Abstract
This study examines Moroccan oral heritage preserved within foreign ethnographic archives during the protectorate era, focusing on the French physician Françoise Légey’s collection, Contes et légendes populaires du Maroc (1926). The research addresses the dialectical tension between the authority of colonial documentation—which sought to contextualize and stereotype folk narratives—and the resilience of local identity embedded within oral subtext. To achieve this, the paper employs a methodological triangulation combining post-colonial deconstruction, structural morphology, and psychoanalytic approaches to analyze the tale of "The Girl and the Seven Brothers" (Lalla Khallala Khedrâ).
The findings reveal that local female storytellers (namely, Lalla El Ghaliya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya) were not passive informants but active agents who asserted their naming and cultural authority within the written archive. Furthermore, semiotic analysis uncovers a rich Maghrebian mythological framework that subverts classical Greek tragic archetypes, moving instead toward a "poetic justice" driven by indigenous symbols such as the ritual of Henna and the camel Hîla. The study concludes by advocating for a digital humanities approach to transition this oral heritage from colonial textuality into polyphonic digital platforms (utilizing trilingual translation and the Amazigh Tifinagh script) as a sovereign strategy to preserve intangible heritage in the digital age.
• Keywords: Oral Tradition; Françoise Légey; Post-colonial Deconstruction; Psychoanalysis; Digital Humanities; Tifinagh Script.
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Introduction
Oral tradition represents the primary cornerstone of cultural identity and collective memory for societies, condensing the psychological, social, and philosophical dimensions of the communities that produced them into folk narratives. In the Moroccan context, this oral legacy is characterized by a unique narrative and linguistic diversity, oscillating between Arabic and Amazigh expressions to reflect the civilizational depth of the Maghreb region. However, this heritage faced a crucial epistemological turning point at the beginning of the twentieth century, transitioning from the space of "local spoken performance" to "colonial written documentation" through the missions of foreign ethnographers and researchers.
Among these documentations, the collection compiled by the French physician and researcher Françoise Légey, titled Contes et légendes populaires du Maroc (1926), stands out as one of the most prominent pioneering references. Due to her clinical and social proximity to local women's circles in Marrakech and its surrounding plains, Légey succeeded in transcribing complex, highly symbolic narrative corpora narrated directly by local female storytellers, such as Lalla El Ghaliya El Rahmaniya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya.
Yet, these acts of documentation, despite their pioneering archival value in saving numerous tales from extinction, were not isolated from the overarching colonial apparatus. Methodological tools, translation mechanisms into the French language, and the Eurocentric interpretive lens often imposed epistemological frameworks that attempted to contain the local tale and stereotype it within primitive paradigms or foreign comparative models detached from the Moroccan sociocultural milieu.
Hence, the core problematic of this research crystallizes in examining the "dialectical distance" between the ambitions of colonial documentation—constrained by its ideological and methodological limits—and the escape of local identity and authenticity embedded within the symbolism of the Moroccan folktale. This study seeks to dismantle this duality through a central question: How did the symbolic core of the Moroccan tale preserve its cultural identity and dynamism inside an archive written in the language of the Other? Furthermore, how can contemporary critical approaches reappropriate this heritage and deconstruct its psychological and anthropological dimensions to decolonize the knowledge surrounding oral texts?
The academic value of this study lies in its refusal to passively consume the colonial archive or merely translate it. Instead, it practices a critical archeology of Légey’s texts (1926) using structural and psychoanalytic tools (deconstructing archetypes and family complexes, such as the incest taboo and intergenerational female conflict). It also offers a practical model for transitioning this heritage from foreign paper archives into local digital humanities platforms, ensuring the preservation of Moroccan cultural specificity for future generations as a living, dynamic anchor of identity.
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1. Conceptual Framework and Literature Review
1.1. Colonial Ethnography in Morocco and the Dialectic of Orality and Literacy
The intellectual landscape of Morocco at the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed intense documentation activities led by foreign scientific and ethnographic missions during the French Protectorate. This interest in intangible heritage was fundamentally intertwined with the strategic objectives of the colonial establishment, which sought to decipher the social and mental structures of Moroccan society to facilitate control (Sebai, 1998). Within this context, local oral tradition reached a critical juncture, forcibly displaced from a dynamic space of performance governed by improvization and real-time interaction to a space of fixed textual inscription governed by the language and cognitive frameworks of the colonizer (Al-Rumaihi, 2014).
