Miroir et mémoire, par Abdelkader Mana 
Georges Essaouira, 1993 (Photo by Luigi Di Cristo, G. De Martino archives)
Fonte: http://rivagesdessaouira.hautetfort.com/archive/2009/03/20/miroir-et-memoire . html
26/11/2009
Lapassade Georges, the friend of Essaouira has always left us Wednesday, July 30, 2008. He died in a Paris Clinque and was buried in the family vault of Arbus in Béarn. Back to Basics:
"I went to Arbus and I started writing in order to exist. "He wrote in his autobiography. His whole life was devoted to writing. Anyone met George did something of his life. As a teacher born, George Lapassade has indeed brought many people to writing, both in Morocco, France, in Italy where he worked with Gianni de Martino and a research group on the tarantula . In his autobiography writes George Lapassade:
"I was born in Arbus, May 10 1924.On said at the time my father sang to the tune of stuffed:
" If the Good God gives us a boy
At the asparagus season
All girls Township
He will burn candle ... "The world
stood for us, roughly between Pau and Monein. "
From there he will go to conquer Paris, as Lucien lost illusions Balzac, where he will be the founding father of institutional analysis, and a world authority of ethnomethodology rites of possession and trance.
Since 1969, George Lapassade visited almost regularly, in Essaouira, every summer:
"I arrived in Essaouira in the first days of July. At first I found the smell of sardines is too strong, almost unbearable. I flip some manuscripts, I always bring with me when I am preparing a new book. I carried in my cloth bags and shopping bags in the large household of which I bought last summer at the market in a Lisbon merchant colors near Belem-Blem-Blum. It was in Belem. I always sang Belem-Blem-Blum in memory of macumba. The rooster crowed, it was midnight in Belem-Blem-Blum. "
Song of the Macumba of Brazil, stembali tunsien, the Moroccan Gnawa and finally rap Paris, wherever he went George was fascinated by the culture-cons and rites of possession of the black diaspora and he began to honor, which earned him an honor of Leopold Sedar Senghor, and a personal letter of congratulations to His Majesty King Mohammed VI, with the publication of his book entitled On the Regraga a marabout, the other in the manner of a castle, one of Celine.
He came mostly Essaouira to write one or another of his books as he recounts in his autobiography:
"I was returning by bus from Marrakech night. It was a night of Ramadan. At dawn, the bus stopped in the open field. And they got off the bus to pray ... It takes a desire higher than normal death and higher than the boredom that suddenly is quite unpredictable, we can begin to define a blank space, as marks of wealth in the desert of white stones placed on the ground in prayer. It should justify what white where words can register provided by law to write. In this white space delimited and we would be looking to the east, very attentive. The sun rises in the east in a broken light, a glimmer of night smashed through the day. The moon has never ceased to illuminate the plain during our journey through the night the moon still up there in heaven, time is suspended over the wavering as if the day was reluctant to get up .... I am making an effort to write about my life in Arbus; I need to find that the memories. I'll try. All festivals were religious. They marked the passage of time. "
And to Essaouira, he was interested in religious festivals, that of the lunar month of Gnawa Shaaban, who are celebrating the birth of the Prophet, but also to seasonal festivals in particular circular Regraga pilgrimage. I had already read his excellent article on the Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom he had published in the journal Metaphysics in 1952, along with Bertrand Russell, but I saw him far on the investigation in Essaouira Gnawa. I was teaching at City College Akenssous. One day in the early 1980s, the headmaster of the school invited me to a meeting scheduled to 16 hours at the Chamber of Commerce, between George Lapassade, and connoisseurs of the city Malhoun. The meeting was caused by Georges, who was investigating Sghir Ben, the champion of malhoun souiri. The origin of this survey, an article Hachmaoui and Lakhdar, summarizing the qasida of Lafjar (dawn) Ben Sghir without giving the text. After this meeting the Chamber of Commerce, George embarked on the investigation into the musical traditions of Essaouira and the region he led after the Festival of Essaouira (1981). Once in Paris he faxed me the following about the controversial article on the malhoun:
"What shocked my mind Cartesian there he wrote, is that we discovered that the specification of a some Saddiki (grandfather of prof. History of the same name) that had exhibited at the Museum and "how" was actually dated from 1920, not 1870 as they claimed, pulling argument that and the contents of the book, to invent a kind of poetic souirie galaxy which would have to sponsor 1870, in Essaouira, Moulay Abderrahman! That's what I contested a lot more than originally souirie B. Sghir. Indeed, this book contained various qasida collected (perhaps) by the grandfather Saddiki during his travels in Marrakech which suddenly became souiri! Given the impossibility of advancing in Essaouira, I finally decide to go visit in Marrakesh Master Chlyeh, host of a sort of Academy malhoun. He very well received, well informed and I think (But be sure) that the version of Lafjar which I then circulated in Essaouira came to him "
whole approach of the ethnographic investigation of George Lapassade resides in the text: when he asked for information on Ben Sghir, Ben Miloud the bazaar, it was sitting on an old trunk containing full qasida, including those of Ben Sghir! This is to circumvent this withholding of information, local reluctance that he was obliged to go to Marrakesh for the famous qasida of Lafjar (dawn)!
