{"id":32344,"date":"2024-04-01T19:54:05","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T17:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=32344"},"modified":"2024-04-07T16:46:07","modified_gmt":"2024-04-07T14:46:07","slug":"nass-el-ghiwanes-moroccan-folk-radical-politics-forged-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/nass-el-ghiwanes-moroccan-folk-radical-politics-forged-in-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"Nass El Ghiwane’s Moroccan Folk, Radical Politics, Forged in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"
The iconic Moroccan folk songs and radical politics of Nass el Ghiwane were forged not in the Magreb but on the destitute streets of Paris in the 1970s.<\/span><\/h5>\n

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Benjamin Jones<\/span><\/h4>\n

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In the fall of 1970, the Moroccan playwright Tayeb Saddiki took his troupe Masrah Ennas from the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Gens on a tour of France to perform the group\u2019s experimental take on North African folktales and oral traditions. In the troupe were a few young actors from Casablanca\u2019s working class Hayy Mohammedi neighborhood, who contrived to overstay their visas after the tour\u2019s end and Saddiki\u2019s return to Morocco. Destitute and isolated, Larbi Batma and Boujemaa H\u2019gour lived a life of intense deprivations on the streets of Paris. Batma would later describe stealing milk and eggs from doorways to eat, taking costumes from local theaters to keep warm, and sleeping in the metro tunnels. \u201cIn Paris there was torture.\u201d He writes in his memoir, \u201cTorture of a different kind, the torture of loitering and sleeping in apartment doorways or on the metro and running from the police.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet something about the revolutionary currents sweeping France in the post-1968 era resonated with the two young Moroccan artists, keeping them in Paris despite the hardships. Eventually they fell in with Mohamed Boudia, an Algerian playwright and leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Through Boudia, H\u2019gour and Batma became enamored with the ideas of radical leftists like Che Guevara, George Habbash, and Mehdi Ben Barka. Boudia \u201cloved us to a crazy degree, especially when we sang our revolutionary songs for him,\u201d Batma recalls. \u201cWe spent three months in Paris living on the streets. Three months felt like three centuries. But during that time we wrote a number of things, <\/span>zajal<\/span><\/i> poetry and song lyrics, which would make us famous.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Upon returning to Morocco later that year, Batma and H’gour founded a folk band called Nass el Ghiwane which would become the most successful and influential North African band of the 20th century. When they returned to Paris in 1976, they did so to headline a performance at one of the city\u2019s biggest venues, the legendary Olympia Theatre.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nass el Ghiwane\u2019s success highlights the importance of Paris as a central junction in the political, social, and cultural networks of North African history. In a postcolonial moment when political conflicts, particularly between Morocco and Algeria, made intraregional travel in the Middle East and North Africa increasingly difficult, Paris served as a meeting point for artists and intellectuals from across the region. Ironically, Nass el Ghiwane achieved success through a folksy, rural, and self-consciously nationalist Moroccan sound, which they actually formulated on the streets of metropolitan France. Paris\u2019s centrality to the questions of national identity and artistic authenticity in Moroccan music demonstrates the increasingly transnational nature of North African political and cultural movements over the past century.<\/span><\/p>\n

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An Unexpected By-Product of Colonialization<\/h4>\n

