الزلزال والعربية “الفصحى”!

As the popular proverb says: “What do you lack, oh naked one? — Rings, my lord!” Meanwhile, the Amazigh proverb states: “Itegg lhenni xef ticcin”, meaning applying henna to lice, an image that describes anyone who oversteps their boundaries, loses all sense of proportion, and tackles tasks far beyond them before even satisfying their basic and essential needs. This is precisely what the first and second television channels did in their coverage of the earthquake in Al Hoceima. How distressing and repellent it was to hear Classical Arabic used to broadcast facts, interview officials, and question disaster victims who do not even master colloquial Arabic. In situations as agonizing as these, which tear at the heart and bring tears to the eyes, do people choose Classical Arabic—and what a classic!—to communicate between journalists, interviewees, and viewers?

Everyone, including television reporters, was absorbed in searching for the appropriate “classical” words to express themselves, without ever finding them. Consequently, the substance that the reporter wishes to convey to the viewer vanishes, the style becomes heavy, the meaning fractures, and the usefulness of live broadcasting evaporates. The first victim of this linguistic aggression is Classical Arabic itself, mishandled not only by interviewees who can easily be excused, but by the reporters themselves. What kind of Arabic is it when a reporter states: “Deux avions sont arrivées” [Two planes have arrived]? As for those reporters who try to improvise to look like seasoned live-reporting professionals, much like their foreign counterparts, one simply has to plug one’s ears to avoid exploding with anger and disgust at their halting, confused, contradictory, and incomprehensible speech. When they direct their questions in Classical Arabic to an official, the latter finds himself forced to react in a register he has undoubtedly never improvised in his entire life. He is then seen stammering, becoming flustered, panicking, and jumping from one word to another without any connection or relation to the answer he wishes to formulate. It is a cruel ordeal endured by this official, spending all his time searching for terms without ever uttering a single useful idea related to the question asked. As for questioning an “educated” disaster victim in Classical Arabic, it is an additional catastrophe piling onto the tragedy of the earthquake, an unprecedented pain that doubles the weight of the tragedy, and an extra terror inflicted upon them alongside the shock of the disaster. Does the victim, bruised in that place and at that moment, need the classical register, or even colloquial Arabic, to express their feelings to viewers regarding the horrors of the earthquake? It is genuine terrorism exerted by reporters on ordinary citizens with a poor command of Arabic, as they struggle to express themselves in an elevated style to describe what happened.

There is no language in the world capable of translating the feelings and emotions of those who have lived through the horrors of an earthquake with as much sincerity as their mother tongue. How right that Rifian resident was who replied to the journalist questioning him in Classical Arabic: “We thank all the officials of this catastrophe,” when he actually wished to express his gratitude to those responsible for delivering aid to the victims. Yet the classical register, clumsily employed by someone trying to speak it without mastering it, perverted the meaning to deliver another, completely unintended one, which nevertheless applies perfectly to this second catastrophe: that of language and communication, far outweighing that of the earthquake.

Many newspapers criticized the poor performance of Moroccan television in managing the Al Hoceima earthquake, pointing out the delay in broadcasting facts from the epicenter starting Tuesday morning, the restriction of subsequent coverage to official and protocolary aspects, and the inability of teams during the first few days to leave the areas of Imzouren and Al Hoceima to reach other isolated and harder-hit regions. Nevertheless, these same newspapers made the mistake of ignoring the linguistic and communicational dimension of the two channels, particularly in a case as singular as an earthquake striking a region and leaving destruction and victims in its wake. The attitude of the two channels—and consequently that of the Moroccan state—consisting of imposing a Classical Arabic that neither reporters know how to improvise nor disaster victims understand, constitutes a flagrant contempt for the suffering of the latter, a notorious lack of respect for their mourning and grief, and a manifest failure in any genuine solidarity toward them (meaning the solidarity of the state and its television channel, not that of the people). Television has spoken at length about a “solidarity” that it reduces to the simple distribution of a little bread and a few blankets to those affected, forgetting that the best expression of solidarity and compassion, as well as the most effective psychological and moral support for the wounded and victims in the heart of such a tragedy, consists not only of granting them food and cloth, but of addressing them in their own language, of conversing with them in their idiom so that they feel the closeness of sincere solidarity and the intimate warmth sheltered by authentic compassion. Resorting to the classical register to speak to them amounts to abandoning them and erecting an immense distance between them and the state, of which television acts as the mouthpiece. Such a stance radically contradicts the discourse of solidarity with which television has saturated us, which boils down, as I have pointed out, to the handout of bread and blankets.

Television should have, by order of the authorities of course, refrained from using any language other than Amazigh—spoken by the inhabitants of the earthquake-hit zone—during live coverage from Al Hoceima, as an exceptional measure. This would have been a way to express moral support for them, to bring them psychological comfort, to truly draw closer to their suffering, their being, and their intimacy, while marking profound respect and consideration for their mourning and sorrow. One could observe the immense and abyssal gap between those who were questioned in Arabic and had to respond in the same language, and those who were questioned in Amazigh and reacted accordingly (notably within the Tarifit section of the national radio). The former appeared confused, frightened, terrified, resembling foreigners, speaking as if they were stating implausible things, as if they were lying, making a sterile effort not to recall facts, but to find terms used out of their context and meaning, distrusting their interlocutor as if he were about to cut out the tongue that the earthquake had nevertheless spared. All of this made the situation grotesque, even though it was fundamentally painful and distressing. Conversely, the latter, who spoke in Amazigh, expressed themselves with assurance, without fear or dread, concentrating on the subject of the question instead of turning the exercise into a laborious quest for vocabulary, sincere in their words, confident toward their interlocutor, and freed from any distrust, because the Amazigh language had abolished all communicative distance between them, unlike the use of Arabic.

Curiously and remarkably, this insistence by television on using the “classical” register to address citizens, and this in circumstances where an individual specifically requires their intimate language, is a phenomenon more widespread in Morocco and Algeria—that is, in the two largest Imazighen countries—than it is in the Arab nations of the Mashreq. Moreover, those countries now resort to their non-classical vernaculars even during official addresses delivered by high-ranking state officials, much like the Gulf monarchies. As for Egypt, all speeches, interviews, and even parliamentary debates take place in the Egyptian dialect. It is entirely natural that these nations use their vernaculars in communication and oral exchange with their citizens, to the extent that Classical Arabic is not a language of oral communication in any region of the world—with the exception, perhaps, of Morocco and Algeria!—but falls strictly within the realm of writing and reading, being no one’s mother tongue in this lower world. When will officials finally grasp this obvious fact and stop torturing and terrorizing citizens with a “classical” language they do not understand at all, particularly when they have just escaped an earthquake that carried off members of their family, which demands authentic compassion? Such compassion only has meaning and reality through the use of their own language, so that they may feel the warmth, tenderness, and sincerity inherent in genuine comfort.

Directly linked to this issue—that of the imperative to use the language of the populations at least during disasters—is the tragic fate of the orphans of the Al Hoceima earthquake, whom the authorities have decided to saddle with the status of “wards of the nation.” There is a legitimate fear of seeing them become wards of the “Arab nation,” should it be decided to transfer them to reception facilities in Rabat or Casablanca, as rumor has it, tearing them away from their Amazigh space in an effort of arabization and assimilation aimed at severing their identity and linguistic roots.

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