It was only recently that I learned the real significance of that night back in 1994.  It ended a thirty-year period of official ostracism and neglect.  It was the first time that Cheikha Rimitti had been programmed in a proper concert hall, and one that was part of one the most respected cultural centres of the Arabic Diaspora to boot.  Since Algerian independence in 1962 Cheikha Rimitti had been given the cold shoulder by the cultural leaders of the newly independent state and had been forced to earn her living by playing weddings, baptisms and henna feasts on both sides of the Mediterranean.  After enduring three decades of Arabisation, corruption, deception, disappointment, moralising, cultural chastity and linguistic repression, Algeria welcomed la diva du rai back onto an official concert stage (the same welcome still hasn’t been extended by state radio and TV).  She lost no time in reminding her fellow country men and women who they really were, what they had been missing  and how to smile again.

Rimitti sang, as she has always done, in the plain spicy slang of Oranie, the huge province that spreads south, east and west from the port city of Oran in Western Algeria.  She didn’t mince her language or play too many high-minded metaphorical games.  She sang just how the poor rural population of her homeland speak, and to the gathered ex-pat crowd that was a refreshing epiphany of epic proportions.  Rimitti had returned, and she was telling it like it was.   The effect was Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf, Barbara Windsor, Eva Peron and Oum Khalthoum all rolled into one.

With your permission, I’m just going to indulge in a little plain-speaking myself.  My recent interview with Cheikha Rimitti was a nightmare.  We met in late January amidst the luxuriant Arabian nights décor of a Moorish bar restaurant in Paris’ third arrondissement.  Cheikha Rimitti arrived with her manager and producer Nourredine Gafaiti, an old rai svengali who has managed an impressive stable of A-list Algerian stars in his time including the late lamented Cheb Hasni and the husband and wife duo Sahraoui and Fadela.  I’ve always had a lot of respect and a lot of time for Mr Gafaiti.  He’s one of the rare native Algerian showbiz operators who has had the courage to explore and master the ‘western’ way of doing business, and the benefits have been obvious.

Cheikha Rimitti has long harboured a deep mistrust of journalists.  You can’t blame her.  Her kingdom is the spoken word, and the written opinions of hacks belong to a sphere beyond her ken, her interest and her control.  Before I had even asked my first question, I was made aware of the ground-rules in no uncertain terms.  Rimitti doesn’t want to talk about her private life.  Rimitti will not discuss her age or her past.  Rimitti only wants to talk about the music.  Recently, I was told, a French journalist wrote an inaccurate and unkind account of the alleged debaucheries of Rimitti’s past life.   She invented stuff.  We trust you won’t do the same.   Have you got a card?  Thanks, now we know how to get hold of you if you write anything cheeky or false.   Ok, now we can start.

The frustration and nervousness inspired by this onslaught of rules and restrictions was diluted by excitement and a gut feeling that this was a one-in-a-million opportunity that should under no circumstances be screwed up.  After all I was sitting inches away from one of my all-time heroines, a living breathing and impatiently waiting piece of history.  “OK, so let’s talk about the new album then…Haja Rimitti, what were you trying to…”  “It’s just Cheikha Rimitti to you, no Haja if you please!” came the booming riposte.  Legend 1, trembling English hack 0.  Everyone had been addressing Cheikha as ‘Haja’ since the moment she arrived, but it seemed that the title conferred on Rimitti following her pilgrimage to Mecca in 1976 was off limits to all but close friends and family.

OK, so CHEIKHA Rimitti, what were you trying to do with the new album?  She has an amazing way of talking, which is close to her singing style.  Her phrases come out like canon balls, rolling, loud and bass heavy, with little delicate grandmotherly croak trails at the end of each sentence.  Nourredine Gafaiti translated, assuring me that his rendition was unspun and word-for-word.   “In some way I wanted to resuscitate my life’s journey and my repertoire with this album but nonetheless I’m annoyed by all the artists who use my songs without declaring them.  I’ve always been short of money and I’ve been deprived of my rightful income so I hope that all of this will be put right sometime soon…”

