For millennia, Imazighen have continuously inhabited their homeland of Tamazgha. Both a historical fact and an aspiration, Tamazgha, which encompasses the vast territories and diverse peoples located between Siwa and the Canary Islands as well as a large portion of sub-Saharan Africa, is first and foremost defined through the Amazigh language varieties spoken by its inhabitants. Although abundant and rich, for most of its history Amazigh literary output remained predominantly oral. Due at least in part to the literary dynamics that encourage writers who speak Indigenous or “minor” languages to prefer writing in languages that carry more prestige and currency, Imazighen preferred to convey their ideas and give shape to their aesthetics in written languages other than their own. Hence, Imazighen wrote in Latin, Arabic, and, most recently, in French and Spanish. As a result of this situation, colonial scholars categorized Amazigh literature as an oral tradition, diminishing and in some cases even denying the very existence of an Amazigh literary tradition. This colonial approach would soon find its way into Arab-nationalist discourse and cultural policies that envisioned states and societies in post-independence Tamazgha as Arab and Islamic only. The result of the active ideological de-Amazighization process that ensued from this ideology was a cultural chaos and a linguicide that could have cost Imazighen their own present and future existence in their ancestral homeland.

Imazighen’s postcolonial precarity gave rise to the Amazigh Cultural Movement (ACM). A group of Algerian residents in Paris established the Académie Berbère in 1966. A year later in 1967, several Amazigh teachers in the Kenitra-Rabat-Casablanca axis established al-jam‘iyya al-maghribiyya li-al-baḥth wa-al-tabādul al-thaqāfī (The Moroccan Association for Research and Cultural Exchange). With the establishment of Tamaynut in 1978 in Rabat, these three associations formed the backbone of the Amazigh civil society that took on the Sisyphean effort of rehabilitating Tamazight and its varied linguistic and cultural manifestations. The ACM laid the groundwork for the current prosperity of contemporary Amazigh literature, which was born out of the struggle for the recognition of Imazighen and their identity in their own homeland. As a restorative endeavor, literature played a crucial role both as a factor that allowed younger Imazighen to regain consciousness of their Amazigh identity and the dangers threatening it, and as a response to the linguistic and cultural disenfranchisement that they experienced in the post-independence period. Therefore, the oral Amazigh literature that was dismissed by nationalists, who overlayed their linguistically diverse societies with an enforced Arabness, became a federating element that anchored Imazighen’s identity in their roots in Tamazgha.

The discovery and reinterpretation of this oral literature during a period characterized by feverish documentation of Amazigh heritage inspired the ACM’s educated youth to start writing their own contemporary literature based on their engagement with literary traditions in Arabic, French, and Russian, among other languages. Oral literature helped the early generations of contemporary Amazigh writers to nourish their connections to their homeland, but it was not enough to give them the fulfillment they discovered in reading literatures produced in dominant languages. This dilemma prompted several Amazigh intellectuals to pen literary works that blazed the path for younger generations to add their imprint to the contemporary Amazigh aesthetics. Most important, however, is the fact that the Amazigh novel in particular was born, in the words of Mohamed Usus, “to carry the discourse that countered the Arab-Islamist ideology,” constituting “an alternative narrative to the master-narrative of the [Arab] nationalist ideology.” The intergenerational links between those who founded Amazigh consciousness and those who subsequently inherited this legacy tell the story of a literature that had to be proactively created in Tamazight to address the aesthetic void left by the forced absence of writings by Imazighen in their mother tongue.

In the space of a few decades, Tamazight passed from being utterly impoverished in terms of contemporary written literature to enjoying an extraordinary prosperity in terms of both quality and quantity. Specific publishers and civic societies spurred a boom that has yielded an impressive number of novels, short story collections, and poetry books. In the 1980s, Algeria had the lion’s share of the production of Amazigh literature. However, the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM) soon caught up with Algeria, and Morocco has now become the primary locus of Amazigh literary production in Tamazgha. In addition to the publications of the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture (IRCAM), civil society associations like Tirra and Ad Nuru are playing a major role in the publication of Amazigh literary works. As time passes, literature in Tamazight has become increasingly salient in the public sphere, carving out space for Amazigh culture in the visual and writerly as well as in the readerly universe of Tamazghan societies.

