Unsilencing the Desert

In the Drâa-Tafilalet region of Morocco, about 220 miles east of Marrakech, drought has swept over the town of Meski like a hush. 

Here, lush date palms once shadowed a serene oasis called La Source Bleue: shallow pools that filled naturally from the underground aquifer. Until 2021, this oasis was a popular tourist destination and a cultural hub for Indigenous Amazigh communities, the nomadic tribes who have lived in Morocco’s desert regions for centuries. 

“The oases are truly a source of life for the nomads who live in the Drâa-Tafilalet region and the entire Moroccan desert,” says Mustapha Tilioua, an anthropologist of Amazigh descent and professor at the nonprofit Tarik Ibn Zayad Center for Studies and Research in Errachidia, a half-hour drive from Meski. La Source Bleue, he says, was “the heart of the oasis.”

For the past three years, climate-change-induced drought across much of Morocco has hit places like Meski especially hard. Now, La Source Bleue is dry, its low walls crumbling into an empty basin. Scarce drinking water has forced Amazigh families to relocate to urban centers with more reliable water resources for themselves and the livestock on which they depend. 

Tourism has likewise dried up, causing a loss of income for the more than 20 families who have depended on La Source Bleue for their livelihood. 

But amid the silence, there is music. In a medina near La Source Bleue, an Amazigh musician is trying to revive Meski—and his community’s heritage—with the sounds of the desert. Mouloud Amrini, who performs under the name Meskaoui, hopes to use what he calls “environmental music” to help his community attract visitors. 

“The music that I play [is like when] I walk throughout the desert,” Meskaoui says.

Meskaoui first founded his Gallery of Music Mouloud Meskaoui in 2009 to educate people about Amazigh musical traditions and nomadic music from around the world. It is supported in part by the Tarik Ibn Zayad Center, where Tilioua teaches Amazigh cultural history. 

On average, Meskaoui says the gallery receives about 800 to 1,000 visitors a year—a mix of international visitors and fellow Moroccans. That’s far fewer than before the oasis dried up, but he says its purpose remains vital. 

Meskaoui’s gallery is part of a wider goal to preserve what Tilioua calls a “rich regional heritage for future generations.” Some of Tilioua’s students have Amazigh lineage but lack a connection to their identity—the result of many years of government-led marginalization. That’s why he established the Sijilmassa Museum: Crossroads of Civilizations, with photographs, instruments, clothing, and other relics that show the diversity within Amazigh tribal history.

Tilioua and Meskaoui’s partnership started 20 years ago when they went on tour together to introduce nomadic Amazigh music to the world, performing in Saudi Arabia, China, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Mali, Timbuktu, Egypt, and elsewhere. Soon enough, they began to host musicians in Meskaoui’s gallery.

Mandolins, West African djembe drums, tambourines, electric guitars, keyboards, and other souvenirs from Meskaoui’s travels crowd the walls of his performance room, where he and other musicians play improvisations that blend elements of Amazigh music with their own styles. 

“It preserves [Amazigh] culture so it doesn’t disappear,” Tilioua says, while also giving it new life through novel collaborations. For example, Meskaoui jams with Gnawa musicians, a nearby Indigenous group known for a type of string instrument called the guembri. “It creates amazing diversity,” Tilioua says. 

“Nomads are in contact with nature every day,” he adds. “They’re surrounded by rivers, mountains, and deserts. The silence of the desert therefore allows them to hear the sounds of nature, like the sound of a river flowing [or] rocks colliding.” 

Inside his performance room, Meskaoui lays out a random assortment of flat stones he collected from the desert. Then, with a pair of stubby drumsticks, he kneels down in front of them, closes his eyes, and begins to play. Similar to the lilting tones of a steel drum that evoke the Caribbean, the sounds of the stones evoke the sounds of the desert.

“The music is in my blood,” Meskaoui says.

Halfway across the globe, in the South Pacific, the island nation of Vanuatu faces similar, if unique, challenges. As climate change and colonialism have encroached upon the South Pacific archipelago west of Fiji, people have migrated closer to urban centers for better access to schools, health centers, and job opportunities. The resulting loss of Indigenous identity inspired cultural elder Sandy Sur, from the tiny northern island of Vanua Lava, to found Leweton Cultural Village.

Sur’s community is sharing a time-honored practice to preserve a vital piece of their cultural history. Women’s water music, or Etëtung, is a performance native to the Banks Islands, where women and girls create rhythms by drumming the water and singing along.

Like Meskaoui’s stones, the water music echoes the sounds of the natural environment, like “the sound of water over the rocks at high tide, or the sounds of a particular species of fish, or the sound of the wind when a storm is coming,” says Catherine Grant, a music researcher at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who spent time with the Leweton community. All of these sounds, Sur adds, tell a story: “It’s all about listening carefully.” 

Vanuatu is one of the places considered ground zero for climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to swallow certain islands in the next few decades, ocean acidification is eating the country’s nearshore coral reefs, the rainy and dry seasons are out of balance, and cyclones are projected to become more destructive by the end of the century. Saltwater intrusion from the coast is also contaminating freshwater springs, imperiling the water residents drink and use to cook, bathe, and perform Etëtung. 

“Life is water. Water is life,” Sur says. The performance is more than just music, but a way of life called motoviran. “Sharing is a way forward for me,” he adds.

Leweton’s performers have traveled around the world to share their water music. And although tourism dollars help pay for food and other expenses, there’s still a critical gap. 

“You’re enjoying the culture, you enjoy everything we do, but I’m still asking if we can work together,” Sur says of visitors, emphasizing the need for community-based action on climate change. “We need to work together to build this knowledge or pass on these stories to our next generation, which is the only way we can solve a problem,” he adds.

On the one hand, tourism offers a way for communities like Sur’s and Meskaoui’s to educate people from faraway places about their cultures and environmental damage. On the other, tourism has caused part of that harm, from global travel emissions to cruise ships damaging Vanuatu’s coral reefs and the overconsumption of scarce drinking water in Morocco. 

Grant says the key is community decision-making and consent. Her work emphasizes “the links between cultural sustainability and social justice.” Fixing larger socioeconomic and political injustices, she says, offers a long-term way to protect the endangered music practices contained within those populations. Efforts to protect community rights should precede efforts to protect only the music itself.

For Meskaoui and Tilioua, the message is simple. 

“It’s a call for peace in the world,” Tilioua says, “between peoples and civilizations and all cultures.” 

Interviews were conducted in English, French, Arabic, and Darija. French translation was done by Marlowe Starling and Arabic and Darija translation was done by Rana Morsy. 

The reporting for this article was made possible by New York University’s GlobalBeat program.