The investigation could take years, each He was returned to the attack with his obsession researcher and his Cartesian doubt to rest and yet still the enigma Ben Sghir. He raised other hares he raised problems with wish even we thought to deal with the obvious: the Sultan Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah had founded the port and the ancient Kasbah and not all the medina as we previously thought . The plan established in 1767 by Theodore Cornut is there to prove that George was right. In the eighteenth century, apart from the Kasbah, people lived in tents and bunkers that gave a face military Essaouira, near the neighborhood administration.
Similarly the location of the Portuguese Real Castello was from an old map drawn by Lambrecht, port and not at the mouth of the river where Ksob Borj El Baroud. This error has been committed often on the exact location of the fortress. It gave, as a ruin of the old Portuguese fort, a stronghold cabin located in the dunes, with the old mouth of Ksob, not far from the palace silted built in the eighteenth century by Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah. This fort is not Portuguese, Georges said with good reason. It is simply a battery constructed also, by the Sultan. His whole approach to ethnographic survey is based on the Cartesian doubt, this constant questioning of evidence to Ptolemy.
order not to "tan idiot" on the beach of Essaouira, George will have to solve another "mystery", which falls this time of ancient Morocco. Until 1950, it was thought that the Phoenicians and Romans were perhaps not exceed northern Morocco, while the side of Luxus and Volubilis we had clear evidence of their presence, there was nothing similar to the South until the day when teachers, MM Desjacques Koeberlé and systematic excavations were undertaken on the island of Mogador, who prove that the ancient world was actually much further south than the famous Limes, more exactly to the island of Mogador we can identify Cerne evoked the mythic journey of the Hannon. In 1985, George Lapassade advantage of visiting the city of Desjacques and his wife to ask him about it, and publishes the results of this interview under the title "the story of a great discovery"
"In 1950 Desjacques Koeberlé and teachers in Mogador, spent their leisure the search for flint from prehistoric times. This research led them to the island of Essaouira, where they found the sand fragments of pottery, coins. More systematic excavations were begun immediately. By digging deeply enough of the beach side of the island, on the "mound" was updated with a layer Phoenician, the deeper layers and particularly the most recent time the Romans JubaII. The story of this research was previously unknown. Desjacques has told us is this:
- As it was forbidden, said Desjacques, hunt on the continent in times of closure, the local hunting society of Saint Hubert raised rabbits in the island. The rabbits were grazed grass and bare soil. As the wind carried the sand by erosion, antiques were visible at the soil surface.
But it was to illuminate the first discovery in the island as a reference and Desjacques Koeberlé familiar: the short story tells of the "journey of Hanno," saved from the destruction of Carthage is said, by a Greek scribe. This document describes the travels of the browser in charge of finding and fixing the steps of a maritime. The contents of the interpreted text and gave Desjacques Koeberlé the conviction of having updated evidence of a Phoenician step in the Atlantic can be identified "where we founded a colony," writes the author of the Periplus of Hanno. They then organized a small museum for their students and for the city to Scala:
- was a tiny room that housed everything that we bring the island the remnants of vases, coins. Tell Desjacques.