The turn to literature in written Tamazight was conceived neither in lieu of the existing oral tradition nor against the multilingual literature produced by Imazighen in other languages. Orality remains a pillar of daily Amazigh art. The poetic jousts of inḍḍāmn (oral poets/composers of poetry), which sustain the tradition of extemporaneous composition of poetry, continue to fashion audiences’ appreciation of poetic words that contain both meaning and linguistic beauty. Traditional tales still serve as a primary means for Amazigh children to hone their storytelling skills. Similarly, the movement toward a written literature has happened in conjunction with, not to the detriment of, the continued existence of a multilingual Amazigh literature in Arabic and French as well as Spanish and Dutch. Although expressed in languages other than Tamazight, the Amazigh lifeworld, myths, concerns, anxieties, and existential questions have made their way into these texts in other languages inhabited by Imazighen, creating a multilingual literary tradition that “speaks in tongues.”

But the profusion of literary output of non-diasporic Amazigh writers in “others’ languages” has not necessarily benefited Tamazight as a literary language. It is true that the themes can be Amazigh, and the aesthetic choices can be embedded in a sense of Amazigh poetics and aesthetics, but the direct enrichment of language happens in the receiving languages—say French and Arabic—and is not reciprocated in Tamazight, which remained impoverished even as the experiences of its speakers enhanced other languages. Thus, despite the ACM activists’ awareness of the importance of this literature in other languages, they resisted considering it a fully Amazigh literature. At best, it is a manifestation of Amazigh culture and writerly concerns, but its creative force feeds the languages in which it is written at the expense of the Amazigh mother tongue. This is probably what Ahmed Assid means when he argues that writing in Tamazight is an “innovation in language and cultural values” and that this writing “revolutionizes language because it transforms it from a discourse for communication [ . . . ] to a discourse for theorization.” This awareness contributed to the ACM members’ endeavor to elevate writing in Tamazight into a pillar of Amazigh renaissance.

The act of penning literature in Tamazight matters because it enacts Amazighitude. A deep consciousness of the struggle required to harness resources to rehabilitate the endangered Amazigh language and culture, Amazighitude has generated a literary corpus that has changed the learned literary scene across Tamazgha. Historian Ali Sadqi Azaykou sums this up in a 1994 article published in Tifawt magazine: “Written works are the proof of a person’s existence. They are the argument of his life and that of his people and [ . . . ] their achievements from their past to the present.” Faced with the urgency of saving their language and culture from the encroachments of Arabization and Gallicization, Amazigh intellectuals channeled their efforts toward establishing a literary voice in Tamazight , which became synonymous with their existence. Rather than a luxury, producing aesthetics in Tamazight in these circumstances was, for Amazigh intellectuals, an act of urgency upon which depended the future of their being or no longer being.

Amazigh literature has also participated in the construction of Amazigh indigeneity. The result of a translation act, the word “indigeneity” in its global understanding entered the Amazigh framework in 1993 when lawyers Hassan IdBalkassam and Ahmed Dgherni attended the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. These two activists had brought a statement in which they described Imazighen as “the first inhabitants of North Africa.” Unexpectedly, however, the sentence “al-amāzīgh yu‘tabarūn al-sākina al-aṣliyya li-shamāl ifriqiā,” which could be translated as “Imazighen are considered the indigenous people of North Africa,” inspired them to see their cause as a part of a larger movement, and to the existence of Indigenous people whose plights were similar to Imazighen’s. Prior to 1993, indigeneity’s evocation of the colonial indigénat (the codified inferior status of the colonized) among post-independence elites had prevented Amazigh thinkers from using it as a self-descriptor, despite the existence of its markers everywhere in Amazigh cultural production as well as in the praxis of Amazigh activists. However, once embraced, awareness of Amazigh indigeneity broadened the horizons of Amazigh activists who saw in literature and translation crucial tools for the revitalization of their language and culture. After the establishment of the Amazigh World Congress in 1994, the Moroccan journal Tifinagh dedicated a section titled “Tagmat” (which I propose to translate as “Indigenous Brotherhood”) to intra-Amazigh dialogues. The word “tagmat” transcends borders, consolidates the deployment of trans-indigenous sympathy, and furnishes a language that Imazighen did not have before 1993 to rationalize their position in the world as Tamazgha’s indigenous people. This conceptualization of tagmat was crucial because it helped fashion a  transnational Amazigh Indigenous community whose sense of unity was vehicled through poetry, prose, and other written forms. 