BANG, ten seconds into the interview, we’ve already collided head on with Rimitti’s obsession numero uno: the great pop-rai Rimitti rip off.   Basically, it goes like this.  Rimitti has written over two hundred songs in her time, without pen or paper, just straight from her buzzing brain and into the microphone. Some of these songs, like ‘El Hmam’, ‘La Camel’ and ‘Mani Mani’ were snapped up by the younger generation of pop-rai chebs, covered on various releases and then registered with the French Society Of Composers, Authors and Arrangers (SACEM) as if they had written them themselves.   In other words Rimitti was deprived of her rightful ownership of and income from the songs.  It’s a legitimate gripe, which has been exacerbated by the fact that none of the younger generation, like Khaled, Mami, Zahouania, Fadela, Sahraoui and Tahar have ever acknowledged the debt they owe to Rimitti.  It’s that ingratitude that Rimitti still finds deeply hurtful. In fact, she’s obsessed with it.  The subject crops up again and again during our interview, like an unswattable insect buzzing furiously and intermittently in the ear.   Basically, as far as Rimitti is concerned, the only thing any journalist she meets is really good for is to help her broadcast this grave injustice, this heinous crime of base ingratitude.

Which is a pity, because deep down under that time-etched visage is a unique and deeply fascinating life-story.  But it remains resolutely stashed away in the vaults of Rimitti’s memory.  I do get a few tantalizing glimpses; a wayward recollection of performing with M’hamed Benzerga, le James Dean du rai, at a restaurant in Oran in 1959 on the night he was killed in a motorbike accident; a strange story about how a lawyer and music entrepreneur called Belhadj once acted as go-between for the famous traditional Oranais singer Cheikh Hamada whilst he was courting a French woman.  These titbits are thrown at me like choice morsels of roast meat to a hungry dog.

Rimitti also likes lists and takes pleasures in intoning them like a Buddhist boom box.   The famous names of yesteryear who she worked with: Hachlef, El Anka, Skandrani, Abdelwhahb, Mohammed El Badi, Abdoulahi Belkhayat, Fadila Djziriya, Miriam Fekkai, Cheikha Tetma, Mahboubati, Benzerga.  The places where she has performed and triumphed: Italy, Casablanca, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Tunisia, Angoulême, London, Bordeaux, Marseille, Spain, Cartagena, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Portugal, Berlin, Cologne.  The labels she has recorded for: Pathé Marconi, Maison d’Armor, Dounia, Philipps, La Voix de Son Maitre.   The old traditional singers who influenced her: Hamada, Madani, El Khaldi, Hadda, Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby, Benzerga, Ahmed Saber.  The new singers who have ripped her off: Khaled, Mami, Fadela, Sahraoui.  For those with only a passing interest in North African and Arabic music, these lists will be more or less meaningless.  But for those few obsessional Maghrebi music train-spotters out there, these lists are stories in themselves, and mighty impressive ones too.

But when I try to delve deeper into the past, all I get is curtains.  “Why are you asking questions about Cheikh El Khaldi, Hamada, Madani?” Gafaiti translates.  “Because I’m fascinated by that period,” I answer.  “In that case you journalists should write the story of that period and give it some more consideration.”  “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”  “I don’t want to talk about others, I want to talk about myself.  What interests me are my rights, my songs and my works.  Ethnomusicology is not my predilection.”

Nor is it mine.  It seems that the real full-bodied Rimitti story might go with her to the grave.  In the meantime, hapless writers and idolizers like myself will have to be content with approaching her as if she were a historical figure, piecing together her story and her significance from the jumble of re-cycled references which can be found in the articles written about her by North African journalists with privileged access and knowledge of her language, especially Bouziane Daoudi of Liberation and Rabah Mezzouane, the musical director of the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Cheikha Rimitti was born in the mountainous region of Tessala, between the garrison town of Sidi-bel-Abbès and the prim wine-growing burg of Ain Temouchent, in western Algeria, on May 8^th 1923.  Algeria was still a part of France, trains still ran on coal and 78rpm shellac was still the only format in town.  She was given the name ‘Saâdia’, which means the happy or the fortunate one.  Her fate did not fulfil the promise of her name, and when she was still young, both her parents died.

