How To Tame A Wild Tongue

''How to Tame a Wild Tongue'' traces the silencing of Tamazight my ancestral language through colonial erasure and Morocco’s ongoing repression. Using fragments, absences, and protest, the work builds a counter-archive of survival and resistance.

Tamazight lives in my mother’s voice, but no longer fluently in mine. At the age of ten, I let go of my ancestral language without knowing it would follow me like a shadow a silence that has shaped my identity as much as any word I learned to speak.

This project begins in that silence and expands outward into history and politics. Born in the Netherlands to Amazigh parents, I grew up fluent in the languages of the coloniser yet estranged from my own. That loss is not only intimate, but political: the result of colonial systems that fractured generations, erased speech, and forced entire cultures into silence.

Like a language silenced, a memory can be erased, suppressed, or manipulated not only by forgetting, but by political design. In Morocco, Tamazight was long denied visibility: banned from schools under French and Spanish colonial rule, marginalised in the decades after independence, and only recognised as an official language in the 2011 constitution, following the February 20 Movement and mass protests during the Arab Spring. Yet implementation has remained slow, and repression continues, particularly in the Rif region, where the 2016–2017 Hirak movement was met with violent crackdowns and mass arrests.

This history of silencing shapes both public life and private experience. My family left Morocco under these same conditions of neglect and repression. I inherited Tamazight not as fluency, but as silence, a silence that fractured my sense of belonging and became the core of my work.

How to Tame a Wild Tongue gathers fragments of memory, erased slogans, unfinished houses, and landscapes of absence to form a counter-archive. Rather than restoring what has been lost, the project stages incompleteness as resistance, insisting that what remains, fractured and fragile, is still alive, still political, still worth carrying.