Rita Stirn is a translator, author, and musician who lives in Rabat, Morocco. Her book, Les musiciennes du Maroc: Portraits choisis (Morocco’s Women in Music: Selected Portraits) was published by Marsam in late 2017. Asymptote’s Editor-at-large Hodna Nuernberg spoke with Stirn about her new publication, Moroccan music, and language politics in the region.
Hodna Nuernberg (HN): How did you decide to write a book on Morocco’s women musicians? And how did being a woman musician yourself shape your approach to researching and writing the book?
Rita Stirn (RS): I’ve always been interested in the silences of history concerning women in art and music. When I started listening to the blues as a teenager, I realized music was a man’s world. Sure, there were plenty of female singers, but very few instrumentalists; I wanted to learn about hidden talents—the women in music who weren’t getting much recognition.
I came to Morocco in 2011. I paid a lot of attention to what was going on here musically. Whenever there was a celebration out on the streets—a marriage, for example—there were inevitably women playing music. So, I’d talk to them. They’d say, “Yeah, sure, people know us,” but none of them were online anywhere. They got all their gigs by word of mouth, and little by little, I began to find out about more and more women musicians.
Around the same time, I was looking though archives for photographs of women in music. All the images were of men. There was no focus whatsoever on women’s talents or the tradition of women instrumentalists, and that’s when the book project started to take shape in my head.
HN: You took a sociological approach…
RS: Yes, absolutely. My book seeks to understand how women manage to become musicians in Morocco. One of the pioneering figures in my book, Zohra el Fassia, is typical of the path to musicianship available to women from Moroccan Jewish communities. El Fassia was born in 1905 and received a musical education from her family, but the she decided to become a real artist. She was a renowned interpreter of malhun, a kind of working-class poetry composed mainly by men. But when she decided to sing popular music she was called a shikha, the name given to all female artists who performed on stage for male or mixed audiences and were marginalized as women.
On the other hand, the women of Arab or Amazigh origin known as shikhat (the plural form of shikha) were all, in a way, tragic figures who, in breaking with all the traditional visions of a woman’s future, faced forced marriages, tyrannical families, and even death threats. Hadda Ouakki, an Amazigh singer who could sing four octaves, is representative of the early shikhat: she left her village in the Middle Atlas region when she was just fifteen and moved to an entirely unfamiliar urban environment—Casablanca—where even the language, Arabic, was foreign to her. There was no going back—and in fact, she didn’t go back until after she’d made it and had some records out. The shikhat were totally excluded from society—no one would dream of marrying one!—but they had a liberating effect on the whole society by daring to give words to the pain of Morocco’s marginalized communities.
HN: I’d like to ask about the idea of a specifically Moroccan music and a specifically Moroccan identity. To be Moroccan means, somehow, to be multilingual: Arabic and Tamazight are co-official languages, but most people also speak Darija (or Moroccan Arabic), French, and increasingly, English. Which languages did the women you profiled sing in and how did their choice of language figure into the (re)construction of a Moroccan identity?
RS: For years, Morocco was like any other Arab country: totally fascinated by the Egyptian singer Umm Kalthum. Listening to “modern Arabic music” meant listening to Middle Eastern music. And then, by the 1970s, Morocco regained its identity with the Nass el Ghiwane generation. Nass el Ghiwane was a band made up of five young men from the impoverished outskirts of Casablanca; they used traditional instruments, but revolutionized Moroccan music with the introduction of socially engaged lyrics.
In 2012, Fatima Tabaamrant, a singer and a member of the Moroccan Parliament, raised the question of the role of the Tamazight language in Morocco. Thanks to her, every official speech is now translated into Tamazight and signs outside public buildings are being translated into Tamazight. So, obviously, she only sings in Tamazight.
Hindi Zahra, on the other hand, sings in Tamazight and in English. When she was invited to perform at Mawazine, which is the second largest festival in the world, she was asked to sing on the Salé stage—the Arab stage. But Zahra doesn’t consider herself to be only a Moroccan musician, so she wanted to sing on the Bouregreg stage—the world music stage. The organizers refused, and she ended up turning down the invitation!
Another musician who sings in English is Salma Charif Khalifi. When I asked her why she, as a Moroccan, chooses to sing in English, she told me she felt too folksy when she sang in Darija, and that French—the language of instruction at most Moroccan universities—reminded her too much of school. She feels free when she sings in English. And that’s something I heard again and again while researching the book. For many of the women I profiled, singing in English means being able to sing about whatever they want without feeling judged or worrying about what their families and their neighbors might think.
Then there are singers like Oum, who say they’ve never been able to identify with the women singers who were popular in Morocco. Oum’s musical identity has been deeply influenced by American music—soul and R&B—but after the 2003 terrorist attacks in Casablanca, she decided to sing only in Darija. It was an act of reclamation: Listen, we are Moroccans and we are not afraid of terrorists and that is not what it means to be a Muslim.
