Moorish Literature
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RENÉ BASSET
Moorish Literature
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Table of contents
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
MOORISH BALLADS
MOORISH ROMANCES
FIVE BERBER STORIES
POPULAR TALES OF THE BERBERS
POPULAR TALES OF THE KABYLES
FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION
The region which extends from the frontiers of Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger, was in ancient times inhabited by a people to whom we give the general name of Berbers, but whom the ancients, particularly those of the Eastern portion, knew under the name of Moors. "They were called Maurisi by the Greeks," said Strabo, "in the first century A.D., and Mauri by the Romans. They are of Lybian origin, and form a powerful and rich nation."1 This name of Moors is applied not only to the descendants of the ancient Lybians and Numidians, who live in the nomad state or in settled abodes, but also to the descendants of the Arabs who, in the eighth century A.D., brought with them Islamism, imposed by the sabre of Ogbah and his successors. Even further was it carried, into Spain, when Berbers and Arabs, reunited under the standard of Moussa and Tarik, added this country to the empire of the Khalifa. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, in their turn, took the name to the Orient, and gave the name of Moors to the Mussulmans whom they found on the Oriental coast of Africa and in India.
The appellation particularizes, as one may see, three peoples entirely different in origin--the Berbers, the Arabs of the west, and the Spanish Mussulmans, widely divided, indeed, by political struggles, but united since the seventh and eighth centuries in their religious law. This distinction must be kept in mind, as it furnishes the necessary divisions for a study of the Moorish literature.
The term Moorish Literature may appear ambitious applied to the monuments of the Berber language which have come down to us, or are gathered daily either from the lips of singers on the mountains of the Jurgura, of the Aures, or of the Atlas of Morocco; under the tents of the Touaregs of the desert or the Moors of Senegal; in the oases of the south of Algeria or in Tunis. But it is useless to search for literary monuments such as have been transmitted to us from Egypt and India, Assyria and Persia, ancient Judea, Greece and Rome; from the Middle Ages; from Celt, Slav, and German; from the Semitic and Ouralo-altaique tongues; the extreme Orient, and the modern literature of the Old and New World.
But the manifestations of thought, in popular form, are no less curious and worthy of study among the Berbers. I do not speak of the treatises on religion which in the Middle Ages and in our day were translated from the Arabic into certain dialects: that borrowed literature, which also exists among the Sonalulis of Eastern Africa and the Haussas and the Peuls of the Soudan, has nothing original. But the popular literature--the stories and songs--has an altogether different importance. It is, above all, the expression of the daily life, whether it relates to fêtes or battles or even simple fights. These songs may be satirical or laudatory, to celebrate the victory of one party or deplore the defeat of the True Believers by the Christians, resounding on the lips of children or women, or shouted in political defiance. They permit us, in spite of a coarse rhythm and language often incorrect, an insight into their manner of life, and to feel as do peoples established for centuries on African soil. Their ancestors, the Machouacha, threatened Egypt in the time of Moses and took possession of it, and more than twenty centuries later, with the Fatimides, converted Spain to the Mussulman faith. Under Arab chiefs they would have overcome all Eastern Europe, had it not been for the hammer of Charles Martel, which crushed them on the field of Poitiers.
The richest harvest of Berber songs in our possession is, without doubt, that in the dialect of the Zouaous, inhabiting the Jurgura mountains, which rise some miles distant from Algiers, their crests covered with snow part of the year.2 All kinds of songs are represented; the rondeaux of children whose inspiration is alike in all countries:
"Oh, moonlight clear in the narrow streets,
Tell to our little friends
To come out now with us to play--
To play with us to-night.
If they come not, then we will go
To them with leather shoes. (Kabkab.)3
"Rise up, O Sun, and hie thee forth,
On thee we'll put a bonnet old:
We'll plough for thee a little field--
A little field of pebbles full:
Our oxen but a pair of mice."
"Oh, far distant moon:
Could I but see thee, Ali!
Ali, son of Sliman,
The beard4 of Milan
Has gone to draw water.
Her cruse, it is broken;
But he mends it with thread,
And draws water with her:
He cried to Ayesha:
'Give me my sabre,
That I kill the merle
Perched on the dunghill
Where she dreams;
She has eaten all my olives,'"5
In the same category one may find the songs which are peculiar to the women, "couplets with which they accompany themselves in their dances; the songs, the complaints which one hears them repeat during whole hours in a rather slow and monotonous rhythm while they are at their household labors, turning the hand-mill, spinning and weaving cloths, and composed by the women, both words and music."6
One of the songs, among others, and the most celebrated in the region of the Oued-Sahal, belonging to a class called Deker, is consecrated to the memory of an assassin, Daman-On-Mesal, executed by a French justice. As in most of these couplets, it is the guilty one who excites the interest:
"The Christian oppresses. He has snatched away
This deserving young man;
He took him away to Bougre,
The Christian women marvelled at him.
