Hammu Unamir

Summary

Hammu Unamir is the hero of an Amazigh tale from the Sous and the Atlas, still told by Tashelhit speakers today. A fatherless boy is loved by a woman from the sky who marries him; he loses her through his mother's fault, climbs to her in the seventh heaven, and then loses himself through longing for his mother. The people of Tata say he was one of them and point to his traces in their land.

Najate Nerci summarizes the story from its many versions. Hammu Unamir was the only son of a widowed mother, who sent him to the Qur'an school. A woman from the sky, whom the tale calls Tanirt, an angel in most versions and a fairy in some, was taken with his beauty; she came to him at night while he slept and painted his hand with henna. When he went to school the teacher saw the henna and beat him, for henna is unfit for a man. Then the teacher devised a ruse, and the next night the boy caught her; she agreed to marry him on condition that he build her a house no one could enter. One day his mother found the hidden key and opened the forbidden room, and with her secret uncovered the heavenly woman went back to the sky.

Hammu rode his horse and wandered for many years, until he met an eagle that would carry him to Tanirt, on condition that he slaughter his horse and cut it into seven pieces to feed it on the way. On the way to the seventh heaven the last piece fell, and he cut a piece from his own flesh and fed it to the eagle. He found his wife in the seventh heaven, and she set him a condition: never to lift a stone of the floor of a certain room in the palace, or in other versions never to open a door or look from a window. On the day of the Feast of the Sacrifice longing overcame him; he lifted the stone, looked through the hole and saw his mother, blind from weeping for him, holding a ram with no one to slaughter it. At her cry he threw himself from the seventh heaven towards the earth and died, torn by the winds; one drop of his blood gave his mother back her sight, and another slaughtered the ram. In other versions his fingers fell from the sky and made a spring gush in his tribe, or five springs in five tribes.

The idea the story turns on is that a man cannot live in two worlds. Tanirt wants him on condition that her house stays shut to the people of the earth, and his mother opens it and he loses her. Then he climbs to her on condition that he not look at the earth, and he looks and loses himself. Each time it is the mother who opens the door: first with the key, then with her weeping. And the tale does not end with his death: his blood restores sight and kills the sacrifice, and his fingers become springs of water. Nerci says that the people of Tata, especially in the village of Tagoujgalt, hold him to have really lived and see the spring and the stones as witnesses to his story, and that one storyteller told her hens have scratched the ground ever since the cock of Unamir's mother found the hidden key and was richly rewarded for it.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ḥemmu u Namir is three words. Ḥemmu is the familiar form of the Arabic name from ḥ-m-d, as Dallet's dictionary records; u is Amazigh "son of", used in proper names, as in Si Mḥend u Mḥend, "Si Mḥend son of Mḥend"; and Namir is the Arabic name from n-m-r. So the hero's name is "Ḥammu son of Namir". We read Namir in the sense of water: in Lane māʾ namīr is "wholesome water", or copious, or "increasing in quantity". That is what the son of Namir becomes at the end of the tale: blood that restores sight, and fingers that make springs gush in the tribes.

Linguistic Root

Dallet's dictionary says that Amazigh u means "son of, of the family of", and that the singular survives only in proper names, where it is fused with the name, as in Si Mḥend u Mḥend and Ccix Mḥend Welḥusin, son of Ḥusin; its plural is at, "the people of, the tribe of". In its index of names ḥemmu is referred to the root ḥ-m-d. So two of the three words of the hero's name are plainly Arabic, and the third is the Amazigh particle of descent.

In Lane under n-m-r: māʾ namīr and namir, "wholesome water, whether sweet or not sweet", or "sweet and wholesome", or "copious", or "increasing in quantity"; ḥasab namīr, pure lineage. Namir is also the leopard, and namira "he became angry and evil in disposition, like the leopard". So the letters are not in doubt; what we propose on the method is the sense: we choose the wholesome water rather than the leopard, because the tale ends with water and sight and has no leopard in it.

Key Mythic Narratives

Tale and myth

Tashelhit speakers call the story of Unamir umiyn, a tale, or lqist, a story; Western scholars put it among the wonder tales, and Moroccan scholars call it a tale and a myth. Nerci argues that it is a myth in the strict sense, because in Tata it is a story of origins that is believed: it explains the village spring, the origin of the tribe that claims descent from him, even why hens scratch the ground. Bounfour, writing on the ogre in the Berber tale in the Encyclopédie berbère, cites his own study "Ḥemmu u Namir, or the Berber Oedipus".

Rising and falling in song

Nerci quotes lines of Tashelhit verse that echo the story: "To climb to the sky and fall to the earth, such is the lover's state", and the hero's prayer: "O my father, O my mother, bless me, and do not leave me to wander the world." Nerci, pp. 185–186.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh essay rereading the myths reads water in Amazigh lands through their environment: the oasis is the earthly paradise, and the cave with its springs is the dwelling of the ancestors. Unamir's tale ends in that place: the hero who climbed to the sky comes back to his land as water, a spring in the tribe, and the people of Tata point to the spring and say: these are his fingers.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Nerci compares Unamir with Orpheus: each loses his wife and makes a fearful journey to recover her, Orpheus to the underworld with his lyre, Unamir to the sky on the eagle; each finds her, is forbidden to look, looks, loses everything and dies torn apart, Orpheus by women's hands and Unamir by the winds.

The eagle carries Etana, king of Kish, up to heaven after he has fed it and healed its wings, as the eagle carries Unamir after he feeds it his horse and then his own flesh.

In Japan Toyotama-hime, the sea god's daughter, marries Hoori; when her labour comes she tells him not to look at her, he looks and sees her crawling as a wani, a shark in most scholars' view, and in shame she leaves her child, closes the sea road and goes back. In the North the swan-maidens come to Völundr and his brothers, stay seven winters and fly away. In the Rigveda Urvaśī tells her husband Purūravas when she has left him: "I have gone from thee like the first of Mornings; Purūravas, return thou to thy dwelling: I, like the wind, am difficult to capture." The wife who comes from another world stays on a condition and leaves when the condition is broken.

Psyche marries Cupid on condition that she never see his face; she looks at him by lamplight in the night and he flies away, and she wanders the earth seeking him until she rises to him, with his mother Venus standing between them, as Unamir's mother stands between him and Tanirt.

In Japan the fisherman Urashima marries the sea kami's daughter and lives with her in Tokoyo, then asks to go home to speak to his father and mother and loses wife and life together; like Hammu Unamir he stands between a woman of the other world and his parents' house; see Urashima Tarō.