A chapter in Walking Through a World in Motion, edited by Susan Ossman,

Chapter 10

From Tribe to Virtual Tribe (*)

Abderrahmane Lakhsassi

As a child, walking beyond the walls of my hometown for the first time, I watched herds of camels moving up from out of the deep south of the Saharan desert. They were heading north. It must have been a year of drought in the desert.  I was scared by the huge number of these strange animals preparing to spend the night just beyond  the walls in front of our house. Even more frightening were the few nomad shepherds dressed in dark blue clothes held together with a belt, garments that left their legs completely bare. These were the aàrabn (the nomad 'Arabs') who are alleged to steal children and hide them in their leather hanging bags (aqwrab). Mothers in Tiznit used images of these men as icons to frighten naughty children. From my child's eyes the world was divided by the coming of the camel herds. There was my hometown surrounded by its defensive walls and the rest. Apart from my birth place the whole country, if not the rest of the world, was inhabited by these ugly, terrifying nomads. This was my first representation of the Other.

            It is always difficult to talk about the self and even more of oneself. Whether as  a reaction to primitive positivism, or an attempt to chart alternative self formations, narratives of self and subjectivity have become a part of academic discourse over the last decades. I am still somewhat uncomfortable with this kind of writing. Putting aside pudeur (cultural decency), exposing one's life experience and submitting it to analysis can be a difficult task for two reasons: first, studying one's own experience is by no means easy. The underlying assumption here is that some sort of distanciation (representation at a distance) is necessary for theorization in social scientific discourse. (Lakhsassi 2005) Secondly, it is not so easy to make one's personal life into subject matter that will be of interest to anyone else. Are certain kinds of selves more worthy of writing about? Are some authors more talented at making themselves into interesting fictions? These are just two questions that I asked myself as I prepared to write this essay about my experience of moving from a small Berber town in Southern Morocco to Marrakech, Beirut, Paris and Manchester and Casablanca.

Here, I will describe three stages of being and belonging that I have moved through in the course of my life. My analysis does not rely on formal fieldwork. Nor do I draw on interviews, questionnaires or even comparative studies to develop my three stage model. I draw only on personal and biographical data. Tiznit of the 1950's, Lebanon of the 60's and Paris of the early seventies exist now only in memory. So although I will be concerned with an individual's life, my own, and the confrontation of the self with different cultural and political structures, I do so in the knowledge that these experiences are now historical. The places involve in my story are far from me now, not only in space, but in time. It is by reference to this temporal distance that I might argue for the validity of my analysis. Indeed, any discussion of the self has to take place in time. Throughout its peregrination through geographical space and different socio-cultural milieus, the self shapes itself by confronting the Other. But this Other is never still. Other and others are ever changing. Linguistically, racially, religiously the self is challenged by different Others at different points in time as well as in different places. A constant process of readjustment and redefinition is fundamental to identity which is a result of a set of evolving relations and connections. Today, from the point of view of my mother and family I am a Westernised person. An Arabic speaking Moroccan will call me a Berber, whereas for someone from the Middle East I am a Moroccan (a berbari). For Europeans I am an Arab and for my American colleagues I am a Muslim. None of these identities is false, indeed, all of them are at the same time true – according to context.

But how did I come to live in so many places in the first place? Where did this constant desire to move to different places and speak different tongues come from?  It is impossible to answer this question definitively.  I can point to my first experience of encountering people who seemed totally different, absolutely Other. As a child in Tiznit in the 1950's it was the shepherd nomad who embodied alterity. He was utterly different from my parents and family members and other people of the village. When I was a small child the nomad and his flocks incarnated the possibilities of lives lived outside the walls of my little town. Like other people in my village, I saw the nomad as ugly and uncivilized. Yet, I also felt that he appeared to me as a messenger to tell me about the world beyond my doorstep. Thinking about the nomads and their travels led me to begin to experience an uncanny feeling of suffocation when I was at home. I  sensed the limits of the village walls and village society. I was not sure I wanted to be a settled city dweller – so set in place, so unlike the ever-moving shepherd. The image of the nomad evoked in me a desire to travel, a thirst to know the world and a feeling of guilt for wanting to leave home. These paired sentiments that have never left me.

