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Cri (Scream) by Ismael Ait Djafer










Ismael Ait Djafer is an Algerian poet and caricaturist known for two gut-wrenching long compositions 'Complainte des mendiants arabes de la Casbah et de la petite Yasmina tuée par son père' (published in 1950) and 'Cri' (possibly composed in 1964, and published in 1987, and 1998).






'Cri' is pratically impossible to find nowadays, so to honour the poet's memory, and to try to keep his work in circulation his poem 'Cri', in the edition published by Novelte Massalia in 1998, is made available here as a pdf (DOWNLOAD). The whole book (with both poems) is downloadable here.


The edition features a profile of the poet by Nadia Idjouadienne, a preface by Yacine Kateb, and two drawings by Ait Djafer.   








Ismael Ait Djafer was born on 1 March 1929 in the Casbah, Algiers, where he was raised. A timid, gentle child, he had an accident young where he lost one of his eyes. He wrote poetry from about 12 years-old, his brother recalls, and very quickly developped a taste for drawing and caricature. He would later also write for newspapers, and even created his own "El-Chaab", which he edited, published, and distributed himself. He obtained his baccalaureate in Algiers and began law studies in the late 1940s. It is in 1949 that he was witness to the tragic event (read about it here) that led him to write his famous poem 'Complainte des mendiants arabes de la Casbah et de la petite Yasmina tuée par son père' (translated to English by Jack Hirschman as Wail of the Arab Beggards of the Casbah (NU press, 2004, see an excerpt here). The poem was published by Jean-Paul Sartre in Octobre 1951, in Sartre's magazine 'Les Temps Modernes'. It was reedited in 1986 by Bouchene editions with a preface by Yacine Kateb. Bouchene

Later, he composed his second long poem, 'Cri', which appeared in Bouchene's edition of 1987 together with the Complainte, and in an edition by Novelte Massalia, in 1998 (the PDF of Cri here is from this 1998 edition).

Ait Djafer passed away on 1 May 1996 of a long illness.


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