Novel - The Return - by Lemon Amspreeth (1/2)
In May 2023, the writer Mimoun Amspreth published a novel in Berber under the title “The Return, Memoirs of “Badi”.” The writer narrates the events of the story in the first person, which makes the reader believe, without any doubt, that he is the one concerned with these events, even if they are an imagined creation. Only in the last seven lines of the last 150 page does he tell us and explain to us that when he and the imam of the mosque came forward to transport the deceased named “Badi”, a resident of the town of “Taghazout” (located in the province of Driush), to the place of washing in order to prepare him for the prayer on him in the mosque Then he buried him, under a pillow in his house he found this story, written on a group of papers written by “Badi” in Berber as it is spoken. The writer reviewed and corrected its writing according to the spelling rules of Amazigh writing within the limits of his knowledge of these rules.
the story:
Buddy tells that he grew up in Taghazout. He spent ten years memorizing the Qur’an and then memorizing it, before emigrating to Algeria to work in the estates of the French settlers. After Algeria's independence, he returned to Taghazout. After that he will emigrate to Belgium to work there. A few years after his marriage to the daughter of his father's friend, according to the latter's wishes, he will move his family to Belgium, within the framework of the "family gathering". After fifty years spent in exile, he and his wife, Hammut, will decide to return to their final settlement in Taghazout. Hence the title of the novel: “The Return.”
After the final return to Taghazout, a new life will begin in the fall of life, whether at the level of the psychological situation of Badi and Hamut, or at the level of the town of Taghazout itself, which will return to its former agricultural prosperity thanks to Tafsout. The granddaughter of “Badi” and “Hammout”, who was born, lived and studied abroad in the science of biological agriculture (bio), which aims to preserve the environment, save water and not stress education, and it is the science that she will practice in the town of “Taghazout” next to her husband, “Massine”, the son of the region who He finished his university studies and did not find a job. It was “Badi” who saw in the marriage of “Tafasut” and “Masin” a marriage with “Taghazout”, because thanks to this marriage, “Taghazout” would continue to live after his death (106).
In his memoirs, Badi tells not only of his geographical migration from Taghazout to Belgium, but also of his intellectual, sectarian and identitarian migration that led him to embrace the left-wing nationalist discourse, then the radical Islamist discourse, then the Shiite discourse with the shining of Khomeini's star... All of this was from In order to reach the truth, the truth of himself and who he is.
After years of settling in Belgium, Moroccan immigrants of a different kind began to arrive, immigrants who did not come to work. Among them were students who came to study, and there were those who claimed to be “leftists” and “oppositionists” who fled the regime and came to Belgium to seek asylum. These immigrants, of this new class, began to sit and mingle with the group of workers to which Buddy belongs. He will realize that the words of these people are a kind of “new and different” discourse that revolves around “big” and “distant” matters that have nothing to do with our lives in Belgium or in “Taghazout” (page 23). This is what made him acquire a radio, which he tuned to the “Voice of the Arabs” radio station, in order to listen to that speech from its source.
After twenty years of operation in Belgium, many factories are closing down and workers are being given unemployment compensation. So these workers are spending most of their time inside their homes. Here, another group of immigrants, from different countries, dressed in Pakistani, began calling them and taking them out to pray with them in “garages” that they had prepared for this purpose. And when they are sure that these polarizers have become one of them, they ask them to convey the message (page 28). The owners of Pakistani dress knew how to attract “Badi” at the most appropriate time: the problems of his children are exacerbating day by day (arrest and imprisonment, drug dealing, public drunkenness…), his wife has turned into an intolerable woman. And he memorized the Qur’an, and the people of Pakistani dress chose him to be a “translator” to convey what they call “the message” (page 30).
With his enthusiastic involvement in the movement of the “Tableegh” group, “Badi’s” occupation was no longer the concerns of his small family, but rather his occupation became focused on the large family, which is the “Islamic nation.” He says: “I have fled from myself to ourselves, from the home to the world, from the family to the nation. I began to feel myself as someone who was handcuffed and got rid of his chains, like someone whose vision was obscured by a cloud and then removed. I no longer care about who studies and who dropped out of my children, who went to prison or who got out. But I used to watch my wife and daughters: what they wear and how they wear it, because women’s clothing is one of the preoccupations of the proponents of the message” (page 30).
