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(Re)Invention of Tradition, Subversive Memory, and Morocco's Re-

Amazighization: From Erasure of Imazighen to the Performance of Tiﬁnagh in
Public Life
Article in Expressions Maghrebines · May 2020

DOI: 10.1353/exp.2020.0008
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(Re)Invention of Tradition, Subversive Memory, and Morocco's
Re-Amazighization: From Erasure of Imazighen to the
Performance of Tifinagh in Public Life
Brahim El Guabli
Expressions maghrébines, Volume 19, Numéro 1, été 2020, pp. 143-168 (Article)
Published by Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures

Maghrébines
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/755413
[ Access provided at 17 May 2020 20:08 GMT from Williams College ]

(Re)Invention of Tradition, Subversive
Memory, and Morocco’s Re-Amazighization:
From Erasure of Imazighen to the
Performance of Tifinagh in Public Life
Brahim El Guabli
Williams College
[T]he Amazigh cause is a deep cultural revolution. As a result, it is a

civilizational and political revolution [that] seeks to make change from within;
change of mentalities and reconsideration of concepts and behavior.
(Akhīyyāṭ 2012: 383)1
The problem of these [people] is that they don’t accept that Moroccan visual
identity become Amazighized through its symbol, the Tifinagh alphabet, after
the officialization of Tamazight.
(Aṣīd 2011)
When my family and I arrived at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca,

we hired a Grand Taxi to take us to Rabat. Once the driver realized that
we were speaking English, he expressed his frustration at his fellow
Moroccans’ rush to learn Tamazight (Amazigh language), adding that
people would fare better if they learned English, the language of science
and technology. Caught between Moroccan society’s increasing
consciousness of its Amazigh identity and his well-argued understanding
of our home country’s dire need for scientific development, the driver,
1
All translations from the Arabic and the French are mine.
Expressions maghrébines, vol. 19, nº1, été 2020

144 Expressions maghrébines, vol. 19, nº1, été 2020
obviously doing much of his business with foreign visitors, had a hard
time comprehending why Amazigh language and culture matter in
Morocco today. This attitude was an indication of the success of the
Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM, henceforth) to place
Morocco’s Amazigh identity on the country’s societal and political
agenda. In fact, the driver’s disappointment at his fellow citizens’ race
toward Tamazight hides another disenchantment with MACM’s concrete
transformation of the public space and collective memory in Morocco
since the early 2000s. The driver spoke for the sections of Moroccan
society that have experienced the successes of Tamazight as a distraction
from important issues, which further exacerbates their resentment of
MACM’s achievements.
MACM, in this article, refers to a network of associations and non-
governmental organizations that advocated the recognition of Amazigh
people’s political and cultural rights in Morocco. “Al-Jamʻīyah al-
Maghribīyah lil-Baḥth wal-Tabādul al-Thaqāfī” (Association Marocaine
de Recherche et d'Echange Culturel, AMREC) and “Munẓẓamat
Tamaynut” (formerly “al-Jam‘īyah al-Jadīdah lil-Thaqāfa wal-Funūn al-
Sha‘bīyah” (Association Nouvelle pour la Culture et les Arts Populaires),
which were respectively created in 1967 and 1978, are the pioneers of
Amazigh activism in Morocco. Following the example of AMREC and
Tamaynut, hundreds of associations have appeared to demand Amazigh
cultural and linguistic rights. Their ardent activism and tireless search for
constitutional consecration of Morocco’s Amazigh identity have resulted
in what Brahīm Akhīyyāṭ (2012) has called al-Nahḍa al-amāzīghīyah
(Amazigh renaissance).2 Lest it be understood that MACM was only
confined to culture, it should be stressed that MACM also had various
political manifestations either in the pro-monarchist Mouvement
Populaire and Mouvement National Populaire or in the more radical
Parti Démocratique Amazigh. Nevertheless, this article will focus solely
on MACM’s cultural and linguistic advocacy and the ways in which the
use of Tifinagh in the public sphere has been the concrete manifestation
2
The word nahḍa (renaissance) in Akhīyyāt’s title not only conveys MACM’s success at
exhuming Amazigh language and culture from official oblivion and marginalization, it
also creates remarkable parallels between this Amazigh revival in the 20th century and the
Levantine Nahḍa in the 19th century. In fact, Akhīyyāt’s reference to Nahḍa gestures to
the deeper, long-term impact of MACM’s work in Morocco and beyond.
(Re) Invention of Tradition, Subversive Memory... 145
of what I propose to conceptualize as “subversive memory”. Because it

