Songs by Mohamed Rouicha

Mohamed Houari (1950-2012), better known as Mohamed Rouicha, was a famous Amazigh artist, poet, singer, composer and musician. “Rouicha” was a nickname which meant “mix something for us” in Tamazight, which was the phrase his friends used to ask him to come up with and perform a new piece of music on the spot. He mastered the “loutar” instrument (see photo). 

Rouicha travelled and performed his music worldwide. He left the “Dior Chioukhs” school in his native Khenifra in central Morocco at the age of 11, and began playing loutar in 1964, especially in traditional bands. The same year, Rouicha started interpreting traditional Tamazight songs and produced his first record in collaboration with the Moroccan channel RTV1. To have accomplished this at that time, when there was only one TV station, was an enormous milestone on the path towards an unprecedented success. 

Rouicha sang in a warm manner, and gradually gained fame in Morocco and North Africa, even among Moroccans who do not speak or understand Tamazight. His music was played on public transport and in public places. He became well-known thanks to titles such as Ya lehbiba, bini w’binek darou lehdoud (My beloved, they’ve set us apart) in Tamazight and Arabic. In fact, Rouicha would sing the same song in both languages with separate titles, the same words poetically translated using eloquent language and very touching poetry. Besides, his unique and artistic way of playing the loutar earned him nicknames such as the “the Spiritual Father of the Loutar” and “the Greatest master of the Loutar” and he was also the one who added the fourth string to the loutar instrument in order to play higher notes. The themes of Rouicha’s texts evoke, in a traditional popular style, love, nature, justice, politics, life and death. 

In 2004, he performed with his fellow musicians in the Roman ruins of Volubilis as part of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music. In July 2010, he was invited to sing to inaugurate the Tinghir Gorges Festival in the town of Tinghir (in the Moroccan Draa-Tafilalt region). This event was very dear to his heart since his mother came from this community. Before starting to perform at this event, he mentioned his parents and sent them his love by saying: “Mimiss n’moulay Lahcen, mimiss n’lala Aicha iliss n’moulay Hanafi oult tdoght”, literally: “Son of Moulay Lahcen, son of Lala Aicha daughter of Moulay Hanafi who comes from Tugdha”.

After a career of almost 50 years, Mohamed Rouicha died on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 because of health problems.

About the songs:

Poetry has played a prominent role in Amazigh culture, as the Amazigh tribes would communicate through it in their daily life and in their work, mainly as agriculturalists, and it was a significant channel to express their feelings, sufferance, and hopes. A great deal of this culture’s history is found in its poetry.

The oral nature of these songs has made them hard to translate because of the numerous varieties of Tamazight dialect; it has also been difficult to transcribe them even within the same dialect because words may differ in pronunciation and thus in their transcription. The standardised script of Tamazight, Tifinagh, is sometimes inadequate because it derives from different dialects; however, looking words up in the dictionary of standardised Tamazight words was of significant help to tackle this issue.

Islam has had a considerable impact on the Imazighen (Amazigh people) as they easily adopted the religion and the language of the Quran and neglected their own. Islam is not to blame and nor is Arabic; however, the Amazigh people should have developed both languages long ago so as to preserve their real identity and stay open to other cultures. However, Islam has improved aspects of Amazigh life significantly, especially in terms of spirituality and the rules of social conduct, as the Imazighen demonstrate in songs like the second one included below. The first song is an emotional song talking about how poverty could affect any relationship; the second song deals with politics and the Arab wars. 

I have added the phrase “my beloved” for reasons of explicitness, because the complement the singer talks about is not yet mentioned. Furthermore, the use of both gender pronouns (him/her) is due to the fact that most phrases from Amazigh songs can be sung by both genders while referring to each other, especially in love songs.

   – Abdessamad Binaoui

The Songs:

Inas Inas (Tell my beloved)

Tell my beloved, tell her/him how I should deal with the time’s ups and downs.

When one cannot find what to offer to his/her beloved

Poverty reduces arrogance

Oh life, you dislike me and death does not wish for me

It is me, God, whom you left to heat and cold.

Oh brothers, a person like me deserves to cry

I miss my beloved, to whom the road is long.

Idda Zman Ighudan (Good times are way behind)

What an abominable time, the good times are over

Let me shed a tear, oh, time, this is what you require

Righteousness is handicapped, when on Earth

Oh evil you’ve been helped to reign over

How we’ve been turned white-headed, oh, because I overthink

Sadness replaced you, my joy

Oh, how Palestine suffers, its walls are torn down

Oh, enemy, they fled abandoning their land to you

They tear down walls, neighbours’ voices are shut off

Bullets empty roads, fear lives in houses

Lovers are separated even if they loved each other

Some left their families seeking solitude of foreign lands

You, oh Jews*, have the power to plan far ahead

Which you use to kill the Arabs, who lack this power

I see Lebanon’s suffering

Whoever is targeted by the Zionists won’t rest

I am skinnier and feeling unwell

Iraq is gone, I am crying over the dying children

So be it, divine revenge is awaiting

Let this matter to God, it is not something he cannot handle

*Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a number of Moroccan musical groups, such as Nass el-Ghiwane, Jil-Jilala, Lamchaheb and Essiham produced songs supporting the Palestinians. Historically, Morocco had one of the largest populations of Jews in the Maghreb and the Middle East, and their presence went back to the pre-Islamic period. The relations between Jews and Muslims in Morocco and the larger Muslim Mediterranean were very much transformed throughout the modern colonial period, and later with the emergence of political Zionism. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the majority of the Jews fled their Middle Eastern and Maghrebi homelands. These and other historical layers, together with the ongoing conflicts – the continuous Israeli occupation of Palestine and the steady normalisation of relations between several Arab states and Israel, including the 2020 agreement between Morocco and Israel – have shaped and continue to shape the stereotyped image of ‘the Jew’ that is noticeable in Rouicha’s song above. The MULOSIGE editors would like to encourage the readers who are willing to know more about the subject to take a look at the following academic books, articles and recorded seminars and literary books (which is by no means exhaustive).