parts are now in the Archaeological Museum of Rabat. Desjacques and his wife are staying on holiday with friends who live in Agadir:
- Our friends lived near the shore of the ocean, "says Odette Desjacques. A day of high tides, at a time when the sea was far removed from the coast, I saw women collecting shellfish from the rocks. They broke the shells, crushed, washed to the sea water and kept in large baskets, the edible part. I approached them, and then I noticed that their hands were purple. Yet we often speak at Mogador, with my husband and Koeberlé the famous purple Getulians why Romans had installed on the island of "factories". We did not know how the dye was made. And then these women Agadir brought us the solution to the riddle! I remember we put some broken shells in a white cotton cloth that has always kept the color ... There was, in the shell gland, yellow when it is collected by breaking the shell. Then the color changed and became greenish in the sun, then purple, specifically "purple ».... We've made some live shellfish in Mogador, we have deposited in the rocks at the" beach Safi "to try to reproduce them. But the sand has covered. Yet on this same beach, we found shells to be precise, the purpurae haemastomae, empty with a hole in the shell. It is through this article we extract the valuable gland. You could probably still find the same place. We've identified at the Paris Museum, the results were conclusive.
The Island site as excavation site was found we have seen, by chance, so we are looking for flints ... The success of this research should encourage our Moroccan archaeologists to search other traces of antiquity on the coast. "Concluding that George did not believe so to speak, since recently, sailors were caught in their nets, two ancient amphorae, completely intact, just covered with seaweed and shellfish ...
During his visits to Essaouira, George loved to travel frequently to Borj El Baroud rallying point of the hippie movement in the wake of which he had discovered for the first time in Essaouira in 1968 with The Living Theatre:
"19 h 30 . The siren screamed Ramadan, tonight for the first time. It was almost dark. Sadness over the town now deserted. I found the anxiety last year. The street lights come on slowly .... The sun rose this morning. It was cold, a little ill wind ran along the beach, close to the sand to large dunes that surround it, there, the Borj El Baroud. It seemed to me just now that I finally bring myself to write the chronology of my childhood, my youth and then, until my final departure from Arbus and my move to Paris. I thought I had found the courage to get up at fixed times and work. I was convinced that this long awaited moment was finally arrived after a long wait. The summer heat is finally back. I found my room once flooded with sunlight all day. I can watch the constant movement of boats in the bay and harbor. Yesterday I decided to write the story of my childhood. But I find only fragments of memories. I do not know how memories get to this point, or why such a memory rather than another ... The day will be as warm as yesterday, I'll go to the beach, I walk up Borj El Baroud, go dwell in the dunes. I am enjoying life. I do not feel like work, I do a pretty big effort to write a few lines each day. "In this period
hippie where George still in the prime of life has arrived in Essaouira with his pipe and his regular attendance at Bijou bar, are reminiscences:" The other day I smoked some grass, enough to not stand altogether. I'm lying on a bench with coffee hippie, and Majid, they call Speed, challenged me, I looked and saw the same time, under the mask of her laughter, another face , darker, closed, immensely sad, as we see the Greeks, the mask of laughter with the mask of tears. And this other face that is always behind the movements of life, it is already, I am sure, the face of our death.
- And if you die now, "said Murad. If you were to say that you regret not having done in your life, what could you respond?
I replied that I had no answer. I had one yet: my only regret is I missed my life force to think about death, not having lived every moment of my life as a moment of happiness possible. "Yet we
experienced moments of happiness in the spring of Regraga during our excesses common to the valley of Ain Lahjar (the source of stone). That's where we had discovered together, him and me, "the bride petrified" of the Sahel, and the concept of Fai'd as overflow water and baraka. One day we even went together by bus to the Happy Valley Tlit between the Tama and Mount Mount Amsiten in the Haha, to investigate the sound of reapers. My maternal uncle when we received the ceremonial tea with almonds, cakes and rye soaked in argan oil honey and thyme. My maternal uncle said then that I thought Bearnais Paris and has always cherish him from his peasant childhood in the "Pyrenees-Atlantiques," as they call them so beautifully in France. So my uncle said to George:
"The Poet and the hood are similar, no one wants
if there is no rain and thus harvest. .
And Georges, who had once helped his father at the mill in the forest béarnaise fully understood the language and had even nostalgia. Now reading his autobiography I understand how his interest our culture was sincere, because so many affinities linking secretly cultural traits of his native Béarn for anchoring Amogdoul where every summer he anchored to write: "In the time of carnival, the first between the year, Mardi Gras, we went dancing every Sunday in the Estanguet Keel, on clay. The musicians settled on a small balcony boards, playing marches and javas with some jumps and some guigues Basque. Other memories come back: the school garden, the rusty gates of the gate. A phonograph with records chipped in a closet. This old gramophone, placed on a small table in the dining room of my grandmother, replaced an older phonograph with a large funnel-shaped speaker that was lying in the attic in the middle of the cobwebs. "
From there, I think he, his passion for the carnival of Essaouira, this competition sung this hullabaloo, who once opposed to each New Year, the two clans of the city and especially the couplet rzoun of Ashura on the phonograph:
"Let me confess that
Worries oppress
And if I die, nobody cry for me
But what is your chief Chebanate O?