The epistemological danger of this transition lies in the fact that colonial writing did not merely record the spoken word; it reframed it through the lens of Eurocentrism (Said, 1978). The methodological tools employed by early ethnographers frequently treated the Moroccan folktale as a "cultural fossil" or evidence of a primitive evolutionary stage, effectively ignoring the profound philosophical and psychological dimensions that the narrative holds within its native environment.
1.2. The Concept of "Decolonizing Knowledge" in the Colonial Archive
This study builds its theoretical framework on post-colonial theories, specifically the concept of "Decolonizing Knowledge" advocated by Frantz Fanon (1963) and expanded by subsequent narrative critics. Operationally, this concept means dismantling the ideological and methodological frameworks imposed by the colonizer on local cultural materials, re-reading them with contemporary critical tools that restore the voice of the independent self.
Dealing with a corpus like Françoise Légey’s (1926) requires practicing what is known in critical analysis as "reading against the grain." This methodology allows the researcher to penetrate the classical written French linguistic layer to access the hidden cultural subtext and symbolic resistance inherent in the original structure of the Moroccan folktale.
1.3. Questioning Textual Authority and the Sociology of the Storyteller (Enfranchising the Subaltern)
The primary academic challenge of this research stems from a glaring paradox documented by the book itself: the colonial text excludes the subjectivity of the local storyteller, placing her in the position of a silent "subaltern" lacking the power of self-representation (Spivak, 1988). This dialectic manifests clearly in the documentary postscript of the tale "The Girl and the Seven Brothers" (Lalla Khallala Khedrâ), where the original text explicitly attributes the narrative to its sources:
"Told by Lalla El Ghaliya Rahmaniya and the Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya" (Légey, 1926, p. 102).
From the perspective of the sociology of literature, the inclusion of these two names represents an unconscious act of equity that slipped through the pen of colonial ethnography. These two Moroccan women do not represent passive "informants" providing raw material; they are the true producers and conscious agents of the cultural text. Invoking the specific names of Lalla El Ghaliya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya provides the contemporary researcher with an academic anchor to dismantle colonial monoliths, proving that the oral text possessed a local identity that dictated its artistic and structural terms even during the process of translation and foreign documentation.
1.4. Literature Review
Reviewing comparative literature on structural and psychological folk imagination reveals that classical anthropological studies, such as Vladimir Propp’s (1968) work on the morphology of the folktale, established universal templates for narrative roles (such as the theme of the seven brothers and the lost sister), yet remained unable to grasp the local specificities of North African cultures. Locally and regionally, the efforts of Said Yaktine (1997) contributed to establishing the foundations of structural and semiotic analysis for folk epics and tales, highlighting the semiotic weight of oral narratives.
However, there remains a prominent gap in academic literature regarding the systematic exposure of francophone colonial archives (such as Légey, 1926, or Émile Laoust) to post-colonial deconstruction that dismantles the binaries of center/margin and colonizer/subaltern while charting their digital and linguistic transformation (via trilingual translation and the Tifinagh script)—a gap this study aims to bridge.
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2. Methodological Approach and Corpus Boundaries
2.1. Methodological Approach: Triangulation Between Deconstruction, Structuralism, and Psychoanalysis
This study adopts an integrated methodological framework based on "Methodological Triangulation" to surpass the limits of a superficial reading of the colonially documented text.This framework operates across three intersecting levels:
1. Post-Colonial Deconstruction: Inspired by the theories of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, this level focuses on tracing "locales of cultural slippage" within the French text; namely, identifying words, margins, and syntactical structures that the colonial pen failed to fully assimilate into Western sensibilities, leaving them expressive of their Moroccan specificity.
2. Structural Morphological Approach: Utilizing the methodological framework formulated by Vladimir Propp (1968), this axis deconstructs the narrative plot and the rules of action within the Moroccan folktale, mapping the distribution of dramatis personae (hero, helper, donor, and villain) to determine their convergence with or divergence from global narrative archetypes.
