Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). He was a Visiting Professor at York St John University (2020¿2023) and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2019¿2022). His recent publications include: Narrating Migrations from Africa and the Middle East: A Spatio-Temporal Approach (with R. Breeze and S. Gintsburg, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Translation and Translanguaging (with T. K. Lee, Routledge, 2019). In retirement he has become engaged with writing and translating poetry and various types of performance. He translates from Spanish and Arabic mainly and has published translations of the poetry of the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika (Baynham 2020). He is currently translating the poetry of the Moroccan zajal poet Adil Latefi and the Kurdish Syrian poet Ceger Hillo. His translation of a poem by Adil was awarded second prize in the 2023 Stephen Spender Poetry Competition. He works as a poetry editor at The Other Side of Hope magazine, setting up a bilingual poetry section, working title Other Tongue/Mother Tongue. In this interview, Mike first elaborates on the reasons behind his involvement with narrative studies and how it became clear that the Labovian model of narrative is not always valid with all types of narrative data. He then reflects on the definition of narrative, the role space and time have in it and offers, as an example of non-linear narrative a ¿picaresque¿ story, in the Arab tradition of storytelling. In conclusion Mike offers his vision of the future of narrative studies.

In this article, the author continues to apply cognitive reading to oral traditional poetry, addressing the kopla zaharra¿a short improvisational poetic genre from the Basque Country that is now extinct. In order to understand how this genre once functioned, the author draws her experience in working with ayyu¿a living poetic tradition from Morocco, which has a strikingly similar structure. The analysis sets out from the historical evidence showing that the kopla zaharra was indeed once an improvisational genre. She then explains the notions of frames, or topics or themes, and scripts, or possible scenarios manifested at least partly in form of formulaic language, which are triggered by these, to analyze the typical cognitive structure of the kopla zaharra. Her analysis shows that on the cognitive level the kopla zaharra offers a structure similar to the Moroccan ayyu, where the first two lines work to activate a frame and the last two lines generally complete a script. This confirms the conclusion that although ayyu and kopla zaharrak are separated by a wide cultural and linguistic rift, the cognitive mechanisms behind the process of their creation are highly analogous.

In this article I continue reading oral traditional poetry from a cognitive perspective. This time I use findings obtained empirically from my previous research on the living short improvisational poetic genre ayyu from Morocco (Gintsburg 2017, 2019a) and turn my attention to kopla zaharrak, another short oral improvisational poetic genre, which once existed in the Basque Country but is now extinct and almost forgotten. In order to better understand how this genre once functioned, I first apply to it the notions of frames, or topics or themes, and scripts, or possible scenarios manifested at least partly in form of formulaic language, which are triggered by them. The analysis reveals that on the cognitive level kopla zaharrak offer a structure similar to the ayyu, where the first two lines work as a frame and the last two lines as a script. In the second part of my research, I compare examples of kopla zaharrak and ayyus and conclude that, despite obvious cultural and linguistic differences, the way both traditions make use of images of the natural world and connect them to human situations has demonstrable similarities.

This article invites the reader to revisit the ancient and universal genre of the lullaby. We start by pointing out that the lullaby has almost never been studied in its natural settings: instead, it is often approached exclusively as a heavily proofread literary text stripped from its context. Further, we focus on tendana, a lullaby from the island of Soqotra. The tendanas used for our analysis were collected from a largely preliterate, non-media-exposed culture and in natural settings. By running a comparison between tendanas and lullabies from a number of other cultures, we conclude that, although there are a number of similarities between them, tendanas also have several unique traits, among them a different sense of safety and danger, only sporadic use of onomatopoetic vocabulary, and an absence of cumulative and counting elements.

Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE (1933, Derry, Northern Ireland) took a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, then joined the Open University of which she is now an Emeritus Professor. Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011). Ruth Finnegan was interviewed by Sarali Gintsburg (ICS, University of Navarra) and Luis Galvan Moreno (University of Navarra) on the occasion of an online lecture delivered at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. In this trialogue-like interview, Ruth tells about the childhood experiences that were decisive for her interest in orality and storytelling, about her education and training as a Classicist in Oxford, the beginnings of her fieldwork in Africa among the Limba of Sierra Leone, and her recent activity as a novelist. She stresses the importance of voice, of its physical, bodily dimensions, its pitch and cadence; and then affirms the essential role of audience in communication. The discussion then touches upon several features of African languages, classical Arabic and Greek, and authoritative texts of Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to the 19th century novel. Through discussing her childhood memories, her assessment of the development and challenges of anthropology, and her views on the digital transformation of the world, Ruth concludes that the notion of narr

En este artículo presentamos la tradición oral de la región de Jbala (norte de Marruecos) desde una perspectiva cognitiva. Empleamos las nociones de «marco» (temas o escenas) y «guión» (lenguaje formulaico) para demostrar cómo funciona el proceso de creación poética en tiempo real. Nos centraremos en el género de ayyu, un género de poesía oral corta, improvisada y autóctona de la región de Jbala. Empezaremos introduciendo brevemente el campo de la poética cognitiva, su terminología más relevante y los últimos avances. Después presentamos la poesía oral de la región de Jbala y examinamos cómo funcionan los «marcos» y los «guiones» en la poesía cantada. Asimismo, analizamos en detalle varios «marcos» típicos de la poesía jebli junto con los «guiones» asociados a ellos para terminar con unas conclusiones en las que presentamos nuestros hallazgos.

