After an hour of pretty heavy rock it picks up Tuareggroup Tamikrest choose to close the Friday evening of the Gnawa Festival in Paard in The Hague with a remarkably charged encore: an emotional song for the children who are victims of hardship and wars in the Sahara. When festival director Mustapha Barbouch thinks back about it the next day, he sighs: “Of course they couldn’t have known it then, but an hour later…”
An hour later. After the concert on the Grote Markt in The Hague, Barbouch is having dinner with other musicians when the first reports of the earthquake in Morocco arrive on their phones. He receives a message from his brother-in-law who has run outside in his pajamas. On the terrace someone screams in horror and sadness.
The affected area is exactly the region where Gnawa comes from, the trance-inducing music style that the Hague festival focuses on. Most musicians and employees have their roots there. ‘Marrakech in The Hague’ is on all posters of the festival.
On Saturday evening there will be A4 sheets with QR codes for donating in the Royal Theater. The festival continues as a benefit. Muffled conversations about family members can be heard in the foyer: “Yes, I spoke to them. They sleep outside.”
At the same time, most Moroccan visitors also come for the music. They clap along with the modern Gnawa. The singing is full of sorrow, but also exciting. In Gnawa, animist practices have merged with Islamic Sufi traditions. It is spiritual music for healing through dancing.
Donate proceeds
Not a word is said about the earthquake in the concert hall. Yet it is implicitly palpable. Music group Fra Fra Sound combines their Surinamese kaseko jazz with the subdued, bluesy guitar playing of Gnawa great Majid Bekkas. The two styles find each other in a distant shared past, because the Gnawa community from Marrakech has its origins in the region of Ghana and Nigeria where many Afro-Surinamese also have their roots. Next to Bekkas are two dancers in traditional robes holding krakebs, iron castanets that dominate the rhythm of the gnawa.
“Gnawa is originally slave music. The pain we feel now is always there,” says Barbouch. During the concert he is briefly alone in the foyer. All night long he was in contact with friends in the earthquake zone – who are miraculously all okay – and with the musicians and festival locations. The venues involved in The Hague soon decided to donate the proceeds. Many musicians also donate their wages to the Red Cross. At the festival market around the Amare concert hall, initially intended to mirror Marrakech’s famous Djemaa el Fna square, a quiet area has been set up and coffee and tea are served.
Barbouch: “I know the region well, it is not known as an earthquake area at all. Several of our volunteers have family there. I once experienced it myself in the north of Morocco and I know that they will be afraid for days to come. Hopefully we can contribute something in this way.”
Healing
The solidarity and the need to celebrate culture is strongly palpable during the closing performance on Saturday evening in the Korzo theater. There, the six Algerian women of the Lemma collective sit in a semicircle. They come from the desert region on the border with Morocco. During a song for a deceased person, frontwoman Souad Asla dances herself into a semi-trance, while she is supported by constant call-response singing and various resonating drums from the women behind her. When she takes her seat again after one of the songs, she says out of breath: “Today we also sing for our brothers and sisters in Morocco.”
There is no question of a sad mood, but there is healing. In the end, stirred up by the percussion, almost the entire audience is dancing in front of the stage with Asla; some in high heels, others barefoot. Even a young woman on crutches. The incense that passes around intoxicates the dancers as Lemma’s women keep prolonging the encore.