In the Haut-Atlas and at the edge of the Tassaout valley, a woman shook societal standards and lived freely at the beginning of the XXe century. A large speaker with an outstanding voice, Mririda did not carel all the challenges she faced daily, including her illiteracy. She then became a symbol of poetry sung in an entire region, even if her life was not very happy.
In the Tassaout valley, few people gave value to the ideas of Mririda, but nothing prevented her from carrying his convictions. She defended beak and nail The emancipation of her fellow citizens, stood against the hegemony of the protectorate and that of the caïds, then watched, without really knowing it, to keep alive a precious oral heritage. However, this woman lived and ended her life in great anonymity, so much so that neither her real first name, her date of birth, nor her grave were known to researchers.
Born to be a free woman
The poet would have emerged at the end of the 19th centurye century in the village of Megdaz and lived in Azilal. Very young, she learned the texts that she heard the singers repeat during the evenings of Ahouach, before starting to take them back in the 1920s. Her oral poems were a real indictment against submission in all spheres, even if they were of public or even private life. Thus, she stood against the alienation of local powers, to whom she reproached for being at the mercy of the French presence in Morocco, while opposing the institution of traditional marriage.
Poems by Mririda indicated that it deliberately led a courtesan life that she fully assumed, thus choosing a certain autonomy in the constraints of marital life which confined her fellow men to household and reproduction work. She sang her freedom:
Poor naive young man, stop harassing me!
I came to the country to see my parents again,
Not to seek a husband – God preserves me –
And I will return to Azilal soon, if God wants …
My evening favors have so panicked
When, without laughing, you invite me to become your wife (…)
What do you have to offer me against my freedom?
Revealed to generations according to a teacher
When they did not perceive it as a shame on the reputation of the valley, the inhabitants of its region locked it in the image of a marginal woman, to the “light manners”, or even dangerous, although it monitoring its services as a prostitute to several men. But among all, only one listened to it carefully and rubbed shoulders with it without being afraid of it. It is the French teacher René Euloge, thanks to whom the songs of the tandamt* were documented and then inspired other artists.
In her book “Women politicians in Morocco yesterday and today”, the researcher Glacier Recalled that the teacher who worked in Demnate met Mririda through a goum. The latter had taken him to take a tea with the young woman, in the heart of the reserved district of Taqqat which was prized by the skirmishers as by the spahis. He promised him that he would make “a memorable meeting”, and she was in several respects. Falseed by the courtesan, the teacher “appreciated the poetry that Mririda sang for him”, until they want to unravel the mystery behind these words sung with a lot of sensuality. His curiosity pushed him to learn the spotlhit (local Amazigh dialect) and he was only seduced by the aura of his new muse.
Indeed, René Euloge lived in the region when Morocco knew its first years of French protectorate (1912 – 1956). Many colonial travelers flocked to several regions, notably in the Atlas. They came within the framework of Jesuit, military, scientific or educational missions, like this French who was there initially to teach the French language to local inhabitants.
If something was missing from such a free, incisive but illiterate woman, it was her ability to keep a written trace of her songs, and by extension, of her very modern convictions compared to her time. René Euloge filled this gap by sparing him to fall into oblivion. In 1927, he recorded his songs, then wrote them by translating them towards French.
A book to immortalize Mririda
René Euloge rubbed shoulders with Mririda did not care until her disappearance, between the 1940s and 1950s. During all these years, she sang while he was transcribed. In Azilal, he also took photos of the young woman, but later he left the city. Upon his return to the end of the Second World War, he lost track of the poetess which he vainly sought. Indeed, the teacher Sillonna Tassaout, the Souks d’Azilal, questioned the local population, his relatives and his neighbors, but no one gave clues to his life.
At the end of the 1950s, the man still did not find the tandamt who had marked him forever. He learned from one of his friends that she would have left the region to live with an old tommmer. Other historical sources evoked a mysterious disappearance, especially since her last contemporaries still alive said that nothing knows about her. In addition, no place indicating his grave was discovered.
As for the teacher, he devoted a book to him to compile his oral poetry in French. Titled “The songs of Tassaout”the work was made up of nearly 120 texts by Mririda. We learned in particular that the latter had been repudiated by her first and last husband and that she told this episode in one of her songs, before being “denied by his own because of her dissolved and shocking manners”, in the words of René Euloge.
“Following this marital experience, Mririda understood that marriage was a social contract which alienated women, because he dispossessed them of their personal freedom (…) Although so -called, she perceived with clarity the social dynamics which perpetuated the patriarchal structures and she refused to join.”
Glacier
It was probably his audacity that a certain denial resulting from in his native region which did not erect it to the figurehead of female emancipation since time, although it brilliantly embodied it in the eyes of historians. His work, preserved thanks to René Euloge, even inspired the seventh Moroccan art. In 2012, Lahcen Zinoun made the film “Written woman” inspired by the life of Mririda.
* Poet in Amazigh
