Yennayer

Summary

Yennayer is the first day of the farming year in North Africa, kept in the villages by Amazigh and Arabic speakers alike. Today it falls on 12 January in Algeria, 13 January in Morocco and Libya and 14 January in Tunisia, because it follows the old Julian calendar, which runs behind the calendar now in use. In Westermarck's Morocco it is called yennáyer, innáyr and nnáyr, and some call the first day of the year, or its last night, ḥagūz. It is said to be the gate that opens the year, while Ansara at the summer solstice closes it, and it lasts two, three or four days depending on the region.

The feast begins with a night of restraint. In many places no couscous is cooked on the eve of Yennayer; berkukes is eaten instead, or milk and boiled pulses, as in Kabylia. Then comes the food of plenty: at Fez the couscous "of the seven vegetables"; among the Ait Warain couscous with seven kinds of vegetables; among the Ait Yusi a wheat porridge in which seven small things are hidden, a date stone, an olive stone, a bean, a grain of durra, a chickpea, a raisin pip and one of the small hard lumps that form in boiling buttermilk, and whoever finds one first will be the luckiest of the household that year. At Amanuz in the Sous every kind of grain and pulse is boiled together into a dish called urkimn. Fowls are killed almost everywhere, in Dukkala one for every member of the household; in Kabylia a bull's head is held over the boy born that year so that he will be "a head" in his village, and his hair is cut for the first time. The old hearthstones are thrown away and replaced with stones never cooked on; a little porridge is left on the hearthstones for the spirits of the fire and on the roof of the tent for the tent itself, and if the lumps are wet underneath in the morning, the year will be rainy and good. Something green is brought into the tent, even a bunch of grass.

On the night of Yennayer an old woman goes round, whom Moroccans call Ḥagūza, a name Westermarck derives from Arabic ʿajūza, old woman, with the ʿ turned to ḥ. She threatens the children who do not eat their fill that she will split their bellies and stuff them with straw, so parents press their children to eat, and a share of the supper is left for her under a covered dish. Masked men go about during the feast asking for money and food for the common meal: the "fig donkey" at Nedroma, Bu Bnani at Tlemcen, Bu Reduan in western Tunisia, and elsewhere a camel or a lion. El Briga, §§5–6; Westermarck, vol. 2, pp. 161 and 168.

The idea Yennayer turns on is that what a person does at the door of the year he will do all year. The Ait Nder told Westermarck that whatever a man does on the eve of Yennayer he will do throughout the year; others said that whoever goes hungry to bed will stay hungry, and whoever fills his stomach will not suffer want. So they multiply the kinds of grain and vegetables in the meal, and Westermarck takes it that they eat of every kind so that every kind will be plentiful in the coming year. The Amazigh rereading essay reads the feast as a farming calendar, the start of the winter rains, and dates it to 950 BCE, the year chosen in the twentieth century as the start of the Amazigh count of years: a convention for numbering years, not the date the feast began.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Yennayer is the Latin month name Ianuarius with its ending dropped, and Ianuarius is the month of Janus, the Roman god of doors and beginnings, whose name also gives ianua, door. This is what the Amazigh essay says when it calls Yennayer "the first door", and what the Encyclopédie berbère says when it calls it "the gate that opens the year". The Janus page reads his name in the Arabic tongue from janna, Latin y answering Arabic j: junna is what covers and protects, and the jinn of a thing is its beginning and freshness, as in jinn al-shabāb, the first of youth, and "he did it bi-jinn dhālik", at the very start of the matter. On this reading Yennayer is "the jinn of the year", its beginning while it is still fresh, the door by which one enters it; and Amazigh doubles its n as jinn doubles it.

Linguistic Root

The Encyclopédie berbère derives the name from Ianuarius without hesitation and calls Ennayer the first month of the Julian calendar. All the Amazigh month names come from Latin, as the Amazigh Semitic-reading essay itself shows in its table: Yebrayer from February, Mayyu, Yunyu. That essay proposes another analysis of the name: yan, one, and ayyur, moon or month, "the first month". This is weaker, because Yennayer came in a series of months that are all Latin, and it matches the letters of Ianuarius in order. Taoutaou mentions a third interpretation, "word of the sky".

Once the Latin ending is removed, the stem Ian- remains, which the Janus page reads from j-n-n: the y at the start of the Latin name answers Arabic j, as the y of Iuno became j again in English Juno. In Lane, jinn al-shabāb is the first part of youth and its vigour, and jinn an-nabt the flowers and blossom of a plant, so the sense is the beginning of a thing at its best. This agrees with the Amazigh essay's "first door" of the season. The one limit here is that the reading passes through Latin: Yennayer is a Roman month name that entered Amazigh, so the Arabic reading reads the name of Janus before it became Yennayer.

Key Mythic Narratives

Counting the years from Sheshonq

The Amazigh essay says that 950 BCE is the year ascribed to the victory of the Amazigh king Sheshonq I over the pharaohs of Egypt. Taoutaou relates that this count was devised in Paris by the founders of the Académie berbère, an association founded in 1967, and published by Ammar Negadi in 1980, who made its starting point the year in which Sheshonq I is supposed to have taken the throne of Egypt. Taoutaou finds that this starting point has no scientific support, and that scholars' estimates for Sheshonq's accession differ widely: about 945 for Kitchen, 980 for Gertoux, 820 or 819 for James and van der Veen. Algeria made Yennayer a national holiday by Law 18-12 of 2018, which set off a debate about the origin of the feast.

Omens and rain

At Yennayer people foretell the year: they read it in the berkukes or in the blood of the sacrificed animal, Kabyles speak to their cattle and goats, and among the Ait Nder a man goes out at dawn before the others wake and calls to the sheep and the goats; if the sheep answer first, the year will be good. Laoust notes that rain-seeking also enters Yennayer: children lead a lamb around and collect grain of every kind, lay it in a saint's shrine and set the lamb on it, and if the lamb urinates they say the year will be good.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh rereading essay reads the customs of Yennayer as farming practice: its dishes, among them couscous with seven vegetables, are crop diversity as in Tagunja; changing the tent poles renews the house; sprinkling water on the threshold purifies the start of the season; feeding the trees manures them in winter. The records keep the renewal in the hearthstones that are thrown out and replaced, and Servier suggests that the feast's name in the Aurès may mean "day of the tent pegs" among semi-nomads. Servier sums up the feast's purposes as four: warding off famine, learning what the year will bring, passing from one season to the next, and welcoming the hidden forces that the masked figures embody.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Ovid's Fasti the poet asks Janus on the first day of January why people give one another dates, wrinkled figs and honey, and Janus answers: for the omen, so that the whole year may be sweet like its beginning, for omens wait on beginnings. This is what the people of Yennayer say when they eat to fill the whole year, and what the At Ubahti eat on the eve: figs and pomegranates. Westermarck holds that some of the masked figures in North African festivals may go back to the Roman feast of the Kalends of January and the Saturnalia customs gathered into it, alongside remains of older Amazigh practice. The farming year that Yennayer opens belongs with the agricultural year, and in Hesiod the rising of the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, marked the harvest.