contests official memory and history, subversive memory creates or
unearths diverse Amazigh-focused histories of Morocco, which has
important consequences for citizenship, history, and collective memory.
King Mohammed VI’s establishment of the Institut Royal de la
Culture Amazighe (IRCAM) in 2001 crowned MACM’s lengthy journey
toward the rehabilitation of Morocco’s Amazigh identity (Akhīyyāṭ
2012). The creation of IRCAM was a crucial step toward the official
recognition of the linguistic and cultural rights of Morocco’s indigenous
Imazighen (Amazigh people). IRCAM was tasked with the “preservation
of [Amazigh] culture and its promotion and consolidation [of] its
position in the national social, cultural, and media environment as well as
in the local and regional affairs” (al-Ẓahīr al-Malakī 2001: Article 8).
IRCAM’s founding decree lists its scholarly, pedagogical, linguistic and
cultural mission (al-Jarīda al-Rasmiyya 2001: Article 2). Despite widely-
commented disagreements over its mission among MACM activists
(Alami et al. 2004: 26), IRCAM has made Amazigh language and culture
a tangible reality in Moroccan people’s visual and linguistic landscape.
Tifinagh script’s ubiquity in the public space is only one of IRCAM’s
remarkable achievements to reconnect broader Morocco with its
repressed Amazigh identity.
Adopted by IRCAM’s board on January 31, 2003 as the official
script for the writing of Amazigh in Morocco, Tifinagh now adorns
school curricula, public transportation signage, as well as the facades of
many official buildings (Figures 1 and 2).3 Sixteen years after the
infamous 2003 ma‘rakat al-ḥarf (the war over the alphabet), Tifinagh is
performed as an iconic marker of Tamazight in Morocco. Regardless of
the lack of consensus over its adoption as the official script for
Tamazight (Silverstein and Crawford 2004: 46; Soulaimani 2016: 5),
Tifinagh has fulfilled a strategic function in the public space as a tool for
Morocco’s re-Amazighization.4 Muḥammad Būdhān, an Amazigh
3
Although I highlight MACM’s achievements through Tifinagh’s functions in the public
space, I do recognize that many Amazigh activists complain about setbacks and
constraints that are imposed on Tamazight in Morocco (Ben Cheikh 2019).
4 Claudot-Hawad has mentioned –although without any detail– the fact that North
African Berber activists adopted Tuareg Tifinagh in order to “reberberize” their region. I
build on Claudot-Hawad’s suggestion to analyze how MACM re-Amazighized the public
sphere in Morocco through the use of Tifinagh.
intellectual and activist, has written that MACM should “look at the
Makhzen as an Amazigh entity that underwent a […] perversion” (2018:
n.p.) For Būdhān, the solution lies in “re-Amazighing [the Makhzen] …
and bringing it back to its natural and original Amazigh stock” (ibid.) Re-
Amazighization is an accurate description of this project because MACM
activists consider the recognition of Morocco’s Amazigh identity as a
return to the country’s roots,5 which the state’s disregard for Moroccan
people’s “cultural and linguistic diversity” has occulted for so long
(Akhīyyāṭ 2007). In fact, the confluence of colonization, Arabization, and
Islamization in different historical periods has resulted in the erasure of
Tamazight and its culture in Tamazgha (the Amazigh homeland), which
Amazigh activists argue extends from southwest Egypt to the Canary
Islands (Akhīyyāṭ 2012). In using re-Amazighization, I am not positing
that Imazighen have been extinct and are now being revived. In fact, re-
Amazighization is an intellectual project that combines cultural
production and deployment of symbols to put an end to the exclusion of
Tamazight and its cultural expressions in the public sphere. The current
re-Amazighization of the public space transcends this historical erasure
and places Tamazight at the center of public life in Morocco. The
centrality of Tifinagh in this article’s argument does not, however,
overlook the fact that the current version of this alphabet is the product of
a powerful work of memorialization and (re)invention of tradition that
allowed MACM to advance its cultural and linguistic demands.
5
This line of argument, which underlined Amazigh activism, was articulated by Brahīm
Akhīyyāṭ: “Throughout history Tamazight is the mother tongue of all citizens of North
Africa. It is the national language of its people, which is a historical, social, and
civilizational reality that we wait for no one to acknowledge” (2007:118).
Figures 1 and 2: The Court of Auditors and the Archives of

Morocco in Rabat
I argue that Morocco’s re-Amazighization speaks to MACM’s will to

repurpose Amazigh heritage through a process of (re)invention of
preexisting or imagined traditions. Ranging from rewriting history and
revisiting toponymies to reviving a new version of Tifinagh (Azāykū
2004; Chafik 1988; Claudot-Hawad 2008) and the adoption of the
Académie Berbère’s Amazigh flag (Tutlayt 2018), MACM wedded
public activism through petitions and media statements to an ongoing
effort to create distinctive markers for Amazigh identity. I first delineate
the different ways in which MACM (re)invented traditions in order to
confer legitimacy on its linguistic, cultural, and Amazigh identity-
centered demands before I shift my analysis to Tifinagh’s pivotal role in
reconnecting Moroccans with their Amazigh roots through these
(re)invented traditions. Although Tifinagh’s origins are still debated
among scholars, between those who foreground their indigenous origins
and those who defend their Punic roots (Camps 2007: 272-275; Claudot-
Hawad 1993; Chafik 1988: 65-67: Hachid 2001: 173-183; Stenberg
2015: 8; 11), MACM imposed this alphabet as a symbol of Amazigh
people’s struggle for recognition. Moreover, in analyzing how MACM
(re)invented traditions, I conceptualize the uses of an existing or
fictitious Amazigh past in the fight for the rehabilitation of Morocco’s
Amazigh identity as subversive memory. Through subversive memory, I
offer a novel perspective in which memory and (re)invented traditions
are read in Morocco’s increasingly re-Amazighized public sphere. I
finish the article with a reading of the significance of IRCAM’s
publications catalogue and an analysis of the recent display of Amazigh
books in a Moroccan bookstore in Rabat. The article demonstrates that,
against all odds and political machinations, MACM’s activism has
created a complex public space, posing crucial questions about the
legibility and significance of Tifinagh in the Moroccan public arena.
(Re)Invented Amazigh Traditions and Subversive Memory
Social sciences and linguistics have produced most scholarly works

about Tamazight in Morocco. Social scientists have traced MACM’s
historical trajectory in response to the marginalization of Imazighen
(Maddy-Weitzman 2011), presented crucial arguments about gendered
spaces and the preservation of Tamazight and its art (Becker 2006;
Hoffman 2008), and theorized racial dynamics in the performance of
identity among MACM’s activists (Silverstein 2004: 67). Linguists, on
the other hand, have delved into Tamazight’s linguistic history,