And then, of course, we could talk about the golden age of Al-Andalus, a musical style that can be traced back to the expulsion of Jewish and Muslim people from Iberia in the 15th century. Here, we’re at the very core of Moroccan music, and there are a few singers today, such as Samira Kadiri or Amina Alaoui, who sing in Ladino, the ancient language of the Sephardic Jews, and also in ancient Spanish.
HN: Can you speak more about Morocco’s complex linguistic situation and the status of music—whether sung in Modern Standard Arabic, Darija, French, or English—as a form of literary production?
RS: Well, there is a book by Fouad Laroui called Le drame linguistique marocain—literally, the linguistic tragedy of Morocco. When I saw that title, I thought it was exaggerated. But we have to face it—Morocco has a complex linguistic situation with, among other factors, the extensive use of spoken Arabic (Darija) at the expense of classical Arabic, which is a written language.
It wasn’t until 2011 that Tamazight was recognized as a national language, and this despite that fact that the Amazigh people were here long before the Arabs (to make a long story short). French, on the other hand, is the language of the former colonial power. The policies of Hassan II, the late king, have helped perpetuate Morocco’s elite by maintaining French as the language of higher education while simultaneously Arabicizing primary and secondary schools. Laroui’s book argues that we’ve now produced a generation of Darija-speaking Moroccans whose mastery of French is entirely dependent on whether or not they’ve been given the opportunity to attend university. Which means that they are cut off from their rights. They can’t even read a contract or lease because—and this is the true tragedy—most young people have no command of Modern Standard Arabic, which is the result of their schooling. And this is not simply some colonial legacy—it is the result of Morocco’s educational policies.
The current king, Mohammed VI, has proclaimed that every young Moroccan should be trilingual, meaning Modern Standard Arabic, French, and English—notice that he didn’t mention Darija or Tamazight. So, these young people are expected to use three languages on a daily basis! It’s quite fascinating because these three languages represent the past, the present, and the future.
At this point, English is a code in Morocco, as it probably is in most countries—a business code, a scientific code, and a technical code. But the fact that I have seen young women compose in English makes me believe that soon we are going to have English-speaking Moroccan writers—I’m convinced of that. Because when people say, “Oh, Moroccans don’t read!” I usually answer that they sing.
Music is really not only a repository of collective memory, but also a way of keeping in touch with the magic of words. Just step outside and you’ll hear people humming under their breath—you might even hear someone singing an entire song behind you while you’re in line at the supermarket or in the streets or at the beach. But it is true that Moroccan cultural policy tends to neglect everything that has anything to do with writing, and I think this has become a widespread cultural phenomenon in Morocco.
HN: Your book is trilingual, too: each page is written in Arabic, English, and French. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to publish it in these three languages?
RS: When I started my research, I had no clue what the world of publishing would be like. I was just producing material. But then I was confronted with the concept of the beau livre, the coffee table book. It was my publisher’s decision to apply for a state-sponsored subsidy that required the book be formatted as a luxury book—glossy paper, photographs, and so on. The second requirement of the subsidy was that the book be translated into three languages.
It’s interesting that you can publish a luxury book like this in Morocco, but you’ll never see it in a bookshop or in distribution—never! Beaux livres are criminally expensive—they can cost more than 1,000 dirhams—and they are, essentially, produced to go straight to embassies and to be given as state gifts.
And, interestingly, even though the book is in Arabic, there has been no organized distribution whatsoever in any Arab network. All my reviews, so far, have been in the French-speaking press—there hasn’t been a single review in any Arabic-speaking media.
It’s ironic to have this book about the visibility of women in music and now I find myself wondering about the visibility of my book in the Arab media, although I did get excellent exposure in the Francophone Moroccan press!
HN: Before we wrap up, could you speak a bit about the future of Moroccan music? Your book gives a retrospective from the very early pioneers, such as Zohra el Fassia, but you also profile rappers and other very contemporary, young musicians…
RS: Yes, for example Soultana, who is a rapper and who is the last one standing from a group of women rappers called Tigresse Flow. She’s part of a very lively scene in Casablanca—and the keyword for her is partnerships. For example, she’s working with a rapper from Ghana, and together they’ve tried to give the whole rap scene some dignity and to create a kind of federation of rappers.
Morocco is terribly lacking in resources—things like recording studios and the proper logistics to promote artists are in short supply. Many of the young musicians I interviewed said the same thing, that they feel deprived. Nonetheless, the will is there. Visa for Music, a four-year-old festival, is helping to connect Moroccan musicians to the wider world and it has become a very decisive meeting point between producers, distributors and artists. It has given us a way—us being here in Morocco—to gain insight into what’s being produced all over the world and to enter into the fray.
Hodna Bentail Gharsallah Nuernberg holds both a Master’s in Francophone Studies and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She is a 2017-2018 U.S. Fulbright grantee to Morocco, where she teaches at University Mohammed V’s École Normale Supérieure. Nuernberg translates from French, Spanish, and Arabic; her work has appeared or is forthcoming with QLRS, Two Lines, Asymptote, Poet Lore, Anomaly, and elsewhere.
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