Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa

Authenticity and Opportunity in Moroccan Ritual Music

Christopher Witulski

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253036766
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Traditionally gnawa musicians in Morocco played for all-night ceremonies where communities gathered to invite spirits to heal mental, physical, and social ills untreatable by other means. Now gnawa music can be heard on the streets of Marrakech, at festivals in Essaouira, in Fez's cafes, in Casablanca's nightclubs, and in the bars of Rabat. As it moves further and further from its origins as ritual music and listeners seek new opportunities to hear performances, musicians are challenged to adapt to new tastes while competing for potential clients and performance engagements. Christopher Witulski explores how gnawa musicians straddle popular and ritual boundaries to assert, negotiate, and perform their authenticity in this rich ethnography of Moroccan music. Witulski introduces readers to gnawa performers, their friends, the places where they play, and the people they play for. He emphasizes the specific strategies performers use to define themselves and their multiple identities as Muslims, Moroccans, and traditional musicians. The Gnawa Lions reveals a shifting terrain of music, ritual, and belief that follows the negotiation of musical authenticity, popular demand, and economic opportunity.

1 One Minute in Meknes

LESS THAN A week after arriving in Fez in November 2010, I made sure to visit ‘Abd al-Rahim ‘Abd al-Rzaq, a gnawa ritual leader with whom I had worked during my previous two summers. His joviality shone through as I sat down in front of his “office” in the Blida neighborhood of Fez’s walled medina, the old city. The smell of the nearby leather tanners wafted through the courtyard where he was sewing gnawa paraphernalia and meeting with prospective clients. The noisy setting made it difficult to converse, something that I had grown used to. His “day job” was as a guardian for the funduq, a collection of workshops and storage spaces where laborers pounded away at brass plates and teapots, making piles of new goods to be sold in the nearby tourist markets. ‘Abd al-Rzaq was surprised and happy to see me. He immediately stood up and handed me a piece of thick cardboard to sit on so that I would not have to be on the stone floor. After the onslaught of introductions that opens so many conversations in Morocco, he invited me to a gnawa ‘ashiyya in nearby Meknes. An ‘ashiyya, like a lila, is a healing ceremony animated by the music of the gnawa tradition. Unlike the lila, which extends from the night into the next morning, an ‘ashiyya begins earlier in the evening and concludes soon after midnight. It is shorter and, therefore, costs the hosts less for the musicians, any space rental, and food preparation for guests. We made the appropriate plans, and I quickly became excited about an auspicious start to this fieldwork visit.

The event took place in a second-floor apartment in a poor neighborhood between Meknes’s medina and the ville nouvelle. After a delicious chicken couscous meal provided by the hosts and shared by the musicians, we descended to the street for the opening procession, called the ‘ada. Accompanied by a pair of large drums (tbal) and four or five sets of iron castanets (qaraqib), ‘Abd al-Rzaq’s brother Hamid, serving as the leader of this event, the m‘allem, lit incense, wrapping the hosts and a young woman in aromatic smoke. As she fell into and out of a trance on the dirt road, the sound of the music and singing attracted a large crowd that, eventually, encircled the central participants. After an extended procession and blessings of the instruments, flags, candles, people, and sacrificial animals to be used later in the evening, the large group of musicians, participants, and spectators made their way through the small door, up the steep, tight staircase, and back into the apartment. The musicians then began performing, inviting the spirits of the gnawa pantheon to join in the event and calling for blessings from Allah and prayers from the Prophet Muhammad. Incense and sound together thickened the air, making it heavy with odor and vibrant with motion.

Over the past two generations, gnawa music moved from an existence that primarily served enclosed rituals to one that engages new contexts across Moroccan popular music. The gnawa are a population understood in contemporary Morocco to be descendants of West Africans, having come to the Maghreb¹ through the slave trade. Their music is now heard on the streets of Marrakech, at festivals in Essaouira, in Fez’s cafés and Casablanca’s nightclubs, and in the bars of Rabat. The gnawa music that appears in these public spaces large and small is based within the constructs of a healing ritual, but the artists filter it through audience tastes as they adapt it to new settings. Different artists take any number of aesthetic paths through this creative process while audiences and individuals choose their favorite singers based on some combination of aesthetic pleasure and perceived authenticity.

