The Gnawa are present in all major cities of Morocco (Oujda, Tangier, Casablanca, Fez, Meknes, Rabat, Marrakech, Essaouira, Agadir etc.). Musicians, churchgoers and worshipers gather in a night ritual called lila (literally "one night") which celebrates both God, his prophet Muhammad, sub-Saharan Africa and many invisible entities divided into seven families. Music, dance and trance are omnipresent in this celebration.
This book analyzes the identity of the Gnawa, their representations, their ritual instruments, their performances, their music, the sung texts, their dances and their trances. Their perception by the Moroccan society, their "pantheon", their rhythms, their dances and their trances, all these aspects of the actions and the thought of the Gnawa are objects of ambiguity. We will see that the examination of these different fields of activity reveals that the Gnawa play with ambiguity in a systemic and multi-level way: musical, choreological, poetic and symbolic.
A hybrid brotherhood that has perpetuated the memory of its sub-Saharan roots and assimilated the mystical and political influences of its society of exile, the Gnawa - blacks but also half-breeds and whites - have made it an art to reconcile imaginations. potentially conflictual in Moroccan society. Paradoxically, they must cultivate esotericism and strangeness to maintain their legitimacy as experts of the invisible.