Thanks to colonial networks of labor migration and material production, Paris has been an important artistic center since the very beginning of the record industry, in the early 1900s. The Paris-based Path\u00e9 Records, which dominated the early market in wax phonograph cylinders, produced the first commercial recordings of North African music, mostly from the classical Andalusian repertoire. European record companies built impressive distribution networks across North Africa, where intermediaries like the Algerian Jewish musician Edmund Yafil would both sell Path\u00e9 records and recommend local musicians for recording and distribution. In the mid 1930s, the <\/span>rrways<\/span><\/i> singer and rebab player Lhaj Belaid traveled from southern Morocco to the Baidaphon Records studio in Paris to create one of the earliest recordings of Moroccan Tamazight music. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Recording<\/a>
Recording History<\/em> is published by Stanford<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Out of this group of recordings, the song <\/span>\u201cAmmudu n Bariz\u201d<\/span><\/a> (A Trip to Paris) praises the city of lights as a place where many Maghrebi immigrants first encountered the wonders of the modern world: \u201cThere are no more troubles, neither on earth nor at sea \/ He who wishes to travel has no more excuses \/ In the heart of Paris I had good company \/ Where you were all gathered oh chleuhs [Imazighen] \/ Chleuhs and Arabs all happy.\u201d This reference points to Paris\u2019s importance as a meeting point for people from different ethnic groups across the Middle East; the song\u2019s spoken introduction (a common formality of early recordings) suggests that the legendary Egyptian singer Mohammed Abdelwahab was in the studio when Belaid recorded.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the decades following World War I, tens of thousands of Maghrebi immigrants settled in Paris, creating a trans-Mediterranean market for North African music. In his book <\/span>Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth Century North Africa<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Christopher Silver details how Paris became an important center for Maghrebi musicians between the 1930s and 1950s. Rising stars like Salim Halali and Louisa Tounsia sang frequently at clubs like Au Petit Marseillais in the Marais and El Djaza\u00efr in the Latin Quarter. Recording in the Path\u00e9 studios in 1939, Halali, an Algerian Jew, gave voice to this immigrant community\u2019s melancholy sense of exile on \u201cArja\u2019 l-biladak\u201d (Return to Your Country). His plaintive voice calling: \u201cReturn to your country man \/ Why do you remain estranged?\u201d was popular both among immigrants in France and back home in North Africa; it was considered so subversive that Vichy officials in Morocco banned Halali\u2019s record in 1942.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given this history of dense commercial, technical, and musical networks overlapping in Paris, it seems almost inevitable that the city would be a launching point for the Ghiwani revolution in North African music in the 1970s. The young Moroccans Larbi Batma and Boujemaa H\u2019gour were forced to return to Morocco in 1970 when French police began investigating Boudia\u2019s activities with the <\/span>Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine<\/span><\/a> (PFLP). Larbi even claims that he and Boujemaa were intended to participate in the PFLP bombings undertaken by the Moroccan sisters <\/span>Ghita and Nadia Bradley<\/span><\/a> in Tel Aviv later that same year. The trip in France would have a permanent impact on the art and ideas of Nass el Ghiwane, particularly through the songwriting of Boujemaa, who \u201cwent from a world of freedom, of democracy [in France],\u201d <\/span>recalls<\/span><\/a> his friend Miloud Oualla, \u201cto one of backwardness and legend that we were living here [in Morocco].\u201d The exposure to revolutionary ideas from across the Middle East that the pair received in Paris catalyzed an artistic process which would lead them to massive success.<\/span><\/p>\n

Upon returning to Casablanca, Batma and H\u2019gour began practicing their music with a newfound intensity. During their brief sojourn in France, they had already composed songs like \u201cMahemmouni,\u201d \u201cWash Hna Huma Hna,\u201d and \u201cEssiniya,\u201d which would go on to be hugely popular. Recruiting friends Omar Sayed, Allal Yaala, Moulay Abdelaziz Tahiri, and Mahmoud Saadi, they formed a band named Nass el Ghiwane after an old line of <\/span>malhoun<\/span><\/i> poetry. Blending regional folk styles like Aita with the religious traditions of Sufi orders like the Hamadsha, Gnawa, and Aissawa, Nass el Ghiwane achieved success by renouncing many of the reigning norms of the North African recording industry. They traded string instruments of the classical Andalusi repertoire for simple acoustic instruments of rural folk traditions like the bendir, tabla, and hajhouj.<\/span><\/p>\n

And they composed, recorded, and performed as a band of equals, rejecting the celebrity culture which glorified singing stars like Umm Kulthum or Abdelhalim Hafez. Their lyrics, sung in Moroccan Darija rather than standard Arabic, eschewed sappy love ballads in favor of poetic ruminations on worry, pain, and loss. At times, these nostalgic laments veered into critiques of the authoritarian regime of King Hassan II, whose brutal suppression of dissent earned this era in Moroccan history the unflattering moniker, \u201cThe Years of Lead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Indigenous Instruments and Musical Genres<\/h4>\n

This combative folk music was a radical departure from previous styles of North African popular music, which up until that point had been dominated by orchestral balladeers. In their proud use of local instruments, indigenous genres, and Moroccan language, Nass el Ghiwane represented a threat not just to the reigning stars and the music industry which sustained them, but also to the pro-regime and pan-Arab political commitments which they espoused. The band inspired many imitators and collaborators, who quickly established a genre of radical neofolk music, variously known as \u201cThe Ghiwani Phenomenon,\u201d \u201cThe Band Phenomenon,\u201d or more simply, \u201cThe Phenomenon\u201d (ad-Dhahira), which took the Maghrebi world by storm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the band\u2019s aesthetic references to rural Morocco as a source of musical inspiration and patriotic authenticity, Paris remained an important meeting point in Dhahira musical networks. Upon emerging in 1970-71, Nass el Ghiwane gained fame through word of mouth, performing at Casablanca caf\u00e9s and theaters and making occasional appearances on Moroccan television and radio. They signed a contract with the German-British company Polydor, but because Morocco lacked properly-equipped recording studios the label sent the band to Paris in 1973.<\/span><\/p>\n

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