Pardieu! O Mussulmans, you
Have repudiated Kabyle honor."7
With the Berbers of lower Morocco the women's songs are called by the Arab name Eghna.
If the woman, as in all Mussulman society, plays an inferior role--inferior to that allowed to her in our modern civilizations--she is not less the object of songs which celebrate the power given her by beauty:
"O bird with azure plumes,
Go, be my messenger--
I ask thee that thy flight be swift;
Take from me now thy recompense.
Rise with the dawn--ah, very soon--
For me neglect a hundred plans;
Direct thy flight toward the fount,
To Tanina and Cherifa.
"Speak to the eyelash-darkened maid,
To the beautiful one of the pure, white throat;
With teeth like milky pearls.
Red as vermillion are her cheeks;
Her graceful charms have stol'n my reason;
Ceaselessly I see her in my dreams."8
"A woman with a pretty nose
Is worth a house of solid stone;
I'd give for her a hundred reaux,9
E'en if she quitted me as soon.
"Arching eyebrows on a maid,
With love the genii would entice,
I'd buy her for a thousand reaux,
Even if exile were the price.
"A woman neither fat nor lean
Is like a pleasant forest green,
When she unfolds her budding charms,
She gleams and glows with springtime sheen."10
The same sentiment inspires the Touareg songs, among which tribe women enjoy much greater liberty and possess a knowledge of letters
greater than that of the men, and know more of that which we should call literature, if that word were not too ambitious:
"For God's sake leave those hearts in peace,
'Tis Tosdenni torments them so;
She is more graceful than a troop
Of antelopes separated from gazelles;
More beautiful than snowy flocks,
Which move toward the tents,
And with the evening shades appear
To share the nightly gathering;
More beautiful than the striped silks
Enwrapped so closely under the haiks,
More beautiful than the glossy ebon veil,
Enveloped in its paper white,
With which the young man decks himself,
And which sets off his dusky cheek."11
The poetic talent of the Touareg women, and the use they make of this gift--which they employ to celebrate or to rail at, with the accompaniment of their one-stringed violin, that which excites their admiration or inspires them with disdain--is a stimulant for warriors:
"That which spurs me to battle is a word of scorn,
And the fear of the eternal malediction
Of God, and the circles of the young
Maidens with their violins.
Their disdain is for those men
Who care not for their own good names.12
"Noon has come, the meeting's sure.
Hearts of wind love not the battle;
As though they had no fear of the violins,
Which are on the knees of painted women--
Arab women, who were not fed on sheep's milk;
There is but camel's milk in all their land.
More than one other has preceded thee and is widowed,
For that in Amded, long since,
My own heart was burned.
Since you were a young lad I suffered--
Since I wore the veil and wrapped
My head in the folds of the haik."13
War, and the struggle of faction against faction, of tribe against tribe, of confederation against confederation, it is which, with love, above all, has inspired the Berber men. With the Khabyles a string of love-songs is called "Alamato," because this word occurs in the first couplet, always with a belligerent inspiration:
"He has seized his banner for the fight
In honor of the Bey whose cause he maintains,
He guides the warriors with their gorgeous cloaks,
With their spurs unto their boots well fastened,
All that was hostile they destroyed with violence;
And brought the insurgents to reason."
This couplet is followed by a second, where allusion is made to the snow which interrupts communication:
"Violently falls the snow,
In the mist that precedes the lightning;
It bends the branches to the earth,
And splits the tallest trees in twain.
Among the shepherds none can pasture his flock;
It closes to traffic all the roads to market.
Lovers then must trust the birds,
With messages to their loves--
Messages to express their passion.
"Gentle tame falcon of mine,
Rise in thy flight, spread out thy wings,
If thou art my friend do me this service;
To-morrow, ere ever the rise of the sun,
Fly toward her house; there alight
On the window of my gracious beauty."14
With the Khabyles of the Jurgura the preceding love-songs are the particular specialty of a whole list of poets who bear the Arab name of T'eballa, or "tambourinists." Ordinarily they are accompanied in their tours by a little troop of musicians who play the tambourine and the haut-boy. Though they are held in small estimation, and are relegated to the same level as the butchers and measurers of grain, they are none the less desired, and their presence is considered indispensable at all ceremonies--wedding fêtes, and on the birth of a son, on the occasion of circumcision, or for simple banquets.