3. Psychoanalytic and Archetypal Approach: Employing Sigmund Freud’s concepts on familial complexes and Carl Gustav Jung’s concepts on the "collective unconscious" and archetypes. This method deconstructs the deep symbolic themes residing in the Moroccan narrative subconscious, specifically the incest taboo and female intergenerational conflict, comparing them to classical Greek tragic consciousness (such as the Oedipus myth and the Electra complex).
2.2. Corpus boundaries and justification of choice
The scientific material subjected to analysis consists of a specific narrative text extracted from Françoise Légey’s Contes et légendes populaires du Maroc (1926). The tale of "The Girl and the Seven Brothers" (La jeune fille et les sept frères), known in the local imagination as Lalla Khallala Khedrâ (pp. 97-102), was selected as the primary representative sample based on several epistemological and narrative justifications:
• Sociology of the Narrative: This tale is an ideal case study for examining the "voice of the subaltern," given its explicit documentation of local female storytellers from the Moroccan popular milieu (Lalla El Ghaliya El Rahmaniya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya).
• Symbolic and psychological density: The narrative features a highly complex psychological structure. It opens with a core crisis introducing the theme of paternal incestuous desire from the king, intersecting with global mythology, followed by maternal narcissistic jealousy and the girl's subsequent escape to the protective, sacred male domain of the seven brothers.
• Maghrebian Mythological Specificity: The text teems with indigenous cultural motifs, such as the use of wild jujube leaves (Sadr) to disrupt the coloring of Henna and the structural role of the old camel Hîla as the bearer of destiny and poetic justice—elements that distinguish it from European variants like Snow White or The Seven Ravens.
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3. First Applied Axis: Sociology of the Storyteller and Enfranchising the Subaltern
3.1. Dismantling the Binary of (Colonial Physician/Local Storyteller)
Légey’s corpus (1926) presents a complex sociological problem regarding the relationship between the describing colonial subject (the physician-researcher) and the described local object (the popular storyteller). On the surface, the French researcher appears to be the sole proprietor of textual authority, validating the text's scientific legitimacy. However, close critical inspection of the postscript reveals an abrupt inversion of knowledge dynamics. The explicit recognition of the storytellers' names—Lalla El Ghaliya El Rahmaniya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya—shatters the colonial monopoly and proves the existence of an active local female agency that dictated its artistic terms behind the scenes.
Lalla El Ghaliya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya cannot be academicized as mere "passive informants" offering raw material to be Westernized; they represent the embodiment of the "collective organic intellectual" guarding intangible memory. Despite their lack of modern alphabetic literacy, they possessed a sophisticated "oral literacy" that forced the French pen to document the tale with its precise sociocultural nuances, evading total containment or erasure.
3.2. Cultural Subtext and the Slippage of Local Identity Through the French Language
The resistance of local identity within the French text manifests through what critical literature calls the "cultural subtext." When analyzing Légey's translation, it becomes apparent that the foreign language frequently fails to fully absorb native Maghrebian concepts, allowing local expressions (Darija and Amazigh) to disrupt the classical French prose.
This narrative slippage occurs at multiple structural levels: retaining the composite local name "Lalla Khallala Khedrâ" inside the French text is a direct admission of the host language's inability to find a symbolic equivalent carrying the same cultural weight and folkloric sanctity attached to the Khallala (the traditional Amazigh fibula symbolizing identity and protection) and Khedrâ (Green, denoting fertility, blessing, and salvation). Furthermore, the domestic labor within the home of the seven brothers—churning milk, preparing butter in traditional vessels, baking bread in clay ovens—retained its socio-environmental Moroccan spirit, reducing the written text to a mirror reflecting an authentic local reality unrelated to the author's European background. This structural integrity proves that the subaltern did not remain entirely silent; rather, through "symbolic smuggling," she asserted her voice and daily life onto the ink of the colonial apparatus.
