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 by genres…
Mostly,
Bab El Oued was to be the place, I was told, where people would speak to me
only in Derja.
Perhaps it is not so much contradictory worlds I encounter than my own adjusting.
I could willingly get lost here forever.
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.speed
does not have the pace I used to know.
Are these kids not getting arrested because their parents are too well placed and no police officer (well if they were around because by nightfall they’ve taken off) would mess with them, a sign of the privileges many (but always the same ones) can claim to? …is living next to policemen safe because I am more wary of them than I am of criminals…
...
someone who steals, wheels and deals or someone who leads, deeds and decrees…
…‘telling’ is often a sign of ‘warning’… … popular not as in famous but as ‘uneducated’ meaning fewer fluent French speakers here. Thank God. … with a section dedicated to Derja, a section you can’t find in any library! … everyone speaks to me in Kabyle here.
There
are several layers of parallel worlds here, not secret worlds, everybody
knows about them, they know where they open and where they exit. Although
beware, the entrances formerly taken no longer lead to known exits.
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