standardization, and revitalization (Boukous 2012; Boukous 2013;
Asmhri 2016). Both social scientists and linguists agree on the fact that
Moroccan Tamazight, which is composed of three dialects (Tashlhit,
Tamazight, and Tarift) spoken by approximately 45 per cent of
Moroccans, has suffered significantly from official marginalization to the
extent that it has become a minority language (Boukous 2012; Boukous
2013; Asmhri 2016). However, these important anthropological and
linguistic works may be enriched by drawing on MACM’s founders’ life
writings, such as Brahīm Akhīyyāṭ’s memoirs entitled al-Nahḍa al-
amāzīghīyah kama ‘ishtu mīlādahā wa taṭawwuraha [the Amazigh
renaissance as I witnessed its birth and development] (2012). As
AMREC’s co-founder and first president, Akhīyyāṭ, like Hassan Id
Belkassm, the founder of Tamaynut in 1978, and Muḥammad Chafik, a
historian and first Dean of IRCAM, was a pioneer within MACM, and
his memoirs are a goldmine of historical information about the
development and achievements of Amazigh activism. Regardless of the
lack of unanimity over his style of activism vis-à-vis the state,6
Akhīyyāṭ’s book length memoir about his extensive work within
AMREC is a crucial text that has not received any scholarly attention. A
crucial revelation of Akhīyyāṭ’s Amazigh renaissance is the light it sheds
on the contrived nature of MACM’s practices that crystalized into
emblems of Moroccan Amazigh identity.
Eric Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition” applies to the long-term work
MACM has undertaken since the mid-1960s to re-Amazighize Morocco.
This re-Amazighization project has drawn on a wealth of (re)invented
traditions. Hobsbawm distinguishes between traditions that are “actually
invented, constructed and formally instituted” and “those emerging in a
less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period –a matter
of a few years– and establishing themselves with great rapidity” (2012:
1) One characteristic of invented traditions, according to Hobsbawm, is
the fictitious temporal continuity they establish between the past and the
present (1-2). Moreover, invented traditions require repetition,
6
Depending on who one reads or talks to, Akhīyyāṭ is either praised or criticized,
eulogized or vilified, but all acknowledge his pioneering role in Amazigh activism. Some
accuse Akhīyyāṭ of not being radical enough whereas others see him as a voice of the
state within the MACM. What is certain, however, is that AMREC was a real school of
Amazigh initiatives during his four-decade long leadership. Several of IRCAM’s current
leaders, including Dean Ahmed Boukous, started their activism within AMREC.
ritualization, and formalization in order for the link between the past and
the present to be entrenched and for the past to be repurposed to serve the
goals of the present (4).
In Morocco’s post-independence context, both the monarchy and its
opposition invented and ritualized traditions that foregrounded
Morocco’s Arab-Islamic identity, thus relegating other expressions of this
identity, including Tamazight, to oblivion (Valensi 1990). An amnesic,
official collective memory excluded Imazighen and reinterpreted
Moroccan history from the perspective of wielders of power (Azāykū
1971:18). This process is not surprising, however, because foundational
moments, like a country’s independence, tend to rally support around a
“master commemorative narrative”, which, according to Yael Zerubavel,
“contributes to the formation of the nation, portraying it as a unified
group moving through history” (1994: 7). Series of single
commemorations crystalize into what Zerubavel calls “commemorative
narratives” (8). While Zerubavel has explained how master
commemorative narratives function, her work does not provide a straight
answer as to how they are challenged and subverted, thus allowing space
for the theorization of subversive memory, which is undergirded by the
(re)invention of real or fictitious Amazigh traditions that challenge,
undermine, or even replace official master narratives. Post-independence
Morocco’s master commemorative narrative established the monarchy,
Islam, and Arabness as thawābit al-umma [fixtures of the umma] to the
exclusion of other components of the country’s identity. MACM has
sustained and revived these excluded identities through commemorative
acts that (re)invent Amazigh traditions to create symbols that unsettle
official canons. This combination of the creation of a subversive memory
undergirded by (re)invented traditions has allowed MACM to repurpose
the preexisting or contrived Amazigh heritage to put an end to the
exclusion of Tamazight and its culture.
This subversive memory and the (re)invented traditions undergirding
it have taken various forms. Similarly to their Algerian counterparts, who
resorted to “catalogues”, “university production”, “gray literature”, and
“Berber websites”, to lay down the foundations for Amazigh cultural and
political work (Dirèche 2017: paragraphs 2-7), MACM deployed the past
in order to legitimize its demands and debunk false ideas about
Imazighen’s lack of a history (Chafik 1988; Azāykū 2004; Akhīyyāṭ
2012: 398). Subversive memory, underlain by strong references to the
past, therefore, confers legitimacy and serves as a source of both pride
and temporal continuity.

MACM has deployed the Amazigh past to institute its subversive
memory of post-independence Morocco in the following ways:
a) Creating a discursive practice about historic and prominent
Amazigh figures. Amazigh activists throughout North Africa delved into
the pre-Islamic period to rehabilitate intellectuals, philosophers, priests,
and fighters who have become crucial for the subversive memory they
were constructing and also served as role models for Imazighen whose
past was denied and represented from the point of view of foreigners
(Tilmatine 2007: 242; Azāykū 1971:17; Chafik 1988: 82-86). The past
here is resuscitated to embody the regained Amazigh historical
consciousness and “reconstruction of [Amazigh] historical memory”
(Tilmatine 2007: 241).
b) Documenting Amazigh oral heritage. In this regard AMREC has
played a crucial role in launching the first modern effort to document
Amazigh literary, poetic, and musical heritage. AMREC invented its own
“ṭarīqat arrātn” (the method of journal Arrātn) to write Tamazight in
Arabic script (AMREC 2002: 5-6; Akhīyyāṭ 2012: 51). Despite the
difficulties involved in this documentary endeavor, AMREC saw it as a
“point of departure for a new history” that will grant Amazigh culture
prominence as an “intellectual and tangible reality in the intellectual
scene” (Akhīyyāṭ: 50-51)
c) Reinventing Amazigh musical tradition. The case of the musical
band Usmān is edifying in this regard. Committed, poetic, and combining
old Amazigh rhythms and melodies with new musical sensibilities,
including the introduction of the guitar, Usmān, under the leadership of
musician Ammouri Mbark, renewed Amazigh music and created a style
that was equally appealing to the youth and the older generations. In the
words of one of its founders, Usmān was a “real epic”, which represented
MACM’s “will and perseverance against marginalization and exclusion
in order to sensitize Moroccans about their Amazigh self through art and
sincere lyrics” (Akhīyyāṭ 2012: 86)
d) (Re)Inventing Tifinagh. This alphabet was not widely
disseminated among North African Imazighen despite continued use by
the Tuaregs (Claudot-Hawad 2008: 3-4). However, when the “Paris-
based Académie Berbère […] developed a system of writing derived
from the Tuareg tifinagh” (Campbell and Moseley 2012: 59), it paved the
way for the reclaiming of Tifinagh as a symbol for Tamazight. Not only
has Tifinagh been standardized and officialized under the aegis of
IRCAM, it has also been transformed into “a visual representation of the