In my paper I analyze transformations happening in the oral tradition of the Jbala, an Arabic speaking ethnic group inhabiting the western and central part of the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. My analysis centers on the work of two modern poets, who although they see themselves belonging to the oral tradition, compose their poetry in writing. Their poetry is, therefore, characterized by use of two different, and, to some degree, opposite modes of language - the oral and the written. This is especially interesting in the context of the Arabic language, where, officially, only Standard Arabic exists in two modes - oral and written, while its dialectal varieties are seen as exclusively oral forms of communication and `vulgar' poetry. The textual analysis will be substantiated by information received directly from both poets. To complement this analysis I examine this tradition through the lens of major cultural and identity changes occurring in local Moroccan genres and traditions at the national level and argue that the oral tradition of the Jbala is converging with the more popular and prestigious tradition of the malhun.

Recent interest in oral poetic traditions has centred on the possibility of applying cognitive linguistic categories in order to shed light on the nature of poetic improvisation across a range of cultures and historical periods (Boas, 2016). Frames, or topics or scenes, can be seen to be associated with particular scripts, consisting at least partly of formulaic language, which facilitates the process of poetic creation in real time. This paper focuses on the ayyu, a short improvised oral poetic genre common among the Jbala people of northern Morocco. In the first section, I examine the habitual repertoire of two singers, and show how they indeed associate particular frames (love, pilgrimage, etc.) with certain organizational sequences and formulaic phrases that are also found in the context of these frames in the wider corpus of Jebli poetry. In the second part, I focus on the klam, or utterances, inserted in the middle or placed in the end of ayyus that are always ignored in dictated or published versions of these poems. Klam does not strictly belong within the four-line verse, but is consistently delivered during its performance. These utterances seem to have an important role in live performances, operating as a confirmation to the audience that they have picked up the right frame from the rather sketchy information in the quatrain, and from the use of particular formulaic expressions. Interestingly, although the singers generally use the predictable last line, occasionally they come up with a different option, perhaps with a view to surprising their audience or provoking a response. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

For centuries the people of Africa have been on the move, seeking new opportunities, fleeing from dangers, or tragically uprooted through human greed and cruelty. In the twenty-first century, with over 40 million people migrating from and within Africa each year, it is clear that migration still has a significant impact on every aspect of African life. For this reason, Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze in their new book, African Migrations: Traversing Hybrid Landscapes, explore the hybrid landscapes of African migration and provide new insights into the complexity of migratory movements and migrant experiences associated with the African continent. Taking the view that the only ecologically valid way to understand migration is by looking at it through the eyes of the migrants themselves, the authors draw on a wide spectrum of first-hand evidence from a multitude of sources, including testimonies, media artefacts, workplace experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations. The contributors reflect on a wide array of themes linked to the African context, such as diasporic mapping of landscapes, hybridity, heterotopia, métissage, cultural mixing, and complementation. This book presents the African continent not only in its cultural diversity but also to cover the complex and wide trajectories of migrations to, from and within Africa.

The recent waves of migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe have given rise to an ample volume of research in areas as diverse as sociology, law, international relations, geography and global security. However, such studies tend to focus on members of the active population, mainly men, and young people in full-time education, probably because of the relative ease of contacting these groups. Despite the considerable presence of women in the migrant population, they tend to be less visible than their male counterparts and have attracted less research attention. However, this very invisibility suggests that female migrants have greater difficulty accessing public spaces and are accordingly less integrated into European societies. This problem seems to be particularly acute among women from the Muslim world, where various factors seem to hinder them from participating actively in the workplace.

Narrating Space and Time in Migration Ruth Breeze Sarali Gintsburg Mike Baynham Migration is one of the defining issues of our time. The number of international migrants worldwide has grown enormously over the last half century, motivated by a series of extremely powerful pull and push factors at work on a global level. The scale of this phenomenon is such that today, on a global level, one in every thirty people lives in a country where he/she was not born, with the current number of migrants estimated at 270 million. Substantial numbers of these migrants originated in the Middle East and North Africa region, and also in sub-Saharan Africa, and were motivated, despite danger and hardship, by the promise of a better life elsewhere. Many of them have crossed the Mediterranean or negotiated complex land routes to Turkey and onwards to Europe, while others have remained in countries near their...

Mike Baynham Sarali Gintsburg Migration is a dominant twenty-first-century theme, and its impact on cultural production of different sorts, songs, stories, films and here comedy performance, is hardly surprising, especially in a country like Morocco with its long tradition of migration. Ennaji (2014: 81) argues that Morocco has a deeply rooted culture of migration, such that young children, including girls, while growing up, already feel the pressure to emigrate. Sociolinguistic research on migration stories (e. g. Baynham and De Fina 2005) has focused on oral tellings of the processes of dislocation/displacement involved. Here we focus on the ways that narratives in filmed oral literary production tell the different facets of the migration story, though, as we shall see, many features of performed oral narrative described in the sociolinguistic studies are also present. The theme of migration has attracted creative responses of many kinds, including novels: Ben Jelloun¿s Partir, for example,...

This article contributes to the topic of Moroccan communities living abroad and focuses on Moroccan immigrants in the United States of America. Among the subjects dis­ cussed are: history of Moroccan immigration to America, distribution of Moroccan com­ munities in the United States, their identities, languages they speak and some differences between Moroccans living in the United States and those living in the European Union.