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  • Performing Gender on the Tremulous Moroccan Body: Zoubeir Ben Bouchta’s Lalla J’mila
  • Khalid Amine (bio)

The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories.

—Aristotle (Fragment 668)

Zobeir Ben Bouchta often approaches Tangier as a palimpsest by performing an intentional writing over of specific spaces already loaded with the city’s memory, and written upon either by individual artists or the collective imagination. His dramas provide ample evidence of the interpenetration of place, space, and memory. In many ways, Ben Bouchta’s theatre is a postcolonial experimental practice that forces its audience to decode various processes of cultural transformation as experimental archaeology. Such place-specific material reveals an extraordinary eloquence insofar as it voices notions of tradition and modernity. It is, then, a theatrical articulation of the space of Tangier as a practiced place.1 Normally, open and undefined, space becomes a practiced place when humans attach meaning to it. Place is therefore highly individualized, but it is also a recognizable cultural construct of symbolic exchanges and interpretive conventions. It is construed in complex relationships between gaze and object within cultural expectations. Space and place, however, are self-erasing, elusive, and difficult to define, for they reflect the surging, shifting, and inchoate character of life itself as a dynamic performative experience. In Derridean terms, space is very much like a [End Page 167] cinder, “something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself” (Derrida 1987:177).

Lalla J’mila and the Performance of Gender

LALLA J’MILA:

The bird is being winged, and the winged one shall never drown.

ITTO:

Happy is the one who has wings to fly with when she is near to drowning!

LALLA J’MILA:

A woman also is winged; she only needs to know how to fly. (Ben Bouchta [2004] 2005:74)2

Ben Bouchta’s play Lalla J’mila constitutes a multilayered exploration of the underground history of Tangier as an Edenic social project erected by paternalistic systems of governance, yet ironically represented with feminine qualities as the “Bride of the North” and “the Pearl of the Strait.” The performance is an act of memorializing as well as a scrupulous practice of excavating and stripping away layers of little histories and fragmented first-person narratives to reveal the interpenetration of space, culture, and gender. It unlocks histories of Moroccan sexual politics within an extreme situation marked by colonial hegemony on the one hand, and the deeply rooted local patriarchal mindset on the other hand. Highlighting constructed fixities and polarities such as centrality and marginality, high culture and low mass culture, masculinity and femininity, the play braids together local and global issues. And it reveals steps and missteps in women’s


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Figure 1.

Itto, narrating her capture by the police, in the fourth lighting of Zobeir Ben Bouchta’s Lalla J’mila. Dawliz Theatre, Tangier, 15 April 2004.

liberation movements in Morocco and the less tangible but pervasive legends that surround the mythic city of Tangier as an interzone.3

The play is composed of seven scenes that the playwright prefers to name “lightings.” An overview of these lightings illuminates the dramaturgical constructs of the text. In the first lighting entitled “The Girls’ Rock,” Itto joins Lalla J’mila in her miserable cave located within the legendary Hajrat L’bnaat (Girls’ Rock), an exclusively women’s site of elaborate formulaic rituals and devotional cults. The rock is one of the mythical spaces where Moroccan women can momentarily subvert deeply rooted patriarchal violence. Itto is considered an unwelcome intruder, yet after listening to Itto’s story of her identity, Lalla J’mila realizes that Itto is her sister. The second lighting, “Lalla Yennou,” evokes the tragic version of thrashing: [End Page 168]


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Figure 2.

Itto is raped while in police custody in “Ould Lgllassa,” the fifth lighting of Zobeir Ben Bouchta’s Lalla J’mila. Dawliz Theatre, Tangier, 15 August 2004.

Lalla J’mila and her mother are forced by Ba’haddo to thresh spines, rather than corn, as a punishment for their participation in Lalla Yennou’s anticolonial song in the public bath. Fqiha...

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