The events of Rimitti’s early life remain locked away in her memory, but one can only surmise that it was a testing and tough existence, battered by extremes of hunger, poverty and loneliness.  The young Saâdia no doubt learned what she needed to know to survive, and events forged a character of street-wise steel.  We can speculate what music she must have heard at that age; a mix of the rural Berber folk of her forebears, which had remained largely unchanged for centuries, like the lifestyle it serenaded, and popular poetry known as melhoun, which had been adapted by ‘urbanised’ troubadours who adopted the instruments of rural poor, the rosewood desert flute or gasba and small goblet drum or guellal, and wore the turbans and burnous of the peasantry, to create what became known as folklore Oranais or gharbi, which means music ‘from the west’.  By the 1920s there were already many recordings available by these venerated cheikhs, a title which is equivalent to something like ‘sir’ or ‘the honourable…’

Men like Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh Madani, Cheikh El Khaldi, Cheikh Benyakhlef and Cheikh Elarbi Ben Sari, were a powerful early influence on Rimitti.  But she also had an ear for another tradition, a more risqué, more libertine and less time-honoured one than that of the chioukh (plural of ‘cheikh’).  This style shared the rural sounds of gharbi, but its lyrical content belonged to the same family tree as the zendani, or tavern songs which were paeans to the pleasures and pain of alcohol, carnal love, feasts and all-night revelry, very popular amongst those at the bottom rung of society’s ladder.  These tantalising themes were taken up by the new sirens of the age, women singers who had ventured beyond the pale of respectable society, wilfully or by force of some misfortune such as the birth of an illegitimate child, a violent husband, a forbidden love affair or just grinding poverty. Even though a career in music and entertainment was considered to be base, unworthy and depraved, at least it afforded these ‘fallen’ women some chance of earning a living and being mistress of their own destinies.  It could also bring considerable fame, and some of the favours that accompany it.

By the time Rimitti entered her teenage years, several of these popular divas, or cheikhas, as they were referred to, in ironic contrast to their ultra-respectable male equivalent, had become very popular.  Among them were Cheikha Kheira Guendil, Cheikha Zohra Bent Ouda, Cheikha Zohra Relizania and Cheikha El Ouachma El Tmouchentia. These proud independent women must have offered the young Saâdia a powerful role model.  But her own road to independence was long and hard.  At some point during her teens, Rimitti joined an itinerant troupe of Hamadcha musicians, who lived out their devotion to the Moroccan Sufi saint Sidi Ali Ben Hamdouch by touring the countryside and performing healing rituals animated by music during which ‘patients’ would go into a trance and communicate with spirits or djnoun.  The troupe no doubt afforded Rimitti a powerful musical education and a kind of ersatz family unit.  The young singer lived a hand-to-mouth existence, sleeping rough in public baths, religious shrines or out in the fields under the stars.  Rimitti learned to survive, to sing and to dance.

And it was as a dancer that Rimitti first began to be noticed.  Her grace and daring were incredibly seductive.  She was famed for dancing with a whole tray of glasses full to the brim balanced on her head, her belly a-blur, without spilling a drop.  News of her derring-do antics at fantazias, or traditional demonstrations of horse riding and gunmanship, also began to spread throughout the region.  She was known for mounting horses with rifles in each hand and giving the gnarled old veterans a run for their money, or for diving under galloping hooves.  Meanwhile she continued to perform with other women, in groups called meddahates, who would sing the medh or verses in praise of The Prophet for women only audiences at weddings, baptisms, feast and henna parties.  She would also entertain male-only audiences with other cheikhas, liberating souls from the straightjacket of respectability, sowing dreams of love, alcohol and oblivion until dawn doused everyone with its sobriety.  It was an exhausting existence, but it kept her alive and gave her dignity, however perverse in the eyes of society at large.

At the age of 20, Rimitti settled in the agricultural centre of Relizane, sweltering in the middle of the hellishly hot plains of Oranie.  It was a town that was famed for its vineyards, its watermelon groves, its olive trees and its cheikhas.  Back in the 19^th century it had been the centre of the uprising against the French lead by Emir Abdelkader. The town dominated a territory rich in cultural as well as agricultural produce, and its jealously guarded rural folk music tradition had given the world several renowned chioukh including Cheikh Belabbas Relizani and Cheikh Mohamed Relizani.   Relizane was also the home of several well-known female singers, including one of dominant voices of the 1930s, Cheikha Zohra Reliziana, whose biggest hit was ‘Moula Bagdad’.