Amazigh language” (Soulaimani 2016: 4).
e) The invention of an Amazigh flag. Made of three horizontal
stripes –blue for water (amān), green for land (akāl), and yellow for sand
(ajmmār), which represent the three topographic elements of Tamazgha
(North Africa)–, the flag was the brainchild of Da Yūsuf Amazigh. Da
Yūsuf defied the reservations of the senior members of the Académie
Berbère, who feared the political implications of having a flag, and drew
on his own resources to create it (Tutlayt 2018). When the World
Amazigh Congress adopted the flag in 1997 as the Amazigh flag, this
iconic blue-green-yellow emblem, with big Yaz (Z in Tamazight) at the
center, acquired a transnational, emotional, and symbolic significance.
The phenomenal embrace of the Amazigh flag speaks volumes about the
force of (re)invented traditions and its myths in feeding the revival of
Amazigh identity.
f) Anchoring the idea of Tamazgha. Conscious of the importance of
geography as an anchor of identity, Amazigh activists invented Tamazgha
to refer to the Amazigh homeland in North Africa. Extending from the
Siwa oasis in southwest Egypt to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic
Ocean, Tamazgha deploys a subversive memory to introduce a totally
different history of North Africa. Moreover, the motto akāl (land), awāl
(language), afgān (people) made its entry into the lexicon of the Amazigh
movement. Although there is no proof that the inhabitants of this land
were “conscious of any ethnic, linguistic or, a fortiori, historical unity”
(Tilmatine 2007: 238), Tamazgha has allowed Amazigh activists to
reclaim North Africa.
g) Revisiting Morocco’s past. Ali Sidi Azāykū is probably the
pioneer of the construction of an alternative Moroccan history. Azāykū’s
questioning of the official writing of Moroccan history predated his
imprisonment in 1982 for calling for the reconceptualization of
Moroccan national identity (1981; 1971:16). Azāykū later brought
attention to oral sources to rewrite this history (1989-1990: 34). Finally,
both his books Tarikh al-maghrib aw al-ta’wīlāt al-mumkina [Morocco’s
history and the possible interpretations] (2001) and Namādhij min asmā’
al-a‘lām al-jughrāfiyya wa-al-bashariyya al-maghribiyya [Samples of
names of Moroccan geographic and human landmarks] (2004) introduce
new ways of thinking about history. Despite the path-blazing nature of
his ideas, his work is still shunned by most academic historians.
These various (re)invented traditions, which combined the historical,
the symbolic, the scriptural as well as the musical, took place as the
MACM was gaining more ground domestically and integrating
transnational networks globally. It is important to notice that there is a
complementarity between the deployment of these (re)invented traditions
at the global level, such as the design of the flag and the recovery of the
geopolitical term “Tamazgha” to rename North Africa, and their local
uses to exert pressure on the Moroccan state. The global aspect of this
pressure was also noticed in the move to rebrand the Amazigh question
as “a fundamental human right [problem] in Morocco and
internationally” (Silverstein and Crawford 2004: 48). Thus conceived,
this invented subversive memory created the needed cultural and
symbolic infrastructure for the re-Amazighization of Morocco and
endowed Amazigh language and culture with the iconic power to be
recognized in an overly-Islamized, Arabized, and Gallicized public
sphere after decades of institutionalized marginalization.
MACM’s activist, scholarly, and political action paid off in the 2011
revised Constitution. Article 5 of the new Constitution stipulates that
“Tamazight [Berber/Amazigh] constitutes an official language of the
State, being common patrimony of all Moroccans without exception” (4).
The combination of cultural work and subversive memory in MACM’s
endeavors laid the foundation for the more human-rights-oriented
activism that emerged in the 1990s (Pouessel 2008: 221; Akhīyyāṭ 2012:
209). MACM became bolder and more politicized thanks to the invention
of an alternative imaginary of North Africa and the construction of
discursive, visual, and intellectual tools for the defense of its project. For
instance, in addition to affirming that Amazigh language and culture are
the oldest in Morocco, the six signatory associations of the 1991 Mithāq
Agadir [Agadir Charter] represented demands that ranged from
constitutional consecration of Tamazight to developing pedagogical tools
for its teaching (Charte d’Agadir 1991: n.p.). The boldness and
comprehensiveness of MACM’s demands in the 1990s was reflective of
Morocco’s increasing political openness, which was conducive to the
emergence of a subversive memory and its (re)invented traditions that
made the stipulations of the 2011 Constitution possible.
The now well-known arrest of seven members of the Tellili
Association in 1994 was a triumphal moment for subversive memory.
Seven male teachers from Guelmima and Errachidia were arrested in the
aftermath of the 1994 May Day celebrations for brandishing protest signs
in Tifinagh (Akhīyyāṭ 2012: 218). Accused, among other things, of
posing a threat to public order and using an unconstitutional language

(Maddy-Weitzman 2011: 120), these arrests and trial stirred a global
human rights outcry. The desire to ban Tifinagh in the public space led to
a major backlash, which forced Hassan II to make a historic speech on
August 20, 1994 in which he announced the need to teach dialects in
order to protect national identity (Wizārat al-Awqāf 1994). Since Hassan
II’s education promises were not implemented, Mohammed Chafik
released his 2000 Amazigh Manifesto, which enumerated the different
aspects of the historical injustice done to Imazighen before making nine
crucial demands. These demands include the recognition of Amazigh
language and culture in the Moroccan Constitution, the allocation of
development projects to Amazigh regions, the rewriting of Moroccan
history to include Amazigh contributions, and the rehabilitation of
Amazigh culture (Chafik 2000). Not only did King Mohammed VI’s
speech on October 17, 2001 announce IRCAM’s establishment, but its
tone embraced MACM’s rhetoric in emphasizing that Amazigh identity is
shared by all Moroccans. With IRCAM’s inauguration, Amazigh
subversive memory and (re)invented traditions made their entry into the
Moroccan public space, where their pervasive existence initiated a
transformation of the way this public arena had been perceived since
Morocco’s independence in 1956.
From its (Re)Invention to the Clash Over Alphabets: Tifinagh Is Not Just
a Script
The debates leading to IRCAM’s thirty-three-member board’s decision to