So a feeling of  being "out of place" (Said 1999)  and the urge to move on has haunted me since I was a boy still living in that then-little town in  Southwest Morocco. What pushed me to get out of the "hole" I was born in to encounter different places and people was no doubt due to an irresistible yearning to constantly search for something. (1) But what was it I sought?  That is what I will never know. What I do know is that normality is generally represented in terms of settlement and stasis. So while I was studying at AUB (the American University of Beirut) in the late 1960's, I remember coming across some phrases in a book that said something like: "the natural state of a body is to be in movement." I vaguely associate the sentence with the British philosopher John Locke, but what was important was not the academic consequences of the words. What was important to me was the emotion I felt when I read them. I suddenly remember feeling very warm and comfortable inside. I had needed some reassurance, some indication that the continuous longing for motion within me was legitimate. Reading words in a book that considered movement to be normal reassured me. One must remember that especially at that time ideas about the nation, belonging and indeed, village prejudices, all agreed that too much movement or adherence to various communities was absolutely abnormal. What sense of belonging and connections to others were possible for a village boy set on wandering so far from home?

My life in motion

Although my very first representation of the Other was developed by observing the Shepherd nomads and hearing the dreadful tales my mother told me about them, I soon learned that there were yet other kinds of people in the world,  that this image needed to be changed or amended. When I was a boy I was sent to a school with a French maitre (schoolmaster).  Leaving Koranic education system to join public school was not in any sense a parental plan. When a new public on-room school opened in my uncle's empty house, right next door to ours, I was sent there as a punishment. Having failed to meet my father's expectations in terms of Koranic learning, he left me as a kind of a sacrifice with the Christian teacher next door. This was how I ended up with Monsieur Leclerc who taught us to sing "O ! Les matelots" ( O ! Sailors). His classroom had colorful pictures of boats and ships on the wall, in total contrast with the dark koranic schoolroom I came from and where my elder brother continued to go to without me. For our class, Mr. Leclerc bought two balls, one blue, the other red. Coming home that first morning from my first French class, my mother wanted to know what that arumi (Christian-European) taught us. When I told her that we were singing and playing football during class breaks, she was, naturally, disappointed. For my part, it was a rather pleasant encounter with a difference. Unlike the first picture of the nomad outside the town walls, the image of Frenchness our teacher projected was not frightening. On the contrary. He contributed to forming my second image of otherness.

            Two years after the end of the French Protectorate, Morocco joined the Arab League after years of discussion with the other members. As Fatima Mernissi notes

"In 1945 the Arab character of Morocco was far from evident, and Allal al-Fasi had to plead his cause to persuade the first members of the Arab League to define Arab in such a way that not-so-Arab Morocco could fit the definition. History has proved Allal al-Fasi to be correct in his predications. His party's wishes became those of the Moroccan state. Morocco, as an independent nation, became a member of the Arab League on 1 October 1958. It affirmed its Arab identity in the Loi Fondamentale de Royaume (June 1961), which became the basis of the 1962 constitution:

'Article 1. Morocco is an Arab and a Muslim country.

'Article 2. Islam is the official religion of the state.

'Article 3. The Arabic language is the official and national language of the state.' (Mernissi 1987, p. 17)

Thus, theoretically, Arabic became the only official and national language. This choice had a tremendous impact on our primary school education. As a matter of fact, the school program launched by the Istiqlal (Independence) Party in the late 1950's was intended not only to thwart the French mission civilisatrice but also to accelerate the elimination of the Berber dimension of the country. School books used in class reflected this Jacobin notion of nation building. The few sentences on the Berbers in the history books refer only to their being the first inhabitants of the country. The image this educational system propagated was Middle-East centered, one might say Arabocentric. Pre-Islamic Arabia, its history and culture became the starting point of this system in constructing the national self image of the ordinary citizen. Not a word was written about the pre-Islamic history and culture of North Africa. Ancient Morocco was not a subject of study. Our part of the Mediterranean world came into history only with the Arab-Islamic conquest, according to our text books. Thus "the school system acted as a machine to fabricate Moroccans, which means in this precise context Arabs for the nationalists." (Aboulkacem, 2006, note 28, see also Aboulkacem, Thesis 2005)             The whole curriculum was disconnected not only from our everyday reality in Tiznit but also from the national reality as a whole. I remember an example from my days in primary school. I puzzled over a picture of a ram in a text book (al-tilâwa al-musawwara).  I was not a city kid, so I knew about animals. But this animal looked strange. In the place of a tail it had some kind of strange growth. I was profoundly disturbed by this strange looking creature, but I never dared to ask the teacher what was wrong with the ram in the picture. The picture was supposed to illustrate a poem we had to learn by heart called, "al-waladu wa-l-kharûf" (the boy and the ram). I lived with that puzzle throughout my school years in Morocco. It was only later, when I once was traveling in the Lebanese country side that I realized that our book had been printed in Lebanon and "their" sheep have a different kind of tail than "our" Moroccan sheep!

