Aitelhaj, in O’Neill Library: A single poem “can go on for three or four hours.” Photograph: K.C. Cohen

Soumia Aitelhaj ’10 was born in Zawite Sidi Belal, a hillside farming village of a thousand people in the southern part of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. When she was around six years old, she moved with her parents and two older brothers to Ouarzazate, a city of some 60,000, where most of her relations still live. She was 11 when the family emigrated in 1988 to the United States, living first in East Boston and then a nearby suburb. Now the 23-year-old Aitelhaj is returning to Morocco in an effort to preserve on film what she can of the vanishing Amazigh culture, in particular the oral poetry that distills thousands of years of tradition in stories and songs.

Like all the villagers in Zawite Sidi Belal, Aitelhaj’s family were Imazighen (singular: Amazigh), an ancient, indigenous people, commonly known in the West as Berbers. Imazighen today account for some 18 million of Morocco’s population of 31 million. They speak a variety of related tongues, often collectively called Tamazight. The official language of Morocco, however, is Arabic, and Tamazight has been marginalized as young people leave their Imazighen villages (the population of Zawite Sidi Belal is now around 400) and are assimilated into the dominant Arab and French culture.

The young leave seeking economic opportunity, as climate change and overpopulation have led to desertification of previously arable lands, and as pollution from mining waste has further devastated agriculture. The dwindling numbers of villagers subsist on farming and carpet weaving, and most rely on aid from relatives in urban areas.

When the younger Imazighen move away, a critical bond is broken between the generations: The village elders are passing, and with them goes a vast trove of myths and village tales, handed down through generations, celebrating the spiritual and practical aspects of a life close to nature. A single poem “can go on for three or four hours,” says Aitelhaj, who loves the “rawness” of the poetry and the way it “transforms into song and dance.” This is what Aitelhaj wants to preserve.

Her effort to capture this legacy originated in fall 2009 when she enrolled in the poetry workshop of adjunct lecturer and poet Kim Garcia. The poems Aitelhaj wrote in the workshop sprang from her Amazigh roots—childhood memories of her mother drawing water out of a well and baking bread in a fire pit, her ancestors’ hardships during French colonization in the 1800s, and the experience of young Imazighen forced to take Arabic names in school. (Aitelhaj herself had to abandon her mother tongue in elementary school in Ouarzazate.) Aitelhaj told Garcia that she planned to study law, political science, or international relations, with the aim of becoming an advocate for the rights of repressed indigenous groups. “I have to do something for my people,” she said. In a meeting at the end of the semester, she mentioned to Garcia that her grandmother, now in her eighties, is an Amazigh poet. Garcia wondered aloud if there was a way Aitelhaj might combine her desire for cultural advocacy with her poetic heritage, and the idea of recording Amazigh poets struck them both.

Garcia introduced Aitelhaj to Alexia Prichard, a Boston-based filmmaker who had recently completed Soma Girls, a documentary about the impoverished residents of a Kolkata (Calcutta) hostel. Prichard liked the idea, and the three began planning “The Amazigh Poetry Project,” a film that will capture the chanting and recitation of rural village poets and explore the status of the Imazighen and their culture in contemporary Moroccan society.

In December 2009, Aitelhaj’s grandmother, Fatima Mourabit, came from Ouarzazate to visit her family in New England, and Aitelhaj, Garcia, and Prichard seized the chance to start filming. Their work can be seen in a four-minute trailer for the project at www.closedloopfilms.com.

Prichard and Aitelhaj hope to travel to Morocco in the summer of 2011 for two months of filming. To lay the groundwork for that expedition, Aitelhaj visited the High Atlas region this past summer. With funding from the Boston College film studies department for video supplies and a scholarship from the Philanthropic Initiative, a Boston nonprofit that provides strategic guidance to philanthropists, she departed in late June, carrying introductions from members of the Boston-area Amazigh community to their friends and relatives in Morocco. Her cousin Abdelmoghite Zouhair, a 20-year-old student at Ibn Zohr University in Agadir, traveled with her at the suggestion of her father, who was concerned about his daughter’s safety. “He’s young, but tall,” said Aitelhaj, who is not tall but is, says Garcia, “pure steel.”

The first phase of Aitelhaj’s research took her to the large Atlantic coastal cities of Rabat, Agadir, and Casablanca, where she interviewed Amazigh intellectuals about Berber traditions, and then inland to Ouarzazate. One evening there, she was photographing a river on the outskirts of town with a 15-year-old cousin when a man appeared suddenly and grabbed the boy, put a knife to his neck, and told them not to make a sound. “I think I never actually knew that type of fear until that moment,” says Aitelhaj. “Thank God he just took whatever he liked in the purse, including the camera, and went.” Fortunately, the interviews with professors, poets, singers, and university students, and the music she’d recorded at a traditional wedding celebration, were stored elsewhere.

Aitelhaj returned from the trip with a sense of Moroccans’ continuing discrimination against Imazighen, and awareness of a pro-Amazigh movement that is growing among the young and educated. She experienced prejudice firsthand: When she spoke Tamazight in banks and shops, the usual response was, “Why can’t you speak Arabic?” (Aitelhaj is fluent in Arabic as well as in English and French.) But she says she also had to overcome “outsider” status among the Amazigh. When she and her cousin traveled to her native village, she had to obtain permission from the elders for her work. “In my region, it’s hard to find a word for poetry, so they have a hard time understanding what I want to do,” says Aitelhaj. It took a couple of weeks sitting with the local women, drinking tea and watching them weave, before they would allow themselves to be photographed with her. One very elderly poet let her film a few minutes of chanting on a camera Aitelhaj borrowed from her uncle.

Having thus prepared the ground, Aitelhaj is impatient to return to the High Atlas region and hopes to go back for a week in winter to do more preliminary recording. She and Prichard plan to visit 10 Amazigh villages next summer accompanied by a videographer, sound-recorder, and possibly a guide/bodyguard. In the meantime, Aitelhaj has been applying for fellowships, internships, and grants to fund the next stage of filming. After her Moroccan summer, she has a much clearer sense of the flexibility and patience needed for this kind of work. “This is definitely for me a long-term project,” she says.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

Read more by Jane Whitehead