Fatema Chebchoub

During her time at the University of Pennsylvania, Fatema Chebchoub worked for the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), an international collaborative research endeavor that creates, collects, and shares linguistic data. Drawing upon her deep knowledge of Arabic syntax and grammar, Chebchoub served as an annotator for the POS (part-of-speech) tagging that helped in the categorization of the Arabic grammatical tag set that the LDC used for the Penn Arabic TreeBank project, version 3.0 (later published in 2008 by Mohamed Maamouri et al.).

Chebchoub died at age 53 in Skhirat, near Rabat, in a swimming accident, on August 9, 2006.

In 2002, with a grant from the Greenfield Intercultural Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Chebchoub produced a documentary film, entitled From Heart to Heart: A Documentary of Feelings and Attitudes towards the Incidents of Sept. 11, 2001, from Arab-Americans in the Philadelphia area.

Chebchoub began acting as a child in the 1960s and directed her first production in the 1980s.  She later moved on to writing and performing one-woman shows. She was the only trained female Hlaqia, the central figure in a traditional form of public story-telling performance known as the Hlaqa. She performed her Hlaqas either as solo acts or with her troop which was known as ASYAS. The Hlaqa genre bears a relation to the idea of the halaqa, which comes from the Arabic word for a ring or circle, and which is also used to describe religious gatherings for Islamic study and Qur'an reading (when people often sit in a circle).

Chebchoub was born in 1952. Her parents, both performers of the Moroccan form of popular performance known as Hlaqa, which is a kind of public storytelling, died while she was very young.  Chebchoub never married and lived alone. Her frequent travels and her bohemian lifestyle earned her the nickname "al-Roumi" or "the Westerner" from her extended family.