 As a child I was taught that inside the classroom and its intellectual universe, the self becomes the Other. In school I spoke French or Arabic. The Arab nationalist movement was then at its peak. The 1956 Suez Canal crisis fueled the Arabocentrism of the classroom; our Arabic teachers had their eyes turned toward Cairo and Damascus. Those who were politically minded were always fiercely competing with their French colleagues. For instance, to counteract the initiative of Mme Foucault who used to keep a piece of soap  in her closet so that students could wash at school, Mr. Al-Manqush suggested that we should change socks three times a week so we would not need to wash our feet at school. In a school like mine where many pupils came to school barefoot, he  did not realize that people without shoes would not have socks!

            Yet, outside of the space and time of the classroom there was no schizophrenic experience as the public space. The language of our town remained and remains Berber. It was only later, during my high school years in Marrakech from 1963 to 1966 that I realized that linguistic considerations could create a feeling of "us" and "them" among Moroccans. Until high School my social and cultural life took place in the Berber tongue. French and koranic (classical) Arabic were simply bookish languages for me. They were good enough in formal situations such as the classroom. But in public space and natural situations they were of no use. Edward Said noted that "everyone lives life in a given language," (Said xiii) and my everyday experiences were assimilated in the Tashelhit Berber dialect. This was the language of my self. It was the language that tied me to the people who counted most in my life. If needed, I would easily translate knowledge from my studies into the common tongue of public space. But all of this changed once I moved to Marrakech where public space was monopolized by the colloquial Arabic known as darija. 

            There is no question that at the time being a Berber meant feeling somehow outside of he nation. Until quite recently it was not unusual to hear that in Morocco there are "Moroccans" and then there are "Berbers". The location of Berbers outside of the emerging modern nation had been working beneath the surface of nationalist discourse since before Independence. Nothing could better summarize that situation than the answer of the leftist leader Mehdi Ben Barka who defined the Berber as someone who has not been to school yet.

"The supposed Berber problem is just a residue of the cultural policy of the Protectorate. It is the product of these "schools for notables" reserved for a well intentioned urban oligarchy. The Berber is simply a man who has not been to school. It's a problem of instruction and social evolution, of intellectual equipment and the technical development of the countryside." ( S. Ossman's translation, quoted in Lacoutre 1958, p. 83)

In Marrakech my image of the other as being either a nomad or a French missionary teacher vanished. The image of the Arabised city dweller came to overshadow both of these others. Public linguistic borders outshined other considerations in defining identities. If a requirement of getting out of one's provincialism is "the willingness to engage with the other" (Hannerz, 1992, 239), I was more concerned with protecting the self than anything else. I did this through silence and avoiding interaction with the new Other. My first two years in the boarding school were spent listening rather than speaking. Yet, I did not go as far as some. The Berber Manifesto relates the example of a worker who pretended to be mute to avoid being ridiculed when using either his mother tongue or Arabic with a Berber accent. (sixth Demand, The Berber Manifesto 2000)

Only after a couple of years, once I felt conformable in using colloquial Arabic, could I engage with the Arabized city dweller.  Appreciating and sharing jokes with Arabic speaking colleagues was a signal to me that I had entered the darjia speaking world. Before that phase, I never thought for a second that I could express humor in a language other than my native tongue. The self, my self, was increasingly being encapsulated in "national boundaries". It was at this time that I started to listen to the national Arabic radio, and to appreciate Moroccan Arabic and Egyptian music. Berber radio programs were produced for illiterate males and particularly for women. Even when programs were available on the air, their diffusion was limited in geographical space and time. So since everything was done to base the new nation on one and unique language to the detriment of the multilingual and multicultural dimensions of the country,  I internalized the idea that Berber is a private language to be used in intimate circles. I implicitly accepted that the colloquial Arabic of the region around Casablanca was the language of the national public sphere. It took me a long time and painful efforts to be able to join this national linguistic realm. I felt that belonging to a public language and culture must give someone the best feeling imaginable because one could be a member of a wider group. So, although I knew Moroccan Jews or Blacks were minorities, I never thought they could experience the same frustration and exclusion that I did, so long as they could speak colloquial Arabic. (2)

