Tagunja

Summary

Tagunja is a large wooden ladle dressed as a bride and carried in procession from house to house to ask for rain, the best-known rain rite of North Africa, held by the Amazigh and by their Arabic-speaking neighbours alike, and recorded from the Atlantic to Cyrenaica. Its name is the Amazigh word for the ladle itself, the big wooden ladle used to draw water, and it takes many forms among the tribes: Taghonja, Tlghonja, Tighonja, Belghonja.

The rite runs much the same way from village to village. When the rain is late and the crops are in danger, the women make the bride: the ladle is tied to a long cane, a stick or a second ladle is tied across it to give it shoulders, and it is dressed in a bride's clothes, with necklaces and earrings. At Marrakech it is made by older women, widows or divorcées of pious repute, who paint eyes, nose and mouth on the back of the ladle in black dye, redden its cheeks and wrap its head in silk scarves. The procession goes out at nightfall, a woman or girl carrying the bride and the women and children following with songs: "Taghonja has uncovered her head, O Lord, wet her earrings; Taghonja, O mother of hope, O God, give us rain." It passes the houses and the shrines of the saints; people sprinkle the bride and her company with water and give them flour, grain and alms, and what is collected is cooked into a meal eaten together, in a riverbed, on a threshing floor, at a shrine or on a hilltop. The procession may be repeated for three nights running.

At the village of Tasemsit among the Infedouaq a second doll goes out with the bride, "Tagunja's husband", made from a pestle and dressed in black rags, because black is the colour of a sky heavy with rain. The old woman who made them puts on her dirtiest clothes so that the sky will turn black and rides a donkey, with the women walking behind; some ask, "Tagunja, who married you?" and the others answer, "The water of Anzar married you." Then they push the old woman and her donkey into the river and make her weep, "so that the heavens weep".

The idea the rite turns on is that rain is a marriage. The procession, as Laoust describes it, is a wedding cortège: Tagunja is led to her husband Anzar, the rain, and sprinkled with water as a bride is. In the Kabyle tale of Anzar the rain holds back the water until the girl accepts him; in the rite a bride is brought to him so that he will come down. Laoust holds that the bride stands for the earth, which bears nothing until the water of the sky reaches it, which is why she is made in most places by women past childbearing by age or widowhood, and that the union of earth and sky is the source of plenty. In Kabylia, where all the rain rites are called Anzar, a real girl was once led as the bride, until the marabouts forbade it from the eighteenth century and in many villages the ladle took her place.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Taɣunja is the feminine of aɣenja, ladle; its initial t- marks the feminine in Amazigh, so that once the ladle is dressed as a bride it takes a woman's name. What remains is gh-n-j, the Arabic root of ghunj: ghanijat al-jāriya, the girl was coquettish, ghanija, coquettish; in the Ṣiḥāḥ, ghunj is shakl, comeliness and dalliance, and in the Tāj al-ʿArūs it is a girl's languor and coyness. Amazigh ɣ and Arabic gh are the same sound, n is n and j is j. On this reading Tagunja is "the coquettish one", the bride adorned and coy in her procession, which is what people make of the ladle: they redden its cheeks, hang earrings on it and sing that she has uncovered her head. This reading is proposed on the method, since the Amazigh essay names the rite without reading its name.

Linguistic Root

The Ṣiḥāḥ gives: "ghunj and ghunuj: shakl; ghanijat al-jāriya ghanajan and taghannajat, so she is ghanija." The Tāj al-ʿArūs gives: "ghunj in a girl is languor and coyness", and also says it is beauty of the eyes. The root turns on a woman's dalliance and comeliness. The comparison keeps all three consonants without exchange. Its one limit is that aɣenja is the name of the kitchen ladle before it is dressed as a bride, so the sense of coquetry fits the adorned ladle of the rite, not the ladle as a tool.

Laoust says the ladle entered the rite because its shape and use picture watering: it is filled with water and emptied, and turning it over works the opposite way, so that a scholar's wife among the Mtougga would turn a ladle upside down to ward off rain about to fall. Westermarck says the ladle was chosen for its connection with fluids.

Key Mythic Narratives

Ali of the Hood

Among the tribes of the Middle Atlas the same rite carries a man, not a bride: the hood of a burnous stuffed with its folded flaps, carried on a boy's shoulder by the men instead of the women, and called "Ali of the Hood". They sing that the rain drove him to the camp, that the dogs devoured him, and that the water flooded the tents and carried off the goods: he is a man caught in the open by a downpour.

At the New Year and Ashura

Laoust notes that asking for rain also enters Yennayer and Ashura, both of which open a year: children lead a lamb around and collect grain of every kind, lay the grain in a saint's shrine and set the lamb on it, and if it urinates they say the year will be good and neither crops nor flocks will perish. Among some tribes of the Anti-Atlas a lamb is led along with the ladle, and the women scatter grain over the procession after drenching it.

Wife or bride?

Gélard argues that in most accounts Tagunja is a wife, not a virgin bride: she wears the belt worn by mothers, the facial tattoo of married women is drawn on her, her clothes are festive dress rather than wedding dress, and she sometimes goes out with a husband. She notes that the rite is usually held before sowing, from December to February in the Sahara and around March elsewhere, and that households give the procession eggs, flour and grain, not meat or money, from which barley soup, porridge or pancakes are cooked in the evening; a ball game often ends the rite. She reads the whole rite as an image of women's fertility, the ladle, the cane, the water and the food all belonging to women's world and women's food, and she quotes a saying that makes Tagunja a sign of the survival of the Amazigh: as long as Tagunja lives, the Amazigh people will live.

Among Arabic speakers

Arabic speakers hold the rite too. In the Garbiya and Dukkala the women dress the ladle as a woman or bride, carry it from tent to tent and sing the same name: "Tagenja has loosened her hair, O God, wet her earrings." Westermarck, vol. 2, p. 268.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh rereading essay describes Tagunja as a spring rite in which foods of seven different grains are prepared, and reads it as a farming guide and a system of mutual support in the form of a rite: seven grains for crop diversity, so that if one crop fails the other six succeed, food shared among all, and spring as the season for sowing. The records gathered by Laoust and Westermarck make Tagunja the ladle dressed as a bride, and they show the mutual support the essay names: the procession collects flour and grain from the houses and the village eats together. The dish of seven kinds these records place at the New Year, at Yennayer. So the essay has gathered under one name two customs of a single farming year. Laoust reads the bride as the earth awaiting the water of the sky, and the Amazigh essay reads the girl or doll in the Anzar tale as the earth too, so the two readings meet.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Hesiod's Theogony, Ouranos, the sky, covers Gaia, the earth, on every side and lies with her so that she bears children: there the sky is the earth's husband, as Anzar is Tagunja's husband here. The difference is that the union of Ouranos and Gaia begins creation once, while Tagunja's wedding is repeated in every drought, staged by the village with its own hands when the rain is late. The rite's place in the year belongs with what the agricultural year gathers.