With the growth of the music’s popularity, listeners hunt out new opportunities to hear these powerful sounds. They return to the rituals, events that continue in both the poorest neighborhoods and the richest. It is the listeners who, when ill or in need of rejuvenation and catharsis, hire musicians and outfit their homes with the trappings of ritual ceremony. (Respiratory issues, arthritic pain, and mental illness are common health concerns that bring people to the gnawa.) They are the ones who watch the events unfold, smell the incenses, wear the colored fabrics, and trance in tune with their possessing spirits. They hire their favorite singers and ask for their favorite songs. They choose to request the spectacle—the burning of candles against the skin of the possessed dancers, the slicing of flesh with knives—or they decide to hire musicians who avoid this kind of ritual manifestation entirely, preferring a quieter, more subdued ceremony.

The gnawa ritual is an event led by and oriented toward the paying host and the present audience of listeners. Although musicians and ritual leaders direct the proceedings, they also defer to the tastes and requests of those present in the room. Musicians and others who work within the ritual economy fight to be hired by potential clients, catering to their preferences. Performers must choose how to adapt and adjust to compete for a limited number of engagements. As younger musicians enter the scene, this competition only intensifies. These musicians, both young and old, use ritual and musical authority strategically to warrant their hire or their fees. As listeners hear popularized versions of these songs and look for their favorite star musicians to lead their rituals, popular aesthetics creep into ritual settings, changing the way events look and sound. The lines between sacred experience and entertainment blur as each follows personal taste to guide his or her engagement with the sounds, scents, and spiritual practice.

In the following pages, I examine different ways that ritual leaders engage their changing audiences by negotiating, performing, and asserting their own authenticity. Most find a point at which they are comfortable balancing the wants of their audience against what they discern as the needs of the spirits and the integrity of the ritual. The increasing influence of popular music aesthetics is dramatically changing this debate, while the professionalization of the gnawa requires musicians to at least consider prioritizing their listeners’ requests.

Zakari, one of the ensemble members, often makes the long train ride from Marrakech to Meknes to perform with ‘Abd al-Rzaq or Hamid. He dances for some of the more virtuosic and acrobatic segments of the ceremony, taking advantage of skills that he developed as a kid when break dancing with his friends. His ability has put him in demand with a number of different gnawa troupes. When the time comes for Sidi Musa to enter the ceremonial space, he overtakes Zakari’s body, causing him to get up from the group of musicians, stand facing the ensemble, and ease into a trance. Sidi Musa, Moses, has control over water. He is the blue spirit. Those whom he possesses are draped with blue cloth by the muqaddima, the woman in charge of the event, as they fall into trance. Sidi Musa’s newly inhabited body enacts an intricate dance that mesmerizes the surrounding spectators, and his presence becomes an early dramatic highlight of the ceremony.

This evening, as Zakari is falling into the trance, holding his head above the incense burner, feeding the spirit with its smoke to entice Sidi Musa to take firm hold over him. Zakari begins to move, bending deeply forward, syncing himself into the music. A small bowl of water appears, brought out by the muqaddima while the room holds its focus on Zakari. He takes the bowl, balances it on his head, and begins to spin. The dance that follows includes rolling on the ground, twisting, and jumping, all with this bowl perched atop his head. He mimics swimming motions while lying on the floor, contorting his body to keep his head upright, holding the bowl. But at one particular moment, he is swaying in front of the incense burner when the sound of the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, drifts in through the open window.

When one hears the adhan in Morocco, the most appropriate action is to silence any music, stop speaking, and listen, waiting for its conclusion. Once the adhan ends, the practicing believer has a period of time to complete her prayers. Some immediately cease any current activities and begin praying. I have been in taxis in both Morocco and Egypt when the call came, and the driver pulled over, opened up a prayer mat, and prayed on the sidewalk next to his car before getting back in and continuing the drive. But many gnawa, and many Moroccans more generally, do not pray so dutifully or at all. Some do; some don’t. It is a matter of personal religious practice, a daily decision made by believers each time they hear the adhan. Most, however, do respect the explicit sound of the religion, turning off music and waiting patiently for it to pass before continuing their activities. This act of reverence marks the day, with each pause becoming a signal for the passage of time. Hirschkind (2006) notes instances in which the adhan even interrupts other religious sounds, as those listening to recorded sermons pause their moral education during these few minutes while the call to prayer is audible.

Despite attending a number of lila and ‘ashiyya ceremonies, I had never experienced this moment, the conflict between the gnawa’s religious sound and the audible institutionalized Islam of the adhan. Lila ceremonies, long and loud, usually occur in the evening, when there are fewer instances of the call to prayer, or they are so loud that they simply cover all outside sounds. Here, though, was an intimate moment as Zakari quietly settled into his possessed state, standing next to an open window in an apartment that happened to be in the proximity of the neighborhood mosque. The second-floor apartment stood above any hindrance from walls or buildings between the mosque minaret’s electronic bullhorns and us, lending both a beautiful view of the outside sky and an unimpeded path for the sound of the adhan’s “Allahu akbar . . .,” God is great.