            There is no doubt that people belonging to a stigmatized and a publicly despised culture, whether religious, ethnic or linguistic, are more inclined to move toward  cosmopolitanism and universalism whenever they can. For me, learning a prestigious language like French, and later on English was a way of making up for my cultural and linguistic deficit. It was certainly a way of hiding my stigma, consciously or not. Somehow, at this stage in my life, participation in the culture and language of the public environment were an ideal goal to achieve. At the same time there was a reinforcement of my awareness of the particularity of Berber poetry and art. This rendered the private sphere even more valuable to me. I began to oppose this cultural world to the public domain in my mind. I became conscious of the beauty of my intimate language. Berber songs and music increasingly attracted my attention. They began to occupy even more my private time as if to compensate the fact that they were excluded from the public realm.  In Marrakech they became my secret garden.

            When I moved to Beirut in the late 1960s as a scholarship student at the American University it took me as long as in Marrakech to appreciate the distinctive  humour and way of life of my Middle Eastern colleagues.  For instance, I only gradually came to appreciate Lebanese cuisine. Indeed, like jokes, openness to new foods is a kind of signal of readiness to encounter alterity. Refusal to appreciate foreign cooking can denote the lack of readiness to be open to difference. Once, when I was living in Paris, I received a businessman from my hometown. I decided to take him to an unusual restaurant for the sake of tasting some exotic food. To my disappointment, he was not excited about the  French food for it was new to his palate. But he was not unhappy either. But when I accompanied him to London and I suggested that he might enjoy eating Chinese instead of European food he adamantly refused. "My dear Abderrahmane," he said, " I will eat Italian food even if I do not like it, since we are still within "ahl al-kitab" (People of the Book) but Chinese…"(3)  If "competence with regard to alien cultures itself entails a sense of mastery, an aspect of the self"  (Hannerz 1994: 24)  the importance of playing on accepted borders and interdictions is not always point out in treatises on cosmopolitanism. The first time I went to France, it was a jambon de Paris and a beer that I craved for. Tasting pork and alcohol was not simply a transgression of a religious taboo; it was also an indication of my desire to meet the Other through his gastronomy. "A state of readiness" to try new things and transgress borders was something I prepared inside myself before I even stepped across the French frontière. 

            It was through sharing jokes and enjoying Levantine cuisine that I encountered Middle Eastern people in Lebanon, but on AUB campus, it was American culture with its protestant ethics that began to fascinate me.  I experienced a cultural shock between two "Western" approaches to education. I could not help but compare Mrs Allen, my first English instructor in Lebanon to Mme Foucault, my French teacher in Tiznit. Mrs Allen, an American woman, was so very relaxed. She usually dressed casually. On rainy days, she used to come to class wearing black rubber boots. The same was true of  Mr. Buckingham, the director of the orientation program. He got  "close" to students. I appreciated this informal attitude, which I never experienced with my French (let alone my Arabic) teachers in Morocco.

            At AUB more than thirty nationalities shared the same campus in a country that was itself multi-confessional, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Junior year abroad students from the USA were part of its scenery. One of these undergraduates suggested that changing geographical locations might actually be a solution to problems at home. In an open letter to the university magazine he wrote "the problem is not where I am but within me". Did I really grasp then what he meant? Indeed, I did believe that changing places could appease some kinds of malaise. Looking out at the world from the Middle East, Paris eventually became my new Mecca.

My move to Europe to Paris in the 1970s was not primarily for my studies. University studies were an excuse to live abroad and to avoid going back home. One could live cheaply in Paris at that time. I enrolled to do a second university degree at the Sorbonne. Cosmopolitan cities like Paris or London can feel like a desert for anyone without a network of social relations. But because I was a student, Paris was a warm and welcoming place. Paris was politically as well as socially stimulating: political activism was an easy avenue to socialization. Perhaps this is why it remained by compass point even after I left to do my Ph.D. in England. I liked England, particularly London. I visited London often even when I lived in Paris. There, I discovered the British Commonwealth and became aware of people from completely different horizons; New Zealand, Australia, East and South Africa, and particularly the Indian Sub-continent. People from these places were few and far between in Paris at the time. But I enrolled to study at the University of Manchester, and for some reason I was never really able to make that city a home. Perhaps by the time I arrived in Manchester I just "ran out of gas" after all of my travels. Maybe my desire to be on the move was extinguished. I was tired of always being a "stranger." I was not homesick, but I developed a new interest in Islamic philosophy as a way of finding a place in Manchester.

