Retrouver Oulad Moumen

“One day in March 92, I took up the challenge of trying to reunite my scattered relatives back in Oulad Moumen, south of Marrakesh, the place where my parents had first founded the family (…). It was as if this return to the past caused the intervening years to melt away (…) And yet there they were, those years, in the accounts of our Arab friends and neighbours, in the historical and family archives, those rare and precious chronicles of life shared by the judeo-arabic Berber culture of Marocco. They were also present quite simply in the daily life of my family, which had started out from a small olive farm in south Marocco and then, through the destinies of nine children over two or three generations, had portrayed the main phases of human migration (…), starting from an extremely tight-knit regional existence through to a world-wide dissemination, from the knowledge of a single dialect-based language (Arabic) to a colourful multilingualism (…) These changes have not, however, meant that we have broken away from our roots (…) This is why I felt the wish to finish the story that my parents had begun to tell me one day in the summer of 1975.” (Izza Genini)