Larbi Batma
Laarbi Batma (1948, in Oulad Bouziri [Chaouia] - 1998) was a Moroccan artist and the charismatic leader of the group Nass El Ghiwane.
Laarbi Batma was very much influenced by the music style of the Moussems (festivals) of his native region Abda oulad El masnaoui, he used to go to as a child. Loving words and rhymes, he was known to never put away his pencil, as he conceived writing as a way of life and an art in itself. As such, he was always ready to write down his thoughts, any events, and inspirations for a poem or a song. Among his many achievements, there is a 21,000 verses poem project Al houmam Al houssam, which took him his entire life to write, but that was only around 17,000 verses at the time of his death.
The famous song Essiniya (The tray) had a particular story to it, very significant to the sense of curiosity and flair of this visionary. It is the story of Ba Salem, a beggar who went through Hay Mohammadi, in Casablanca crooning the first verses of "Essiniya": walli macheftouni rahmou alia, bahr el ghiwane my dkhaltou belâani.... Laarbi, who listened to the first strophes from his window, invited him in and had a long conversation with him. This is how the famous song was composed.
Diagnosed in 1993 with lung cancer, he lived since then on agonies due to "the cronyism of a certain medical profession" as he puts it in the second party of his autobiography El alem (The Suffering). Outside the group, he was also an actor and a writer of both literature and playwrights, talents that would make him the emblematic face of the musical group. "What had hit me in this man was his constancy; he was exactly the same in Hay Mohammadi, his neighborhood, or in the Club Med of Agadir, in the middle of the tourists, or in the Cannes film festival, where we had gone together to represent our movie "El hal" (Trances, feature-length film redrawing the career path of the group), Batma remained such as we knew it ", says Ahmed El Maânouni, the film director.
His 2-parts long autobiography, Arrahil (The Trip) and Al-Alem (The Suffering) published in Arabic, is an evidence of life, seen through the eyes of a misunderstood and despised genius. Since his death, his brother Rachid replaced him as leader of Nass El Ghiwane, paying tribute to him at the beginning of every appearance of the group with the song Ghir Khoudouni (Just take me away). To this date, Rachid says he still receives condolences from people deeply touched in their heart by Laarbi's death, considered to have happened too early as he was only 50 years old then.