Morocco’s Popular Culture Powerhouse: Darija and the chaabi music of Nas El Ghiwane

Darija (or vernacular Moroccan Arabic) with its regional diversity is one of Morocco's most vital artistic languages with a rich oral and performative literary repertoire and heritage. Its sophisticated popular literary imaginary and vocabulary has inspired generations of Morocco's centuries old literary traditions such as Zajal and Sufi genres of poetry, Halqa performances, Malhoun and Gharnati music as well as modern forms of performative genres such as theatre, musical, cinematic and television productions. In this paper, I explore how contemporary Chaabi (popular) music has reinvented the literary language of Darija through a close reading of the musical group Nas al-Ghiwane (established in 1971), a group that is credited not only with revolutionizing the aesthetics of Darija but also with starting a popular social and political movement of freedom in 1970s/80s Morocco, an era marked by brutal political oppression. I argue that the group's use of storytelling through songs draw heavily on Morocco's popular Sufi poetry, performative traditions of folktales and proverbs as well as on the sounds and rhythms of Gnawa (African-Moroccan) music and repertoire. The group reinvented a plural literary Darija in their lyrics and music that cut across regions and social classes; their sophisticated political lyrics represented a nation in search of its “soul” at a time of rapid social and political change. Ultimately, I want to show that although Darija is strongly co-constituted with Arabic Fusha (written Arabic) and Tmazight (Morocco's other vernacular language) as well with other languages in Morocco, it has its own literary imaginary that has constituted a powerhouse of Morocco's popular oral culture. Therefore, instead of opting for the flawed equation of “either or” (referring to the current debates in Morocco on the merits of Fusha and Darija), I argue that we should opt to enrich and nurture Morocco's multilingual scene of oral and print languages and cultures that are not only co-constituted but also marked by their own literary specificity and locality.