Another class, composed of Ameddah, "panegyrists," or Fecia, "eloquent men," are considered as much higher in rank. They take part in all affairs of the country, and their advice is sought, for they dispense at will praise or blame. It is they who express the national sentiment of each tribe, and in case of war their accents uplift warriors, encourage the brave, and wither the cowardly. They accompany themselves with a Basque drum. Some, however, have with them one or two musicians who, after each couplet, play an air on the flute as a refrain.15
In war-songs it is remarkable to see with what rapidity historical memories are lost. The most ancient lay of this kind does not go beyond the conquest of Algiers by the French. The most recent songs treat of contemporary events. Nothing of the heroic traditions of the Berbers has survived in their memory, and it is the Arab annalists who show us the role they have played in history. If the songs relating to the conquest of Algeria had not been gathered half a century ago, they would doubtless have been lost, or nearly so, to-day. At that time, however, the remembrance was still alive, and the poets quickly crystallized in song the rapidity of the triumph of France, which represents their civilization:
"From the day when the Consul left Algiers,
The powerful French have gathered their hosts:
Now the Turks have gone, without hope of return,
Algiers the beautiful is wrested from them.
"Unhappy Isle that they built in the desert,
With vaults of limestone and brick;
The celestial guardian who over them watched has withdrawn.
Who can resist the power of God?
"The forts that surround Algiers like stars,
Are bereft of their masters;
The baptized ones have entered.
The Christian religion now is triumphant,
O my eyes, weep tears of blood, weep evermore!
"They are beasts of burden without cruppers,
Their backs are loaded,
Under a bushel their unkempt heads are hidden,
They speak a patois unintelligible,
You can understand nothing they say.
"The combat with these gloomy invaders
Is like the first ploughing of a virgin soil,
To which the harrowing implements
Are rude and painful;
Their attack is terrible.
"They drag their cannons with them,
And know how to use them, the impious ones;
When they fire, the smoke forms in thick clouds:
They are charged with shrapnel,
Which falls like the hail of approaching spring.
Unfortunate queen of cities--
City of noble ramparts,
Algiers, column of Islam,
Thou art like the habitation of the dead,
The banner of France envelops thee all."16
It is, one may believe, in similar terms that these songs, lost to-day, recount the defeat of Jugurtha, or Talfarinas, by the Romans, or that of the Kahina by the Arabs. But that which shows clearly how rapidly these songs, and the remembrance of what had inspired them, have been lost is the fact that in a poem of the same kind on the same subject, composed some fifty years ago by the Chelha of meridional Morocco, it is not a question of France nor the Hussains, but the Christians in general, against whom the poet endeavors to excite his compatriots.
It is so, too, with the declamatory songs of the latest period of the Middle Ages, the dialects more or less precise, where the oldest heroic historical poems, like the Song of Roland, had disappeared to leave the field free for the imagination of the poet who treats the struggles between Christians and Saracens according to his own fantasy.
Thanks to General Hanoteau, the songs relating to the principal events of Khabyle since the French conquest have been saved from oblivion, viz., the expedition of Marêchal Bugeaud in 1867; that of General Pelissier in 1891; the insurrection of Bon Bar'la; those of Amera
vun in 1896, and the divers episodes of the campaign of 1897 against the Aith Traten, when the mountains were the last citadel of the Khabyle independence:
"The tribe was full of refugees,
From all sides they sought refuge
With the Aith Traten, the powerful confederation.
'Let us go,' said they, 'to a sure refuge,'
For the enemy has fallen on our heads,'
But in Arba they established their home."17
The unhappy war of 1870, thanks to the stupidity of the military authorities, revived the hope of a victorious insurrection. Mograne, Bon Mazrag, and the Sheikh Haddad aroused the Khabyles, but the desert tribes did not respond to their appeal. Barbary was again conquered, and the popular songs composed on that occasion reproached them for the folly of their attempt.
Bon Mezrah proclaimed in the mountains and on the plain:
"Come on, a Holy War against the Christians,
He followed his brother until his disaster,
His noble wife was lost to him.
As to his flocks and his children,
He left them to wander in Sahara.
Bon Mezrag is not a man,
But the lowest of all beings;
He deceived both Arabs and Khabyles,
Saying, 'I have news of the Christians.'
"I believed Haddad a saint indeed,
With miracles and supernatural gifts;
He has then no scent for game,
And singular to make himself he tries.
"I tell it to you; to all of you here
(How many have fallen in the battles),