Orature

Abstract

Since the Byzantine rulers shared the Roman interest in theatre or at least in theatricalized spectacle, it is quite possible that the century of their somewhat tenuous control over the Maghreb encouraged some revival of such activity, at least in the coastal cities, but the historical record does not provide clear evidence of this. Certainly with the arrival of the new conquerors, the Arabs, little was preserved of the first Western-style theatre in the region beyond the monumental remains of its performance spaces. Traditional European-oriented theatre history regarded the next millennium of this region’s history as a blank, until European-style theatre returned in the form of French colonial dramatic activity. The advent of Franco-Hispanic colonialism in the twentieth century confronted Moroccan consciousness with the necessity of writing drama, among other Western genres. As colonial anthropology and cultural ethnography erected a hegemonic reading and interpretation of Moroccan cultural history, “it would become increasingly difficult for Moroccans themselves to avoid the need to define themselves and thus to interpret themselves as against the inchoate, unwritten and uninterpretable reality of existence.”¹ Theatre practice in Morocco, then, was informed by the desire for self-definition, and subject to an ambiguous compromise, “at least linguistic — between Semitism and Latinity.”² It was in effect a transfer from formulaic artistic expression, unwritten yet transcribed as a collective artistic imaginary that transcends the bounds of individual author’s signature (theses), to written dramatic and theatrical models borrowed from the West (anti-theses), into a genuine hybridization based on the diffusion and transmission of formulaic artistic space from basic orality to literacy and textual practice (syntheses).