12 - In Search of Lost Kabyles in Mehdi Lallaoui's La colline aux oliviers

Summary

Ce sont des âmes d'ancêtres qui nous occupent, substituant leur drame éternisé à notre juvénile attente, à notre patience d'orphelins ligotés à leur ombre de plus en plus pâle, cette ombre impossible à boire ou à déraciner.

[We are busy with our forefathers’ souls, subjecting their ongoing ordeal to our youthful expectations, our impatience that of orphans who are bound to these fading ancestral shadows, shadows you can neither drink nor uproot.]

Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (1956).

Introduction: Forefathers’ Souls

The first pages of Mehdi Lallaoui's Kabyles du Pacifique, on the subject of the deported Algerian Kabyles punished by the French for their uprising in 1871, incorporate this chapter's epigraph—a quotation from the famous twentieth-century Kabyle poet Kateb Yacine. According to Patricia M. E. Lorcin, “The Berbers of Algeria comprise the Chaouia of the Aurès mountains in southeastern Algeria, the Kabyles (the largest group) of what is now known as Kabylia, the Mozabites of the Mzab in the northern Saharan region and the Tuareg of the central Sahara.” Lorcin adds that “Individual exceptions apart, all but the Mozabites are, like the Arabs, Sunni Muslims of the Maleki rite. They are distinguished from the Arabs by their culture and language, of which there are several dialects, but there are none the less Arabic-speaking Berbers and Berber areas, among the Chaouia for example, where Arabic culture has been absorbed into their own.” Kateb Yacine fought all his life for Algeria's diversity and, in particular, for the right of Kabyles to have their language recognized as one of the national languages.

It is significant that Mehdi Lallaoui, a writer born and raised in France but nevertheless considered in France as “second generation of Algerian descent,” pays tribute to Yacine by quoting from the latter's masterpiece, Nedjma. Lallaoui thus acknowledges the place of the poet in his own intellectual journey to research, share, and publish the Kabyle experience within and outside Kabylia itself. The “forefathers’ souls” contributed to shaping the destiny of many victims of and actors behind colonialism, and they occupy a crucial space in Lallaoui's works. As with so many other contemporary writers belonging to a dual cultural heritage, Lallaoui's birth as a writer corresponded with and, one could even argue, was triggered by particular socioeconomic factors connected to colonialism.