Success within the gnawa musical community is increasingly defined by the commercial standards of the music industry rather than by ritual criteria. Most performers and journalists locate ideas of ritual efficacy as the result of an effective command of two distinct sources of authenticity: Muslim piety and African heritage. While there are many other potential interpretations for gnawa authenticity—age, experience, knowledge of various regional styles, or professional networks, for example—these two consistently came up in conversations with practitioners, listeners, and people from both within and outside the gnawa community. That they are conceived in opposition to each other was often demonstrated when I introduced my topic of study to most Moroccans; the common reply was some variant of “Oh, why are you studying that? Just know that it is not Islam,” or “You know that the gnawa are from Africa, right?” By “Africa,” people are referring to sub-Saharan Africa and using the gnawa community’s history of slavery as a marker, positing them well outside of a Moroccan identity. Musicians highlight specific performance characteristics or personal narratives in an effort to claim effective authenticity as Muslim or African, usually opting for a combination of the two sources, intentionally locating themselves as possessing both Islamic piety and a personal linkage to sub-Saharan Africa. I heard a number of examples for this, including a variety of references to the recently deceased Mahmoud Guinea of Essaouira as a “true gnawa” because “he is so black” or ‘Abd al-Kabir Marshan’s self-identification as part of a sub-Saharan lineage despite his lighter complexion because of his “black wet nurse.” Conversely, in other interviews, elders like Mulay al-Tahir of Tamesluht highlight an ideal gnawa singing voice as resembling the sound of someone reciting the Qur’an. Similarly, Aziz wuld Ba Blan of Fez, whose dark skin and clear lineage prove his heritage to others, cites his recent pilgrimage to Mecca as demonstrating his Muslim piety. These outwardly performative and personal attributes emphasize the gnawa community’s internal debate between the Sufi and African sources of their authenticity and thus their ritual power. Sufism itself is a problematic term; it serves as an umbrella for a number of local and transnational practices—“mystical Islam,” if you will. Some of these attributes are highly contested while others are respected, erudite, and able to be traced back to the earliest intellectual histories of Islam itself. Other symbols include the importance of prayer and pious behavior: the sound of the performed music, residence in a city that was a known slave trade post, correct pronunciation of Arabic texts, use of non-Arabic words, age, chain of lineage to previous gnawa musicians or identifiable slaves, and so on.

After just over fifteen minutes of music for Sidi Musa, the room fell into silence. Hamid, the m‘allem, had softened his playing and came to a terse stop, the qaraqib had already been at rest. The nasal loudspeaker nearby is barely audible on my recording, but it speaks loudly in the absence of all other sound. As the long syllables of the muezzin’s recitation come to a close, Hamid signals to his musicians and, rising from the quiet, dovetails the music of his ensemble back in, rising against the interruption’s final notes. He reengages the room and the spirit, who spent the minute waiting patiently, bent in half at the waist. Zakari’s body reanimates, stepping back into the groove of the ceremonial music.

The moment, a literal suspension in time and space, displayed the web of performative acts that stretches between many Moroccans’ spiritual lives. The gnawa, self-identified Muslims, defer to the adhan, an aural symbol of their faith. Sidi Musa, like many other gnawa spirits, is respected as a holy figure, either a prophet (nabi) from the Qur’an or a local saint descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, depending on whom you ask. Sidi Musa is joined in the ceremony by other literal or spiritual ancestors throughout the ceremony. Mulay Ibrahim possessed the host of that evening’s ‘ashiyya later, as she picked up a Qur’an and prayer beads, reciting verses. Saints and spirits join the gnawa ceremony each time it is held, but here, in Meknes this evening, Sidi Musa showed patience and deference, becoming a meditative listener along with the rest of us, experiencing the adhan.

Negotiating Gnawa Authenticities

There are a number of stories, of narratives, about who the gnawa are, where they come from, what they do, and whether their practices are morally appropriate or even permissible. Or Muslim. Questions—or, better put, declarations—about who the invited spirits are or how the music comes from “Africa” peppered my conversations with both fans and disinterested listeners. These conversations did not always go in the same direction, however. Markers of effectiveness within ritual were widely different. What some participants were willing to ignore as unimportant—training, for example—were held up as pillars of authority by others. Authenticity in the contemporary gnawa community exists as a meeting point between performers and listeners. It can mean many things, depending on who those performers and listeners are, just as it can look very different as the meeting point itself shifts. Authenticity is therefore unpredictable and constantly in flux. There is no urtext, no wide communion of opinion that deems certain performers or styles “authentic.” It exists in a marketplace—an exchange—and appears within the agreement between a performance and a client’s expectations. This vision of authenticity does not imply that it is exclusively monetary, that is, always a commodity, though as the paragraphs and chapters that follow make clear, this is certainly a component of the discussion as money changes hands, social capital gets wielded, and power over spirits and listeners asserts its significance.

