The Amariya: The Bridal Palanquin and the Entrance

At a quarter past midnight in a rented hall on the road out of Casablanca, the music changes. The orchestra stops the chaabi it has been playing for dancing and starts a slow, processional piece that every guest recognises. The double doors at the back open. Four men in white, in matching caps, walk in carrying between them on their shoulders a canopied seat, and in the seat, under a dome of red velvet and gold fringe, the bride, in her first dress, one hand on the rail and the other raised. Three hundred people stand up. The bearers walk her slowly around the room, past every table, twice, and set her down on the platform beside the groom.

The seat is the amariya. It is the object most associated with the Moroccan wedding in the outside world, the one that appears on every wedding-planner’s page, and the one whose history is least known to the guests photographing it. It is the subject of this article, which sits inside the wedding sequence hub at the moment of the bride’s entrance.

What the amariya is

The amariya is a bridal litter: a seat, enclosed or canopied, mounted on a platform with carrying poles, borne on the shoulders of men. In its current form it is used inside the wedding hall to bring the bride from the door to the platform and to show her to the guests. In its older form it was used outdoors, to move the bride from her father’s house to her husband’s, and to hide her while it did so.

Both forms are called by the same name, and the name is worth a sentence. ‘Ammariya in classical Arabic is a camel litter, the covered seat in which women travelled across the desert, and the word came into Moroccan use with the object. In Morocco the litter sat on a mule rather than a camel, and by the twentieth century it had come off the animal and onto men’s shoulders. The current object is the camel litter’s great-grandchild, and it has kept the name while losing the camel, the road, and the purpose.

From the mule to the hall

Westermarck, writing before the First World War, describes the bride in most of Morocco being conveyed to her husband’s house in a closed litter on a mule, wrapped so completely in cloth that she could see nothing and could not be seen, and in some regions carried in a wooden box with a door. The procession went through the streets, with lanterns and music, and the point of the box was that the bride was inside it and invisible. Her arrival at the groom’s house — the door of the box opened, the bride lifted out — was the first moment she could be seen, and it was seen by the groom’s family, not by the street.

By the middle of the twentieth century, in the cities, this had changed in stages. The litter came off the mule and onto four men’s shoulders, because the bride’s family and the groom’s family now lived in apartments and the distance was a courtyard rather than a district. The box lost its walls and became a canopy, because the bride was no longer being concealed from the street but shown to the guests. And the procession moved indoors, because the wedding had moved to the hall.

The object that resulted is what circles the hall at midnight. It is not old. Its ancestor is. The distinction matters because the amariya is routinely described as a tradition of great age, and it is a twentieth-century adaptation of one — an adaptation that reversed the ancestor’s purpose.

The object

The modern amariya is built to be carried by four men through a door, and its dimensions follow from that.

The amariya is not owned by the family. It is owned by the negafa, or by a rental business that supplies negafat, and it arrives at the hall in a van with the dresses. A negafa with a full wardrobe will have two or three amariyas in different colours and bring the one that matches the first dress.

The bearers

The men who carry the amariya are hired. They come with the negafa, as part of her team, or are supplied by the hall, or are a separate business that does nothing but this. They are four, sometimes six for a heavy amariya or a long route, and they are dressed alike: white djellabas and red caps, or white trousers and embroidered waistcoats, or a costume the negafa has chosen to match her theme. They have done this hundreds of times. They know how to tip the amariya through a door, how to keep it level on a step, how to turn it in a narrow aisle between tables, and how to lower it onto the platform without jolting the bride. The good ones move in step and do not look at the bride; they look at the floor and at each other.

They are paid by the night, in cash, by the negafa or by the family, at a rate that is a small fraction of what the negafa is paid, and they are fed in the kitchen. They carry the groom too, if the groom is carried. They may also carry the trays of the hdiya earlier in the week, if the family uses the same men, and in Fez the tray bearers and the amariya bearers are often the same trade.

Bearers drop brides. Not often, and rarely from height, but a bearer who stumbles on a cable or a step tips the amariya, and a bride in a heavy dress with her hands full has little to hold. Negafat tell brides to sit back, keep one hand on the rail, and wave with the other only. The advice is practical and repeated.

The entrance, step by step

The entrance is timed by the negafa and the musicians together, and in the cities it runs as follows.

1. The bride is seated, out of sight

   In a side room or behind the hall’s back doors, the negafa seats the bride in the amariya, arranges the dress over the edges of the seat so that it hangs correctly, checks the headdress, and gives her the milk-and-dates instructions for later. The bearers take up the poles.

2. The music changes

   The orchestra, or the daqqa ensemble, or the DJ, moves from dance music to the processional. In Casablanca and Rabat this is often an andalusi piece or a slow chaabi in the wedding register; in Marrakech the daqqa’s steady drum. The guests know what it means and stand.

3. The doors, and the ululation

   The doors open. The women of both families ululate — the zgharit — and the sound continues, in waves, through the whole entrance. The bearers step through, lift the amariya to full height, and begin the circuit.

