Voices of the Saghro: Timnaḍin

Timnaḍin (also spelt timnadin, timnaddin) are described as very short pieces, often sad and melancholy, improvised at celebrations and gatherings. The examples published by Lhoussain Azergui take the form of couplets: two lines that set up an image, then turn it around.

The form resembles the izli couplet, dominant in the Tamazight poetry of central Morocco, but SAGHRO does not treat the two genres as identical: no consulted study precisely describes the metre of Ait Atta timnaḍin.

Azergui writes that women sing timnaḍin “away from men's ears” and become “chroniclers” in them: they describe what they see, criticise, mock, advise, and take on the voice of young men to express their fears. Their songs are reduced neither to lament nor to war song: love, humiliation, faith and irony are heard in them.

The sources disagree on whether the genre is exclusively female: Azergui says it is sung “only by women”; Zakia Salime describes it, according to her article's abstract, as produced by women and men. SAGHRO presents both claims.

In the quoted texts, the sun, the needle, the letter and the bus that carries the men away are addressed directly: apostrophe to nature and everyday objects carries the emotion. The body becomes geography (“my liver has burst” between France, Ouarzazate and Tazarine); society is read through its gestures (the green or red stamp on the chest).

Borrowed words, Fransa, lbaliza (suitcase), lbabur (ship), inscribe history into the language itself: poetry records the new objects of an era.

The timnaḍin collected by Azergui concern the recruitment of miners for the coal mines of northern France by Félix Mora in south-eastern Morocco from the 1960s: selection stripped to the waist, coloured stamps, mass departures of young men. The villages named, El Qelâa (Kelaat M'Gouna), Msemrir, Tazarine, place these songs in Ait Atta country and its surroundings.

These texts therefore do not date from 1933. They show that the genre kept recording the great upheavals families lived through.

According to the abstract of Zakia Salime's article, timnaḍin have declined in recent decades with television, schooling and new information technologies, but have been taken up again in contemporary struggles, notably around the Imider mine. Today's musicians also claim the heritage of the songs of 1933 (a creation by the band Meteor Airlines, 2020).

These claims have not yet been verified in the texts. They call for collection work with the poets themselves, and with IRCAM.

No authorised recording has been identified: a search of the CREM (CNRS) sound archives found nothing for the Saghro or for Imilchil. SAGHRO does not fabricate recordings or synthesise any voice; the player will show a recording as soon as an authorised source becomes available.

Several essential works could not be read: Salime's article (2022), Arsène Roux and Michael Peyron's Poésies berbères de l'époque héroïque (2002), Peyron's study of bards facing the conquest (AWAL, 1996) and his “Izli” entry. They are listed in the library as “record only”.