In Morocco today, clients hire musicians to welcome spirits into a ritual for healing purposes. Other clients, notably concert producers or promoters, hire musicians to entertain crowds. Both sets of clients might demand performers who are authentic. The “inauthentic” may be unable to facilitate the cure of an ailment or may poorly represent what the client or audience expects as “gnawa tradition” on stage. In some cases, authenticity may be benign, unimportant. I attended a birthday party for an expatriate teenager in which the entertainment was a local gnawa troupe. The small group of friends in attendance, mostly young, white, and foreign, knew little (if anything) about the potential ritual power of the music. They danced and enjoyed themselves, and the event was a success. Each group of performers and listeners approaches an engagement, whether ritual, commercial, or otherwise, with expectations. When the listener’s expectations for the ensemble are not met, claims of inauthenticity result. This is hardly unique to the gnawa. In a TED talk, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie relates a conversation in which her writing was deemed inauthentic because her characters were not the impoverished Africans that a professor had expected.² When there are singular expectations, authenticity can be fairly simple, even binary. When there are a number of expectations, a performance can meet some or otherwise elicit a measured response. For example, the playing of Earl Scruggs, Pete Seeger, and Dink Roberts speaks to entirely different sets of expectations about American banjo playing. The symbol and sound of the banjo go in even more diverse directions within the music of artists like Sufjan Stevens or Beck. (I remember being struck by the banjo’s role in his song “Sexx Laws” the first time I heard it.)

In the case of the gnawa, as with conversations of authenticity elsewhere, it’s not just that there is a moving target: there is no single target authenticity to seek out. Experiences from diverse audiences result in a wide variety of expectations, many of them conflicting or even irreconcilable. Perhaps luckily, there are equally diverse performers ready to meet the needs of those potential clients. While there are hierarchies of success based on each of these measures, they are not identical, but they may overlap. Certain measures of authenticity map well onto others, opening areas of opportunity for those who identify and effectively occupy them. In gnawa music, authenticity revolves around ritual practice, skill with “working the spirits” (Kapchan 2007). But just as all spirits are not equal, every trancing body is different. Further, the trance takes place in the center of a room encircled by family, friends, and neighbors. At this point in history, especially with the extraordinary fame and familiarity of gnawa music within Morocco, those listeners’ experiences need to be accounted for as well. This leads to a wealth of measures by which a client can select a performer and a similar wealth of different local performers from which to choose. Money can certainly play into the equation, and does (see chap. 4), but taste matters as well. And taste is not easily defined. The available authenticities have largely mapped onto two narratives mentioned above: African heritage and Islamic piety. A third is growing in importance, and for some it has overtaken the others: the ability to engage an audience of listeners, trancing bodies, and spirits.

My effort here is to explore how authenticity is created and wielded in a specific place and time. The term authenticity is a slippery one, much in the way that hybrid can carry a range of meanings, each with powerful political connotations in the postcolonial world (Kriady 2002). Michelle Bigenho (2002) outlines three forms of authenticity: experiential authenticity, cultural-historical authenticity, and the authenticity born of uniqueness. These three conceptualizations conflate in the narratives I describe in different ways and for different reasons. The first two prove to be the most influential, however. Experiential authenticity describes the moment of engagement in which a music or ritual effectively moves a listener. It may be a matter of aesthetic taste or even that the listener was in the right emotional and spiritual space to receive and connect with what is happening. Cultural-historical authenticity articulates a sense of truth derived from a valued contextual positionality. This may involve placement within a historical trajectory or one’s status as a representative of a community. By following the discourses, definitions, and debates that pepper casual conversations within the gnawa community, I aim to foreground the process by which these modes of authenticating people, sounds, style...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration and Transcription
• 1. One Minute in Meknes
• 2. Defending Ritual Authority
• 3. African Routes and Sufi Roots
• 4. Making a Living as a Contemporary Ritual Musician
• 5. New Opportunities
• 6. Light Rhythms and Heavy Spirits
• 7. Fighting New Demands
• 8. Heritage and Hybridity
• 9. New Authorities and Authenticities
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author