4. The circuit of the hall

   The bearers walk the bride around the perimeter of the hall, slowly, past every table, so that every guest sees her at close range and can photograph her. In a large hall this is one circuit; in a smaller one, two. Guests throw flower petals or, in some families, small sweets. The groom stands on the platform and waits.

5. The setting down

   The amariya is brought to the platform and lowered, level, onto the floor or onto a low stand. The negafa steps in, lifts the bride out — literally, in a heavy dress — and seats her on the koursi beside the groom. The bearers withdraw with the empty amariya.

6. Milk and dates

   The couple are handed a glass of milk and a plate of dates and feed each other, once, while the photographer works. This closes the entrance. The music returns to dancing.

The whole thing takes between eight and fifteen minutes. It is the most anticipated moment of the night and the most photographed, and it is over quickly. The bride will re-enter the hall several more times as the dresses change, but she will walk in, or be escorted, and the amariya is not used again.

The mida of Fez

In Fez, and in families of Fassi origin elsewhere, the bride is carried into the hall not in an amariya but on a mida: the round, low, wooden table on which Moroccan meals are served, lifted on the shoulders of four men with the bride seated on a cushion in its centre. She is at the same height as an amariya bride, but she is not enclosed; there is no canopy and no rail, and she holds the edge of the table. The mida is covered with a cloth and sometimes with the bride’s own dress spread around her.

Fassi families are firm that this is the correct form and that the amariya is a Marrakchi or Casablancan thing. The mida-carrying is old: Westermarck records brides carried on a table or a tray in Fez, and the practice of raising the bride on an object of the household — a table, not a vehicle — is one the Fassi form has kept while the rest of the country moved to the canopy. Fassi grooms are carried on a mida too, in some families, at their own entrance.

The mida has a longer and wider life than its use at weddings, and the article on the mida covers it. At the wedding its meaning is plain: the bride is lifted up on the table the household eats from.

The groom’s entrance

The groom enters before the bride, and how he enters varies more than how she does.

In most urban weddings he walks in, behind the musicians, in a white djellaba and a red tarbouche or in a suit, with his brothers and close friends around him, and is seated on the platform to wait. In Marrakech he may be carried in on an amariya of his own, or on the shoulders of his friends in a chair. In Fez, on a mida. In the Souss his companions, the isnayen, bring him in with a drum. The groom’s entrance is shorter, less musical, and less photographed than the bride’s, and no one pretends otherwise.

Where both are carried, the groom’s amariya is plainer, and it is set down beside the bride’s on the platform so that the couple sit side by side in two litters for the photographs before they are moved to the koursi. This is a recent staging and it belongs to the wedding as a photographed event.

Regional forms

The hall amariya is a national form now, but it is not the only one, and in the regions the older logic of the bride’s transport survives in different objects.

Concealment to display

The amariya’s history contains a reversal that is worth stating directly because it is the most interesting thing about the object and is never said.

The old litter hid the bride. She travelled from her father’s house to her husband’s inside a closed box on a mule, and the box existed so that the street could not see her. Her body was moved through public space without being exposed to it. The procession was loud and lit precisely because what was inside it could not be seen; the drums and the lanterns announced a bride whom nobody on the route would look at.

The new litter shows her. She is lifted above the heads of three hundred people, carried slowly past each of them, lit, photographed, and set down in front of a room. The canopy that was once walls is now a frame. The object that was built to make the bride invisible now exists to make her the most visible person in the hall.

The object that was built to make the bride invisible now exists to make her the most visible person in the hall. It has kept the name and reversed the purpose. Editorial statement — Moroccan Rituals

This is not a corruption of a tradition. It is what happened to the object when the wedding moved from the street to the hall and from the family to the guest list. The amariya adapted to the new use and kept its name, and the name is why guests believe they are watching something old. What they are watching is a mid-twentieth-century solution to the problem of getting a bride from a side room to a platform in a way that gives every table a photograph. It is a good solution. It is not the thing it descends from.

What it costs, and what is changing

The amariya is usually inside the negafa’s price. A negafa’s package for an urban wedding — the dresses, the jewellery, her own work, her assistants, the amariya, and the bearers — is commonly cited at anything from five thousand to forty thousand dirhams depending on the city and her wardrobe. Hired separately, an amariya with bearers for the night runs to a few thousand. It is one of the smaller lines in the wedding’s cost and one of the largest in its photographs.

What is changing is the object’s competition. The rotating platform — a motorised turntable on which the couple stand and are turned slowly for the room — has appeared in Casablanca halls since the late 2010s and does what the amariya does without the bearers. The lit amariya, with LEDs in the canopy, is now standard. The Gulf-style cage, cylindrical and open, has been adopted by some negafat as a second entrance object for a later dress. And the number of entrances is growing: a bride who once entered once on the amariya may now be brought in on it, then on a lit throne, then on a cage, one per dress, so that each change of costume gets its own procession.

None of this is a loss to be regretted in the abstract. The amariya has always been whatever moved the bride into view. It is currently a velvet canopy carried by four men in white, and it is currently competing with a turntable. Its next form will have the same name.