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After Morocco\u2019s devastating earthquake on September 8, 2023, both the world and many Moroccans discovered that the High Atlas Mountains are home to Amazigh-speaking populations. With its epicenter some 45 miles southwest of Marrakesh, the earthquake wreaked havoc throughout the High Atlas, killing nearly 3,000 people and wounding over 6,000 others<\/a>, \u00a0while demolishing fifty thousand homes<\/a> and causing significant financial damage. As the world turned its attention to Morocco, Amazigh survivors of the earthquake shouldered the double burden of processing their trauma and conveying it in Arabic \u2014 a language thousands do not understand.<\/p>\n Apart from a few villages, the overwhelming majority of Moroccans in the Atlas Mountains speak Tamazight as a mother tongue. They live, exist, and breathe the air in Tamazight. They conduct their daily activities and worship God in Tamazight. They receive their phone calls and respond to them in Tamazight. They address the authorities in Tamazight, and celebrate their deaths and births in this language. The lullabies they sing to their children are in Tamazight, and the stories through which they encounter the world everyday are also in this millennial idiom. Their mother tongue is consubstantial to who they are as an integral component of the Moroccan nation.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, when the earthquake struck, they were called upon to diverge from this ordinary rule and use a non-mother tongue to share their losses. The various articulations of their pain in Arabic, which some media supposed is spoken universally in Morocco, is a case study for the way asking people to communicate their hurt in a language other than their mother tongue not only prevents an accurate and more fluid description of pain, but also becomes an obstacle that hinders audiences\u2019 understanding of the immensity of the tragedy that struck central Morocco. The language we use to describe our pain is not peripheral to the relief and information effort; it is rather a foremost factor in the efficiency of any aid and recovery effort.<\/p>\n In her classic book, The<\/em> Body in Pain<\/em>, Elaine Scarry argues that pain is both incomprehensible and inaccessible to others. Scarry writes that \u201c[w]hatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.\u201d Scarry pushes her analysis further, adding that \u201c[p]hysical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.\u201d<\/p>\n Scarry was, of course, writing from an Anglophone tradition and at a time when Indigenous languages, like Tamazight, were almost inexistent in larger literary \u00a0and intellectual conversations. However, Scarry\u2019s provocative thought that pain both resists and destroys well-endowed languages is crucial for a generative reflection on how the articulation of pain works in a marginalized Indigenous language.<\/p>\n If pain eludes the powerful and terminologically-cutting-edge English language, then one needs to find out how Imazighen \u2014 the speakers of the Indigenous Amazigh language \u2014 have conveyed their pain after the catastrophic magnitude 6.8 temblor that decimated their \u00a0villages and way of life in the High Atlas region. In the midst of the natural disaster in their homeland emerged the beleaguered language of Imazighen; it resurfaced like a phoenix from the folds of oblivion to shed light on multilayered historical narratives about North Africa and their limitations. The world finally saw that these Indigenous people of North Africa speak a language that is not necessarily comprehensible to Arabic speakers. Imazighen\u2019s painful struggle to speak Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and Fu\u1e63\u1e25a<\/em> (Modern Standard Arabic) is an entirely normal condition for those of us who grew up in villages and had parents and relatives who could not formulate a sentence in any variety of Arabic.<\/p>\n Despite Scarry\u2019s argument that language breaks down in pain, it is still a crucial medium for the exteriorization of what one feels. Rather than focusing on whether Amazigh survivors\u2019 pain is fully understood, it is equally fundamental to draw attention to a crucial, albeit basic, observation whether Imazighen were even able to voice their hurt after the earthquake.<\/p>\n The seismic catastrophe has elicited extensive media attention from both local and transnational press outlets. As I watched how Amazigh men and women were asked to respond to questions in Arabic without interpreters \u2014 a normal practice in Arabic-speaking media that host international speakers \u2014 it was obvious to me that their responses would have been better and richer if they were asked to respond in their mother tongue. This was an instantiation of both linguistic and traumatic erasure as people scrambled to find words and the right register to express their loss in a language most of them did not know well enough to engage in deep conversations.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/The-Body-of-Pain-the-making-and-unmaking-of-the-world-Elaine-Scarry-Oxford-9780195049961.jpg\")
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