Cherifa - Berber Blues

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Cherifa - Berber Blues

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Cherifa - Berber Blues
2001 | ASIN: B00004ZBMY | MP3 192k | 77 MB
Genre: Moroccan Berber - Ethnic

Cherifa - Poetess of Middle Atlas

Cherifa Kersit is a singer-sheika from Tazruth mmuukhbu the hanging rock, a few kilometres from Khenifra. She was born in 1967 and was brought up in her family in the country, where she never went to school, like all the other girls of her age. She practised singing in the open air, either as she followed her herd, or as she did the housework, or again when she met up with other young girls. When she was sixteen, she gradually started to perform at weddings or traditional village fetes. Her reputation started to gain ground in the early 80's when she met Mohamed Rouicha, one of the singing stars of the Middle Atlas. Up til then she had never shown the desire to record anything under her own name; she'd always been with other singers such as Rouicha, Meghni, Lmrabeth, Aziz Arim and others. Her family did not want her to make a career of singing. But with her powerful, typically Middle Atlas voice, she quickly made a name for herself in her own region. She met her match only in the person of Tifrsit, another tamawayt singer, and incidentally Cherifa's idol, as well Rqya Abbou and Hadda Ouâkki, to mention only women. Cherifa made her first visit to France in September 1999, when she took part in the show "Dances and songs by the women of Morocco, from dawn to dusk" at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. This was in turn part of the Paris Autumn Festival, under the aegis of the special "Honouring Morocco in France" campaign. Her particularly strong, rough voice touched and moved the European audience. Where Rouicha had revived and highlighted the lutar (lute) by adding a fourth string and altering its shape, it was now Cherifa's turn to try and reinstate the sheikhat with her singing. The unjustly bad reputation surrounding the sheikhat comes from a perception of this art form that does not stem from intimate knowledge of it, and which in turn is due to the fact that too much emphasis has been placed on dance, much less than on the voice and the words of the songs, which can only be understood by the Imazighn.

In fact, the central matter here is pure poetry, linked to the daily life of the people and their moments of joy or misery. It is poetry construed around a whole philosophy of life rich in teachings and wisdom on this people's conception of the world. But the poems are often difficult to translate because of their highly metaphoric style, made up of images where everything is stated in half-tones. The inshshadn or songwriters do not necessarily sing their own songs. Like the singers, they are illiterate, and they make up their poems during group dances (ahidus) or other similar circumstances. The poems are rarely written down, for we are at the heart of the domain of oral transmission here, and the fact that they are sung on cassette only gives them a new opportunity of being transmitted.

Generally speaking, a song progresses as follows:

First of all, an instrumentalist, in this case the lutar (the Berber lute) player plays an improvised taqsim, followed by the singer (who may be a man or a woman) who begins a solo known in Berber language as a tamawaytor Imaya.. The lines sung alternatively by the chorus and the singer are known as izian in Berber; they are independent of each other and don't necessarily ouch on the same themes. They can skip from one theme to another whilst speaking, for instance, of an impossible love, of moral or social problems, in short of everything that affects their emotions in the course of their daily lives. The songs often draw to a close with much livelier tunes known as tahidust, the masculine form of ahidus, the traditional and highly symbolic collective dance of the Middle Atlas. The gestures made by the dancers' or singer's hands recall the gestures made by women at their loom, or their movements as they untangle and skein the wool used to make the famous zayan carpets from this region.

While both are Amazigh (Berber) singing in their native and suppressed language of Tamazight, this Cherifa (last name Kersith) is not the Kabylie Algerian Cherifa who adapted Brahim Izzri's poignant folk standard "Chtedouyi" into a rave disco hit a few years ago, and is featured on the Berber compilation LA KABYLIE AU COEUR.

This Cherifa has a deeper and huskier voice. She sticks to traditional music and instrumentation, and works in a different regional dialect of Tamazight spoken in her native Middle Atlas mountain range of Morocco. Her art is as much in her character-rich phrasing and improvisational verbal versifying within the women-made rules of the Ahuache and Ahiduth rituals, as in being straitjacketed into any confining modality. For Amazigh (Berber) women of the Atlas, the woman takes the role of griot feeding the male musicians cues for accompaniment, even as she conducts the tempo changes with the stamping of her feet.

The CD booklet carries translations and an ignorant essay in French mistakenly identifying the source poetry as being translated from the Arabic. Cherifa is the actual poet, and she is improvising her verses in the ancient tribal tradition of Amazigh (Berber) Women who rate the men in her village and pick themselves a husband in the Ahuache tradition. There are also pieces from the Ahiduth worksong or devotional tradition, again composed by women (Arab society has nothing like this, one reason why the Imazighen, or plural of Berbers are so threatened by the Arabization of their native North Africa). These verses are in the Chleuh dialect that was commonly spoken by the Judeo-Berbers of Morocco, and in the Tashleheith dialect of Tamazight language spoken in the Middle to High Atlas mountain range that bisects most glorious North Africa between the dry Sahara and the deep blue Mediterranean sea.

The producers of this CD in France have already pledged to correct the erroneous liner notes that misidentify this wealth of song and women's verbal virtuosity as being Arabic. The Tamazight language in both written form and oral history has been found in North Africa some 2200 years before the arrival of Arabic via the Islamic Conquest (Al Fatah). The matriarchal Amazigh (Berber) people were theist, pantheist, Judeo and Christian living in multi-cultural tolerance throughout the Greek and Roman invasions, and only converted en masse with the arrival of the ultimately victorious Umayyid armies dispatched from Syria in the year 700. The record producers include their e-mail address so if you get this marvelous recording and don't find a note on the errata or a correction properly identifying the source material and traditions as Amazigh, let them know we're still waiting. It wouldn't be such an issue if the native Tamazight language were not already an endangered language, not allowed to be taught in Moroccan schools, and Amazigh names not allowed to be given to newborn babies who all must be registered with only Arab names.

»Berber Blues« der marokkanischen Sängerin Cherifa Kersit ist die perfekte Ergänzung dazu, denn die Berberin führt nordafrikanische Tradition in Reinform vor: Sheikhat ist kein bestimmtes musikalisches Genre, sondern vielmehr die Bezeichnung für musikalische und tänzerische Aktivitäten. Ein traditioneller Song entsteht meist so: Der Lutar-Spieler (die Laute der Berber) gibt ein Muster vor, die Sängerin stimmt ein und zeigt mittels der Komplexität ihrer Stimmführung ihr Können. In diesem Improvisationsumfeld werden die Songzeilen entwickelt. Kein leichtes Stück Musik, die Sogwirkung entsteht aber dank Cherifas prägnanter Stimme und den vorwärts treibenden Rhythmen allemal.