Asafar: A Remedy in Our Own Words

Warda Belkass holds a Master of Arts in Human Rights Practice from the University of Arizona and a Master's degree in Linguistics from Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, Morocco. Her work explores Indigenous Amazigh rights, language preservation, and the intersections of culture, mental health, and human dignity. This blogpost is based in part on work completed for her Capstone project in Human Rights Practice.

by Warda Belkass

I was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2018. It's a chronic condition that makes the body intolerant to gluten. What people don't always talk about is that it can also affect your mental health. For me, that meant periods of depression and high anxiety levels. Ones that would last hours, sometimes days. Living with it was one thing. Explaining it was another — especially in Tachlhit, my mother tongue, the language I grew up hearing at home, the one my mother still speaks exclusively. Tachlhit is one of three main varieties of Amazigh spoken in Morocco, alongside Central Atlas Tamazight and Tarifit in the Rif region, each rooted in a different region of the country.

I was afraid of being labeled weak. Or lazy. Or overly sensitive. I knew that emotional suffering could easily be interpreted as the evil eye or possession. In many spaces I grew up in, emotional pain was either spiritualized without support or simply silenced under the pretense of “Sabr” or patience. And somewhere in that silence, I started asking myself a question that stayed with me for years: what would mental-health conversations sound like in Tachlhit? What if anxiety, burnout, or depression were explained using our metaphors? Our rhythms? Our ways of understanding the world? Because we do have ways of making sense of emotional turbulence. They just aren't always recognized as legitimate.

When I started trying to translate "therapy speak" into Tachlhit, I quickly realized it wasn't simple. Some concepts felt foreign. Some words didn't exist in the way English or French use them. I had to search for metaphors, stories, everyday expressions that could carry these ideas without feeling imported or clinical. That search kept leading me somewhere older.

That's how Asafar began — around three words my community has always known: Awal (language), Akal (land), Afgan (identity). The kind of words that don't need a definition so much as a memory.
Asafar means remedy. But this project is not only about mental health. It sits at the intersection of language, human rights, and presence.
 

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Mental health is a human-rights issue, and access to information in your own language is part of that. In Morocco, Amazigh is constitutionally recognized — but recognition on paper doesn't automatically mean presence in clinics, research, or public-health messaging. Arabic and French still dominate those spaces. Throughout this process I kept encountering that same structural reality: there are very few mental-health resources in Amazigh, and even fewer that approach the topic through our own lens. That absence isn't accidental. It reflects decades of linguistic marginalization, and when emotional vocabulary doesn't exist in culturally grounded forms, stigma grows.

I chose to create these videos and publish them on YouTube because digital space travels. Academic texts don't always circulate widely, but links do. WhatsApp groups do. Videos do. I wanted this conversation to move beyond the university, and enter spaces where emotions are more likely to be expressed — the home, the kitchen table, the voice note to a cousin. (The videos, in Amazigh with subtitles, can be viewed using the links below.)

My mother was my quiet target audience throughout all of it. She speaks only Amazigh. Arabic and French — let alone clinical terminology — are not her languages. So every time I sat down to write a script, I imagined her listening. Would this make sense to her? Would it feel alienating, or would it feel like it belonged to her world? That question kept me honest. Trying to explain anxiety or burnout in simple Tachlhit taught me something I didn't expect: clarity is harder than complexity. If I couldn't make an idea land for her, I probably didn't understand it deeply enough myself. She became, without knowing it, my most important collaborator.

Translation, I learned, is not neutral. It's political. Not in a loud way, but in a quiet, steady one. There was a moment early on when I was trying to find a Tachlhit word for "anxiety" — not a borrowed term, not a clinical one, but something that lived inside the language already. There wasn't a clean equivalent. I had to feel around for it: a phrase about the chest tightening, a proverb about carrying something too heavy for too long. That search was the work. Every time I stretched a metaphor or coaxed a concept into Tachlhit, I was pushing the language into a space where it has historically been excluded. Digital platforms are not neutral either. They are archives — they decide what is visible and what is searchable. Contributing Amazigh content about psychology and rights is my small way of occupying that space.

Asafar started as a capstone requirement. It became something more personal.
A way of healing without surrendering my language. A way of saying that Amazigh is not only for memory or folklore — but for theory, psychology, and the future. And somewhere in all of it, a way of making sure my mother could hear herself in a conversation that has, for too long, been held in languages that weren't hers.

Remedy, yes. But also continuity. May our language continue to breathe in the individuals that carry it within.
 

YouTube links:

Episode 1: https://youtu.be/c_TEvc9a790

Episode 2: https://youtu.be/ER-yKQr1foM

Episode 3: https://youtu.be/PZ8JEmbllCA

Episode 4: https://youtu.be/3fQ_fOHsddI