Three Stages of Migration

            There are basically three phases in my peregrinations. The first, which I would call a "tribal" one, began at home and finished in the campus of AUB. The second, characterized by a search for some universal belonging, ended up at Manchester where I had the feeling of being totally detached with no point of reference whatsoever apart from the work of my university. The third and last phase started when I realized that deepening the particular is probably a more secure road to the universal than denying it or looking for a ready made universalism. Let us call it "rooted cosmopolitanism" to use Ulrich Beck's expression. (Beck 2001, 19)  During the first phase my mental and emotional efforts had to meet the other in his relative multiculturalism. Studying languages and Western literature and philosophy for instance was a way to get involved intellectually with others or at least some kinds of different others. In this precise case, these were those that are dominant throughout the world – varieties of a Western model. This period was also, paradoxically, a time during which I was holding tightly to my own tribal perspective. It was in Beirut that I first started to transcribe Berber oral poems during my leisure time.  I used to listen to Berber music with friends and started to translate some of the songs into French. Curiously enough, it was a Lebanese teacher who kept encouraging me to pursue this work. Mr. Samaan was one of my first English instructors during my orientation program at A.U.B. in 1966. Since he learned that I was a native Berber speaker, he kept suggesting that I start working on a Berber-English dictionary. 

 It seems to me in hindsight that all my learning about the other was something of an intellectual sport. My beliefs and values appeared to remain the same even though some doubts started to creep into my worldview. It was really in Beirut that the gap between intellectual belief in humanism and universality on the one hand and my Berber particularism on the other blew wide open. I could not then see how they could be reconciled. I was trapped in a see-saw between what I saw as universal and my own particularism and sense of self.  I felt like I had an impossible choice:  to hold on to my  mother tongue no matter how it was seen by others or sacrifice the deep belief in the kind of universalism I was taught.

Arab nationalist ideology with its anti-minority attitude was sweeping at AUB at the time. (al-Shawaf 2006)  Nothing illustrates its intimidating overtones better than the image of a Sudanese student from the deep-south who stood up one afternoon in the campus speaker's corner to cry out "I am an Arab! I am an Arab!" although he didn't speak a single word of Arabic! Unlike this South-Sudanese who no doubt broke under pressure and tried to denying his particularism, I was caught in-between Arabs and non-Arabs in this struggle as a Berber from an Arab country who had been educated in classical Arabic as well as French and English. It was only later on in my journey that I realized that there was nothing incompatible between the two positions, that for me one could not exist without the other.

The second phase coincides with the time when I became aware that western universalism is one among other universalisms. I questioned its power and egocentric tendencies. I started to take interest in Islamic culture and civilization. In the seventies I was faced with a situation that for me was symptomatic: many of my peers then found it awkward and even absurd that I decided to travel to Europe to study about Islam and Islamic philosophy. Yet, for me it was a way of holding to a certain kind of identity within this so called universalism – even at the cost of being exposed to some obsolete Orientalist ideas. Perhaps I was trying to integrate myself within the Arabo-Islamic entity as a way of making up for the drawback of the lack of public face given to Berber culture. I was not trying to hide or cover up my origins, local culture or language, but it seemed it could not be extended outside of private, outside intimate circles. One needed to find other arenas and ways of speaking for that.

The third phase began at the point when I returned to Morocco, a home that was no longer so much home to me anymore after 16 years abroad. I was not the same as when I left as a young student – if only for the passing of time. To say the least, I had developed a certain distance towards my early environment. But I also continued to orient myself with respect to my earliest experience. I came to place the study of Berber cultural forms at the centre of my intellectual interests. An anthropological approach to the study of  Berber poetry  – accompanied with a disposition and a readiness to understand its significance and values at a more general level - helped me to set a kind of compromise if not reconciliation with this native world of mine. With my mother I discovered a passionate subject of discussion about Berber poetry and oral tradition in general. (Lakhsassi 1988; 1989a; 1989b) Returning to Morocco, I knew it would be difficult and challenging to communicate with some members of my family and old friends. The tribal world I came from no longer looked quite the same. The nomad I was so frightened of as a child had probably settled down in a shantytown. Tiznit is no longer a little town. Its mushrooming neighborhoods have swallowed the walled paradise in which I grew up. (N'Ikhsassiyn 1987)

