2024-07-11 18:56:17
In 24 chapters, Aomar Boum retraces in this work, published in Arabic, French and English, the life of his father, the late Faraji Ben Lahcen Ben Bourhim Ben Boum who was probably one of the last Rekkas of Morocco, these messengers who carried letters on foot before the arrival of the post.
Little known to the younger generations of the digital age, this profession is demystified in this family and historical story aimed at sharing and transmission, illustrated by Majdouline Boum-Mendoza who is none other than the author’s daughter, born in the United States and now fourteen years old. The author and her daughter seal the links between three generations and intertwine their family history and the great history of Morocco, shedding light on little-known parts of our past.
“Faraji, the last rekkas, or pedestrian messenger, traveled thousands of kilometers from his hamlet in southern Morocco, during which he experienced famines and wars, and a whole bunch of anecdotes that he told us, and that we have transcribed and illustrated here,” they write in the preamble to the book.
In an interview with MAP, Aomar Boum confides that “The Last Rekkas” is “a family biography and a story of historical events from the point of view of an ordinary villager from the southeast of Morocco.”
“Majdouline and I use the ethnographic voice of Faraji – my father and my daughter’s grandfather – to tell a local story that has been silenced or neglected. Faraji and the Tata region become, in this perspective, anchor points of our story to tell the story of Morocco,” he explains.
The question of transmission is central to the work of this anthropologist historian who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in addition to his contributions as Associate Professor at the International University of Rabat.
“As an educator”, he claims to believe “in the importance of the message and the means of transmission for a successful transmission of knowledge” just as, as a Moroccan living in the USA, he is attached to “staying in touch with the Bled, parents and family” or again, as a father, he wants to “maintain a link between his daughter and her native oasis”.
“The Last Rekkas” is “a literary and artistic exercise in transmitting not only family memory but also national history”, continues the man who considers the use of illustrated books or comics today as “a requirement to be able to involve the young generation, which is largely connected to images and visuals”.
Due to his father’s profession, the rekkas, his story obviously goes back to “the origins of the Moroccan post office” from the colonial period when, until the introduction of the telegraph, the use of the services of the rekkas remained essential as many regions of Morocco were devoid of roads and railways.
Following in the footsteps of Faraji and the many journeys he made on foot or on the back of a donkey, “his faithful companion”, to deliver written or verbal messages to their destination, braving the many dangers and obstacles that stood in his way, a favorite target for bandit attacks, the book reads like a revisit of the great history of Morocco. The narrative focuses on major periods of the colonial past up to Independence and the epic of the Green March, passing through the transformation of the Moroccan agricultural model, against a backdrop of a succession of droughts, particularly in the oasis areas of the South, local cultural specificities, the diversity and openness of Moroccan society…
For the author, “The Last Rekkas”, a personal witness to many local, regional and global events, is, fundamentally, the story of “a messenger who lived Moroccan history from the 1930s to 1975” with a high sense of patriotism that is reflected in particular by his participation in the Green March. It is “a micro-history that goes against the normal tradition of historical writing that does not focus on ordinary people,” he says.
Richly documented, Aomar Boum’s book draws, in addition to interviews with Faraji, Mahira, his wife, and other villagers of the Anti-Atlas, on archival collections from the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods, research carried out in various institutions around the world, including the Archives of Morocco, the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) and the UCLA Library.
Prefacing the book, the president of the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad (CCME), Driss El Yazami, notes that the work of Aomar and Majdouline Boum also functions as “a beautiful history lesson, pure and simple, inviting us to revisit, thanks to the homage to the last Rekkas, some blind spots of our recent past including the issues of discrimination, skin color and racism, slavery, etc.”
The story, he believes, raises “a fundamental problem in the eyes of any parent, and particularly within immigrant families, that of transmission.”
Holder of the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies in the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, anthropologist-historian Aomar Boum is co-editor of several journals including Souffles Monde, Revue d’Études Tamazgha, and the series Morocco and its Mediterranean Space: Texts and Translations. He is also co-founder of the Amazigh Studies Initiative at UCLA, and co-director of the Moroccan Jewish Studies Initiative at the same university.
2024-07-11 18:56:17