Machaho Tellem Chaho

This is an exchange initiated by @ayatghanem in response to Nabila Ramdani's latest piece in the Guardian "Comment is Free" section. Ramdani's article starts with " It is now half a century since Algeria, the jewel in the crown of Gallic imperialism, was finally granted independence ". You can check it on Storify or read it below (starting from the bottom up). I find it infuriating that journalists discussing Algeria and Algerians use poorer and poorer language, churning and rechurning words and expressions thoughtlessly, often simplifying language for the 'general public to understand more easily', when it is only a clear lack and want of intellectual effort. "Algeria was granted its independence" is the way the French authorities have been wording the historical fact that Algerians fought tooth and nail to get back their independence violently stolen by this former colonial power.  Algerians were granted nothing. The...

The photographer Marc Garanger is exhibiting portraits of Algerian women he took between 1960 and 2004 in Kabylia.  The exhibition is taking place in Paris at the Centre Culturel Algerien.  Here are a few photos taken from this gallery, for an interview he gave to TV5 Monde (in French) . In this interview, he recounts he was one of the photographers that the French army employed to take photos of women forced to unveil (1960) during the ceremonies of  forced unveiling organised by the French. 

Arabic is a “ Semitic language first attested by inscriptions in the Arabian peninsula from about the 5th century BC carried by the expansion of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries AD to a large area across the southern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and thence, as a language of religion especially, much wider. Written in a North Semitic alphabet , in origin purely consonantal , but with marks for vowels added in the 8th century. The language of the Koran is Classical Arabic, and modern Arabic-speaking communities are in the main diglossic , with a range of variation between ‘Modern Standard Arabic’, a form of Classical Arabic with a modernized vocabulary, and one of many national or local ‘dialects’. At sufficient distances these dialects are mutually unintelligible. ”  So says the Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics . Are language, dialect, Classical, Modern Standard, the 8 th century and the MENA what we talk about when we talk about Arabic ?  L...

Since 10 November this year, the Algerian cartoonist Slim now blogs at SlimLeBlog ! Mid-month, he posted a short video from a talk he gave in 2008 at UCLA, California, where he was invited to talk about Human Rights in Algeria.   (Click on the photo to go the video or click HERE )