The translations presented here reflect some of the results of the effort to produce literature in Tamazight, much of which addresses political unrest. Iken’s Askif n inzaden (ⴰⵙⴽⴽⵉⴼ ⵏ ⵉⵏⵥⴰⴷⵏ/Soup of Yarn), for example, is a fictionalized rendering of the events of March 1973, which unfolded as a result of an attempted armed revolution against Hassan II during the “Years of Lead.” Spanning almost four decades, from 1956 to 1999, the “Years of Lead” were characterized by the repression of any institutional manifestation of Amazigh culture as a part of larger governmental violence against the Moroccan people. Similarly evocative of this repressive period is Azergi’s novel Aġrum n Yihaqqarn ((ⴰⵖⵔⵓⵎ ⵏ ⵉⵄⴰⵇⵇⴰⵔⵏ/Ravens’ bread), which tells the story of a journalist who flees to the mountains to avoid arrest after penning a critical article for the newspaper he works for. Both novels depict this painful period of Moroccan history, adding an Amazigh-centric dimension to the already abundant literature about state violence in Morocco.  

Unlike Iken and Azergi’s focus on the sociopolitical conditions during the “Years of Lead,” Mohamed Akounad brings the explosive politics of Amazighity to the mosque. Ssi Brahim, who is the imam of a village mosque, realizes that his Amazigh congregants do not understand his sermons in Arabic. Since comprehending the religious message is fundamental to worshiping God, Ssi Brahim decides to deliver his sermon in Tamazight instead of Arabic. This pedagogical act elicits a whoop from one of the women; an act of celebration and happiness that is not supposed to take place in the solemn space of the mosque. This joyous shrill leads to the intervention of the Makhzan, the authorities in charge of maintaining the sacrosanct Arabness of the religious sphere that they consider foundational to the Moroccan state. The imam also faces resistance from members of his community who have developed the habit of listening to sermons in Arabic. The novel depicts the various ways in which Tamazight and Imazighen were kept in check through institutional and interpersonal mechanisms that sustained their linguistic disenfranchisement.

The aforementioned historian Ali Sadqi Azaykou was the first Amazigh intellectual in Morocco to have drawn attention to this intentional amalgamation of Islam with Arabness in his article for the first and last issue of the Arabic version of Amazigh magazine in 1981. Azaykou was part of the first generation who combined academic activism with literary output. Entitled “For a Real Conceptualization of Our National Culture,” the article dissociated Arabness from Islam and made the case that Moroccans can be Muslim and Amazigh at the same time just like other Muslims who worship God in their languages across the globe. The result of his effort to drive a wedge between Islam and Arabness was a year in jail and the closure of the journal that published his article. Azaykou was the first political prisoner in the history of Amazigh activism in Morocco, and this bitter experience informed both the defiance and the sadness that underlie his poetics.

Placed in the broader field of novelistic output in Tamazight, these texts reveal that the Amazigh novel is expanding and prospering. Both Algerian and Moroccan novelists are pushing the boundaries of the genre, opening it up to experimentation and bringing Tamazight into a literary realm that remained underexplored in their language for a very long time. Today, the Amazigh novelistic corpus contains hundreds of novels written in the Tifinagh, Latin, and Arabic alphabets. Some noteworthy novels include Lynda Koudache’s Aâecciw n tmes (ⴰⵄⵉⵛⵉⵡ ⵏ ⵜⵎⵉⵙ/Cabin of fire), Fadma Farras’s Tilffighin (ⵜⵉⵍⴼⴼⵉⵖⵉⵏ/Wounds), Umer Ulamera’s Timlilit di 1962 (ⵜⵉⵎⵍⵉⵍⵉⵜ ⴷⵉ 1962/An encounter in 1962), Mezdad’s Idd d wass (ⵉⴹ ⴰ ⵡⴰⵙ/Twenty-four hours), and Ahmed Haddachi’s Aduku n udar azlmad (ⴰⴷⵓⴽⵓ ⵏ ⵓⴹⴰⵔ ⴰⵥⵍⵎⴰⴹ/The slipper of the left foot).

