Soumia Aitelhaj '10 rejected her Amazigh heitage as a child but has now fully embraced it. (Photo by Katherine C. Cohen)
'I Knew I Had to Find Myself'
Senior is on a mission to keep alive the poetry of a dying culture - her own
By
If you ask senior Soumia Aitelhaj's what she's planning to do after graduation, be prepared for quite an answer. This summer, the BC English major is starring in a film that will document her work to save the poetry of her dying culture in North Africa.The task is a far cry from where the 22-year-old started. Aitelhaj is Amazigh (better known as Berber in the West), an ancient, indigenous people who inhabited North Africa and the Sahara desert.
She grew up in Morocco, and from an early age shunned the Imazighen culture in an effort to fit in with her peers. She studied hard, learned Arabic and quickly distanced herself from her heritage.
"I remember one day when I was around 10 years old, an Amazigh girl came to our school who did not speak Arabic. Other students started laughing and making fun of her. I joined in," said Aitelhaj.
"I have so much guilt surrounding that moment," she said. "As a child, you are confused about such things, but that decision haunts me to this day."
Aitelhaj's family eventually moved to the United States and started a life in Revere. She attended high school in Boston and, over her past four years at Boston College, has attempted to reconnect with her lost identity.
"I look it as an evolution of identity. When I arrived at Boston College, during my freshman year, I decided to remove my hijab [headscarf worn by Muslim women]. It was a scary experience, but one I could deny no longer. I knew I had to find myself and turned to the part of me that is Amazigh," said Aitelhaj, adding that the transformation caused some tension within her family.
Last semester, during an especially challenging Introduction to Poetry course with English part-time faculty member Kim Garcia, Aitelhaj started to take a closer look at her culture.
"Soumia came into my class with strong poetic gifts, although she hadn't written much formal poetry up until then," Garcia remembers. "She had an intuitive grasp of the importance of image and from her earliest work produced poems with remarkably rich imagery."
During Garcia's office hours, Aitelhaj shared her hopes to pursue a career in political science and law, possibly at the United Nations, so as to advocate for the Imazighen people. But she also shared her desire to have poetry play a role in her life.
"It was not until the last day of class when Soumia mentioned that her grandmother was a poet, one of the last of the elders who still recite the poetry of the Imazighen," said Garcia. "The idea of recording and translating the poems - and thereby combining Soumia's two passions - finally came together in our minds."
When her grandmother recently visited the US, Aitelhaj took the opportunity to interview her. Although illiterate, the older woman would often regale her family with stories that have been passed down by village elders for thousands of years.
"When I ask her about the poetry she learned as a girl, I see her smile," said Aitelhaj. "My mother also helps translate the meanings, which I am so grateful to have."
As part of a post-graduate research project funded in part through the Philanthropic Initiative, Aitelhaj will travel to Africa and begin to record and translate the oral tradition of poetry among the Imazighen. She has partnered with a documentary film crew, Closed Loop Films, who have already started recording her efforts - beginning with that first interview with her grandmother. The BC Human Rights Center and Law School have also offered support for the project, and at this time Aitelhaj is working to secure additional grants.
"This needs to be done now because so much of the poetry and stories are with the elders alone. As they pass on, the poetry slips away," said Aitelhaj. "So many people, like me, want to assimilate and often forget the poetry and traditions. Now, I'll be working to preserve that."
Garcia takes it one step further.
"If you want to destroy a culture, you attack where the meaning inheres most richly - its religions, its art and its poetry. Poetry is the way a culture knows itself. It can store everything from myths to village stories to love poems with rhythms and musical language in a way that allows generation after generation to access that passion and know who they are," said Garcia.
"Each time I heard Soumia's grandmother falter and then grow silent during the recording, I felt a pang, as though a page of The Iliad was just lost," said Garcia. "There are a handful of these poets occasionally reciting in her village. No one knows how old they are, even the poets themselves. No one knows how long Soumia has to record them before their poems are gone. Every minute is precious."
Ask Aitelhaj to share her favorite poem and she pauses, lost in thought.
"My favorite is one my grandmother tells about a man coming to the village," she finally says. "He offers praise for the beauty of all the women, but also makes fun of them for being so vain. It's not only the words that make it a favorite - my grandmother starts laughing when she tells it, laughing at the jokes the man tells. It's hard not to see the humor in the story when she laughs."
A trailer of the documentary will be published on the Closed Loop Films website, www.closedloopfilms.com.