The sea, for example, has sometimes served as a thinly veiled metaphor to evoke desire. Popular song has taken over the sea to mean the words Of sex without saying them. And we find ourselves with this “high” tide to mean the rise of desire, or “low” to mean that the erection is only a memory and that there is nothing more to hope for…
But it’s not just love or sex hiding behind these metaphors worthy of the best poets. This is the characteristic of all the taboos, of all these ideas and all these words that are scary, that we cannot say.
To point out a political decision-maker, nothing better than talking about the climate and the disruption of the seasons! This is what Nass El Ghiwane sang for example, in their memorable “Soubhane Allah”. Climate change evokes thymic (mood) disorders and unexpected decisions. And when we sing about summer coming into winter, it’s a way of saying: “Our man does anything!”.
Of course, our ancestors also used these metaphors and semantic slips to escape censorship. With a flowery language (in the floral sense of the term), nourished by natural elements (water, air, sun, salt, etc.), to circumvent the prohibitions and impress the gallery.
When, in this extraordinary sung art that is Malhoun, the poet says: “Witnesses saw me cutting and picking flowers, so they said I don’t do Ramadan“, one must decode and decipher to reach the conclusion that the flowers in question are the breasts of one’s sweetheart. See and taste where all this can take us.
And if natural calamities (earthquakes, floods) have always been associated with “ghadab ilahi” (divine anger), a direct consequence of a dysfunction noted among the people and society, the disruption of the seasons, as we have seen, is more generally linked to the “hakem”, that is to say the political decision-maker. Whether local (caid, governor, even tribal leader), or national (central makhzen).
The grid of coded interpretations sees even further. Human crime, that of society, is linked to morals (alcohol, dancing, sexual and religious diversity). As for political crime, it is often linked to a tax that does not comply with Sharia law or to a commercial treaty with the “kouffars” (here the Christians).
Everything is linked to heaven. And to religion. But calamities (the term itself contains a dimension of punishment) and climate change are first and foremost an economic sanction: bad harvests, desecrated fields, decimated livestock, destroyed housing, etc.
Taken to their extreme, these hazards could just as easily fall into the category of “Alamat Assa’a”, the harbingers of the end of the world. This eschatological dimension has always accompanied the lives of our ancestors, explaining the inexplicable and providing certain answers to their misfortunes…
Global warming, tectonic plates, toxic gases, ozone layer, melting ice, ecological imbalance… Don’t know, my friend, not yet. The world was simple, there was no need to complicate it!
