Representational Sovereignty in Moroccan Amazigh Documentary Film

For the Imazighen,¹ who are the Indigenous peoples of North Africa, Indigenous language control and identity construction are the key pillars of human existence. After decades of repression through colonization, Imazighen are increasingly bringing to the fore their hidden histories, through means that ensure control of processes of self-representation, and they are working both locally and in the diaspora to reframe narratives that once erased their specific cultures by promoting Arab language and culture. Cleo Jay has written that "culture is an important arena for the Amazigh movement" and screen media plays a pivotal role in both the representation and retention of "endangered cultures. … torn between globalisation and conservatism" (69). Using a medium that has historically worked to obfuscate, exoticize, and orientalize Amazigh representations and voices by depicting them as adventurous, romantic, and non-European, Amazigh filmmakers take back their stories and reframe them from their sovereign points of view.

As screen media researchers who have collaborated on a number of projects, we come from different backgrounds but share a common world-sense. As a Moroccan Amazigh, Brahim Benbouazza believes very strongly in the preservation of Amazigh identity and languages. For years, he participated in the struggle to have his language recognized as an official language in Morocco, which it finally was in 2011. As a descendant of Canadian settlers and a scholar of sub-Saharan African, Maghrebi, and Amazigh cinemas, Sheila Petty believes strongly that working in cultural contexts different from one's own necessitates the development of respectful listening skills and an openness to new experiences that are critical if one is to listen to, and understand, the goals of such artworks and artists. We both share the philosophy that applying eurocentric frames of analysis to non-eurocentric artworks and texts leads to a context of mistrust and rejection of cultural and representational sovereignty.

In her work on global Indigenous media, Pamela Wilson, building on previous work by Kristen Dowell (2013) and Michele Raheja (2010), proposed the term "indigenous representational sovereignty" to allow for the use of a culture's own particular logic to control and organize the process and product of artistic creation. Wilson maintains that "indigenous representational sovereignty" has evolved in different ways over time as various peoples have appropriated film and video technology and made it their own (97). In this essay, we draw on this foundational work on Indigenous screen media and build on this by looking at the theories of Amazigh scholars of culture and cinema to analyze two Moroccan Amazigh documentary films in light of their embedded representational sovereignty. In 2013, Filmmaker/historian Kamal Hachkar directed Tinghir-Jerusalem, Echoes from the Mellah, in which he travels to Tinghir, Morocco, in pursuit of his Jewish-Amazigh roots. This performative documentary contrasts sharply in style with Tala Hadid's more recent 2017 documentary, House in the Fields, in which she documents the life and rituals of a rural Amazigh community in the southwest region of Morocco's High Atlas Mountains. Themes of identity, language, land, and memory link the two films, as they depict Amazigh history and stories from Amazigh points of view.

Historical context and the amazigh renaissance

By the 8th Century AD, Roman dominance of North Africa had waned leaving the region open to Arabo-Muslim penetration. Indigenous populations—the Imazighen (Free Men)—who had lived peacefully through major Amazigh dynasties such as the Almohades and the Almoravides, found their languages and identities slowly eroding through the centuries as Arabic took hold as the dominant language and Islam as the predominant religion (Pouessel 13–14). In 1912, France established a protectorate out of the majority of Moroccan territory and although the colonizer favored secularism, it generally allowed populations to follow their customary laws. After independence in 1956, however, Arab-Islamic nationalism dominated and the Arabic language and Islamic religion were considered pillars of the Moroccan state, which also served to justify the existence of the Moroccan king, a descendant of the prophet Mohammed (27).

In the early post-independence years, Arabic was enshrined in the Constitution as Morocco's official...