“The Ghiwane Phenomenon”… Bahraoui places the performance of groups between creativity and “repetition”

A re-reading of the “Ghiwana phenomenon”, with its many groups singing in colloquial Arabic and Amazigh, is present in the latest book by critic and academic Hassan Bahraoui, who is interested in the various groups associated with the phenomenon, chronicling it and its achievements, poetry, music and issues, and researching its societal and artistic nursery, and the internal and external problems it encountered, and discussing what has been written about it and the accuracy of the responsibilities and popular, political and societal characteristics it carried.

This book, which is concerned with the groups “Nass El Ghiwane”, “Jil Jilala”, “El Machaheb”, “Iznzarne”, “Ousmane” and “Takada”, does not merely praise the phenomenon or chronicle it; rather, it diagnoses its internal contradictions and what led to the limitation of some of them or limited their continuity, while presenting conclusions about what explains the wide Moroccan popular spread that the “Ghiwane phenomenon” experienced in contrast to the “musical” and “political” trials of it, whose luster quickly faded.

Among the things that Bahraoui’s book “On the Ghiwane Phenomenon” specializes in is providing details that are not widely available about what each of the groups studied faced; which explains changes that affected individuals in several groups, or limited the singing of songs, or limited the popular influence of a group in a country, such as the song “Al-Ayoun Aini” celebrating the return of the southern regions to the Kingdom’s soil, which was sung by “Jil Jilala”, and which had a subsequent impact on the group’s position in Algeria.

In contrast to the influence of oriental songs and the inability of “modern singing” to “present a convincing local alternative,” which “reduced its communication with new generations,” and with the overflow of “the types of singing and popular music in Morocco” from “traditional arts,” the Gnawa phenomenon was “the historical alternative to an artistic crisis that had been rampant for a long time, and the time had come to overcome it so that art could finally be in the service of society.”

This does not negate the fact that “the return to the ancient Moroccan heritage by these groups constituted a major pivotal point in their experience”; rather, it explains “the appeal of broad sectors of the Moroccan public of both Bedouin and urban origins, and opened the door to its recovery of its own identity that had been tampered with” by bourgeois and artisanal colors, and models of modern romantic singing with an oriental reference, in addition to the decline of the “vulgar” popular song and its “regurgitation of themes and rhythms.”

Thus, a group like “Nass El Ghiwane” brought “Moroccan song out of its state of slumber and stagnation and into the arena of public affairs” nationally and Arab-wide, and ignited the depths of the youth audience that was busy following “the conquests of English and American pop music (…) or French variety music (…) and freed it from its attachment to the different voice of the other, which was leading it towards certain alienation, with unforeseen consequences.”

With “Al-Ghiwane”, for example, “the Moroccan person will emerge for the first time, with all his misery and humiliation, as the subject of a song that seeks to express himself without vulgarity, to delight without vulgarity, and to celebrate collective values ​​in opposition to narcissism and sick stardom”, knowing that the Ghiwane song “did not seek, throughout its long history, to barricade itself behind dazzling slogans that use politics as a pretext to alienate the broad public, but rather proceeded consciously and with complete spontaneity in the direction of drawing inspiration from the most prominent moments of light in popular heritage and distilling the sap of the Moroccan collective conscience.”

Among the things that the book specializes in is its interpretation of the reasons that made the phenomenon as a whole, with its various groups, enter “almost the repository of history” after entering the “circle of repetition” after it had raised “the slogan of creativity and the pursuit of originality” in the seventies of the twentieth century, and after it had unleashed hidden creative energies and renewed Moroccan song and taken deep root in the popular soil.