“Crazy Passion” .. Ben Zidane dramatizes the Amazigh legend “Isli Wetsalet”

A rewriting of the play of the Amazigh legend “Isli and Taslit”, after “a love for its details and its human heritage”, is present in the latest texts of the Moroccan playwright Abdel Rahman Ben Zidane, which was published concerned with impossible love, entitled “Travels in a Crazy Passion – Isli and Taslit”.

In an introduction to his theatrical text, Abdul Rahman bin Zaidan wrote that “the effectiveness of the imagination in creativity – that is, creativity – is what gives writing the ability to deal with heritage, understand it, read it, and derive meanings from it, which will help provide the possibility of addition and transform what can be transformed in writing into New proposals that expand the vision of the text so that its semantic composition is a generation of the new text that I want to accomplish, and is a formation of what I include of the tragic vision that may disappear in the depths of the discourses and the resolution of its connotations, or it may remain apparent through its implications.”

He continued, indicating that this is what he bet on as he built “the process of events with the realistic, symbolic character and the imagined characters to form the network of relationships in the narrative system to combine what the text says with history, with the imagination, and with the characters to whom a function was assigned that exists in the process of events of the new text, the basis for crystallizing the existence of the new text with the new approach.” For the subject of love, which was introduced into other orbits imposed by the nature of the new writing and the new vision of its semantic components.

This “popular myth in Morocco,” its “themes,” according to its theatrical inspiration, is “the love between Moha and Hadda (Isli and Taslit),” and “the tribal factor that was the main obstacle that prevented the marriage of the two lovers as a result of the raging conflict between the tribes over water and agriculture.” And the tribal interests based on revenge and the love of controlling the country and the people,” and “the tragic death of the two real or imagined heroes produced by the Amazigh collective consciousness,” then he adds: “There are those who say that the two lovers got married after a bloody conflict between the tribes after reconciliation took place between the parties to the conflict.” .

The playwright added: “These central themes that surrounded the Berber legend (Isli and Taslit) are what motivated me to write a new dramatic text with a new vision. I wanted it to be full of presenting a contemporary vision of heritage, love, and the psychological struggle of the heroine whom I gave the name (Asfar), drawing on all What the dramatic imagination will provide for creativity of the possibilities of imagination that the playwriting wants to build in addition, with interpretation, and with difference. With it, the boundaries between my contemporary vision of heritage and the vision of myth and reality disappear, as it is a reality that the Amazigh collective memory still tells, with the popular difference regarding the topic of the story because it is an essential component of the heritage. The oral language, which still carries true authenticity, can be classified as part of the intangible Amazigh cultural heritage.”

Then Bin Zaidan went on to write: “Writing the new text with his own speech was in keeping with my characters (Isli and Taslit), and the centrality of storytelling and revelation that Taslit (Asfar) loves was writing an autobiography for the central character. I wanted her to be the one who possesses the poetry of the narrative and the romantic speech. The struggle and search for Isli while she is swimming in a transparent self overflowing with love, as is the speech of (Asfar), which was poured into the speech of the absent person (Amoudhin), because the experience is the same for them, the suffering is the same, the failure is the same, and the belonging to an unforgiving world is the same.”

He continued: “Despite the obstacles that existed between the meeting of (Isli and Taslit) – (Asfar and Amudhin), identifying with them made me facilitate the process of pouring meanings into their speeches, and I made the flow of their feelings a meeting point between the two lovers,” while paying attention to the play of “the traditional material with the similarity that It symbolically leads to (…) harmony and difference between the past and contemporary reality, without moving away from the essence of the stories, which is represented by the active characters in the course of the story (Isli and Taslit).”

With “an emphasis on linking the legend of (Isli and Taslit) to the theme of love and the theme of tribal conflict,” the playwright “modernized” the myth and its vocabulary so that the dramatized story interacts with his contexts and the contexts of the world. He recorded, explaining: “I had fun while reading her legend while reading the Amazigh heritage (…) I found it to be a wild, wild memory that tamed my writing so that I could write about her and her world and write about the common situations between me as a writer and her as a historical awareness of what is happening in the contemporary world.”

Bin Zaidan enumerated the aspects of his modernization of the myth: “I made the places in which the events take place absolute, symbolic (the café – the station as a place for waiting – and the court as a place for accountability and reproach), while pointing out in some of the text’s dialogues some places that give the identity of the text’s time its possible harmony in imaginary travels.” It is the component of the textual writing with the meanings of passion and love, which were the last chapters in the legend of the existence of Isli and Taslit under the water, after they were killed by hatred as two inseparable lovers, so that the central theme of these books remains the revelation of the spread of the culture of hatred in the contemporary world, not only between individuals – but what Between the great powers and those with major interests in a world in which peoples are victims of wars, exploitation, and the systematic plundering of their resources, victims of racial discrimination, and victims of biological wars that expand the hegemony of Western capital over the world.”

Then he concluded by saying: “Rewriting the Amazigh legend (Isli and Taslit), whose details I loved, and whose human heritage I loved, is my motivation to reformulate the story of impossible love with which the Amazigh memory is full, and it prompted me to share their love with the victims of love, to experience their tragedy, and to connect the old with life’s data.” In this century, which is what put me through a writing experiment from which I concluded that I edit what I say in a clear way, sometimes dreamy, political at other times, and many times romantic, driven by nostalgia, especially for all ancient times of heritage, in order to make the flow of expression of characters into speeches balanced by the scale of expression of dreamy feelings, so that they are closer. From a human topic, which is love, social and civilizational conflict, and bringing the subjective signifier closer to its political meaning, which is what I wanted to be a qualitative addition to all my writings, which are described by their special qualities and known for their boldness in writing the meanings of life, so that everyone who lives in situations of possible love, in true love, can share with me the joy of its aesthetics. Before politics, or the impossible love that remains alive in all times and places.”