adopt Tifinagh script for the writing of Tamazight in Morocco were the
clearest demonstration that the script was not merely a technical issue
(Boulguid 2002: 85-90; Soulaimani 2016). As was already mentioned,
Tifinagh only emerged in the 1960s when the Paris-based Académie
Berbère adopted it, but it quickly acquired an iconicity and symbolism
that give the impression that its use in North African public life dates
back to an immemorial time. In the absence of a unified script, Moroccan
Amazigh activists have historically used all three scripts (Arabic, Latin,
and Tifinagh) in their publications (Ouazzi 2002: 35-45). Sometimes,
these alphabets were used alongside each other, depending on the
activists’ affinities. However, AMREC, the longest-serving Amazigh
association in Morocco, has consistently used the Arabic alphabet in its
publications: Arrātn, al-Tabādul al-Thaqāfī, and Amūd since the 1970s
(AMREC 2002: 5-6). Moreover, AMREC held workshops in which its

members reflected on the different aspects of developing a convenient
script to write Tamazight (6-7). By 2003, however, MACM had changed
dramatically; it became more transnational, more radical, and ideas about
modernity and progress permeated its discourse, which erupted in
ma‘rakat al-ḥarf [the battle over the alphabet]. While the pro-Arabic
script positions of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) and
pan-Arabist groups were an open secret, the divide within MACM,
however, revealed the depth of its members’ disagreements (Alami et al
2004). Although MACM faced accusations of being anti-Arab and anti-
Islam as well as being a tool of colonialism (El Qadéry 1998: 430), the
polarization within MACM’s ranks over whether to use Latin or Tifinagh
script to write the unified Tamazight threatened the unity of the
movement. Of utmost interest in this regard is the generational divide
between AMREC veterans, who all advocated for Tifinagh despite the
fact that their publications were in Arabic/Aramaic script, and the
younger generations and newcomers to Amazigh activism, who signed
the “Meknes declaration” in favor of Latin script.7
Beyond the technical and functional aspects of the alphabet, these
divides were symptoms of the transformation of imaginaries about
Morocco’s Amazigh identity and the place of modernity in this identity.
The war over the alphabet was in fact a battle over Morocco’s Amazigh
identity and the most efficient way to reject or reclaim it.8 By having
Tamazight written in Arabic script, the proponents of the Arabic alphabet
sought to contain Imazighen within the fold of their Arabo-Islamic
worldview of Morocco as an Arab-Muslim country (Ouazzi 2002: 40).
Amazigh activists from all persuasions understood that proponents of the
Arabic script wanted “Tamazight to remain under the banner of
Arabness, as a language, culture and civilization” (Akhīyyāṭ 2012: 350),
thus leading to the “unanimous rejection of the Arabic script” (Maddy-
Weitzman 2011:170). Those who advocated for the Latin script were
more concerned about modernity and communication (Soulaimani 2016:
7
The “Meknes declaration” elicited a scathing response from a number of Amazigh
associations that disagreed with its signatories’ rejection of both Tifinagh and the Arabic
script. See Muḥammad al-Rāwī’s article “jam‘īyyāt amāzīghīyyah maghrībiyyāh tastankir
al-da‘wa li-‘timād al-aḥruf al-lātīnīyyah fī kitābat al-lugha al-amāzīghīyyah”, in al-Sharq
al-Awsat: <https://archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?article=132126&issueno=8733#.Xi2Z
UC2ZNPM>.
8
For more details about these debates, see AMREC 2002.
6) and inadvertently gave the Islamists and pan-Arabists more

ammunition to attack MACM’s project as a whole. Analyzing AMREC’s
pro-Tifinagh position, Akhīyyāṭ writes:
We at the Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange
[AMREC] had a clear position vis-à-vis this issue since the beginning
of the 1990s. Our choice had been made since we organized a
workshop on writing and the dictionary in Maamoura in 1992, which
adopted a holistic approach to Tamazight; Amazigh language should
not be divorced from its Tifinagh alphabet. We considered that the
Tifinagh alphabet is a fundamental element in Amazigh identity,
since by writing Amazigh in Tifinagh our language liberates itself
from subordination to other linguistic systems, either Oriental or
Western. Therefore, we say that Tifinagh is the symbol of our
liberation both symbolically and civilizationally
(2012: 349)
The civilizational and symbolic recognition of Amazigh language and

identity as a substratum for Moroccan identity through its historical
alphabet mattered the most for the pioneers of Amazigh activism. For
AMREC, issues of standardization, functionality, computerization, and
dissemination, which were important for Latin script proponents (Ḥusnī
2002), were moot compared to Tifinagh’s symbolism and iconicity as a
token of Amazigh identity (Boulguid 2002: 85-88). This move connects
to the importance of subversive memory.
In tracing its trajectory as a crucial (re)invented tradition within
MACM’s push for recognition, Tifinagh emerges as a vital force in the
work of Amazigh subversive memory. In not heeding the scholarly
debates about Tifinagh’s origins and in favoring its civilizational
importance, MACM activists, regardless of their deep internal
disagreements, turned this alphabet into a transformative tool in their
endeavor to consecrate Morocco’s Amazigh identity. From its
(re)invention by the Académie Berbère in Paris to its adoption by
IRCAM in 2003, Tifinagh has resignified artefacts and mnemonic
devices, juxtaposing a subversive worldview alongside a master
commemorative discourse of official truths and historical narratives in
the public space. Since the 1990s, Tifinagh script has played a crucial
role in iconizing an alternative Amazigh past that reshuffled the “visual
identity” of the Moroccan public space (Aṣīd 2011). This transformation
of Moroccan people’s visual identity has not taken place without hurdles
and bureaucratic obstacles (al-Ṣabāḥ 2018), but what really matters here
is the fact that Tifinagh has become a potent public marker of subversive
memory in its reclaiming of Morocco’s Amazigh identity. The use of
Tifinagh in official signage has placed this subversive memory at the
center of Moroccan people’s societal consciousness.
Beyond the Tifinagh-Adorned Facades: The Civic Significance of a Re-