The three poems included in this dossier are also representative of the deep transformation in Amazigh poetics between the 1980s and the present day. While Ali Azaykou’s poem “Language” embodies the questioning and disorientation experienced by Imazighen as a result of their linguistic dispossession, Mohamed Ouagrar’s “Mirrors” and Fadma Farras’s “Tomorrow I Will Celebrate Myself” are manifestations of the new poetic trends in Tamazight. Simultaneously experimental and philosophical, Ouagrar’s “Mirrors” builds on the reflection of the self-image to start a series of interrogations about the writing self and distinguish the true from the untrue. Finally, “Tomorrow I Will Celebrate Myself” is Farras’s feminist poem, radical, uncompromising, and deeply independent, announcing a woman’s choice to reclaim her life. Taken together, these poems give us an idea of the range of poetic topics and experiences that Amazigh poetry has captured since its phenomenal explosion in the early 2000s.

Poetry has always been the locus of Amazigh creativity. Because music and dance are fundamental to Amazigh celebrations,  composing poetry on the spot and declaiming it is an art that many Amazigh people still master today. This tendency has carried over into written poetry, which has prospered. In Amazigh contexts, both men and women historically composed poetry and participated in poetic jousts, and recent poetry collections demonstrate near parity between male and female poets.

While these translations convey the state of Amazigh creative writing to Anglophone readers, they also draw attention to the importance of translation as a revitalizing force for Indigenous languages. Indeed, as the rich theory produced in the field of translation studies demonstrates, translation scholars have long grappled with untranslatables, furnished approaches to translation (choosing to domesticate or foreignize a text, for example), and examined the multidirectional impact translation has on both the source and target languages. However, this theoretical focus has barely extended beyond the realm of the colonial languages that continue to set the literary and intellectual agendas for most of the “World Republic of Letters,” as Pascale Casanova has famously called it. In fact, this focus on dominant languages has sidelined translation theory, which, for the most part, has failed to account for Indigenous languages. Unlike their richly endowed counterparts, Indigenous languages do not necessarily have the institutional or financial capital to stay abreast of intellectual production in other languages. The asymmetry between these well-endowed languages and Indigenous languages is not only one of richness of cultural production but also of the existence of human resources capable of translation.

As the experience of Amazigh literature demonstrates, translation can play a restorative role in the field of Indigenous languages. One could say that to be translated is to be given a chance to sustain a language and culture that dominant languages could phagocytose and potentially replace. It would seem contradictory to see a savior in translation, which is also shaped by the very forces of capitalism and cultural hegemonies it perpetuates, but the truth is that translation can prompt local speakers of a language to return to it when they see that it has gained value in other languages. Just as many local authors become visible when they are translated into and win awards in foreign languages, translation can give life to Indigenous literatures that decades, if not centuries, of marginalization and colonization have cheapened in the eyes of their speakers. The biggest issue facing Tamazight is the quasi absence of anglophone scholars and students who can translate from it into their mother tongue. In this context, translators are not merely conveyors of meaning and culture but also ambassadors who strive to create space for unknown literatures in their dominant languages. 

