Erasure and Rehabilitation of the Halqa in Morocco: The Vicissitudes of an Intangible Cultural Heritage

If we had to pick one typical cultural phenomenon of Moroccan imperial cities, it would be the public spaces dedicated to the street performances commonly known as “halqa”. This Arabic word means “circle” and it is an approximate equivalent of “agora”. In a famous work on the city of Marrakech, Elias Canetti devotes an entire chapter to these performances, unknown to him up to that point. The chapter is titled “The voice of storytellers”, since the traditional storytellers had chosen this public space to meet their audience daily just after the third prayer of the day, “al asr”. The “halqa” is a practice rooted in Moroccan culture and in specific geographical spaces. From here comes the anthropological interest in this tradition and in these geographical space as “places of memory”, in the definition of Pierre Nora. Whether as a practice or as a space, the so-called “halqa” has gone through a period of neglect, and in some cases even an attempt at complete obliteration on the part of city authorities. This has contributed to the decline of the tradition and to the decrease in the number of practitioners, thus limiting the possibility to hand down the skill to future generations of practitioners and renew the tradition – at least until recently, when intellectuals (such Juan Goytisolo for Jamaâ El-Fna in Marrakech) and specialists (such as anthropologist Ahmed Skounti) have worked to safeguard this heritage. Today, after the rehabilitation of “halqa” in Morocco, questions still remain on its place in modern culture as well as on its future. Would it be enough to restore the “places of memory” destroyed in the last decades to guarantee the continuity of the cultural practices linked to those places? And when it comes to storytellers and practitioners, whose chain of transmission was interrupted, can they rise from their ashes and guarantee future continuity?