Voices of Iggi n Issnayn: Gender, and narrative memory in a Moroccan Mellah
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38140/ijrcs-2026.vol8.1.06Keywords:
Cultural memory, reported speech, Mellah, Gendered memories, MoroccoAbstract
Females have historically played a vital role in preserving and maintaining a rich reservoir that nourishes cultural memory. In this paper, I employ narrative research to gather data from participants in the villages of Ighalen and Mastour, which are adjacent to the only Mellah of the Ait Inzal subfraction of the Mesfiouia tribe in the Northern High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. My objective is to demonstrate that, in the absence or scarcity of individuals who have had close contact with the Jews of the Mesfiouia tribe in the El Haouz region, elderly rural females from these two villages continue to retain intimate memories, customs, and oral traditions that reflect the Jewish influence on Amazigh culture in the area. Utilising thematic analysis, I collected and statistically analysed narratives from the elders residing in the Ighalen and Mastour villages who interacted with the Jews who once lived in their community (10 males, 5 females). The findings reveal that females from these rural villages employ reported speech in 35.19% of narratives compared to 9.63% for males. An examination of the data indicates that the status of the Jews in these two villages is influenced by the gender of the individual recalling them. Males tend to speak on behalf of the Jews, whereas females provide them with a voice. I contend that, despite their marginalised status in rural Morocco, females from Northern High Atlas Mountain villages remain reliable carriers of memory, steadfast guardians of memory, and abundant reservoirs of memory.
References
Assmann, J. (2011). Communicative and cultural memory. In P. Meusburger, M. Heffernan, & E. Wunder (Eds.), Cultural memories (Vol. 4, pp. 15–27). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_2
Assmann, J., & Czaplicka, J. (1995). Collective memory and cultural identity. New German Critique, (65), 125. https://doi.org/10.2307/488538
Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., Emerson, C., & Bakhtin, M. M. (2011). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (18th paperback printing). University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., & Emerson, C. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (1st ed.). University of Texas Press.
Banfield, A. (1973). Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech. Foundations of Language, 10(1), 1–39. JSTOR.
Budgeon, S. (2014). The dynamics of gender hegemony: Femininities, masculinities and social change. Sociology, 48(2), 317–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038513490358
Chetrit, J. Y. (2019). Intimacy, cooperation and ambivalence. European Judaism, 52(2), 18–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/ej.2019.520203
Chouraqui, A. (1968). Between East and West: A history of the Jews of North Africa (M. M. Bernet, Trans.). Varda Book.
Clark, H. H., & Gerrig, R. J. (1990). Quotations as demonstrations. Language, 66, 764–805.
Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge University Press.
Crawford, M., Herrmann, D. J., Holdsworth, M. J., Randall, E. P., & Robbins, D. (1989). Gender and beliefs about memory. British Journal of Psychology, 80(3), 391–401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1989.tb02329.x
Dijck, J. van. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford University Press.
Driver, C. T. P. (2018). Muslim custodians of Jewish spaces in Morocco: Drinking the milk of trust. Palgrave Macmillan US.
El Guabli, B. (2023). Moroccan other-archives: History and citizenship after state violence (1st ed.). Fordham University Press.
Ely, R., & Ryan, E. (2008). Remembering talk: Individual and gender differences in reported speech. Memory, 16(4), 395–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210801949869
Erll, A. (2011). Memory in culture. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670
Genette, G. (1988). Narrative discourse revisited. Cornell University Press.
Georgakopoulou, A. (1995). Women, men, and conversational narrative performances: Aspects of gender in Greek storytelling. Anthropological Linguistics, 37(4), 460–486. JSTOR.
Goldberg, H. E. (1983). The mellahs of southern Morocco, report of a survey. The Maghreb Review, 8(3–4), 61–69.
González Mandri, F. M. (2006). Guarding cultural memory: Afro-Cuban women in literature and the arts. University of Virginia Press.
Goodwin, M. H. (1995). He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children (Nachdr.). Indiana University Press.
Hammoudi, A. (1993). The victim and its masks: An essay on sacrifice and masquerade in the Maghreb. University of Chicago Press.
Hirsch, M., & Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1086/340890
Ilahiane, H. (2006). Historical dictionary of the Berbers (Imazighen). Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Martin, J. S. (2022). Memory/memory studies (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing.
Johnstone, B. (1993). Community and contest: Midwestern men and women creating their worlds in conversational storytelling. 911409 Bytes. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/6469613.V1
Karrouche, N. (2017). National narratives and the invention of ethnic identities: Revisiting cultural memory and the decolonized state in Morocco. In M. Carretero, S. Berger, & M. Grever (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of research in historical culture and education (pp. 295–310). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52908-4_16
Kattago, S. (Ed.). (2015). The Ashgate research companion to memory studies. Ashgate.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.02nar
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.02nar
Lears, J. (1988). Power, culture, and memory. The Journal of American History, 75(1), 137–140. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1889658
Leavy, P. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research approaches. Guilford Press.
Levin, S. F. (2007). Wit, ruse, rivalry, and other keys to coexistence: Reflections of Jewish-Muslim relations in Berber oral traditions. In N. Boudraa & J. Krause (Eds.), North African mosaic: A cultural reappraisal of ethnic and religious minorities (pp. 178–200). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Levin, S. F. (2017). Narrative remembrance: Close encounters between Muslims and Jews in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. University of California.
Menin, L., & Zentrum, M. O. (2014). Rewriting the world: Gendered violence, the political imagination and memoirs from the "years of lead" in Morocco. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 8(1). https://www.ijcv.org/index.php/ijcv/article/view/3044/pdf_105
Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520
Pascon, P. (1983). Le Haouz de Marrakech (Editions marocaines et internationales, Vol. 2).
Ricœur, P., Blamey, K., Pellauer, D., & Ricœur, P. (2010). Memory, history, forgetting (Paperback ed., Nachdr.). University of Chicago Press.
Rosen, L. (2002). The culture of Islam: Changing aspects of contemporary Muslim life. University of Chicago Press.
Sachs, J. S. (1967). Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse. Perception & Psychophysics, 2(9), 437–442. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208784
Sadiqi, F. (2024). Women in Morocco. In F. Sadiqi (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1232
Saldaña, J. (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). SAGE.
Schippers, M. (2007). Recovering the feminine other: Masculinity, femininity, and gender hegemony. Theory and Society, 36(1), 85–102.
Sylvia, S., & Sylvia, P. (2008). Remembrance and gender: Making gender visible and inscribing women into memory culture. In The gender of memory: Cultures of remembrance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe (pp. 267–287). Campus.
Tannen, D. (2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Brahim Akaya
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
