Poetry in the face of war: Memory of the Ait Atta

SAGHRO distinguishes poems collected during the events, those composed soon after, traditions transmitted and collected later, and contemporary creations. Each text in the library carries one of these labels.

A poem is not a report: it expresses an experience, an emotion, a judgement. It is set against other sources, without replacing them and without being silenced by them.

An Ait Atta “quip” recorded by Peyron mocks the neighbours who hesitated to join the resistance: “Sell your lambs, you will be buying weapons!”. After the fall of the Baddou, a bard of the eastern High Atlas sings the end of arms: “Honour is no more, the voice of steel has fallen silent!”. The oath attributed to Dadda 'Atta expresses the refusal to pay tax “even if the Sarhro became a plain”.

In the 1930s the officer Jean Robichez collected Amazigh poems about the conquest; Bounfour studied them. They show that the fighters and their families also told the war in their own language.

According to her article's abstract, Zakia Salime writes that timnaḍin, in their most political form, kept the memory of the Ait Atta resistance and the battle of Bougafer. The documentary Bougafer 33 (2010) gathers testimonies of descendants. In 2020 a band released a song presented as reworking songs of women from 1933.

We have been unable to read any of these texts: no composition about Bougafer is therefore reproduced here. This is the priority of the next collection effort, with the families of the Saghro, who are its keepers.

Military archives count the dead of the columns and say nothing of those on the other side; poetry and testimonies say what the reports leave out. On the Baddou, Peyron reports women killed at night at the water points; on the Bou Gafer, an officer himself acknowledges that the blockade struck “women and children”.

Setting these voices against each other means refusing two easy paths: believing that the lack of a figure means the lack of victims, and taking a line of verse for a toll.