Machaho Tellem Chaho

My phone rings. It's Kahina. She's supposed to be out with her boyfriend at this hour. It's their second outing together in two-years. Relationships here are often mostly distance relationships, conducted over the phone between lovers who practically live next door.  Kahina is turning out to be like Amine, a once very close friend who used to call me from toilet cubicles in hotels, restaurants, coffee-shops, to give me the details of the girls to whom he'd just been introduced. He'd decided to get married and had embarked on a bride search with his dad as mediator. He'd initially set his heart on his cousin but eventually had a change of heart. He couldn't tell his dad about what he called 'a detail'. "I really like her but uncle abused her when she was 12 and her mum's been hiding it from family members who all seem to know anyhow". - Hi Kahina, are you in the loo? - what? no, am in bed, am soooooooo..... She lets out a cry. One ...

Some months ago, a pipe burst in the plumbing of my upstairs neighbour's bathroom. If it hadn't been for my kitchen's plaster ceiling suddenly falling off, and for the water bursting forth out of electricity plug holes, we'd never have known. My landlady had just pocketed my upfront three-months rent. Bad timing for a catastrophe. Hibba, my landlady, has been suffering from severe mood swings - that’s how she calls dodging out of any spending to repair the flat I’m renting from her. Her husband passed away last year from brain cancer. She picks up:   - tifla ! how are you? how's your family? you need anything? you know if you need anything, you just call me right!  - Hibba, the ceiling's falling off.  - I'm practically in the car, you hear the engine? I have to leave Algiers. It’s the stress, the four months’ mourning, the traffic jams, the white & blue paint replaced by black & white on Didouche, she starts sobbing, I'll deal w...

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 t...

I've just come back home from visiting a troublesome relative. My other relatives (women) are eagerly awaiting my return for news. The news they are after though are not those I expected. No one is interested in whether or not she still gets beaten up, if there's food in the house or if the children are now completely ready to commit parricide: - Come and give me a kiss ! How was the visit ? - was ok... the kids seem ok, they told me that... - So... are they sleeping together again? - what? bloody hell, I don't know, that's none of my business. - you don't know? you could have asked, I mean she should let him, what's a wife for otherwise? - oh my god, we're not 1890! What the hell are you saying... I don't even want to imagine where their children came from... - where they come from and where they go indeed... she told me she lets her three year-old sleep in bed with her. Then the little girl pees during the night and the sheets smell. ...

"can I come in? I really need a smoke..." My landlady The flat I rent used to be my landlady's "office", a private space that operated under the guise of a public one. She kept her office to escape the non-smoker act she carries on outside, to smoke to her heart's content inside.  Now it's occupied, but she still comes from time to time for the odd fag and to pour out her frustrations when she returns from food shopping trips at the nearby market.  My landlady "Why don't they review the number of fasting days we have to follow like they review the amount of zakat we have to pay every year? A whole month seems so excessive! 20 would be more than enough, we're in the 21st century and I've got things to do, God damn!"

A few days back, relatives so distant you could call them strangers came to visit. As it often happens when recently married women are among the group, older women who have been married a while turn the spotlight on these young brides and the conversation inevitably turns towards the shape of lower abdomens, an indirect manner to fill the bottle (to get information to later shine in gossiping contests) on the brides' private relationship with their spouse. - Nice bump, are you pregnant? - What? No! We've been to so many wedding parties, I've eaten too much cake these last few weeks, got a bit overweight that's all. - Come on, I was at the doctors with your cousin last month and when we chatted she said you might be expecting. - No, I'm not, I take the pill anyway. - You shouldn't take the pill so early on, have children first, men love to have children, lots of children, take the pill when you're old and can no longer have any.

- Were results announced today? - Yes, they did ok, but it's not great... given that they knew the questions in advance.  - Won't seem like a suspicious ranking then. Local schools in our area have been told to simultaneously run an exam to test literacy. The results won't count nationally, nor will they affect the funds or the future of the schools that will end up at the bottom. As soon as the exam date was set, the director organised a teachers' meeting in the photocopy room, they were getting ready to leak questions. Simultaneously, students were contacting teachers demanding to be given the questions in advance. Both side were in symbiosis.  The test was leaked. To 6 year-old children. They don't know how to read, write or count yet, but they are already perfectly aware that an exam isn't a test of knowledge, it's a test of skills. Cheating is the exam. Cheating is the skill. Is cheating is a question of survival?

I am sitting on a bed, drinking coffee in a bedroom that overlooks the courtyard of our house, set in an orchard, by a country road in a village, next to the city, in the east of the middle... the middle of Algeria. Or is it the other way round? I am in Algeria, in the middle of the north... not the middle-east though... near a city, in a village up a country road, by the orchard that leads to our house and its courtyard, sitting in a room, on a bed with a coffee cup in my hand. In this enumeration of geographical locations, I suddenly wonder about space, the private and the public. Societies have divided space in at least two spheres, the private and the public. Private and public spaces are a kind of market, a place where information is shared and exchanged. Both operate with codes on how information gets exchanged. Some things are spoken about in private, and others in public but their borders aren't so fixed that both spheres never meet. In that meeting place, t...

In a small village surrounded by fruits trees, a group of women are talking under a walnut tree, resigned and dignified. - That's it, all the oranges are gone. - And the mandarines? - Finished. His daughters-in-law's mothers didn't even get given any... - Damn, we've eaten everything. Again. - He's going to get mad. - Yea but how much? - Not more than last year when he made her cook makrout for him all summer, even during Ramadan... - Her face and arms spent all summer above boiling oil. - ...and not less than the year he discovered that the girl to whom he married his son is a moron. - He should have known, beautiful but never married at 29... - Why don't any of you refuse his madness? Why don't you say no to him when he asks for crazy things to punish you with? - We can't ! - Why? What's the worse thing that can happen? - He'll stop speaking to us. - What ? - He'll go silent. - Your grandad r...