Amazighized Public Sphere
Arabic-French bilingualism, which since independence has dominated

Moroccan public life, has been complicated by the incorporation of
Tifinagh as a language of public signage in Morocco since 2011. The
addition of Tifinagh has created a visual dissonance and added more
textual elements to an already complicated landscape, further
complicating the legibility and the navigation of the Moroccan public
sphere. It only took fifty years for Moroccan official buildings to display
trilingual panels (Arabic, Amazigh, and French) and along the way
become sites in which Amazigh “locational citizenship” (di Masso 2015)
is reactualized and performed.
Access to the public sphere is a marker of citizenship or lack thereof.
Andrés di Masso equates “locational citizenship” with “the right to have
a place in the public space” (2015: 66). Derived from “the right to the
city”, which emphasizes the “entitlement of any urban dweller to freely
access and use public space” (ibid.), locational citizenship is about the
politics of place and codification of access to it. Moroccan Imazighen
were denied the right to the city through intensive Arabization, the
folklorization of their language and culture, and the non-recognition of
their existence for a long time (El Kably 2011: 730). The absence of
Amazigh culture from official public life was such that the drafters of the
Agadir Charter requested granting Amazigh “the right to the city in mass
and audiovisual media” (Charte d’Agadir 1991). Between its
marginalization in the first Constitution in 1962 and the repression of its
expression in the public space, Amazigh identity was de facto placed out
of locational citizenship from Morocco’s independence until the creation
of IRCAM in 2001. However, Amazigh’s resurgence on the facades of
official buildings, in tramway stations (Figure 3), and higher education
institutions is an indication that Amazigh cultural and linguistic
citizenship is now located and has full potential access to the public
arena. It is certainly ironic that the same buildings where the erstwhile
decisions to marginalize Amazigh were issued are now adorned with
Tifinagh alphabet. Even if this is symbolic, the paradox is stark between

1994, when Amazigh activists were denied locational citizenship on the
basis of writing in Tifinagh, and 2019, when this marker of Amazigh
subversive memory graces the facades of ministries and courts of justice.
Figure 3: Tramway station in downtown Rabat
Public signage is crucial for people’s daily life, hence the transformative
nature of the inclusion of Tifinagh in these trilingual signboards. Public
signs “help us to structure physical space, to mark it, give it meanings
and thus to create particular places and landscapes in which we live and
act, which have a practical and emotional value for us, and which are
sources of our identity” (Sloboda et al. 2012: 52). Public signage is a
complicated network of connections that all entrench the identity of a
place and its values. While post-independence Morocco suppressed
expressions of Amazigh identity, it Arabized the public sphere in utter
disregard of the emotional and cultural needs of its Amazigh citizens.
Hence, French and Arabic, two non-indigenous languages, expressed a
prevalent identity whereas Amazigh was relegated to oblivion, thus
making its resurgence on public buildings all the more meaningful.
The public use of Tifinagh raises new questions about the legibility
and functionality of this (re)invented script in public signage. Tifinagh, a

most conspicuous marker of MACM’s subversive memory, has a
fourfold transformative value for Moroccan society. First, beyond
functionality, the inclusion of Arabic, Amazigh, and French (Figure 4), in
this order, is a translation of the constitutional text and a performance of
the spatial hierarchization of languages based on their official status,
regardless of their differential economic power. Second, by having an
embodied existence in spaces from which it was excluded, Tamazight
destabilizes the normalcy of the predominantly Arabic-French public
space and reclaims its share in it. Third, educated Moroccans’
perceptions of literacy are challenged because the majority of them have
no mastery of their ancestral language and its neologisms. Even Amazigh
speakers experience a disconcerting unfamiliarity within a language
supposed to be familiar. Fourth, Tifinagh is an aesthetic script, which
vulgarizes Amazigh’s sense of beauty even as it creates visual dissonance
in the Moroccan public space. Regardless of the fact that educated
readers default to Arabic or French to position themselves in space, they
will experience their inability to read Tifinagh as a handicap, which
reflects the impoverishing impact of the repression of Amazigh.
Figure 4: Trilingual plaque in front of Bab Rouah Gallery in Rabat

Tifinagh’s subversive memory in public life disturbs any conventional

reading of the Moroccan public space. The space it occupies between
Arabic and French in the signboards inserts an additional visual layer
into the bilingual palimpsest of Moroccan identity, thus disrupting the
linguistic order by removing French from its second position in the
signboards and driving a wedge between Morocco’s languages of power.
The introduction of the indigenous language of North Africa in the space
MACM has managed to reconquer separates Arabic and French. In fact,
Tifinagh is not there to orientate, but rather to remind the public of a
hidden past. Indeed, contact with Tifinagh is supposed to prod
Moroccans to scratch beyond the surface of these incomprehensible
neologisms in Tamazight in order to penetrate the layers of silence and
ignorance that excluded this language from Morocco’s official visual
space for decades. Furthermore, the presence of Tifinagh in signboards in
front of courts, hospitals, schools, and even police headquarters can be
read as the Moroccan state’s attempt to reconcile Amazigh subversive
memory with the past legacy of violence it wielded on Amazigh language
and culture. Finally, compared to the earlier scholarship, which rightly
suggested that Tamazight survived as an art at home and in gendered
spaces (Becker 2006), Tifinagh’s conquest of the facades of public
buildings is proof that Moroccan Amazigh identity is normalized.
Normalization does not, however, mean that MACM has no grievances
or that the Moroccan state is not trying to take away these gains.
Publishing in Tifinagh: Two examples of the Afterlives of MACM’s

