Idir
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There is no higher form of
belonging to a people than to write in its language.
Heinrich
Böll, German writer (1917-1985)
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Algerian singer Idir,
an icon of Berber culture, uses his talent and guitar to fight for recognition of
his mother tongue
 ‘Txilek elli yi n taburt a vava invba
/ ccencen tizebgatin im a yelli ghriba” (“Please, father Inouba, open the door /
Oh Ghriba girl, jingle your bracelets”).
This refrain from a Kabyle song, “A Vava Inouva,” rang out around the world in the
early 1970s. Only 10 million or so Berbers, scattered over the Sahara and North Africa,
could understand the words, but the song became an international hit.
Its young Algerian author, Hamid Cheriet, took the stage name of Idir (“he shall
live” in Kabyle). “At a time when many epidemics were raging, new-born babies were
called Idir to ward off bad luck,” he says. “I chose it as a tribute to my culture,
which I felt was threatened.”
The Berber people, who mostly live in the mountains of Morocco and Algeria, speak
Shawiya, Shilha, Kabyle, Mzab, Rifain, Tachelhit, Tuareg, Targi and Tarifit–all dialects
of Tamazight, their native tongue, which is only recognized as a national language
in Niger and Mali. In other places, Berber culture is ignored or even banned.
“They give me an Algerian passport, but I have to get permission to speak my own
language,” says Idir who, like the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire,
speaks up for “those who have no voice.”
It never occurred to him to write in French, the language of the colonizer in which
he did all his schooling, right up to a Ph.D in geology. Nor would he write in Arabic,
which was taught as a second language in Algeria at the time.
“If I hadn’t left my village, I’d never have spoken a word of Arabic,” he says. “French
and Arabic would allow me to get my message over to a wider audience, but I wouldn’t
know how to go about it or what to say.”
Kabyle is a language of feelings and storytelling that flows naturally in poetry.
It is also the language Idir has chosen to use. “To sing in Kabyle is a militant
act, a way of expressing my rebellion, to say that I exist,” he says. “If I’d had
another profession, I would have found other ways to express the same demands.”
Three
languages for Algeria
The young Hamid Cheriet
stumbled on singing by accident. He was born in 1955 in Aït Lahcêne, a
remote mountain village in Kabylia. When he was nine, he went with his parents, sister
and two brothers to Algiers. He attended a school run by Jesuits, where “being Kabyle
meant you were part of some kind of dirty rebellion.”
His natural sciences teacher taught him to strum a guitar. The future geologist started
writing songs when he was 16 and warmed to the Kabyle singers. In 1973, he was asked
to stand in at the last minute for the famous singer Nouara, who was unable to sing
live on the Kabyle radio station in Algiers the lullaby he had written for her.
Idir was an immediate success. In 1975, he came to Paris to sign a contract with
Pathé-Marconi and stayed in France. Ever since, this child of the Aurès
mountains has celebrated Berber culture through music, thus extending a movement
launched in the 1940s by major Algerian writers such as Jean Amrouche, Mouloud Mammeri,
Mouloud Feraoun and Kateb Yacine. These pioneers had to use French to defend the
Berber language if they were to get a hearing. As Amrouche put it: “I think and write
in French, but I weep in Kabyle.”
These days, Idir can go further than that. He advocates three languages for Algeria–Arab,
Berber and French. “I want Algeria to take into account those who live on its land,
who love the country and want to build it whatever their origin, language or religion,”
he says. “Islam shouldn’t be an official religion. Religion is for believers, not
governments. Arabic shouldn’t have a special status just because it’s the holy language
of the Koran–especially classical Arabic, a sanitized tongue ordinary people can’t
understand. No language is more worthy than another, even if Berber is the oldest
in terms of years. Fate has put these languages on this land and they must remain
there.”
Straddling
two cultures
But for the time being,
the Kabyle radio station that opened in 1948 is still the only media outlet in Algeria
that uses Berber. It is also “the only one monitored by a censorship board,” says
Idir. Another French colonial legacy enables “you to get credits in Berber towards
your baccalaureate graduation exam if you want.” But the language is not part of
the national curriculum. Since his election in April 1999, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika
has ruled out officially recognizing Berber, except after a referendum that Kabyles
fear might backfire.
“It’s a very dangerous idea. If such a vote took place, the result might well be
‘no’,” says Idir. “And if people say ‘no’ and reject a part of themselves, it would
mean there’s nothing we can do together. Except for a few fanatics, Berbers have
never wanted independence.” Their main demand is to be recognized as Berbers in their
own country. “As a Kabyle, I want to be an Algerian through and through, not just
partially, as I am today,” he says.
A member of a minority group both in Algeria and in France, Idir has chosen to straddle
cultures. “Identities”, the title of his latest album, released by Sony at the end
of last year, is far from bland. Singing with him are Ireland’s Karen Matheson, Geoffrey
Oryema from Uganda, Bretons Gilles Servat and Dan Ar Braz, the French-Galician Manu
Chao, the French groups Gnawa Diffusion and Zebda (of Arab and Berber origins), all
of them representatives of small cultures. He says they have allowed him to show
that his own minority culture can be part of the wider world.
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