Machaho Tellem Chaho

If you imagined Language as a big Lego castle, you would see it was made of several blocks. Vocabulary would make up one lot. The arrangement of words ie Syntax another. The rules that organise words-strings - ie sentences - would give yet another shape called Grammar. Add hues for morphology and phonology and start building or deconstructing. Am not sure what's we'd put in the royal garden, perhaps poetry? When I began looking into francophone Algerian detective-stories and francophone Algerian literature in general (I am still looking for works in the Algerian language but that's another subject...) I was looking for a particular kind of Lego castle arrangement. As I began investigating from abroad, the majority of works I found dated pre-90s, the libraries in London to which I had access had been supplied with books from Algeria up to a certain period, then supplies had clearly come to a halt to pick up later only with writers that boast international clou...

Shadow 67 ( Ombre 67 ) briefly begins in Algiers with two cousins who go to pick up their tourist visas to go to Paris and Madrid. Rashid is a scientist working for an international company and is taking his closest friend, his cousin Karim, with him on a week holiday. The next morning of their arrival in Paris, on their way to visit the Eiffel Tower, Rashid pales before a man he sees far away in the crowd and who advances towards him calling him Hassan. Panicked, Rashid hurries his cousin back to the hotel, and with no explanation forces him into a cab and orders him to return to Algiers, then disappears. Karim of course does not return home, makes his way back to their original hotel and begins to search for his disappeared cousin. After having alerted the French police, the Algerian Embassy in Paris and enrolling the help of a woman journalist looking for a scoop, he becomes embroiled in a case a lot more threatening than had at first appeared : the 11th century sect the A...

Do you know Johnny Cash's song I hung my head ? A man goes out to practice shooting, early one morning. Not paying particular attention to his surroundings, he fires into the distance and his bullet shoots a rider down. I always felt this song captures the fixed and unforgiving essence of doom, how one single moment, one single action, can make your entire life tip over, to merge the real and the nightmares. Perhaps we've all been at the threshold of such moments? Perhaps not. But it is the kind of texts that sends ice cold waves down one's spine (well mine), because it tells and foretells life's potential for horror.  Abdelhamid Ben Hadouga's novel ' The South Wind ' sends such shivers, only they will be burning, as burning as the guebli- wind. The story is set post-independence (the novel was published in 1971) and the Algerian government is about to implement its land redistribution plan. Nafissa, a young university student, returns to...