Mezoued, the North African art form you never heard of…
Lotfi Jormena (Whose name literally means “Lotfi the Duck”), a Tunisian Mezoued artist, passed away a few days back. May he rest in peace and may his loved ones be granted strength and patience. His passing made me realize that most of my non-Tunisian friends have never heard of Mezoued, the most under appreciated art form to come out of North Africa.
Most World Music aficionados have likely heard of Moroccan Gnawa. Algerian Rai, though not as famous as Gnawa, has significant followers in several parts of Europe, and has arguably gone mainstream in France. But very few people outside of Tunisia know about Mezoued.
The word “Mezoued” (also spelled Mezwed, as well as other alternatives) refers to both an instrument, a sort of Tunisian bagpipe made out of a goat skin, and the genre centered around that instrument, which basically consists of Mezoued solos interlaced with singing, all against a constant swinging darbouka beat. More recently, modern recordings will often include bass guitar, synthesizers, and electronic percussion as well. I was briefly the bass player for a Mezoued band one summer in Tunis. Those were the two most interesting two gig nights I’ve ever had: Mezoued musicians make the Rolling Stones and Metallica look like choir boys.
Often times, Mezoued goes hand in hand with belly dancing. The belly dance moves that Tunisian women do are not too different from the Middle Eastern belly dance that most people are familiar with. However, unlike the Middle East, in Tunisia, men will belly dance as well. The dance moves that the men follow are different, and are actually closer to Flamenco or Latin dance styles than to what most people think of as Belly Dancing.
Mezoued occupies an interesting place in Tunisian society. The urban elite of the capital Tunis and the coastal cities look down on it with derision, to the point were “Mzaoudi” (i.e Mezoued player) is a by-word for Riff-Raff. Respectable people don’t go to neighborhoods were Mezoued is played from houses at night. Parties with Mezoued bands should be avoided. Even drivers blasting Mezoued out of their vehicle (usually an Isuzu pick up truck) on the road are to be avoided, as they are possibly dangerous,….
Worse still, Tunisian musicians who are trained either in the Tunisian/Arabic classical tradition or the Western classical tradition, look down on it as an “unscientific”, improvisation heavy, style, that requires little skill and no “finesse” in playing.
And yet….Mezoued is actually a very complex genre: The scales that Mezoued music uses are an interesting combination of traditional Middle Eastern scales, similar to what you would hear in Egyptian or Turkish music, and pentatonic scales and patterns that came to Tunisia from the other side of the Sahara desert via the medieval slave trade (yes, Arabs had some pretty shameful episodes in their history as well…). Note the similarity to blues and jazz here. Additionally, the drumming patterns typically start out as basic swinging syncopated patterns, but can occasionally turn into a very complex, almost polyrhythmic interplay between multiple darboukas and bendirs (two types of Arab percussive instruments).
But the most intriguing thing about Mezoued was the lyrical content. During the dictatorships of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, censorship was rife, and mainstream and serious musicians typically sang sterile love songs about how their beloved looked like Jasmin flowers or the full moon or what not, or maybe they would be commissioned to record some obnoxious hymn to the glory of Tunisia and the hospitality of Tunisian people, etc….
Mezoued musicians were the only people during those dark times (1956 ~ 2011) who actually dared sing about sensitive topics, such as unemployment, immigration, poverty, etc…..Even when they sang love songs, they tended to use a more risqué register and sensual vocabulary than mainstream signers did.
One of my favorite Mezoued songs is by an artist called Salah El Farzit (literally, Salah “The Cricket”), “Irdha a’alina ya l’ommima” (Oh mother, please forgive us). On the surface the song is about a son who was treated unfairly by his mother, but he is begging for her forgiveness since he will always love her no matter what she does. The real topic of the song though (based on hints in the lyrics, and a more explicit version which was only published after the revolution of 2011) is prisoners in general and especially political prisoners, and what the singer is saying is: “We will always remain patriots, even though our country has mistreated us.” — hence the analogy with son always loving his mother, no matter how much she mistreat him. The word that gives away the political nature of the song is the last part of the chorus, where he sings “I’ve been waiting for your forgiveness since 1976” — 1976 is the year that the Bourguiba regime declared that they would start respecting the rights of prisoners, although in practice they never did. There is another interpretation of the song, where “mother” is a reference to Habib Bourguiba himself, who on one hand is referred to as the “father of modern Tunisia”, but who was also a ruthless dictator who didn’t tolerate any opposition and many political prisoners were tortured by his regime. Salah El Farzit himself spent time in jail for expressing opinions that were objectionable to the Bourguiba regime.
Mezoued is about breaking social norms in more than one way. One of my fondest memories when I was a kid was of my Tunisian grandmother singing a Mezoued song called “Ya Jari Rod Enneba” (Oh neighbor, please bring me the news). According to her it was originally a traditional song from El Kef (A city in Northwestern Tunisia, near the Algerian border) that was sung at weddings, but by the time I was in elementary school (1988~89) it had become popular all over the country. Unlike the album versions playing on the radio or on the street, the original version my grandmother knew had some swear words in it. Which was interesting, because in Tunisian culture, it is considered highly inappropriate for women to swear (men might do so occasionally, but they would never do it in mixed company). Moreover TV or commercially recorded music never has any explicit language in it either.
So I was shocked that my grandmother, a polite, soft spoken, conservative lady from the Tunisian country side, who used to frown when a scene involving lip to lip kissing appeared on TV, and never left the house without her headscarf and safsari, would sing such lyrics. The song consisted of a man waiting for his friend “Laamari” to bring him news of whether “that perfect tall girl, the mistress of all women” would accept his courtship. The recorded versions included only the man’s side of the story. The longer version that my grandmother sang to me included the responses from the girl, where she would mock him and say things like “Let that asshole make his own couscous, I’ll never cook for him.”.
Back to the topic of socially conscious music in Tunisia: The tradition has continued and flourished in other genres as well. My friend Emel sang protest songs about freedom of expression and workers rigths (For example “Ana kilmti hurra” — my word is free) during the height of the Ben Ali regime’s oppression, at serious risk to herself and to her family. And Tunisian rapper El General actually ended up in prison for a Rap track called “Rais El Bled” (Mr President) — where he echoed the same themes as Salah El Farzit did decades earlier, but this time addressing Ben Ali, not Bourguiba: “Oh Mr President, you say you are our loving father, how do you let them (corrupt government officials and violent police forces) treat us this way? Please treat me as one of your children (i.e. don’t get offended) when I complain to you about the state of the country”.
Emel, El General, and many others, were actually following in the tradition of socially conscious music that Mezoued musicians first established in Tunisia, in the 1950s and 1960s.
The below song is a recent track by the late Lotfi Jormena, along with a younger artist named Wajdi Roussi. It is titled “Ya Sfina” (Oh Ship) and is about a father urging his son not to get on a ship, the “ship” here referring to the small fishing boats that migrants use to cross over secretley from North Africa to Europe, and which are not built for crossing the Mediterranean. The son responds with a litany of reasons why he is desperate to leave Tunisia and go to a developed country, where he can find jobs and a future, and that the ship is his only way out, as dangerous as it maybe.
Allah Yarhmek ya Lotfi (God bless your soul, Lotfi).
