote ²² for instance, the poetic contestation in tanddamt of tirruyssa settles on individual opponency where both rrays and tarrayst equidistantly serve as the leading figures. Joseph argues that “Berber poets exercise considerable license in their songs, in sharp contrast to the normal decorum and modesty required of a young Berber virgin.”Footnote ²³ In patriarchal Berber households, along with Joseph's reasons of “decorum” and “modesty,” a woman might be deprived of free expression when it comes to argument or communication with the spouse due to fear of the male's authority in the private space of home; access to riposte is offered more in the public space during festivities, where women poetically and lyrically unleash their genius. In similar vein, I borrow Beverley Skeggs's assertion of how female rappers “defiantly speak”Footnote ²⁴ to the system of institutionalized and hegemonic masculinity that places all women as objects through the representational processing of masculine fear and fantasy.Footnote ²⁵ The Amazigh poetess in tanddamt also enjoys the power privilege offered through the physical and symbolic space of the song. Her voice projection, posture, movements, satirical grimaces, are all the more obvious to the audience in a way that overturns or, if nothing else, diminishes, the phallic, masculinist, and patriarchal dominance. Mina adequately manifests Moisala's claim that “staged performance allows the performer to move in and out of conventional gender roles.”Footnote ²⁶ While gender riposte and resistance through music is a universalized experience, it is worth noting that the history of tanddamt is devoid of performance between a black female and a white person, whether male or female. In the United States, for instance, black rappers developed a version of rap music to resist the stereotypical perception of black women as possessions and sex objects; black females in Morocco have not figured on the list of tirruyssa, which is an obvious gap in gender dialogue.

Nowhere is this riposte clearer than in Mina's messages to Ajoujguel, who becomes an object of her blazing fire for his solicitations. The whole exchange is a round of praise and satire. Whereas Ajoujguel sings the praises of her company, Mina simply mocks and ridicules him for his older age and lower social class. The patriarchal logic of subjugation is poetically redefined through lyrical jousting:

While the youthful Mina speaks from a vantage point incompatible with her antagonist's age, and while she questions the logic of a patriarchal society in which older men have free access to marrying and remarrying younger women, she falls into a sidetracking blunder when she associates love with social class. Whereas her argument on age sounds solid (questioning early marriage), her stance weakens by virtue of her discriminatory views against poor lovers. She literally endorses the fact that access to a female's emotions is contingent on financial power. The best expression of this view is reiterated in the following verses:

Music is oftentimes carried through the use of figurative language. In tanddamt, where gender and race issues are performed, we spot a recurrent reference to fruits/vegetables and their monetary and symbolic value. Mina uses almonds as a fruit that only rich people could purchase, in contrast with soybeans as a symbol of a vegetable that is easily accessible to the average citizen. Mina is hence metaphorically pictured in these verses as an almond fruit that is too expensive and too beautiful to be reached by the old poor rrays. Similar images are used in the race-performing tanddamt between Afroug and Boulayad in their verses with food-related imagery. Notably, the isemg is pictured as somebody whose survival in their master's households is secured on the guts of livestock. While the masters enjoy beef or lamb steak and liver, the isemgan live on the leftover guts. Such metaphors enrich the aesthetic poetics of tanddamt as they mirror the living traditions of the Amazigh in villages. Most rrayses hail from a simple rural lifestyle. These agrarian circumstances are decisive in formulating the stylistics of tirruyssa poems and transmit much of the emotional as well as the psychological state of Amazigh poets.Footnote ²⁸