I woke up this morning struck with the, finally lucid, realisation that attempting to learn Derja or Kabyle for a Francophone zmigré over 18 is pointless. In a country where you would be justified to think the last thing needed is another French speaker, it turns out that irrationality, economics, and the neighbourhood's geopolitics will largely forgive you, if not encourage you, to simply come settle, and remain, on the strength of that ability alone: speaking French. When do we need to learn a language, or rather, when does a language become necessary to learn? The earliest evidence of language writing found so far shows it is economics that motivated writing, not the dire need to record love songs, although that came later. Economics is probably the preponderant factor that decides and motivates learning a language, and ultimately keeping up with it. Learning a language for the love of it, like setting poems in clay or stone, comes after. But the economics of ...

Pink and rosy lenses on my glasses The first external place you'll end up knowing well after you land anywhere urban is the street. Streets are the arteries that pump and tie up all activities, whether you walk them or drive through them. I have been walking the streets as a woman, I can't escape my gender, but mostly I walk them as a human being. In the streets, among the vast Algerian skies, the ochres of city houses, the dusty whites of metropoleis , palm trees' flamboyant greens, and the pale khakis of olive orchards, there is quite a crowd. But people aren't walking. Pedestrians appear static. While the act of putting one foot after another is visibly unfolding, no movement to speak of is perceptible. And so, avoiding collision at a very slow rate into a variety of static but not fixed obstacles may have slowed, and toned down, my perception of several events. One such and which has been popping up much in blogs and radio lately is street harass...

Ain Fezza's Grotto - Tlemcen In the net that a language weaves, and in the concepts woven into that net, giving shape to the pattern, you can find antonyms. Antonyms, carried by a word, represent a meaning that faces another and stands opposite to it. Like a spatial location, top/bottom, a physical attribute, tall/short, a time stamp, before/after, an abstract, beginning/end. Each word-vessel is separate from its opposite and is spelt differently. Among the group 'antonyms', there is the peculiar category of auto-antonyms. Peculiar because the same word carries two opposite meanings, both inside a word with the same spelling. There is no graphic difference, no visible identity for each. In English, before both means in front of (I am here before you) and, well... before (have you ever thought about this before?). Auto-antonyms are absolutely fascinating. Fascinating because they point to and illustrate the lexical extent a word can reach. This category ...

Qal lek that during the fasting month of Ramadan, Shaytan, this much greater devil than Insan , gets chained up for the duration. This has for effect that in some unsought way, the human beings we are, are offloaded from his wickedness (that is not to say from all wickedness, only Shaytan's inspired own). Effectively, during the month of Ramadan, Shaytan is neutralised, out of circulation, pulled off the streets. Puff. And who would have thought that the combination of fasting and a lack of inspiration for evil doings could lead to: a very great street party. A great nocturnal fest, not only a feast, is taking place in Algiers nightly (this year and perhaps so for a long time) featuring all manners of concerts, museum tours, exhibitions, theatre plays on a wide array of themes, and open-air cinema. Not to mention sweet-cakes, mint tea and salty peanuts stalls, ice-cream parlours, brochettes vendors and various restaurants opened from dusk to dawn. This is mo...

I went to a debate during the International Festival of Literature and of Young People’s Literature ( FELIV ) in Algiers on the competing voices of official versions of History and factual's versions. I wrote the below for Arab Literature in English Translation and wanted to post it here to record it because this subject is the very reason why I have been looking into Algerian literature, why I think its role is so important, fragile and ultimately crucial. The (literary) writing of history” was the topic of Sunday, June 15′s discussion between French author and Goncourt prize winner Jean Rouaud ( Fields of Glory, 1990 ) and Algerian writer Abdelkader Djamai ( La Dernière nuit de l’Emir, 2012). France Culture producer Catherine Pont-Humbert aptly moderated the talk around the following questions: In the historical novels you’ve written, where was the frontier between what is lived and what is history? Rouaud was clear on this. For him, “every novel, exc...

“We” are interrupted You might have noticed that in the Algerian language, to conjugate a verb in the first person singular (in the present-future), you prefix it with noon : n ften , n ro7 , n 'bghi . This noon is also found in the conjugation of the first person plural verb (in the present-future), with the addition of the plural marker waw : n b'dl o , n tlaqa w , n 7ebb o .    noon is part of what makes "us" and "I".  “We”, in Algerian, is grammatically built on part of the identity of "I". “We” is a continuation of “I” grammatically speaking. "I" s are linked by their plurality, the waw plural marker says as much. "We" is a plurality ( waw ) based on singularities ( noon ).  In Algerian, “we” is a group of individuals ( I ) linked by their singular state ( noon ). "We" is a group tied by their individualities - their differences, not by their similarities. waw is also used elsewhere in gra...

The High Commission for Amazigh identity*  is currently holding a three day conference, started on 7 June, to review the situation of Tamazight in the public sphere, specifically in the media, and generally in terms of communication in Tamazight. The very formal opening (with the Minister of Communication Hamid Grine, the HCA's High Secretary, police, a stand up ovation for Qassaman and a two-hour lunch) began on a frontal political footing (in my opinion not necessarily welcome for a conference based on science and research, away from emotion) and on a two-fold demand or the reiteration of one: 1) the officialisation of Tamazight 2) making Tamazight tuition in school (primary and secondary) obligatory. 1) The officialisation of Tamazight No definition of what officalisation means in concrete terms was given. Maybe everybody in the audience knew what this is expected to involve except me. Still, it was spoken about, in an emotional way, invoking officialisation as a g...