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4. Second Applied Axis: Semiotic and Psychoanalytic Analysis of Narrative Structures
4.1. Deconstructing Collective Psychological Complexes: Greek Tragedy vs. Popular Poetic Justice
The tale of Lalla Khallala Khedrâ presents a deep dramatic structure that intersects with classical Greek mythology, specifically the Oedipal and Electra frameworks. The tragedy begins with the father (the king) declaring his intent to shatter the most sacred cultural taboo:
"If you give birth to a daughter who is more beautiful than you, I shall marry her" (Légey, 1926, p. 97).
This represents a clear manifestation of the incest taboo; the father shifts from being the symbol of law and protection to a source of psychological threat within the familial core.
However, the epistemological difference between the Oedipal myth and the Moroccan folktale lies in their handling of "destiny and consciousness." In Greek tragedy, fate is blind and inevitable—Oedipus falls into transgression unconsciously, ending in self-destruction. In contrast, the Moroccan popular imagination rejects tragic defeatism, leaning instead toward "Poetic Justice" through active survival mechanisms.
The mother (the queen) plays a dual role: she hides her daughter to protect her from the father, but later falls into "narcissistic jealousy" induced by her continuous interrogation of the Sun regarding her beauty. This psychological conflict drives the mother to abandon her daughter in the forest, representing what Jungian psychoanalysis defines as forced separation from the maternal matrix to begin the journey of "Individuation."
Conversely, the girl’s flight to the house of the seven brothers marks a transition to a protective space. The number "seven" carries universal and local symbolic weight associated with cosmic completeness, sanctity, and shielding from evil. The brothers do not pose a threat; they become an alternative protective institution that compensates for the absent father, providing the nurturing environment necessary for the girl to transition from isolated childhood to social and marital maturity, mediated by traditional rituals.
4.2. Local Symbols and Mythology: The Semiotics of Animals and Spiritual Kinship
The Moroccan folktale charges local environmental elements with highly specific semiotic and mythological meanings, setting it apart from standard Western variants:
A. The Old Camel Hîla: The Animal Guardian and Intelligent Destiny
While European tales rely on fairies or birds, the Maghrebian imagination uses the camel as a symbol of endurance, loyalty, and deep spiritual connection to nomadic realities. The camel Hîla in Légey’s text acquires supernatural semiotic dimensions; the name itself denotes intelligence, stratagem, and the ability to maneuver through crises. When the brothers fail to diagnose their sister’s clear death caused by a poisoned ring, the tribe questions the camels regarding their patience. Hîla responds with a profound mythological declaration:
"As for me, I shall carry her until the Day of Retribution" (Légey, 1926, p. 100).
The transformation of this animal into a "bearer of destiny" guarding the heroine's body represents the continuity of life and the preservation of spiritual trust until the spell is broken, guiding the heroine to ultimate salvation.
B. The Ritual of Henna and Jujube Leaves: The Semiotics of Legitimate Selection
When the seven brothers fall in love with the mysterious girl who has been maintaining their home, the heroine resorts to a clever semiotic stratagem to resolve the marriage dilemma without inciting fraternal strife. She asks to apply Henna to their palms, but secretly crushes wild jujube leaves (Sadr) and mixes them into the Henna of the six younger brothers, leaving pure Henna only for the eldest.
This ritual carries deep anthropological meanings: Henna is a symbol of transition and blessing, while jujube leaves are tied in Maghrebian folklore to protect, ward off spiritual interference, and alter physical properties. Its use here to prevent the Henna from staining the palms of the younger brothers is not a malicious act; it is a cultural filtering mechanism and social control device to affirm the authority of the firstborn (El-Bikr), maintain the familial hierarchy, and ensure a stable, harmonious resolution for the community.
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5. The Horizon of Digital Preservation and Re-Archiving
5.1. From Colonial Paper to Digital Space: Mechanisms for Decolonizing Text
The process of decolonizing the knowledge surrounding the ethnographic archive does not halt at theoretical deconstruction; it must extend to the practical reappropriation of this material, making it accessible to the native cultural community that produced it. Allowing tales like Lalla Khallala Khedrâ or Aicha Ramada to remain confined to Western academic shelves and classical French print perpetuates an "exclusionary archiving" that deprives the local society of its intangible memory. From this perspective, Digital Humanities emerge as a strategic tool to transition the text from colonial paper rigidity to technological dynamism.
