Hidden - part 2

The day before I left Marrakech I went on a personal errand to find a famous Gnawa Master of the Guembri more famous for his singing voice than his instrumental dexterity but a Master nonetheless. I wanted to give him a glossy World Music magazine featuring a photograph I had taken of him six years ago. I found him in a ancient but recently renovated caravanserai where he had set up his small shop, a colorful hole in the wall lined with his beaded guembris, photographs, posters of European concerts, etc... His French was poor, so we sat there for a while, exchanged news of common friends, drank coca cola, he smoked some kiff… I left having performed my duties and just as I was about to turn the corner I noticed an antique looking black and white photograph hanging on the wall over another musician’s shop. Three old, almost toothless Gnawa, dressed up in their Lila best stared at the camera with a knowing grin. It had the look of the kind of ethnographic photography from the 1930’s. But the caption under it, which was as faded as the image itself said it all: Le Maroc d’Autrefois. The Morocco of the Past. Of course we tend to believe that a certain kind of “restorative” nostalgia only belongs to the present. If only things were like before! Everything was better when…! But how often do we stop to think that someone from that very past we now idolize had the same longings?

Documenting marginal groups has been a traditional documentary genre since the early days of “salvage ethnography” when Western anthropologists roamed the world desperately trying to capture on film the nature of rapidly vanishing cultures. Ironically, today it would seem that the ancient taboos against photography might be coming true. We are all “vanishing” in some way or another, lost in a world of manufactured images that perpetuate the hope that if we keep on filming, if we keep reaching for the margins, if we keep searching for that “other” we will find ourselves in them. And what are we looking for anyway? The enduring stability of traditional cultures versus our westernized cultural suicide? Westerners of developed nations easily forget that they too were once members of a native culture with its traditions tightly bound to community, earth and the spirits of the past. We separate ourselves from our past in exchange for modernity and then, when we feel empty inside; we try to reclaim it in someone else’s. But, if you believe, like me, that there are no boundaries that separate human beings, be they cultural, political, geographical or even physical, then you can go through a red door and come out through a green door. It doesn’t matter. The energy that allows you to find “yourself”, to sail that “sea of tranquility”, to lift the societal veils that bind you like a slave to your assigned roles, that energy, is not local. It does not obey the Newtonian laws of mechanics of our known world. It’s everywhere and belongs to no one. Shamans, spiritual leaders and Gnawa Priestesses like Malika are just better conductors than most.

“The Morocco of the Past” has always been vanishing. When I lament that ten years ago, it seemed that the Gnawa were more stable and truer to their culture, I am acting just like those European photographers caught in their misguided and egocentric circles. It’s a necessary step of deception. One of holes the mind loves to dig for itself. The Gnawa have always been in a state of transformation. They are uprooted slaves, survivors. This is their essence. They deal in Spirits, in that Baraka, that energy that knows no bounds and has the power to get you out of that comfortable hole you’re living in.

Everything that I say about the Gnawa has to be understood from this context. Yes, there is a clear corruption. There a divisions. There is jealousy. There is a flood coming and it seems to me that the ones that will survive are the ones hiding as we speak from my inquisitive gaze…though I have managed to find a few that believe it is still possible to hide in plain sight!