The sun is setting and I'm sitting in the orchard, under the shade of my relative's olive trees. I'm sulking my father's trees, we've just argued. Again. As I turn to watch our lot to give me some sense of filial responsibility, I see my cousin's wife and her 4 year-old daughter awkwardly hiding behind tree trunks and picking the olives that have fallen on the ground after the harvest. My olives. My harvest. Next to me, my relative is working hard on her garden. We chat while I munch on 'tassememt'. "Have you seen what they're doing..." she tells me while she digs the ground to make space for her future onions. "Yup". "She told me she's teaching her daughter how to earn and save money. So at every sunset she comes down with her, and picks the olives that are left on the ground. Then they go by the roadside where vegetable merchants set up shop to sell on the highway, and she sells the olives there. She doesn't take the olives from under her trees, she takes it from under all of ours. She's stealing basically" "You're going to tell her off?" "No, I can't, we already argued years ago and didn't speak for one year. We can't do that again. When she's done stealing yours she's going to run off home, so am going to clear the ground under my trees then. She'll be a lot more upset to find nothing than to be told off."
(photo credit: Yacine Bouaziz ) Every Friday, for the past 38 weeks*, men and women with their children have been peacefully demonstrating in Algeria, reclaiming public space and demanding a complete overhaul of the political landscape. In the country, these demonstrations are described as part of a larger whole: the " hirak " (less often harak ), 'the movement'. It was of course only a matter of time before the hirak became the main subject in books. So far, non-fiction leads with analyses and commentaries of this nationwide movement, written in Arabic and French, by single authors or collectives, published as early on as May 2019 (demonstrations began on 16 February 2019). The hirak has also crossed into poetry and fiction. Khaled Ben Salah's poetry collection " diary of an African man who wears a floral shirt and smokes L&M's in the time of the revolution " was published by El Mutawassit editions in October (see an excerpt...
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