Amazigh literary output has a long way to go to reach global audiences. Although the march might be long and arduous, it is not as stupendous as the effort it took for Amazigh intellectuals to infuse new life into their language and culture. Maghreb or North African Studies in their current state continue to offer specialization in this predominantly Amazigh area in Arabic and French, but no trace of Tamazight.  Even though Imazighen have adopted the name Tamazgha to refer to their indigenous homeland, scholarship has yet to normalize its use and tap into its potential, which would entail making Tamazight a cornerstone of the curricula that focus on the region. The normalization of the use of Tamazgha would mean seeing Amazigh cultures and literatures in their continuities across North and sub-Saharan Africa. However,  this ongoing situation in which Tamazight is not taught in anglophone programs specialized in the region, and the continued avoidance of engagement with Imazighen’s reimagination of space reveals that much of the talk about representation, inclusion, and diversity, which have become foundational to our academic culture, has failed to extend to the study of Imazighen.  In light of this misalignment between the re-Amazighization happening on the ground throughout Tamazgha and the unwillingness within anglophone academia to depart from the Arabic-French framework, one wonders if it is not high time the notion of postcolonialism, whether it really applies to Imazighen, was revisited. And, most important, whether scholarly disengagement from the study of Tamazight and Imazighen has been the other face of the coin of the marginalization that Imazighen have faced for the last sixty years.

Still, Amazigh literature is thriving and enjoying an unprecedented revival. Tamazight and its cultural production went from being silenced and threatened by an impending extinction to revitalization. This selection of poetic and narrative texts translated from Tamazight into English is only the tip of a larger literary iceberg that, until recently, led a precarious existence because of statal denial (for purely ideological reasons) of its rightful place in the public sphere. The fact that we are today publishing these prose and poetic works in English is a testament to the failure of this ideological repression intended to uproot Amazigh language from its homeland of Tamazgha. These works are proof that Imazighen have never ceased producing literature in both written and oral forms, even as they navigated an inimical political context that reigned over their societies from independence in the 1950s to the constitutional recognition of the Amazigh dimension of their identities in the mid-2000s. Instead of disappearing, as was intended by the implementation of aggressive Arabization policies in Amazigh-speaking countries, Tamazight has proved its resilience through its proverbs, songs, tales, poems, and, most recently, novels and short stories, which reflect the ethos and experiences of a people who actively engage with their lifeworlds in their own mother tongue. As Amazigh literature reveals, storytelling is not just an aesthetic need but also a fundamental medium for the exteriorization of the existential threat facing an Indigenous people and the sharing of it with the broader world. Translation, then, functions as an amplifier of Amazigh literary voices in the universal literary scene.

Works consulted

Akli Haddadou, Mohand. Introduction à la littérature berbère suivi d’une introduction à la littérature kabyle (Algiers : Haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité, 209)

Assid, Ahmed. Dirāsāt fī al-adab al-amāzīghī (Rabat: al-Ma ‘had al-Malakī li-al-Thaqāfa al-Amāzīghiyya, 2015)

Assid, Ahmed. Imārīrn: Mashāhīr shuu‘arā’ ahwāsh fī al-qarn al-‘ishrīn (Rabat: IRCAM, 2011)

Casanova, Pascale. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. The World Republic of Letters (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004)

El Guabli, Brahim. Moroccan Other-Archives : History and Citizenship after State Violence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023)

El Guabli Brahim, “The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential,” Tamazgha Studies Journal 1(2023): 7-22, https://www.tamazghastudiesjournal.org/articles-fall2023-issue-01-article02.

El Guabli, Brahim and Boum Aomar, “The Amazigh Republic of Letters: A Review and Close Readings,” Review of Middle East Studies 56(2)(2024):162-170. doi:10.1017/rms.2023.25.

Galand-Pernet, Paulette. Littératures berbères: Des voix et des lettres (Paris: PUF, 1998)

Sadqi Azaykou, Ali, “Uraren,” Tifawt 3(1994) :8.

Silverstein, Paul, “The Productive Plurality of Tamazgha: Boundaries, Intersections, Frictions,” Tamazgha Studies Journal 1(2023):23-34, https://www.tamazghastudiesjournal.org/articles-fall2023-issue-01-article03.

Usus, Mohamed. Fī riḥāb al-ungāl; Dirāsāt fī al-riwāya al-amāzīghiyya bi-al-janūb (Ait Melloul: Manshurāt Rābiṭat Tirra, 2022)

Zaheur, Lahcen. Al-Adab al-amāzīghī al-ḥadīth bi-al-maghrib (Ait Melloul: Publications Tirra, 2022)