After the followers of the “Tableegh” group increased, sects and disagreements emerged among them about the type of dress (Kasati, Afghani, Saudi…) and the shape of the beard, and the way to deal with the “infidels”, the people of the countries in which they reside in Europe. Badi says: “We used to quarrel in Taghazout, in the event that this happened, because of the land. Now, the dispute is because of the beard” (page 32). Even in the summer, when Badi was visiting Taghazout, he used to publish in it the discourse of the people of the “Tableegh” on “the nation,” “the lawful,” “the forbidden,” “true Islam,” “disbelief,” “heresy,” “the Sunnah.” , “we”, “they”… He succeeded in that until the “sectarian” differences among the town’s residents, regarding clothing, the veil, the method of reading the Qur’an, burying the dead, and whether television is forbidden or permissible…, exceeded those known in the countries of the Diaspora (page 33).
With the success of the Iranian revolution led by Khomeini, the latter will have a strong and profound influence on “Badi” regarding his positions and sectarian choices. He saw in him the model of the true Muslim, and in his Shiite doctrine the true Islam. He made a real personality change. “Badi” says about Khomeini: “Since I watched him (on television), I am no longer who I am: everything I lived, everything I saw, everything I knew, everything I was convinced of in Belgium … all of that melted like a piece of ice in the sun.” (pg. 34). He embraced the Khomeini doctrine and turned into a Shiite who is hostile to the Sunnis, and he and a group of other Shiites opened a prayer mosque for the followers of the “Ahl al-Bayt” (page 38), that is, the followers of the Shiite sect that Khomeini represents. It was not enough for him what he reached, through his readings of some books pertaining to the Shiites, about the truth of this doctrine, so he wanted to scoop from the original source of Shiites, so he traveled to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, then “Qom” in Iran (page 39).
Gradually, Khomeini will turn, in Badi's view, into a dictator and tyrant. But he outdoes other tyrants because he exercises his tyranny in the name of heaven, as he says (page 41). Thus, he and the members of his group will abandon their Shiite affiliation and their allegiance to Khomeini without any of them informing the others.
After receiving the retirement letter, he began reviewing the stages of his life, stopping at the “Taghazout” stage when it was the “nation” before it was replaced by the “nation” of leftists and Islamists (pages 45-46). The countries of emigration have turned into a harm to “Taghazout”: many of the children of Taghazoutian immigrants belong to them more than they belong to “Taghazout”. In fact, they do not belong to this or that (page 47). Thus, the new generation of immigrants does not know any belonging to earth, because they feel belonging to heaven, which they consider true belonging. So you see them racing to defend Islam and Muslims in any country where they are subjected to treatment that they deem, from their point of view, to be inappropriate. “Badi” says: “We are watching, through broadcast videos, Ibn Haddou slaughtering a man he considers an infidel … and Abdel, Mosta and Simo (these are their names before they called themselves: Abu Obeida, Abu Yasser, Abu Jaber) while they are abusing girls and women for not wearing the veil.” (pg. 49). In addition to those who joined the “infidel” fighting fronts, there are those who remained in the “infidel” countries of Europe, striving by using themselves as a bomb, or by running over passers-by with a car, or by attacking passers-by with a knife…” (page 49). These young men do this because they do not feel they belong on this earth. They were born with it and raised in it, but when they become men and women, the doors close in their faces. This is the aspect exploited by the polarizers of these young men (p. 49). Along with these, the Europeans are no longer “Christians” (Irumians), but rather “infidels” (page 51).
In “Taghazout” after returning:
Once settled in Taghazout, Badi will buy, at the request of Hammout, two pairs of ewes, goats and chickens (page 67) to start cultivating the land and raising some poultry. That is why the first year of the residence of “Badi” and “Hammut” in “Taghazout” was a year for learning anew the contact with life in all its manifestations (page 70).
After Badi got to know the young man, Massine, who came to Taghazout from the city where his family lives, which owns land adjacent to Badi’s, the second will accept joining the Badi project, which is to cultivate fields from the land to revive it from New as possible. After a year and a half, those fields became all vegetables and fruits, so that “Badi” no longer buys from the weekly market except the materials that are not provided by agriculture (page 81).