5.2. Trilingual Triangulation and Reviving Tifinagh: Reconstructing the Visual and Linguistic Imagination
The methodology of this reclamation project is realized through a "Trilingual Triangulation Strategy" (Arabic, Amazigh, and English), a step that breaks the linguistic monopoly of the original French documentation and addresses complementary audiences:
• Reviving the Native Tongue (Amazigh in Tifinagh Script): Translating Françoise Légey's tales into Amazigh and adopting the Tifinagh (ⵜⵉⴼⵉ ) script on digital interfaces represents the peak of restoring Moroccan heritage. This step restores the organic link between the tale and the historical language in which it was spoken by local women storytellers over a century ago. The Tifinagh script on a digital interface is not merely a visual design choice; it is an identity imprint that validates the native elements of the region.النّاق
• The Contemporary Arabic Idiom (Darija and Fus'ha): This ensures bridging the gap with the local and regional audience, reintegrating these rare narratives into the collective educational and cultural fabric after decades of absence.
• The Global English Idiom: This aims to liberate Moroccan heritage from francophone isolation, making it accessible to international comparative folklore researchers, elevating the global visibility of Moroccan culture.
This digital linguistic architecture integrates with contemporary cinematic visual media. Using realistic visual esthetics helps transform Légey’s dry textual descriptions into rich scenes that simulate the sociocultural environment of the Atlas villages and ancient medinas. The fusion of the historical script (Tifinagh), modern critical translation, and digital technology ensures that the colonial archive is transformed from a static object of past observation into a living, dynamic repository of identity.
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6. Conclusion and Findings
6.1. Synthesis
This study conducted a critical archeological deconstruction of the francophone corpus of French physician Françoise Légey (1926), Contes et légendes populaires du Maroc, driven by an epistemological objective to decolonize the Moroccan oral text. By reading "against the grain" the tale of "The Girl and the Seven Brothers" (Lalla Khallala Khedrâ), the research mapped the dialectical space between the authority of foreign transcription—constrained by ideological stereotyping—and the resilience of local identity embedded within the symbolic structure of Moroccan folk narratives.
6.2. Core Findings
Based on the semiotic, structural, and socioliterary analyses of the text, the study presents the following central findings:
1. The Agency of the Subaltern Voice: The study demonstrates that local female storytellers (represented by Lalla El Ghaliya and Chérîfâ Lalla Ourqiya) were not passive sources but active, conscious agents who left their cultural names within the written archive, proving that the subaltern possessed strategies for self-representation.
2. Specificity of the Mythological and Psychological Metaphor: The psychoanalytic reading of Lalla Khallala Khedrâ uncovers a rich symbolic framework that subverts classical Greek tragic archetypes (Oedipus/Electra) by steering the narrative toward a "Poetic Justice" rooted in the local socio-environmental context. This is emphasized through the anthropological functions of the Henna ritual, jujube leaves, and the mythological role of the camel Hîla.
3. Digital Humanities as a Sovereign Alternative: Transitioning oral heritage from its colonial textuality into a polyphonic digital space—via trilingual translation and the deployment of the Amazigh Tifinagh script—represents a crucial step to reclaim cultural sovereignty and connect intangible heritage with future generations.
6.3. Future Directions
Consequently, the study recommends directing academic efforts toward
• Subjecting other francophone ethnographic collections compiled during the protectorate era (such as the works of Émile Laoust, Louis Brunot, and Jean Scelles-Millie) to similar deconstructive readings that restore credit to local storytellers.
• Supporting the development of specialized digital platforms dedicated to reviving and translating Maghrebian intangible heritage trilingually, safeguarding popular memory within the global digital landscape.
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References
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• Benbein, A. S. (2003). History of libraries in Morocco. Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Rabat.
• Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
• Légey, F. (1926). Contes et légendes populaires du Maroc. Éditions Larose.
• Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale. University of Texas Press.
• Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
• Sebai, M. (1998). Colonial anthropology and the question of identity: A reading of French ethnography in Morocco. Dar Toubkal.
• Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? Macmillan.
• Yaktine, S. (1997). The storyteller said: Narrative structures in popular epics. Al-Markaz Al-Thaqafi Al-Arabi.