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Showing posts from January, 2014

Alone in Algeria

W'7di. I came here with only a Bachelor’s-degree’s-worth of scholarly knowledge in modern standard Arabic, and a vocabulary and pronunciation in Syrian, acquired during one year of study in Damascus forced upon me. During those years, I learnt that to say ‘alone’ one should say ‘ li wa7di ’ which to my western terms of reference meant… ‘alone’. I never had to ponder on the term much, I only encountered it in newspaper articles' translations into English, and during my study year I lived with English speakers, so telling someone 'get out, I want to be alone' was always going to be understood. When I came to Algeria, after about three months of living from friends’ homes to family members’ homes, it became vital to learn how to express ‘I need to live alone’, not so much as in ‘you all drive me bonkers’ but more as in trying to express the dire wish to place my body and self in a space with no other bodies and selves within that space, apart from perhaps the

Parallel Worlds - Algeria

 Algiers. At nightfall, on my way down Didouche Mourad street, I saw them again, skaters coming down the road. Young’uns, acting nonchalant, sliding down between cars at a speed peculiarly slow considering it was downhill, risking, if not their lives, those of others. Are these teenage kids monkeying about being a pain as in so many other cities, a sign of the famous but somewhat fragile ‘return to normality’? It made me think of the kids in Bab El Oued where I currently live practically next door to the DGSN which by default makes me live in one of the safest areas in Algiers… …but then in Algeria (as elsewhere) what is a criminal? When I moved here I was told: Bab el Oued is the ‘popular’ quarter, a famous area… It turns out it’s movie heaven here. Sold on improvised kiosk stalls, there are all the movies you could want, old and just released, CDs organised by actors (the Di Caprio CD, the De Niro CD) or