![]() ![]() ![]() In the first lighting entitled “The Girls’ Rock,” Itto joins Lalla J’mila in her miserable cave located within the legendary Hajrat L’bnaat (Girls’ Rock), an exclusively women’s site of elaborate formulaic rituals and devotional cults. The play is composed of seven scenes that the playwright prefers to name “lightings.” An overview of these lightings illuminates the dramaturgical constructs of the text. Liberation movements in Morocco and the less tangible but pervasive legends that surround the mythic city of Tangier as an interzone. Itto, narrating her capture by the police, in the fourth lighting of Zobeir Ben Bouchta’s Lalla J’mila. ![]() And it reveals steps and missteps in women’s Highlighting constructed fixities and polarities such as centrality and marginality, high culture and low mass culture, masculinity and femininity, the play braids together local and global issues. It unlocks histories of Moroccan sexual politics within an extreme situation marked by colonial hegemony on the one hand, and the deeply rooted local patriarchal mindset on the other hand. ( Ben Bouchta 2005:74) 2īen Bouchta’s play Lalla J’mila constitutes a multilayered exploration of the underground history of Tangier as an Edenic social project erected by paternalistic systems of governance, yet ironically represented with feminine qualities as the “Bride of the North” and “the Pearl of the Strait.” The performance is an act of memorializing as well as a scrupulous practice of excavating and stripping away layers of little histories and fragmented first-person narratives to reveal the interpenetration of space, culture, and gender. In Derridean terms, space is very much like a cinder, “something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself” (Derrida 1987:177).Ī woman also is winged she only needs to know how to fly. Space and place, however, are self-erasing, elusive, and difficult to define, for they reflect the surging, shifting, and inchoate character of life itself as a dynamic performative experience. It is construed in complex relationships between gaze and object within cultural expectations. Place is therefore highly individualized, but it is also a recognizable cultural construct of symbolic exchanges and interpretive conventions. 1 Normally, open and undefined, space becomes a practiced place when humans attach meaning to it. It is, then, a theatrical articulation of the space of Tangier as a practiced place. Such place-specific material reveals an extraordinary eloquence insofar as it voices notions of tradition and modernity. In many ways, Ben Bouchta’s theatre is a postcolonial experimental practice that forces its audience to decode various processes of cultural transformation as experimental archaeology. His dramas provide ample evidence of the interpenetration of place, space, and memory. Zobeir Ben Bouchta often approaches Tangier as a palimpsest by performing an intentional writing over of specific spaces already loaded with the city’s memory, and written upon either by individual artists or the collective imagination. ![]()
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