Mine has been a story of a long detour. How did I tolerate living in Rabat and Casablanca and being accepted by those in my home town without giving up my acquired sense of cosmopolitanism?  In the midst of the process of return the feeling of belonging to a universal sect or society started to overtake me. It was stronger than any other collective sentiment I could feel. I realized that the tribal world has vanished now, leaving room for a virtual tribe that I share with all those who can no longer live only within the boundaries of their own places of birth. We must stretch beyond given linguistic, regional and national borders. In this space of belonging, my original tribe can  appear as one representation of the particular. It can be subject to analysis on a far larger scale than has usually been done by anthropologists or historians. Some of its values and achievements can be considered as an authentic contribution to human legacy. As I have become an anthropologist at home, I have worked to make the particularities of my original tribe a part of a more general conversation about the human condition. This is part of what I can exchange with my virtual companions.  (Lakhsassi 2005)

There is no question that we are far away from the sixties and seventies when any particularism, whether religious, ethnic or linguistic, was seen as a conspiracy against the Arab nation. Public space is not monopolized anymore by such ideologies. The Berber movement that has taken advantage of transnational spaces over the last decades helped to keep alive our language and culture, and by extension, Berbers' self-esteem. Berber studies has ceased to be the domain of colonial scholarship. Maghrebi scholars started doing research in this area from the early seventies. Their work prepared the ground for social and political Berber movements within national borders. The growth of these movements has coincided with the growth of ethnic rights and human rights movements around the world. The impact of these new transnational connections has had a profound impact on how Berber/Amazigh expressions are viewed in Morocco. Today, the intense sense of exclusion I experienced in Marrakech during the sixties is no longer possible. Personally, the fact of going through a series of other places, languages and ideas influenced my attitude about events in Morocco and how I perceived my own language and culture. The new atmosphere of the country makes it possible for me to live in Casablanca in a way that keeps me connected to my self as I have been shaped by the places I have moved through. My passages through many places  was a kind of rite of passage into my new virtual tribe that allows me to live in Morocco as a member of my tribe of birth.

Conclusions

"Césaire and Senghor rediscovered the sentence of the German philosopher Hegel who stated that 'it is not by negating the singular that one moves toward the universal, but by deepening the particular". And Césaire added: « You see, the more we are Negroes the more we will be men."  ( http://martinique.rfo./article10html )

My two quests - going from one place to another looking for something I could not identify, and progressively creating a personal world that I carry with me wherever I went were not incompatible. As a matter of fact, they are two sides of the same coin. From my first glimpse of the herds moving north from the Sahara, I have been attracted by the unknown. Ever since my days at school with Mr. Leclerc I have been   learning new meanings and values in order to get out of my native cultural abyss - but not at any cost. The fear of being trapped in a new system or another "hole" has always haunted me. Perhaps it is a form of claustrophobia. Yet, the feeling that there must be something more interesting and more appealing somewhere else, in a life different than the one I am living persists. It never left me throughout my travels. My life has thus developed in a kind of "du provisoire permanent" (temporary permanence). In the first phase, the world in which I was living was not the universal one I ended up with. I tried to protecting myself from the assaults of ways of living that challenged – instead of enriching - my own. From Tiznit to Marrakech where I discovered the low status given to my mother tongue and local culture, to Manchester, where I was not afraid but felt no sense of direction, the circle was closed. Now I am back "home" in Morocco, in Casablanca, far from Tiznit, which is not a home to me  in the usual sense anymore.

I see that my willingness to travel and to know others implies never getting totally involved with any one place. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it prevents me from going deeper into becoming assimilated to any one way of life.. It also keeps me contented with life as it offers itself to me. I am perhaps more an interested and curious tourist than a serial migrant who becomes totally involved in each place he lives. The kind of distance I always have with the people and places, languages and ideas I encounter means that I can maintain my own, slowly evolving, sense of personal meaning. I do not get caught up in any new alien system of meaning without careful reflection. Thus, I avoid the regret or sorrow some people who "go native" feel if their hopes of transformation through moving and becoming other are dashed. (which inevitably occurs). My distanced approach facilitates my ability to take displacement lightly. I never took another culture or place as "a package deal," I try to draw on my various experiences selectively to build the self.