Subversive Memory in the Field of Publication
Tamazight has always been the throbbing heart of the Amazigh

civilizational project. Language was the core of Amazigh subversive
memory and subsequent endeavors to end the marginalization of
Amazigh culture. In this final section of the article, I focus on the
significance of IRCAM’s publications’ catalogue and the meaning of the
existence of Amazigh shelves in one Moroccan bookstore in Rabat.
1. Dalīl manshūrāt al-ma’had al-malakī lil-thaqāfa al-amazīghiyya

[IRCAM’s publications catalogue]
Since its founding, IRCAM’s mission was to collect and document

Amazigh heritage, conduct research on Amazigh culture, promote
cultural and artistic production in Amazigh, and produce knowledge

about Amazigh language and culture (al-Jarīda al-Rasmiyya 3677 2001:
Article 3). With the establishment of IRCAM, this official institution
took on the activists’ “cataloguing and inventorying” mission to anchor
Amazigh culture and preserve it (Dirèche 2017). However, beyond the
mere function of inventorying an already-existing knowledge or
patrimony, IRCAM’s publications catalogue perpetuates MACM’s
subversive memory from a position of power. Although IRCAM is an
official institution, funded directly from the budget of the royal palace,
its catalogue reveals that it has initiated a publishing culture that draws
on the subversive memory that I theorized throughout this article.
Published in 2017, sixteen years after the establishment of IRCAM,
Dalīl manshūrāt al-ma’had al-malakī lil-thaqāfa al-amazīghiyya (Figure
5) displays a long list of the institute’s publications. In terms of form, the
introduction is written in Amazigh (first) and Arabic (second), thus
inverting the constitutional order of languages in the country in order to
foreground Tamazight’s primacy. This mere displacement of Arabic as
second on an official publication is a powerful, although subtle,
subversive act, which breaches established linguistic hierarchies.
Moreover, the catalogue emphasizes the fact that IRCAM has “become a
referential and pioneering pole in the field of Amazigh studies through its
subscription to the concretization of the strategic goal of promoting
Amazigh culture” (2017: n.p.). Opening the catalogue, the reader
discovers poetry collections, novels, children’s literature, monographs,
scholarly studies, and journal issues that discuss all aspects of Amazigh
language and culture. These works, the authors underline, are testament
to IRCAM’s “enrichment of this [Amazigh] culture by numerous
publications that contribute to the development of scientific research in
and rehabilitation for Amazigh culture” (ibid.). In a self-congratulatory
tone, the authors add that these publications reveal the “depth and
efficiency of the Institute’s participation in the process of modernizing
Amazigh culture and standardizing language”. It is clear that a colossal
effort went into the publication of over three hundred works in fifteen
years, but the catalogue itself is an important object for the entrenchment
of an Amazigh visual reality.
Figure 5: IRCAM’s publications catalogue
The catalogue is a piece of art. It was clearly designed to communicate

the subversive memory underlining a distinctive Amazigh publishing
identity. The catalogue carries IRCAM’s circular Tifinagh blue logo,
centered around a large Yaẓ (Z). Because of the iconicity of the letters,
the reader cannot miss the fact that this is an Amazigh-branded
publication. As was mentioned previously, the illegibility of Tifinagh for
most educated Moroccans does not mean that they cannot access the
meaning of these publications in French or Arabic. The catalogue itself is
documentation of an existing, organized, meticulously prepared, and
prolific production in Tamazight, which builds on MACM’s legacy and
(re)invented traditions. For instance, the most important element the
perceptive observer will notice is the camouflaged Amazigh flag on the
cover of the catalogue. Despite the fact that they are not arranged in
horizontal order, the mixture of blue, green, yellow, and red evokes the
Amazigh flag, which helps the catalogue to combine its cataloguing
function with mnemonic work. The catalogue’s memorial function is
even deeper than it would appear at first glance. For instance, the
reedition of some of the earlier publications endows it with the power to
remember Amazigh activists and their writings, which also serves
MACM’s memory. Additionally, the use of bright-colored, polished, and
highly artistic covers further contributes to the distinction of Amazigh

cultural production from the rest of Moroccan production. Therefore, it
would be limiting to analyze IRCAM’s publications catalogue only as a
commercial or promotional tool. It is in fact a testament to the continuity
of Amazigh subversive memory’s impact beyond the period of open
struggle with the state over the recognition and acceptance of Amazigh
people’s rights.
2. Maktabat al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha [Third Millennium Bookstore]:9 a

Home for Cultural Production in Tamazight
Bookstores are commercial spaces, and their raison d’être is to make

profit. Since Amazigh language and culture publications were not
profitable, their circulation, like all “gray literature”,10 happened in
activist spaces (Dirèche 2017: paragraph 6). As a result, profit seeking
bookstores dedicated their shelves to commercially successful books.
However, the change in the situation of Amazigh language and culture
can be felt in Moroccan bookstores nowadays.
Located across the street from the Moroccan parliament in Rabat,
Maktabat al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha sells books in Tamazight. Not only does
the bookstore display an entire section in Tamazight, but the works it
offers span generations of Amazigh thinkers and intellectual producers.
For instance, al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha sells Chafik’s three-volume Arabic-
Amazigh dictionary (1993-2003), Muḥammad Hawzālī’s religious
exhortation Baḥr al-dumū‘ (2009), Brahīm I‘zzā’s poetry book Iskla n
yiḍ (2016), Ḥasan Awrīd’s Arabic poetry collection Taghūyt n tīn hinān
9
Maktabat al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha is an important example of the transformative effects of
MACM’s initiatives on the Moroccan cultural scene. In addition to the symbolism of its
location across from the Moroccan parliament, Maktabat al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha has
dedicated an entire section to Amazigh language and culture in Arabic, French, and
Tifinagh. The fact that such a very busy commercial bookstore allocates a large space to
Tamazight is reflective of the profound changes that have taken place in Moroccan
readers’ understanding of literature and culture. This means that there is a growing
readership that bookstores are trying to tap into.
10
Gray literature refers to a host of nonconventional sources and materials that are
produced and circulated outside the commercial publication channels. Alberani et al. have
underlined the fact that “librarians have been reluctant to acquire this material and add it
to their catalogs” (1990: 358).
(2014), Muhammad al-Ja‘fari’s bilingual collection of proverbs and