In the summer of the second year of Badi and his wife's settlement in Taghazout, Tafsout, their granddaughter, will come to spend the holiday with her grandparents. She belongs to the third generation, holds a diploma in biological agriculture (pg. 82). She, too, will choose the final settlement in the Beda, and she will marry the young man “Massine,” and turn the estate into a laboratory (page 123) to conduct experiments in the field of “alternative agriculture” that seek to improve the yield of soil production with the least stress on the soil and the greatest possible economy of water by adopting drip irrigation, with the exclusion of Use of any unnatural materials such as fertilizers and pesticides. Even the energy required to extract irrigation water from wells is derived from solar panels, as clean and natural energy. With Massine's work and Tafsout's guidance, Taghazout turned into a green paradise (page 90). Thus, the town became known for its natural (biological) products, frequented by people from the city and from neighboring villages, as well as immigrants from abroad who flock to it in the summer, to purchase its seasonal vegetables and fruits (page 135). Due to the high demand for the agricultural products of “Taghazout”, a “Taghazout Cooperative” was established to employ the region’s youth (page 123) to increase production. This was a motive for the return of life again to “Taghazout” after the youth of the cooperative and those who joined them from other villages settled there, so they married and had children, so life returned to “Taghazout” with all its social and natural manifestations (page 137). As the town's reconstruction continues, Badi will call for the restoration and repair of the mosque and the mausoleum, as they are part of Taghazout's identity.
Thus, “Taghazout” will turn into a school for its children to learn about life, identity, and authenticity (page 144). Like the legendary phoenix rising from the ashes, Taghazout returned from its ashes after being burned, as Badi commented (page 144).
?another indication
We may deal with the content of this novel according to its apparent direct significance, without interpretation or searching for an assumed hidden significance. What confirms this apparent direct indication is that the writer, Mimoun Amspreth, is the same son of “Taghazout”, and he himself works and resides in Belgium. He therefore has field knowledge of the conditions of diaspora workers, especially those who belong to his village, such as “Badi”. Thus, the novel “The Return” is a “biography” of the immigrant “Badi”, nothing less, nothing more.
However, the focus in this novel, prominently and remarkably, is on what “Badi” was subjected to in terms of alienation and brainwashing, which facilitated his polarization by ideological and sectarian currents that have nothing to do with “Taghazout”, nor its culture, language and identity, nor the concerns and preoccupations of its inhabitants, which made him a soldier. He sincerely defends it, and desperately promotes its ideas and doctrines and travels to remote countries to spread and serve them. It may suggest (focus) that “Taghazout” does not mean only that rural town known as the Driush region, but may mean the Amazigh identity stemming from the land of “Taghazout”; Rather, it may even mean all of Morocco, with its Amazigh culture, language and identity. This identity awareness of Badi appears clearly when he explains why he chose to write his autobiography in the language of “Taghazout”. He says: “We, the people of “Taghazout”, do not write about ourselves. And if we write, we use the languages of others... This is how we erase our traces, or we transform, through writing in foreign languages, into others. I did not want to write in other people's languages.
So I said to myself: Why don't I write my biography in our language in order to protect it from disappearance, because it will be restricted (from restriction) in my language, the language of “Taghazout”.[…] In the language of “Taghazout”, man, language and land mix. The absence of one element leads to the absence of the other two. There is no “Taghazout” without the existence of its language, and there is no human existence without the existence of his language and his land” (page 148). It is clear that those who did not write about themselves in their own language, or used the languages of others to accomplish this writing, are not only the residents of “Taghazout”, but all the Berbers in all of Morocco, but in all of North Africa. This may confirm that the “return” to “Taghazout”, after half a century of alienation and false awareness, may symbolize the return of the Berbers, who are Moroccans with regard to Morocco, to their Berbers, identities, culture and language. Thus, the invitation of the Taghazoutis by “Badi” to use the tongue of “Taghazout” to write, as he did in writing his autobiography, is an invitation to these Amazighs to use their Amazigh language in writing themselves about themselves. And do not forget that the name “Taghazout” is a geographical science known and used in all regions of Morocco, and in Algeria as well, many towns and villages are called, and it is an Amazigh word in its form, even if we assume that its root may be of other linguistic origins. Moreover, all the Moroccans who appeared in videos of beheadings in areas of Syria controlled by “ISIS”, and all those who carried out truck-running operations and knife attacks in the streets in European countries, as stated in the novel, do not belong to the rural “Taghazout”, but rather they are Moroccans - or Algerians descend from different Moroccan regions, which may mean that “Taghazout” is the Amazigh Morocco. And when “Badi” arrived in “Taghazout” after the final return to it, he found that “its features have disappeared due to the sun, wind and rain since its children left it, and they no longer undertake it to care and level its grooves that dug its surface” (page 59).