            For a long time, there must have been some sort of fear of taking root that prevented me from remaining in a particular place.  I never knew quite what I was running from or what I was trying to find. As I mentioned, I often experienced a kind of suffocating feeling resembling a nightmare ("baghrar" in Berber/ "bu-tekkay" in Moroccan Arabic). But as time has passed, I have forgotten that fear, that striving to move beyond the claustrophobia of place. I have increasingly come to appreciate the places I have lived. Locations of our past is not so much the disappearing old places as such,  the  way they once were, but the moments we spent there, vanished times now gone forever. My childhood hometown still stands as ever in my mind in contrast to the actual town that exists today- a place devoid of that gone-forever-time. It has taken me all of these years, these many voyages with their detours to understand that the kind of universalism I was probably looking for could emerge from that small place I was born. Instead of running from the particular, I now seek to create a dialectic or a bond between the different moments, memories and the questions I ask my many places. It is perhaps once we achieve this point that we are cosmopolitans. Perhaps cosmopolitanism is not just about not being local, but of developing a kind of productive universalism of the kind suggested by  Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor.

Endnotes

* I would like to express my gratitude to Susan Ossman for her encouragement, suggestions and help in preparing the final version of this paper.

1. On the metaphor of the "hole" in Moroccan literature as related to village life, see Ossman 2002, p.19.

2. Some Moroccan Jews were Berber speakers, and others who received a French education could not converse easily in Arabic.  On Berber speaking Jews, see Lakhsassi, "Pourquoi la langue première des juifs berbères n'est pas Amazigh ? » a paper given at the International Conference on Morocco Today (Marocco Oggi) organized by the University Ca' Foscari Di Venezia (Italy), 26 – 28 January 2006, to be published by its Department of Euro-Asian Studies.

3. Muslims, Christians and Jews are "people of the book".

4.  http://martinique.rfo.fr/article10html  (retrieved on May 10, 2006), translation by Susan Ossman

Annex

The Berber Manifesto March 1, 2000

Sixth Demand

1. When a poor Berber speaker leaves his village to go look for work, usually in cities, it is only with enormous difficulty that he is integrated into the working class society of his peers: his poor knowledge of Arabic barely allows him to ask his way and earn his pitifully small wages. He is perpetually embarrassed at work in his relations with his employers and colleagues. He comes to believe that he is cursed: a result of being Amazigh. Over the last thirty years, it has been recorded that at least 60% of construction workers in large cities are Berber speakers. They may use their hands to construct beautiful buildings and sumptuous homes but they are reduced to living in the greatest material and psychic misery. One of the charitable Berber cultural associations that took an interest in their lot discovered that one of them took on the role of a mute so as not to suffer the sarcasm that his incapacity to express himself in Arabic inspired. (my italics)  Add to this the incredible number of Berber speakers who go to the totally Arabized city centers to beg with a mere twenty to thirty words in the language of dâd [Arabic language].»  http://www.mondeberbere.com/societe/manifeste.htm, (retrieved on May 17, 2006)  (Susan Ossman's translation from French)

References

Aboulkacem, El-Khatir

- 2006. El-Khatir Aboulkacem, « De la négation nationale à la construction identitaire ; le cas des Amazigh marocains », unpublished article.

- 2005. El-Khatir Aboulkacem,  «Nationalisme et construction culturelle de la nation au Maroc : processus et réactions », Thèse de Doctorat, Paris, EHESS.

Césaire, Aimé (and Senghor),

- Aimé Césaire, http://martinique.rfo.fr/article10html (retrieved on May 10, 2006)

Hannerz, Ulf.

- 1992. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hart, David.

- 2000. David Hart, "Scratch a Moroccan, Find a Berber", in Hart, Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco. London: Frank Cass, pp. 23-26.

 Lacouture, Jean. and Simone.

- 1958. Jean. and Simone Lacouture, Le Maroc à l'épreuve, Paris: Seuil.

Lakhsassi, Abderrahmane.

- 2006. Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, «Pourquoi la langue première des juifs berbères n'est pas Amazigh ? » paper given at the International Conference on Morocco Today (Marocco Oggi) organiz