After rraysa Mina's harsh response, the male rrays, Ajoujguel, modifies his initial discourse based on flirtation and praise by adopting a scolding tone in the second exchange. The female's subverting arguments only intensified his inner unease and triggered a masculinist, even misogynist, mindset. “Shahdat ukan ay moslmen ftalloubanti / O Muslims!! Bear witness to Talloubante.” In his eyes, Mina Talloubante should have approved of his requests of love and possession. It sounds quite odd how, given the patriarchal logic, a eulogized female does not reciprocate the courter's compliments. The rrays then intensifies his negative judgments of women, asserting that they are useless, a source of neither panacea nor agony (“orguiwnt aasafar ola tamadonti”). This machismo surfaces when he describes Mina as gar amud (rough trans.: a crop culled from a defected seed): atguit agar amud orguiwn lmzziti. She is lost, with both mind and feet adrift: ijlayam rbbi l3aql jlunam iddarni. The male poet feels he should interfere, and he responds (with shocking ignominy to an outside audience): radam neg ahllass nkrfam idarni / “we'll saddle you up and truss your feet.” The poet crudely brags of his power to subjugate her: ikfayagh rbbi sber ikfawnt lhifi / “we're endowed with poise while you're cursed with indecency.” This image is reminiscent of Moroccan wedding tradition to celebrate the sanctity of the bride and show her preciousness to the groom. Deborah Kapchan notes:

The exchange ventures into a round self-eulogizing and other denigrating lyrics that jeopardize the potential of gender complementation and negotiation. Jousting is based on argument, but not to the extent of a gender chasm that becomes scooped out more by the competitive logic of exclusion.

This last verse inflames the woman, it unleashes the inner forces of a femme fatale through (counter)seduction wiles. Mina's response in the second exchange is lyrically ambivalent. She becomes well aware that the old man speaks out of envy of her beauty and young age. Meanwhile, she seizes the chance to posit a different logic that she considers more plausible in love affairs. For her, the flaw of old men is that they are seeking to exploit younger girls to deflower their beauty. She advises him that she is definitely beyond his reach, and that it would be better for him to fetch an older woman, instead:

I use the concept of femme fatale for there is a remarkable use of images that reveal how detrimental the seductiveness of the woman is. The poet accuses his opponent, and by extension, all women, of a lethal infliction: mchka nyan atnghamt mchka ityagasni / “how many men you've killed, many you've wounded.” Since the rare and precious Mina is beyond the poet's reach, he lambasts her with accusatory lyrics associating females with violence. Elsewhere in the song, he states: mchka ikhlan ikkiss ak aqchab nsi / “how many men got maddened and took off their clothes.” Death, injury, and madness are the eventual consequences of love/women. Mina the precious pearl, turns into a ball of destruction, a vamp that flips the gender logic of authority and power.

In fact, the song covers a controversial conversation of different logics depending on gendered perspectives. The last two exchanges open up on a set of eternal questions: who's to blame? The male's instincts or the female's seductive beauty? The verses reflect this debate of power dynamics. In the third exchange, there is a conspicuous imagery of the dissolution of power, which the male poet raises through the use of animal metaphors – lion, eagle, cat, porcupine – all of which to refer to the crumbling of man's authority. The singer sees this power dissolution as a result of anarchy and chaos.

Everything has become out of control. Gates open, domestic animals have all fled in defiance of their keepers; the lion and eagle, the great symbols of power and prestige, are challenged in the jungle by the powerless animals; the cat is chased by mice; all of these tropes reveal a different status quo of a world in turmoil. The conventional order of things is reversed. Man's power has turned to weakness and fragility.

Nevertheless, the song ends in a compromise. Rrays Ajoujguel reduces the whole conflict to man himself, and his instincts. He wisely argues that awareness and respect of boundaries, physical, social, or cultural, is likely to avoid such conflictual conditions. Explicit in the last exchange is a self-blame recovery by which the poet resists his own detrimental ego asserting that beauty cannot be held responsible for man's caprices.

Allusion to the physical boundaries is metaphorically fulfilled through imageries of animals and their spatial configuration. Majju innan ichat iifis ghlmdinti / “who's ever complained of being attacked by lion in the city??” This rhetorical question explains the concept of area demarcation and reservation in the sense that if one is the victim of a lion attack, it is because they have trespassed his own territory. This metaphor is borrowed to elaborate on men's transgression of their own scope of rights and needs by virtue of their instincts, kullou madak innan zzin adagh idlmni / “Anyone accusing beauty of starting evil”; inatassn chahawa nek ak irrublni / “tell them it is your own instincts that have troubled you!” This last exchange whereby the male poet admits his own destructiveness ends the opponency of the song.