Telling the conquest: poetry under the bombs

Between 1936 and 1938 the officer Jean Robichez collected poems about the 1927-1933 conquest; most come from the Aït Sokhman, some from the Todgha. Abdallah Bounfour analysed them in 1989: colonisation is first thought of as a tribal war or a Christian invasion, then as “the Thing”, an unnameable misfortune.

Resistance is named by metonymy (powder, bullets) and the inequality of weapons is stated bluntly: “Flintlock, what use were you to me? / The cannon, aimed, is stronger than anything. / The aeroplane poisons the life of whoever is on the road” (poem of the Ichqern, translated in Bounfour).

For the most part these texts do not come from the Aït Atta, nor from the Bou Gafer: they shed light on the shared experience of bombardment in the Central Atlas. A poem attributed to the fighters of Bougafer circulates online without verifiable source; it is not reproduced here.

Lines specific to the Bougafer are known at second hand. An Aït Atta chant, quoted by M. Boukbout from witnesses in Erfoud, sets the ascent of the Bougafer, “the Prophet walked before us”, against the descent, when “we left the Prophet behind us”; poems collected by L. S. Amrani and A. Rakkouk mourn Adjou Moh and blame those who accepted the negotiations (al-Hadik, 2017). They are presented in the timnaḍin library with their limits: incomplete Amazigh texts, translations made from the Arabic.

The setting of these chants is the ahidous. Among the Aït Atta, men and women dance and sing it in two facing rows; only the men play the frame drum (allun), in a measured rhythm. It opens weddings, on the first evening, at both families' homes. Hart reports that after 1933 Assou Oubasslam, then a caid, forbade women to dance it outside weddings, despite a French attempt to oppose this (1984, pp. 92-93).