Amazigh language and poetry

Every language or dialect has its value, and it can be expressed with any form of literature or art.

Also languages, and more so mother languages, are always capable to stir something within that can not always be explained.

I think that part of this is well explained by Said Leghlid in his words about Tamazight, one of the languages spoken in Morocco.

I heard many female voices singing at wee hours of the summer nights I spent at Ighrem Ne Mejrane, my mother’s birthplace. The name of this small Kasbah was tucked away in the diaries of forgotten cultural heritages, as was the case in countless Amazigh towns and villages in Morocco.

The history of Imazighen of Morocco was written with the fangs of countless powers that passed through the North African country, preventing Imazighen from claiming their legitimate status as the original inhabitants of Morocco and preventing their intellectual and cultural identity from flourishing. People who took over Morocco preserved their cultural status quo at the expense of other cultures that existed in pseudo anonymity. This was the fateful hand history dealt a brilliant culture: That of the Imazighen of North Africa.
Hauntingly beautiful minds expressed their hearts away to an obliviously silent world where echoes of darkness were the only feedback that bounced off their voices. I thought that was the case with unheard voices in the middle of the night until I learned further that those voices were part of an oral landscape that made the culture vulnerable to the imposing interpretations of religious wisdom and how it treated sobering voices of women reciting poetic inspirations in the wee hours of the night. Those voices were the fabric that wove existence of Imazighen with fresh memories of their culture.
The inspired voices of the women drove darkness out of shelters and projected loud vocal lights on an otherwise sleepy eventless Kasbah known as Ighrem in the Amazigh language. Years later, their voices compelled me to relive those times again and again, and make sense of some extremely important aspects of my culture. With this essay, I hope to convey a perspective on the rhetorical meanings of an amazing strong oral tradition gone unnoticed and burgeoning on extinction.

Said Leghlid