Idir: A Berber Singer Activist (synthèse en anglais)

Jad Harradi

SOC 1301

Idir: A Berber singer activist.

`Txilek elli yi n taburt a vava invba / ccencen tizebgatin im a yelli ghriba" ("Please, father Inouba, open the door / Oh Ghriba girl, jingle your bracelets"). This refrain from a Kabyle song, "A Vava Inouva" rang out around the world in the mid-1970s. Only 10 million Berbers scattered over the Sahara and North Africa, could understand the lyrics, but the song became an international hit. The Algerian singer Idir, an icon of Berber culture, uses his talent and guitar to fight for recognition of his mother tongue. Hamid Cheriet, took the stage name of Idir ("he shall live" in Kabyle). "At a time when many epidemics were raging, new-born babies were called Idir to ward off bad luck," he says. "I chose it as a tribute to my culture, which I felt was threatened."

The Berber people, who for most of them live in the mountains of Morocco and Algeria, speak Shawiya, Shilha, Kabyle, Mzab, Rifain, Tachelhit, Tuareg, Targi and Tarifit. These are dialects of Tamazight, their native tongue, which is only recognized as a national language in Niger and Mali. In other places, Berber culture is ignored or even banned. "They give me an Algerian passport, but I have to get permission to speak my own language," says Idir who, like the great Martinican poet Aime Cesaire, speaks up for "those who have no voice." It never occurred to him to write in French, the language of the colonizer in which he did all his schooling, right up to a Ph.D in geology. Nor would he write in Arabic, which was taught as a second language in Algeria at the time. "If I hadn't left my village, I'd never have spoken a word of Arabic," he says. "French and Arabic would allow me to get my message over to a wider audience, but I wouldn't know how to go about it or what to say." Kabyle is a language of feelings and storytelling that flows naturally in poetry. It is also the language Idir has chosen to use. "To sing in Kabyle is a militant act, a way of expressing my rebellion, to say that I exist," he says. "If I'd had another profession, I would have found other ways to express the same demands."

In 1975, he came to Paris to sign a contract with Pathe-Marconi and stayed in France. Ever since, this child of the Auras Mountains has celebrated Berber culture through music, thus extending a movement launched in the 1940s by major Algerian and Moroccan writers such as Jean Amrouche, Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun and Kateb Yacine. These pioneers had to use French to defend the Berber language if they were to get a hearing. As Amrouche put it: "I think and write in French, but I weep in Kabyle." These days, Idir can go further than that. He advocates three languages for Algeria--Arab, Berber and French. "I want Algeria to take into account those who live on its land, who love the country and want to build it whatever their origin, language or religion," he says. "Islam shouldn't be an official religion. Religion is for believers, not governments. Arabic shouldn't have a special status just because it's the holy language of the Koran--especially classical Arabic, a sanitized tongue ordinary

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