by Devin Race
Essaouira is a mid-sized beach town on the southwest coast of Morocco and for 4 days every summer since 1997 its pedestrian-only streets have been mobbed by dreadlock-wearing soul-searching musical pilgrims. This year, I was one of them (sans dreadlocks). If you can successfully brush aside the very insistent vendors of marijuana-laced pastries, the Gnawa Fest is an enthralling event.
The focus of the fest, the Gnawa, are a spirit possession sect of Islam almost exclusively living in Morocco. The Gnawa version of Islam tells that there are spirits that walk and live among us. Spirits can posses, and this can mean bad news if you don’t deal with it. So, the Gnawa have a song for each spirit. These songs bring the spirits to the surface and ultimately allow you to figure out how to cope with bodily possession.
That gives you a poor picture of how the fest actually went down though—the vibe of Gnawa fest is more like a big party than spiritual healing, more so than any concert I’ve been to in the U.S. Here are some reasons why: First, nobody crowded up against anyone else, despite the thousands of people there to see the shows. Spend some time at popular concerts with young people in the US and you’ll find yourself unintentionally grinding with the people stiflingly packed in front of you.
This space was very key for the next way that the Gnawa fest was unique: everybody danced, all the time. The only ones awkwardly standing were the occasional Westerner—a breed in short supply anyways. The Moroccans there, young and old, danced with abandon, and most everybody clapped along to the rhythm of every song. In fact, the musicians seemed to expect it. And not just simple downbeats either; people would clap out syncopated rhythms as they jammed out.
The Gnawa music is supposed to be a direct call to the spirits inhabiting the body of the possessed—it is religious, even more so than a hymn. The festival though was spiritual only in the loosest sense of the term. As the festival publicity details, the idea of the Gnawa Fest is to “share the authentic soul of Morocco.” This changed how the Fest was billed—it was never really packaged as an Islamic festival, but an African one—the poster for the fest this year was a smiling African man. Moreover, organizers this year decided to invite K’Naan—an icon of hip-hop pan-Africanism. K’Naan’s show was fun and unexpected, but his between-song banter made nothing of spirituality beyond the pan-African spirit he embodies.
The African-izing of the Gnawa has been a consistent theme in their history with the West, starting with the jazz pianist Randy Weston, responsible for introducing the West to the Gnawa. Ironically, this popularity has made the Gnawa less “African” in the sense that American blacks mean to represent them—most Gnawa were born into being Gnawa as descendents of slaves brought to Morocco from the South of Africa. But because it has become profitable to be a Gnawa musician, more and more Moroccans apprentice to become Gnawi. So, your average Gnawi is much more likely to be phenotypically Arab than black African.
I don’t want to take an oversimplifying moral stance or leave it ambiguous what I think about this. I like Gnawa music and I liked the big party of the festival. But I like the chaotic, syncretic mish-mash of the Gnawa’s African-influenced pantheon of spirits, drawing from Islam as well as Christianity and even Judaism. There can be three or more languages in a single song. This syncretic intersectionality is also a big part of the character of Morocco, and it would be a part of anything I took to be Morocco’s “authentic soul.”