At around this time Rimitti met the venerable gharbi flute player Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems and set up a ménage with him.  Ennems was famed throughout the region and the protection he gave the young Rimitti was invaluable.  Together they started a family, and Ennems opened the door for Rimitti to many established musical figures, eventually clinching a session for her at a radio station in Algiers.   With this unfamiliar stability in her life, Rimitti began to compose her own songs.  It was a time of terrible hardship in Algeria.  The Second World War was raging in Europe and North Africa, and the Allied invasions of 1943 brought violence, danger and famine in their wake.  Oran and its surrounding regions were also ravaged by a plague of typhus, immortalised by Albert Camus in his existentialist masterpiece ‘La Peste’.  Meanwhile the entrenched apartheid of colonial Algeria heaped misfortune on the native underclass.  Rimitti began to sing about these terrifying realities, not in a polemic or analytical way, but rather like a mirror coloured with cautionary tales, idioms, double entendres, popular epithets and the rich patois of the region, reflecting the woes, aspirations, trials and tribulations of the ordinary man and woman.  And the ordinary man and woman began to love her for it.

Rimitti would travel the region with her retinue of two flute players (Habib and El Manouar were her favourites), percussionist, dancer and berrah, a kind of MC whose job it was to keep the dedications coming and receive the tips in return.  Apart from private weddings and feasts, the public venues she played at were often bars, cafés and cantinas in the red light districts and entertainment quarters of towns like Sidi bel Abbès, Relizane, Mostaganem, Hammam Bouhadjar, Ain Temouchent and Oran.  The main square in the Medina Jdida, or Arab quarter of Oran, which was called the Tahtaha, was a favourite place for chioukh and cheikhates to appear.  Rimitti would often perform completely veiled, especially in front of mixed or male only audiences.  It all helped to heighten the sense of mystery and forbidden allure.  In fact, anonymity was a crucial aspect of the cheikhate phenomenon, and remains so until this day.  They ditched their real names in favour of nicknames which might describe their place of origin, or a salient characteristic.  Later, when their music was released on 45rpm singles or cassettes, a stock photo library shot of an Alpine scene, or the Tour Eiffel or some voluptuous blonde model would be use for the front cover, rather than a picture of the singer herself.  Although extremely popular, no one with the slightest concern for the colour of his own reputation would actually admit to listening to recordings of the cheikhas.  It was a private affair, but none the less potent or widespread for all that.

The story of how Rimitti earned her own stage name is a revealing one, that has been told many many times.   Near Relizane, just by a river called Oued Rhiou, there was a shrine dedicated to Sidi Abed, the patron saint of the region.  Every year, as happened all over Algeria, a festival or wa’ada, was held near the shrine.  Hundreds of white canvas tents were erected and all manner of musical attractions, both extremely famous and less well known were brought in to animate this temporary ‘musical’ city.  There would also be feasting, drinking and fantazias.  One year, Saâdia was walking through the festival with her retinue, accompanied by Cheikh Hamada and Cheikh Bouras, and was caught in a torrential downpour.  She took shelter in a canteen run by a local French company.  There she was recognised and complimented.  Someone suggested that she give thanks to her assembled fans by buying them a round of drinks.  The problem was that the bar was run by a French woman and Rimitti has never spoken more than a few words of French.  So she asked for a panaché (shandy), and then kept saying “Remettez panaché madame, remettez, remettez!”, (“give me another shandy, madame, and another, and another…”) eventually actually putting the words to music and singing it for the benefit of her delighted audience.  When passed through the filter of a thick North African accent, ‘e’s tend to mutate into ‘i’s, and so the assembled crowd started to cry out, “It’s Rimitti, it’s the signer Rimitti!”   “There,” she still says, “I became ‘Rimitti’ thanks to alcohol.  It’s a fine name!”

It was also at one of these wa’adat that Rimitti was spotted by a talent scout for the Pathé Marconi Company and in 1952 she released her first 78 for them, featuring the classic ‘Errai Errai’, followed by ‘Trig Tmouchent’ and ‘Gasmou Tiaret’.   Two years later she released ‘Charrag Gatta’, a barely veiled invitation to virgins to do the deed.  “Tear, lacerate / Rimitti will mend / Let’s caress under the covers / somersault over somersault / I’ll give my love everything he wants / I’m smitten by the wholesale fruit seller / by the one with his turban and his turtledove” went the lyric.  It’s not hard to imagine the effect of such a discourse on the polite Algerian society of the 1950s.  The song was a big hit and Rimitti’s reputation was assured.