aphorisms Swingm ṭamzt awāl (2016), Muḥammad Mustāwī’s complete
works entitled Smmūs idlisn n tmdiazin (2010), and Ali Sidqi Azāykū’s
collection of poems Timitār (1988), among many others.11 Combining
centuries old Tamazight literature in Arabic script with the newest
publications in Tifinagh, the Amazigh section of al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha
bookstore speaks to the spirit of the Amazigh renaissance that MACM
has been able to engender in Morocco. Unlike in the past, when
Tamazight was absent, the customer can, in just a few shelves, see the
rootedness of Amazigh cultural and linguistic heritage in Moroccan
history. In addition to being a testament to Amazigh intellectuals’ prolific
production, the diverse quantity of works for sale indicates that
Tamazight is increasingly gaining ground as a language of cultural
production. It also shows that Tamazight has left the gynécée, which
played a crucial role in its preservation for a long time, to exist in the
wide-open world. A visit to al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha does indeed
demonstrate that writing in Tamazight has become a “civilizational act”
that succeeded at “rehabilitat[ing] an ancient language that represents
North Africa’s inhabitants’ shared civilizational legacy” (Agounad 2016:
17).
This article has demonstrated how the Amazigh movement used
multiple strategies to establish Morocco’s Amazigh identity through the
(re)invention of tradition and the creation of a subversive memory that
displaced Morocco’s official history and identity in the public arena.
Focusing on how Tifinagh has become the public marker of this
subversive memory, the article has revealed that despite its divisive
adoption as an official script for the writing of Tamazight, it has allowed
Moroccan Imazighen to practice their locational citizenship in the public
sphere. The ingenuity and creativity of MACM’s leaders allowed them to
tap into the powerful potential of memory and (re)invented traditions to
anchor Amazigh cultural identity in spaces of Moroccan daily life.
Although MACM’s activism has yielded some of the movement’s
significant demands, the future of these achievements looks bleak in light
11
While only Baḥr al-dumū‘ is available in English under the title Ocean of Tears
(2009), the other titles can be translated respectively as: Shadows of the Night (2016),
Tinhinan’s Cry (2014), Ponder and Learn (2016), Five Books of Poetry (2010), and Signs
(1988).
of recent governmental projects to establish al-majlis al-waṭanī lil-al-

lughāt wa-al-thaqāfa al-maghribīyya (the proposed National Council for
Moroccan Languages and Culture). If this bill is to be adopted by the
Moroccan parliament (Ra’īs al-Ḥukūma 2016), IRCAM, perhaps
MACM’s most significant achievement in the last two decades, would
lose its financial and administrative autonomy, which has so far allowed
it to write its laws and bylaws, establish hiring processes, and manage its
annual budget (al-Ẓahir al-malakī 2001: article 7). Under the proposed
National Council for Moroccan Languages and Cultures, IRCAM would
become a mere directorate, which would deprive it of its current freedom
to make administrative and financial decisions. It remains to be seen how
MACM member associations will navigate the arduous challenges lying
ahead and, most importantly, how they will resignify and repurpose their
own activist past to bypass the noxious effects of state efforts to reclaim
the spaces Amazigh activism has gained over the years.
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(Re)Invention of Tradition, Subversive Memory, and Morocco's Re-

Article in Expressions Maghrebines · May 2020

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[T]he Amazigh cause is a deep cultural revolution. As a result, it is a

When my family and I arrived at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca,

Expressions maghrébines, vol. 19, nº1, été 2020

of what I propose to conceptualize as “subversive memory”. Because it

Figures 1 and 2: The Court of Auditors and the Archives of

I argue that Morocco’s re-Amazighization speaks to MACM’s will to

(Re)Invented Amazigh Traditions and Subversive Memory

Social sciences and linguistics have produced most scholarly works

the other hand, have delved into Tamazight’s linguistic history,

and temporal continuity.

IRCAM, it has also been transformed into “a visual representation of the

posing a threat to public order and using an unconstitutional language

The debates leading to IRCAM’s thirty-three-member board’s decision to

(AMREC 2002: 5-6). Moreover, AMREC held workshops in which its

6) and inadvertently gave the Islamists and pan-Arabists more

The civilizational and symbolic recognition of Amazigh language and

Beyond the Tifinagh-Adorned Facades: The Civic Significance of a Re-

Arabic-French bilingualism, which since independence has dominated

Tifinagh alphabet. Even if this is symbolic, the paradox is stark between

Figure 3: Tramway station in downtown Rabat

and functionality of this (re)invented script in public signage. Tifinagh, a

Figure 4: Trilingual plaque in front of Bab Rouah Gallery in Rabat

Tifinagh’s subversive memory in public life disturbs any conventional

Publishing in Tifinagh: Two examples of the Afterlives of MACM’s

Tamazight has always been the throbbing heart of the Amazigh

1. Dalīl manshūrāt al-ma’had al-malakī lil-thaqāfa al-amazīghiyya

Since its founding, IRCAM’s mission was to collect and document

cultural and artistic production in Amazigh, and produce knowledge

Figure 5: IRCAM’s publications catalogue

The catalogue is a piece of art. It was clearly designed to communicate

highly artistic covers further contributes to the distinction of Amazigh

2. Maktabat al-Alfiyya al-Thālitha [Third Millennium Bookstore]:9 a

Bookstores are commercial spaces, and their raison d’être is to make

(2014), Muhammad al-Ja‘fari’s bilingual collection of proverbs and

of recent governmental projects to establish al-majlis al-waṭanī lil-al-

Agounad, Mohamed (2016) “Tajribatī fi al-kitāba bil-amāzīghīyah” in Abdelali

Awrīd, Ḥasan (2014) Taghuyt n tīn hinān, Rabat: Groupe Elmaarif.

nationale. Le cas du Maroc”, in Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, vol. 45,

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