The poetry and song of Ahwach
ⴰⵎⴰⵔⴳ
Before the drums comes the verse. A poet opens, two choirs answer, and a village’s honour can rest on a couplet.
The genres of Chleuh poetry
INALCO’s Centre de recherche berbère distinguishes several genres tied to Ahwach. Amarg is author poetry; the word also means song, affection and nostalgia. Aqsiḍ is a long, slow poem sung through the night by master poets with aḥwac accompaniment. Lqiṣt is narrative verse. Tiḥwacin, or tiytt, are short repeated couplets, sung by women in the mountains and by men in the plains, which can also stand alone.
This poetry is in Tashelhit, but a worked Tashelhit: its images, riddles and symbols deliberately depart from everyday speech. That is what makes Ahwach a school of language as much as a celebration.
Sources A. Bounfour, Centre de recherche berbère (INALCO) Hespress, Abdullah Bouchtar, “Ahwach poets, guardians of values” Al Araby al-Jadeed
The izli and the unconscious calculation
The basic unit of Amazigh sung poetry is the izli (plural izlan), a couplet of about fifteen syllables, sung to the drums in the ihidusen of the Middle and High Atlas as in the ihwachen of the Anti-Atlas and the Souss.
These lines seem free. The linguist Hassan Jouad showed, from recordings made in the central High Atlas from 1969, that they obey a closed system of metrical formulas: the refrain formulas of the joust provided the key, and the system holds across the Berber speech of Morocco. The improviser composes within a learned frame, at the speed of speech.
To set up the melody, built on pentatonic scales, the opening couplet may use “abstract formulas”: meaningless syllables that hold the place of the metre before the words arrive.
Sources Review of Middle East Studies (Cambridge) D. Casajus, L’Homme (Persée) B. Lortat-Jacob, Cahiers de littérature orale
The joust and honour
In several regions the piece opens with a poetic joust, the lmsaq: a soloist improvises lines (tawala) answered by two facing choirs, one of men and one of women; the accelerating final phrase leads into the dance. The Institut du monde arabe presented it this way in 2007, with the Aït Itkel ensemble.
The sung exchange between poets is a contest, the tanḍḍamt. The best was given the title anddam on behalf of the community he represented, and at large gatherings between tribes the collective honour rested on its poet. Moroccan researchers also describe these poets as mediators, who channelled rivalries between confederations into a contest of verse rather than conflict.
Sources Institut du monde arabe Géoparc du Jbel Bani, “Ahwach, dance and music of the Chleuh country” Hespress, Abdullah Bouchtar, “Ahwach poets, guardians of values”
What Ahwach speaks of
Love and nostalgia, praise and satire, wisdom, religion, the land and farm work, tribal solidarity (tamunt), the memory of events. From the late nineteenth century, resistance and then the social and political questions of the day also enter it; a resistance poet of the colonial period, Oubidar n Toukart, is cited around 1918.
The Larousse notes that amarg expresses lived experience, where the repertoire of the professional rais is more conventional. Researchers see in it the means by which the communities of the south-east record and pass on their own history.
Sources Hespress, Abdullah Bouchtar, “Ahwach poets, guardians of values” Al Araby al-Jadeed Larousse encyclopedia, “ahouach” Hespress
Two choirs, women singers, rais
The song is antiphonal: a soloist proposes, a choir answers, and in mixed Ahwach the men’s and women’s choirs alternate; the older literature speaks of “semi-choruses”. In Télouet and around Ouarzazate it is traditionally the women who carry the vocal line while the men drum. In the hinterland of Agadir, ahwach n tfrkhin, “of the girls”, gives song and dance to young women, with men on percussion.
Village Ahwach should not be confused with the rwais, professional itinerant singer-poets with ribab and lotar. The ethnomusicologist Philip Schuyler set them against each other as early as 1979: on one side a collective art bound to the community, on the other a profession. The rwais nonetheless draw on Ahwach poetry, which is often their school.
Sources B. Lortat-Jacob, Cahiers de littérature orale Larousse encyclopedia, “ahouach” Hespress P. D. Schuyler, “Rwais and Ahwash: Opposing Tendencies in Moroccan Berber Music and Society”, The World of Music 21(1), 1979
Collecting the poets
Long oral, this poetry now has its modern collections. In March 2012 IRCAM presented “Imarirn”, Ahmed Aassid’s book on the great Ahwach poets of the twentieth century. The Institute has since published further collections of Ahwach poets.
Practitioners interviewed in 2016 nonetheless said that poets wholly devoted to Ahwach “can be counted on one’s fingers”. Collecting, publishing and making these voices heard remains one of the stakes of transmission.
Sources Hespress, “Imarirn, a new book by Ahmed Aassid” Géoparc du Jbel Bani, reprinting Albayane, “Ahwach, an authentic art turned folklore”