But 1954 was also the year in which the first salvos of the War of Independence were fired, and life in Algeria began to mutate irrevocably. Despite all the immense hardships of the pre-war years, despite the racism and apartheid rule of the European pied noirs, it’s astonishing how much nostalgia still exists for those times when life, although not easier, was perhaps simpler than now and blessed with greater degrees of tolerance and diversity of culture, opinion and entertainment.  Rimitti supported the independence cause, as did other female signers like Cheikha Kheira Guendil, but she was also a popular act on colonial radio and TV stations, whose programmers valued the non-political nature of her songs and her immense popularity amongst ordinary native citizens, which was precisely the constituency that the French propaganda machine found hardest to reach.  Thanks to this popularity, Rimitti and the other Cheikhas were deeply distrusted by the cadres of the FLN, MTLD and other revolutionary groups.  As far as these po-faced strategists were concerned, this music was just a frivolous distraction, an opiate that drew the populace away from their true revolutionary Arab destiny.

Thus began Rimitti’s long fall from official grace and favour.  During the ‘60s and ‘70s she maintained her grassroots popularity by performing at hundreds, even thousands of weddings, naming ceremonies and henna feasts.   “I was fed up with doing weddings before you were even born,” she declares during our interview.  In the 1970s the North African community in France multiplied a hundred fold, and Rimitti became a favourite in the cafés of the Arab quarters like Barbès in Paris, Place du Pont in Lyons or Cours Belzunce in Marseille.  Her songs were a potent balm for the sorrows of lonely Algerian men, living in their worker’s hostels and pining for the warmth and sun of the heir homeland.  A horrendous car crash on the road back to Oran from a concert in Algiers, in which three of her musicians died, had a deep effect on Rimitti.  She sings about it in the song ‘Daouni’, one of the best on her latest album ‘N’ta Goudami’.  In 1976 she went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and soon afterwards gave up alcohol, cigarettes and other carnal indulgences.  Since then she has lead a modest and frugal life, split between a hotel room in the Barbès quarter of Paris and a  home in Oran, which she has been visiting regularly during the Ramadan period, when fasting and partying go hand in hand.

Rimitti’s restitution in 1994 came in good time.  She has had another decade of life, and will hopefully have yet another one, in which to prove to the world that she is one of the greatest female voices in the Arab world and a cultural gem that Algerians from every level of society should protect, value and cherish.  Despite the global popularity of the electrified rai sound, Rimitti’s roots formula of voice, flute and drum remains the most arresting, the most evocative and the most enticing clarion-call of the genre.  It takes you straight back to the dusty plains of Oranie, and to the lives of its struggling millions.   The fact that Rimitti and her team of producers and musicians have managed to modernise it so effectively, first on ‘Nouar’, a modern rai masterpiece produced by Algerian Mohammed Maghni and released in 2000, and now on ‘N’ta Goudami’, is something that all of us should be grateful for.  Remettez Rimitti.  Let’s have another one, and another, and another!!!

Ivan Chrysler, (c) 2004

First published in fRoots Magazine, May 2004

The post CHEIKHA REMITTI #2 – Ethnomusicology is not my predilection! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Someone had the idea of organising a rai festival in the suburbs of Paris.  All the A-List raimen and women were invited: Cheb Khaled, Cheb Sahraoui, Chaba Fadela, Chaba Zahouania….  But only one singer was deemed worthy to open the event.  She was la mamie du rai, a living legend to whom all the younger singers owed their freedom of expression, their linguistic and moral rebelliousness, their sense of unchained hedonism, and a significant proportion of their repertoire too.  She was Cheikha Remitti.

“I had the impression that I was being used,” Remitti explained two decades later to Le Monde. “I suffered, I even cried.  They used me to launch the new rock-rai sound.  I’m the mother of rai music, but I’m rooted in a tradition… Remitti is like the plam tree that provides dates for all and sundry.  But all the young ones have evaporated, and I’m still here.”

