We need to start this with a brief talk about that word. “Berber” comes from the Greek word barbori, meaning “someone who does not speak Greek.” A lot of people will tell you that it comes from the word “barbarian,” though, if you think about this, that would be a little egotistical of us to think that it was English that define this ethnic group, especially as they’ve been on the world scene since long before anyone was speaking English. No, the truth is that our “barbarian” comes from the same root. This is a lot like the evolution debate. Humans aren’t descendent from monkeys – no one wants to think that – we both come from the same place. By the same token, Berbers aren’t barbarians.
Still, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from believing that “Berber” is a derogatory term, a situation that isn’t helped by the way it’s been used in the past. Rather than represent the complex and storied culture of the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Africa, it has come to suggest all the worst of Orientalist prejudice. As a response, activists and progressives have proffered the word Amazigh, the Berber word for “Berber.” The reasoning is simple: Berbers are backwards, uneducated peasants, Amazigh are proud mountain people. Although we can disprove the origins of the word “Berber,” we can’t ignore the fact that it’s been used for the purposes of subjugating the collective consciousness of this people, and, despite the fact that the Amazigh word for “foreigner” literally means “Roman,” we can support their re-identification by using “Amazigh.”
It’s beside the point, anyway, since we’re talking about language here, and there’s really no such thing as the Amazigh language. It’s more like the scores of Amazigh languages, which is the biggest problem we have. There are some universal words, like “bread,” “water,” and “foreigner,” but where you have one ethnic identity, you actually have at least five distinct languages. In the north, most Amazigh speak Terrifite (taken from the Rif Mountains). You’ve got Tassousite in the Souss Region of the Anti-Atlas, Tashleheit in the High Atlas, and Tamazight in the Middle Atlas. Finally, there’s even a separate term for the language spoken by the Amazigh in the Sahara: Tasaharouite.
Even then you’re misleading yourself if you think that with only five languages, someone might be able to master all this. The history of the Amazigh is one of mountain isolation, and, as a result, you can go thirty kilometers down the road and you’ll find Shleu (another Amazigh word meaning “Amazigh”) saying something completely different. Some people claim that if you speak one Amazigh language natively, you can understand the gist of any, but I doubt that. I’ve seen my host brothers (who speak Tamazight) watching a tv show in Tassousite, and they have about as much clue what’s going on as I do.
Imagine then, that you’re an American Peace Corps volunteer trying to figure all this out. Youth development volunteers like myself all learn Darija, but a little more than half of the small business development, and the significant majority of health and environment volunteers I know learn to speak Amazigh. This is because we have spring and summer camps with kids from all over the country, and they tend to live in much smaller communities (and stay there). It can be a real problem, though, when they do travel. Our spring camps include volunteers from all sectors, and we were fortunate enough to have two environment volunteers who spoke Tashleheit. Unfortunately, not a single kid in camp could understand it. Granted, it was an English immersion camp, but let’s not kid ourselves, they were left to the mercy of the other volunteers whenever they wanted to say just about anything.
The worst, though, is training. You can’t go five miles without finding a new Amazigh dialect, so imagine what happens when you train in a town on one side of the country, and then find yourself serving on the other side of the mountains. Most everything you just learned has to be unlearned and then replaced with something new. This goes for grammar as well as vocabulary, since, being a proletarian household language, there aren’t really any “rules” – only generally accepted forms and structures. Anything goes, really, as long as everyone else knows what you’re trying to say. I know a guy near me who trained in the Azilal Province, and he couldn’t say anything to his host family when he showed up here, and, already three months into his Peace Corps service, he had to deal with his town asking him why he couldn’t speak.
But if it’s crippling on mobility, it makes up for it in spades when it comes to integration. If you ever wanted to ruin someone else’s service, all you have to do is show up in their site and speak the local dialect. Until that volunteer leaves, and probably longer, they’ll never hear the end of people in their site talking about that other volunteer, who came and visited for just a few hours, and how great he or she is for speaking Shleuha, more likely than not with the added “better than you.”
I don’t speak Tamazight, but I’ve learned, and Dr Peter Venkman would undoubtedly agree with me, that when someone asks you if you speak Shleuha, you say, “Yes.” At first (and we’re talking within my first days in site), I would make the very reasonable response that I’d just gotten to Morocco, that youth development volunteers need to speak Darija, that I hope to learn the one and then the other but don’t want to mix them together by learning both at the same time. “No,” they would reply. “You need to learn Amazigh.” Now, when someone asks me, I just say, “Sure, etch agharom” (“eat bread”). If they press me, “Su ahman” (“drink water”). It doesn’t matter if they just asked me if I think the weather is hot, if I want to go home to see my parents in America, if I’m on the way to the hammam, and they don’t seem to really care, either. I’ll say everything else in Darija, including “I don’t know what you’re talking about” in response to anything said in Tamazight, and I’ve never once had a person tell me that I don’t know enough. In fact, they tell their friends that I have supernatural abilities. Even if I try to say that, in reality, I only know about twenty words, they have no desire to believe in anything other than my absolute fluency.
Which, unfortunately, isn’t likely to ever actually occur. Despite the aesthetic and intellectual attraction of the Amazigh languages, they really can’t be called “essential.” Granted, there are some people here you’ll meet who don’t speak a word of Arabic, but, on the whole, that’s a very small minority. The truth is, that, being so community specific and informal, someone who speaks a dialect will invariably have to speak another language during their service. And, to top it all, the Tamazight spoken here in Freedonia is so full of Arabic that I can pretty much understand the general idea of anything that my family is talking about, as they only speak when they’re talking to me. And the few times that I’ve gone and learned something in Amazigh, I’ve come back to my host family and repeated it for them, only to be told that that’s not our Tamazight.
I’m glad I know what I do, especially when I can impress my friends here with a few words, but I don’t think I’m going to be an Amazigh scholar when all is said and done. And I don’t think my community expects me to, either. They probably won’t ever stop talking to me about how great Jawad (Josh) was for knowing how to speak Shleuha, but I think that all they really want to see is some validation of their culture. They speak Darija the majority of the time, too.
1 comment:
Damn that Josh!
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