Osman head hunchback
And the belly of a tight rope?
And who is your leader Antar O Blessed?
Ali Warsi port dragging his dog
Eternally on his ass?
Why did you replace,
malhoun by singers of the phonograph? "
He was the first, for his many articles, had popularized the idea that" the city of Essaouira Gnawa. " He had long investigated their rites of possession on those people from the shadows these and these Hamadcha Aissaoua these sacred music which had devoted the first festival and symposium whose proceedings were published in the second issue of the journal Transit Paris-VIII, while the first issue was devoted to secular songs Song titles Essaouira.
Viewers of nocturnal rite of possession fascinated by this "show" trance "inhabited", is primarily sensitive to the music game of its leaders. It is tempting then to conclude that among the Gnawa, it is the musicians who are masters of the game actually tells us George Lapassade here, as in all the rites of possession, management of the situation is provided by the priestesses of the cult. And here as elsewhere, women, because they are held in the margins of religion men have secretly given another "religion" the religion of women.
Again, to explain his interest in ethnomethods healing through induction of trance, we find that distant impression of childhood: "My grandmother knew how to draw the cards and I was encouraged by his example, when I was twelve, to teach me the fortune-telling and even practice. This created an atmosphere, and I can now fairly easy to understand people's beliefs, Brazil and Morocco, around the practice of clairvoyance and possession. My early initiation has determined my continuing interest in the esoteric practices. "
In May 1986 under the title" Journey Into the World of Magic: Talisman and divination in Essaouira, he published SINDBAD, the results of a survey it had conducted with Boujamaa Lakhdar on magic: After survey among the talismanic tolba and bookish sources (the yellow books of magic, developed and published in the Middle Ages inspired great occult tradition, El Bouni Damyati and the Arab-Muslim world in the 12th century, and Agrippa d'Aubigné for the Western world in the 16th century) they conducted another survey on the oral traditions of divination in Shufat:
"Our Drive to Essaouira ethnological research practices magic was done at several levels and in several steps: we first inventoried few bundles of papers tolba existing museum. We then conducted a survey of some tolba in office who were asked to produce herz and talk about their practices. We finally met with some Unlike showy .. Taleb, the showy as women can not relate to "texts" or use writing to make talismans. The women who make magic items, kammoussa are not flashy but called saharate (witches). The blind do not make magic items. She practices especially divination and have a therapeutic role. They often find their vocation through illness (possession) and they go into a trance to make their divination. "
Ten years later, in 1996, the last survey in Essaouira George focused on the tala, the blind psychic, the priestesses of Gnawa who practice divination in a trance. Between
Essaouira and Pau, Pyrenees-Atlantiques and the Western High Atlas, these flavors are transverse to writing, death and nostalgia of origins: "Earlier we butchered chickens in the Street, near Bab Doukkala. The blood flowed into the buckets, it was overflowing onto the sidewalk. In the middle of the courtyard of the shrine of chickens slaughtered red bathed in blood. I did not linger. I looked just in passing, I can not stand this show. And suddenly, as I write these lines, a memory returns to me: I'm lying on the table in the dining room transformed into an operating room, I have eleven years, I scream, it sews the flesh raw. The following year, a surgery of phimosis, but this time at Pau, in a clinic. At this time I was injured for life, comes to anxiety and fear of death. When my mother died, I refused to see her, as required by custom. I held my tears during the funeral, it was a cold day in February, with a pale sun on snow. The day before the funeral, I'm locked in my room with my grandmother, and I wrote not to think about it. After the funeral, I walked into the plain, in the salt, the trees dead of winter. I walked in our fields, I push my shoes in our muck. And then I cried because I was alone. "This anxiety
departure, which heralds a symbolic way, this departure forever is death, George has always felt whenever he had to leave to go to Essaouira to Paris at the end of summer, as a symbolic death and new birth: the end of the summer writing and the birth of a new work.