Remitti is most emphatically still here, well past her eightieth birthday, sharp, defiant, halogenically lucid, still giving her audiences the proverbial cru-cut with her freight-train baritone holler and still raising the temperature with her shimmying shoulders and pulsating midriff.  Moreover Remitti really does seem to have overtaken and outlived much of the younger generation that she originally spawned.  Her brand new album ‘N’ta Goudami’, is creatively more ambitious and successful than 95% of the rai being recorded by singers one third her age.  It seems like Remitti has trounced the rai youth at their own game.

Under direction from her long-time manager and producer, Nourredine Gafaiti, Remitti took the bold step of recording ‘N’ta Goudami’ at the Boussif studios in the western Algerian seaport of Oran, the city where rai music was born over a century ago.  She also used a 100% Algerian crew of musicians and arrangers.  Younger pop-rai stars have been in the habit of paying through the nose for top-flight studio time and trophy producers from France or the USA, in pursuit of off-the-peg musical credibility.  Remitti likes to keep things 100% homegrown.  Her penultimate album ‘Nouar’, which was produced by the talented and often overlooked Algerian Mohammed Maghni, is a modern rai masterpiece.   Her creative juices are flowing as freely as ever.

To place the Remitti legend in its proper context, you have to take a trip back to a time when Algeria was still under French colonial rule, when 78rpm shellac was still the only format in town, and trains still ran on coal and sweat.  Cheikha Remitti was born on 8^th May 1923, in Tessala, a lost burg near the French garrison town of Sidi-bel-Abbès, deep in the countryside of western Algeria.  She was christened Saadia, which simply means ‘happy’ or ‘joyful’.  The name didn’t deliver on its promise, however, and Remitti lost both her parents at a very early age.  In those remorseless days when the welfare state was still a socialist dream, a young female orphan had to learn the game of survival quickstyle, the hard way.  “Misfortune was my teacher,” Remitti is fond of saying.

The young Saadia would sleep rough in local hamams (‘Arabic baths’) or shrines dedicated to local saints.  She made her clothes from old mattresses, and her coffee from ground wheat germ mixed with syrup.  By day she would earn a few francs working as a maid for French families, or helping out with the harvests.  At the age of 15 she joined a troupe of traditional hamadja musicians, who devoted their lives loosely to some revered Sufi saint, and travelled the countryside entertaining the populace.  In their company, Remitti felt something approaching familial warmth and security.  She also learned how to sing, and dance.

“She used to dance like some kind of possessed spirit,” remembers an old-timer.  Amongst her repertoire of crowd-pleasing tricks was the ability to balance a tray laden with brimful glasses of water, and shake her hips without spilling a drop.  She would also dive under feet of galloping horses at fantazias, which were traditional displays of breakneck horsemanship mixed with gun practice.  Audiences were so aroused by her antics that would shoot their rifles in appreciation, and came close to terminating the young Saadia before she had even begun to make her mark.

At the age of 20 Remitti moved to the moribund provincial town of Reliziane which sat in the middle of the vast hot plains of Oranie, surrounded by vineyards, wheatfields and water melon plantations.   She was still singing and dancing herself to exhaustion at festivals, weddings and henna parties, and her reputation was beginning to grow amongst the rural poor of Algeria’s far west.   But she was also beginning to compose her own songs with the encouragement of the renowned flautist Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems, who became Remitti’s protector, partner and champion.  It was he who took her to Algiers to record her first radio broadcasts.

From an early age, Remitti had adopted the style known as folklore oranais or bedoui rurale which was championed by venerable old male singers like Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh Al Khaldi or Cheikh Madani.  These folk troubadours would intone ancient epic poetry which spoke of the heroic deeds of yesteryear over a bed of pounding goblet drums, known as guellal, and the hot breath of rosewood desert flutes, known as gasba. Remitti kept the gasba and guellal but dispensed with arcane verses of the cheikhs. Instead she adopted a rich linguistic stew of local slang and rural patois, liberally sprinkled with metaphors and popular sayings.  It was the language of the common man, and Remitti became its champion.

