Ya Lalla: Oh Queen

There are songs for happiness, songs for marriage, songs for birthing, even a song for when a woman’s water breaks during labor. All our feelings, worries and joys are voiced through song .

This is the region where the Royal Family’s Hijazi ancestors moved to in the 12th or 13th century as well as the region that has birthed many important Tsaddikim , such as the Baba Sale, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzera. The Tafilalet is a holy land, imbued with holiness and royal lineage. Women often sing to the Tsaddik Rabbi Meir Baal HaNess from the 2nd century, the Maker of Miracles whose wife, Bruria was a scholar and is one of the only women named in the Talmud.

When I was a young mother, my friends and I would get together in the central courtyard of our houses to sing while we cooked, kneaded bread, did chores, and watched our children. Today everyone lives spread out and we only sing when we gather on special occasions such as weddings, births and Bar Mitzvahs.

When they get married, we have an extravagant Henna celebration , to protect them from the evil eye and to sing blessings into them and into their future children. We know that the power of our voices travels down through the generations. For most brides, the Henna is more important than the wedding with the white dress.

At the beginning of the ninth month of pregnancy, when we lived in the Tafilalet, women would gather for tea and sweets and sing to the mother-to-be to have an easy delivery, to have many celebrations .

We would gather around the mother-to-be every day to help usher in the new life that was coming. These were moments to laugh and celebrate the new baby, and her as a mother. Some songs joked about wanting a boy over a girl, because the mother’s status was higher if she had boys.

We, the older women, know the fear and pain of childbirth. Childbirth was a dangerous moment in the life of both the mother and the child. When we left the bled (homeland) and moved to Meknes, we continued singing, as well as when we moved to Casablanca in the 1990s. I still sing these songs to my daughters and grandchildren who live in Paris, Israel and New York, but many do not know how to sing them anymore.

The first 40 days after birth are the most perilous for mother and child .

Mother and child stayed in their room, protected from germs, and the mother rested and was taken care of as she healed. If the baby was a boy, the week before the brit (circumcision) the men would come every night to perform the tahdid sword ceremony.

We began having our babies in hospitals and staying there for a month of recouperation, cut off from our community. Some of the dangers were taken away, but so were many of our traditions . French scholars said our music, which is rhythmic and cyclical, was like the Amazigh areas, less controlled by the central government which they called bled el siba. The musicologist Alexis Chottin declared it primitive, uncultured, rural and connected to nature. The French preferred Andalusian melodies which represented bled el mahkzan, the lands controlled by the Sultan, and were according to Chottin, urban, melodic, civilized and refined. Our children were educated in French schools, we gained access into the Western world’s economic opportunities, but lost many of our own ancestral traditions.

Thousands of Moroccans do not know these traditions anymore and many feel disconnected from the depth of their millenary traditions. This cultural deracination often breeds depression and anxiety leading young people to feel isolated and incompetent. I know that young women in the big metropoles of Paris, London and New York might want to feel the enveloping circle of these powerful voices that can accompany them in their mothering .

We hope this online resource will inspire you to reclaim and revive these powerful traditions.