Abdelmajid Arrif, ethnologist, Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme (USR 3125), University of Aix-Marseille (AMU).

 

 

These lines, cut in marble in a plaque on one side of Jemaa el-Fna Square, inform the passer-by about the universal heritage quality of this square, awarded in 2001.

Juan Goytisolo (born 1931) is no stranger to this enterprise. He was its critical conscience.

Ever since his first visit to the square, and long before he campaigned for its preservation, he praised in his writings the oral culture which pervades the square and makes it the spoken word's most prominent landmark in a world governed by the written word and challenged by broadcasting (radio, television later joined by the new communication technologies). A human and a literary commitment which has produced the most beautiful pages written about the square[1] already invested with and saturated by words, images, fantasies, writings and stereotypes. He was able to embody the vitality of the spoken word in performance and create various characters who animated it. Even so close to the asphalt he was able to read its human and expressive richness, while never falling into the facile, romantic, exotic hyperbole which took hold of the square.

His reflections on oral culture also questioned his own writing, literary culture and style.

“As Mikhail Bakhtin showed in his admirable analysis of Rabelais, there was a time when the real and the imaginary mingled, when names supplanted the things they designate, when invented words had their own existence : they grew, developed, mated and reproduced as beings made of flesh and blood. The market-place, the main square, any public area was the ideal place for them to develop: stories became mixed up, legends took on a new life, the sacred was subject to ridicule while never ceasing to be sacred, the most scathing parodies were reconcilable with the liturgy, the well-turned story kept the audience in suspense, laughter mingled with thanksgiving, and the juggler or the showman grabbed the moment to pass the bowl.

(...) In the light of oil lamps, I thought I noticed the presence of Rabelais, the Archpriest of Hita, Chaucer, Ibn Zaid Al Hariri and many dervishes.”[2]

Unlike the Tharaud brothers who devoted a chapter of their book Marrakech ou les seigneurs de l’Atlas (Marrakesh or the Lords of the Atlas) to this square, calling it La Place Folle (The Crazy Square), J. Goytisolo makes much of a popular oral tradition's subversive wisdom coming up against the authoritarian reason of scripture.

“And always the tide brings me back to a strange place where this rustic population, different each day, stops and crouches around things which delight it – and retain me as well – for hours, attentive as an unlettered man in front of a large open book.”[3]

The Tharauds wrote about Jemaa el-Fna under a spell, saying how difficult it was to understand the scenes and situations, thus doubling the interest and passion for the square's strangeness.

On the other hand Juan Goytisolo learnt the Moroccan dialect and had conversations with ordinary folk and the hlayqia in the square. He was no longer at the stage of amused or intrigued curiosity but in a dialogue with the square and its men which fed his own literary creativity. On the edge of the square, sitting on the terrace of the Café de France, he made his table a centre of hospitality, welcoming the hlayqia with whom he exchanged stories.

He said later that “Jemaa el-Fna is a great oral book, written by the illiterate.”

When he knew the square well, Juan Goytisolo developed a series of stimulating thoughts about oral culture and its historical forms. From the American historian and philosopher Walter Ong[4] he borrowed the idea that there are two categories of oral culture: primary oral culture and secondary, adding a third – hybrid oral culture.

Hybrid oral culture seems the best way of describing Jemaa el-Fna today, saturated as it is with signs, graphics, images, objects, writing – a whole multi-faceted culture, both tangible and intangible – presented by real, live voices which perform them in inventive narratives and stage-shows where the body is an integral part of the whole story-telling magic.

 

Born in 1931 in Barcelona, ​​Juan Goytisolo went into exile in 1950 fleeing the Franco dictatorship. At the end of the 1960's he settled in Marrakesh, an important resting place on the map of the towns of the nomadic life to which he was committed.

“Spanish in Catalonia, French-ified in Spain, Latin in North America, Christian in Morocco and everywhere an alien. Because of my nomadic life and my travels, it did not take me long to become one of those writers whom no-one claims as theirs, foreign, hostile to clans and categories. (...) Freedom and isolation are the reward for any creator immersed in a multiple, border-free culture, wandering wherever he likes towards the country that suits him best, never becoming tied to any.”[5]

Faced with globalization and the culture multinationals such as the Walt Disney Corporation, which he says “has killed the imagination of millions of children around the world”; faced with the contempt of “everything that is not part of the competitiveness prevalent in the Global Village”, Juan Goytisolo, Marrakeshi by adoption, was the originator of the concept of an oral heritage of humanity, a concept taken up by UNESCO and applied for the first time in Jemaa el-Fna after his article, “A magical space of sociability. Jemaa el-Fna, the oral heritage of humanity”, published in Le Monde Diplomatique in June 1997.

“The influence of cybernetics and broadcasting flattens populations and minds, “Disneyises” childhood and atrophies its imaginative abilities. One town alone retains the privilege of sheltering the otherwise deceased oral heritage of humanity, qualified by many with Third World contempt. I mean Marrakesh and Jemaa el-Fna, on the edge of which, for over twenty years and at regular intervals, I have written, walked and lived.” This article was the start of the process which led to the consecration of this site by UNESCO.

“The adoption by UNESCO of the new concept of Oral and Intangible Heritage has opened the way to preserve the oral culture of hundreds of languages ​​that have no written form. It has stimulated the historical study of innumerable inter-weavings and intermediate situations resulting from the influence of writing, printing and modern broadcasting and information technology on the spoken word.

It is an urgent task, given the size and complexity of the mosaic of languages ​​and cultures under threat, in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. And we must tackle it fully aware of the risks: these cultures and languages ​​are a living heritage, and we should not fall into the trap of making them museum pieces, of playing at being anthropologists who, as a Mexican intellectual said “consider people as cultural fossils.” Our action must therefore be subtle and discreet, protecting the various cultural manifestations of the 3,000 spoken languages ​​in the world and their “living treasures”. We must not create “native reserves” except in cases of extreme necessity, that is to say when we have to write a death certificate for a language, having first recorded and filmed its death throes for the anthropological museums in the major cities of the world.

To do this, we must bear in mind the different degrees of primary oral culture we are faced with, and the hybrid nature of the examples of oral and intangible heritage preserved by tradition over the centuries. A challenge open to all government organisations concerned about biodiversity in the world, a biodiversity severely threatened by the uniformity imposed by the laws of the Global Village and the fundamentalism of techno-science.”[6]

 

 

 

Juan Goytisolo, Makbara, Paris, éd. du Seuil, 1982.

Juan Goytisolo, Un espace magique de sociabilité. Jemaa-el-Fna, patrimoine oral de l’humanité, Le Monde diplomatique, juin, 1997.

Jérôme et Jean Tharaud, Marrakech ou les seigneurs de l’Atlas, Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1920.

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London and New York: Routledge, 1982; Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1971.

 

 

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