The late 1930s and early 1940s were a time of intense hardship in Algeria.  The mediterranean was at war, famine was widespread and the western provinces were scourged by typhoid epidemics, immortalised by Albert Camus in his novel, ‘The Plague’.  Remitti didn’t flinch from singing openly and directly about these contemporary miseries, and about the more personal traumas of alcoholic oblivion, lost love, emigration and carnal pleasure.  Her music was like a clear and exhilaratingly sharp mirror, which reflected the daily grind of the poor.  In that sense it was both revolutionary and delectable.  To date Remitti has written over 200 songs on subjects as diverse as sex, alcohol, oblivion, nocturnal pleasure, the telephone, the TGV, virginity, enforced emigration, the carnal desires of workers at a chemical refinery, the offensive nature of forced marriages between older men and teenage brides, friendship, war…and the list goes on.  “Songs canter through my head and I tie them to my memory,” she says.  “I don’t need paper or pen.”   Illiteracy has never posed her the slightest problem in pursuit of her art.

By the her late 20s, Remitti had become the queen of the cheikhate, (plural of ‘cheikha’) a new breed of popular female singer, who would tour the countryside with a retinue of dancers, musicians and berrah, or MC.  In order to protect the reputation of their families and loved ones, the cheikhate would operate behind a soft-focus gauze of anonymity, adopting nicknames, decorating their cassette covers with Alpine scenes or stock library shots of young models and performing infront of their male audiences wearing a veil.  They were martyrs to the hidden desires of the population.  Dealing with the all-pervading moral hypocrisy of the nation required considerable courage, guile and self-belief.

It was sometime during the second world war that Saadia became Cheikha Remitti.   One day, she was performing at one of the biggest Festivals in western Algeria, dedicated to the saint Sidi Abed.  The sky burst open and the rain came down in sheets so Saadia and her retinue were invited to take shelter in a tented watering hole normally reserved for Europeans.  She was recognised, fêted, and to show her gratitude she offered to buy a round for some of her admirers.   The problem was that the bar woman was French, and Remitti has never spoken more than a few words in that language.  So she just kept saying, “Remettez panaché, remettez, remettez!”   (Another shandy, and another, and another).  When spoken by a North African with a strong accent, ‘e’s tend to mutate into ‘i’s.   And so the gathered crowd took up the refrain and started shouting, “It’s Rimitti!   It’s the singer Rimitti!”    “My name became Remitti because of alcohol,” she says, “it’s a great name.”

In 1952, Remitti recorded her first 78 for Pathé Marconi under the name Cheikha Remettez Reliziana.  It was a roots rai standard called ‘Er-rai er-rai’.   Two years later she recorded ‘Charag Gatta’, a barely veiled invitation aimed at young women to trade in their virginity for the pleasures of carnal love.  “Tear, lacerate…Remitti will mend,” she sang.  The song was a monstrous success, and Remitti’s fame was assured.

The bitter war between the moujaheddin of the FLN and France started the same year.

Remitti was unequivocal in her support for the rebels, but she also found it hard to refuse the growing number of invitations to sing on radio and TV.  The colonial authorities knew only too well that Remitti was the most popular singer amongst the poorest of the poor.   If they could only keep the mind of the masses  focused on forbidden love, alcohol and oblivion, then they might dissuade them from thinking too much about rebellion and independence.   To Remitti , the radio was just another gig, another way of making a living.

Nonetheless the FLN, high on hardline Nasserist Pan-Arabic socialism, denounced Remitti as a purveyor of hedonistic frippery and “folklore perverted by colonialsim”.  When independence finally came in 1962, the new government did everything they could to silence the cheikhas, who continued to sing in the everyday language of the streets.    Their high-minded strategy was to try and impose classical Arabic on the nation, a language which noone spoke, and hardly anyone understood.  Remitti was banned from radio and TV.  She continued to perform at weddings and feasts, and to release a few 45rpm singles and later cassettes.   But in effect, her country abandoned her, officially at least.