If we adopt this reading, then the “return to Taghazout”, after fifty years of wandering between various ideologies and religious and sectarian currents, is not just the return of “Badi” to the rural land of “Taghazout”, but may mean the return of all those who resemble “Badi” in their dispossession And their embrace of foreign pseudo-ideologies, identities, and issues, while abandoning their true original identity and abandoning the issues of the country to which they belong, (is a return) to their Amazigh identity that stems from this Moroccan land that is represented by “Taghazout”. “Badi” says, explaining this wandering and this return: “I was like a child whose mother was lost at a wedding, so I began to track down mothers who were made of words and not of dirt (the earth). I run after them and grab their collars. And when they turn their faces, I find them ghouls, so I run away from them and enter myself. Mother of Kalam will never be like Mother Earth. The earth does not lie because it does not speak” (page 61). What “Badi” lived through, after abandoning his mother (his true identity) that stems from the land of “Taghazout”, and replacing it with mothers from the words (various speeches of nationalists, Shiites and Islamists…), is the same as what the Moroccans who have changed from their Amazigh race to another foreign race, so they became They claim that they are not Berbers after being saturated with Arab discourse, in its national and Islamic forms. Just as the rhetoric of the proponents of the message that “Badi” imbued with, and which represented for him, according to his alienation experience, the whole truth, was the one who distanced him from “Taghazout” in the belief, according to what this discourse convinced him of, that the more he moved away from it, the closer he got. From the truth that the nation represents in exchange for the “lie” represented by “Taghazout” (page 67), as well as the pan-Arab discourse, national and Islamic, pushes its Moroccan adherents to exaggeration in denying their Amazigh identity to the point of fighting it, believing that this is the proof that they did not They remain Berbers.
And if “Badi” had seen in “Massine”, the activist in associations defending the Amazigh language and identity, the most suitable person for “Taghazout” (page 80), this is because when he asked him in his first meeting with him about the reason for his visits to “Taghazout”, he answered: «In recent years we have begun to care about who we are, we have begun to ask: Who are we? Why are we not us? Why are we other, though our language is not theirs, our land is not theirs, and our way of life is not theirs? (pages 75-76).
And if the return to “Taghazout” is a return, identities, culturally and linguistically, to the Amazigh after restoring proper awareness and getting rid of false consciousness, this does not mean a return to a past identity that is not keeping pace with development and renewal. We have seen that the agricultural revival of “Taghazout” relied on the latest technologies of “alternative agriculture”, under the supervision of a scientist specializing in agricultural science, the engineer “Tafsout”. Even when the shrine was restored, a “house of culture and education” was established in it, in which the town’s youth meet to discuss issues of concern to the village’s affairs, and to learn a set of skills and knowledge. Thus, the name of the “mausoleum” was not “Amarabaz”, but rather “The House of Culture and Development” (page 131). Converting the shrine into a house of culture is a kind of new modernist dealing with old customs and beliefs. This is what Maassen meant when he was explaining that there are associations working to preserve the Amazigh language and the Amazigh way of life, but not as a dead archive, but as a renewed life (page 95).
Et toujours dans le cadre de cette autre indication possible du roman, on peut lire dans le soin de la mosquée et du sanctuaire, devenu une « maison de la culture et du développement », une manifestation de ce que certains appellent « l'islam marocain ». , qui n'est en fait rien d'autre que "l'islam amazigh", c'est-à-dire la religiosité telle qu'elle était pratiquée par les Berbères depuis la diffusion de l'islam au Maroc jusqu'en 1956. Cette religiosité apparaît également en ce qui concerne la pratique de la prière, comme le dit "Badi" que seuls – à « Taghazout » et avant l'immigration en Europe – les personnes âgées et les « étudiants » sont ceux qui prient à la mosquée. Quant aux autres, soit ils ne prient pas du tout, soit ils prient chez eux (page 21). Cela n'a pas soulevé de remarques ni créé de problème entre ceux qui prient et ceux qui ne prient pas.
I know it is tempting to object that this possible reading of the connotation of “return” expresses what the author of these lines wishes the novel to say, and not what it actually says. But what will we do with the almost eye-popping coincidence between the return of “Badi”, after the misguidance of an ideology and identity he lived for half a century, to “Taghazout”, with the accompanying revival of this town and its resurrection, like a phoenix, from its ashes after it was about to burn, He also described the process of that revival, and what the defenders of Amazighism are calling for to return the lost and lost Maghrebians, identities and ideologies, to their collective Amazigh identity for Morocco and for Moroccans, with what this requires of reviving the Amazigh language by working to spread it among Moroccans through its unified compulsory teaching?
Source: websites