In this period of "transition" and "transit" we send our articles for publication on music as a social fact, "the folk movement of Nass El Ghiouane", "empire of signs" , "the marketers of Essaouira," or "Spring Regraga. It was to defend the vitality of popular culture against the museumification who watches. In these articles Georges was against what he called the trivialization is in his eyes a museumification Life: As in a museum, it was a sort of scarecrow instead of a living being who was once a costume. Similarly the local music is devitalized by its trivialization.
The Ethnographic Museum of Popular Traditions of Essaouira, headed by Lakhdar Boujamaa fire was then transformed by Georges in a department of ethnography and at the same time, a place of intense cultural encounters. This intellectual hyperactivity, symbolized by the incessant clatter of his typewriter, which filled the vault of the museum all day, gave rise to envious admiration by its creative vitality, was forgetting to George for a time his anguish native of departure to that which can also be death. But as soon as the actual time of departure approaches, the excitement swirling yet again of his lair and recover his person as a jinn possession of writing: "I can do nothing against the anxiety of starting against the suffering that I carry around probably as long as I write ... The night will be hot. A slight wind shakes the palm trees outside the hotel. But the big tree remains stationary. Only the evening star burning in the sky. A distant music pierces the silence. Summer is dying, maybe tonight. But I wish it drags on. Whatever the book if nothing can prevent the death of summer. My summers are already counted. Anything that reminds me, all these signs increase my pain. But the beginning of summer every year brings the illusion that life begins again ... "
Lapassade continued:" The end of summer approaches. I can now return to Paris, and then perhaps return to Pau and then really put me to work. I go through all the places where I lived when I was a kid Lalie I asked the sister of my mother, she remembers everything, she likes to tell stories. It is now time to translate - and my book is done, it will be all alone. This morning, I did not even have the courage to go to market, I will not buy vegetables to prepare my lunch ...
Guy tonight will help me, like last year, to leave this city. Boujamaa happens. He is worried, he asks:
- But what do you do during these two days, nobody has met in the city.
- Nothing. I just wrote a few pages only. And then I waited Guy. Tomorrow we will go together.
Now the weather is gray, intermittently, a pale sun:
- It smells like winter, "said Boujamaa, it is time to leave.
I returned to the hotel earlier. I put in paper bags on camping gas, glasses, plates and I left everything at Fatima. It will keep my business until I return. I paid my final hotel bill. I autographed a copy of Kamal Test on trance. I went to the coffee ice for the last farewell to Said. Birds fly faster in the sky, as clouds of ash blown away. Snow white gulls around a sardine, which returns to port. The shutters of the hotel slamming against the walls. Departures always depress me. I'll leave. I'll leave those I love here. "When we move away
Essaouira is always in the form of the gull that again! Their flight at dusk, they fly low over the waves and above the poles, are the reincarnation of the legends and mythologies marine, as pointed out so well Moubarek Raji, the young poet Arabic contemporary city:
"The seagulls are waves that take flight
And the waves, seagulls mutter
When a wave breaks
A wing penetrates you deeply
And when you break a wing
A wave penetrates you deeply Listen
three seagulls break their eggs
As if the sea rose from the sand for the first time
With musical notes as: hatching eggs of seagulls "
For this poet as the magician what was the land Boujamaa Lakhdar, a gull is not a seagull, it is for the artist the very symbol of the city. The last painting by Lakhdar Boujamaa before his death in 1989, was a fantastic gull wings on the signs and magic symbols of the city. Lapassade George was one of the figureheads of the city, one of its principal authors, his gaze was a clear mirror to the memory of the city. One of these sea birds flying in the light piercing the shores of Purple. It's always in the form of a gull that we visit our loved ones.
One of the fundamental teachings I received from George Lapassade, carrying all our survey word of Essaouira in the early 1980s is not only an obligation to keep a kind of summary of each day learning, but also the educational value of the report: the return of my pilgrimage in Regraga, he came every evening to listen, telling him what happened, I realized that my subconscious had recorded facts without my knowledge. But without listening carefully, I certainly would not produce this or that idea interesting, as the link with the "theory of the gift 'of Mauss, the" eternal return "of Nietzsche, or" observation participant "of Malinowski is produced both by yourself than by listening to the other friendly. As I was saying so my friend George Lapassade in your brain and mine, there is only water, the real spark in the interaction between the two brains. That dialogue was born the light ... I'm afraid that with his death being buried the Word of Essaouira, which he had skillfully managed to escape from the limbo of oblivion.
Abdelkader Mana