From the 1970s onwards Remitti became increasingly popular amongst the growing number of Algerian immigrants in France, who led a nostalgic existence in their factories, worker’s hostels and high rise low rent housing, pining for home, stranded in a kind of mental ghetto with no hope of release.   It became a habit to spend the month of Ramadan back home in Algeria, and the rest of the year living modestly in a hotel room in the Parisian immigrant quarter of Barbès, where she would perform regularly in North African bars.  Remitti could command very good fees for wedding performances, but officially, in Algeria, she was still persona non grata.   In 1971, after a rare concert appearance in Algiers, she was involved in a terrible car crash near Mostaganem, not far from Oran.  She went into a coma that lasted several weeks.  Three of her musicians died.  The incident is the subject of the song ‘Daouni’ (JENNY PLEASE CHECK NAME) on ‘N’ta Goudami’.

Perhaps it was this close encounter with death, coupled with her increasing age that prompted Cheikha Remitti to go on the ‘hadj’ or pilgrimmage to Mecca in 1976.   Since then the doyenne of hedonism has actually lived quite an ascetic life, devoid of cigarettes or alcohol, and sustained mostly by rice and water.  This might go some way to explaining why Remitti is still singing, dancing and speaking her remarkable mind at the age of 82.  The disappointment of the Bobigny Rai Festival, and the blatant way in which the new pop rai starts like Cheb Khaled or Chaba Fadela have plundered her repertoire without moderation or recognition, or even thanks, all weigh heavy on Remitti’s mind, but they haven’t managed to destroy her spirit.

In 1994, partial recognition by the self-proclaimed guardians of Algerian culture followed Remitti’s two triumphant performances at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.  For Algerian audience members present, whose lives and hopes were being torn apart by the increasingly brutal civil war back home, Remitti’s appearance was a triumphant homecoming, a deeply moving exposé of Algeria’s true character, which is Mediterranean and not middle Eastern, a handsome mongrel mix of Berber, Christian, Jewish, Ottoman, Spanish, French, and Maltese  influences with a corresponding language of infinite richness which has no better champion than Remitti herself.

Since then Remitti has been hailed in every continent, and fêted at festivals from Tokyo to Toronto.  In 1994 she collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the album ‘Sidi Mansour’, which nudged the creative boundaries of the rai genre out further than ever before.  She has always avoided the spangly cabaret pop approach to rai so favoured by the younger generation.  Even though she has adopted the bare bones of the rock format in her last two releases, the pure essence of the North African blues, whose active ingredients are powerful unpolished vocals, driving trance beats and the searing swirl of the gasba flute, remains the most crucial element in Remitti’s music.

Remitti is nothing less than the living surviving incarnation of Algeria’s long lost lust for life.  Like some dauntless liberated aunt at a dysfunctional family feast, who sings, laughs, chides and surveys the psychological torture going on all around with her knowing eye, Remitti continues to remind her fellow Algerians that spiritual faith can coexist with a love of life and physical pleasure.  No regrets.  Live and let live.   Let’s have another one Remitti…remettez, remettez!

Andy Morgan, c 2004

(Artist biog for Because, 2004).

The post CHEIKHA REMITTI – Grand Dame of Algeria’s school of hard knocks! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Ousmane from Tamikrest

I’ve been busy translating the lyrics for the forthcoming album by Tamikrest, the band from north eastern Mali lead by the talented Ousmane Ag Moussa. If you don’t know them already check out their existing album ‘Adagh’. One thing I always suspected but now know for sure is that Ousmane is a really excellent poet. As usual when I’m trying to get to grips with Tamashek poetry in translation, reading Ousmane’s lyrics in French gives me the feeling that I’m drinking a super fine whiskey that’s been watered down to a faint and washed out compromise, in comparison with the original. It reminds me of something that I learned quickly when I went to the Sahara and started working with Touareg musicians: their lyrics, or poems, are at least as important as their music, and probably a lot more so.

Some people complain about the repetitive nature of Touareg music: the drone, the simple call and response arrangements, the track-bound linear form of every song. It’s only a problem if you don’t understand the lyrics. I’m certain of that. And of course, apart from the very few non-Saharans who have learned how to speak Tamashek fluently, and there are some of those blessed people out there, most of us don’t understand the lyrics. Which is a crying shame. It’s left to record companies to squeeze a French translation out of the artist, and then someone like me, to turn that French into English. I’ve tried my best, and hopefully, the core meaning of each song will be very clear. But all those verbal subtleties, the puns, the nuances, the colour of and the depth of meaning of the original, will hover like an enticing aura around the words, unreachable to most of us. I’d love to do some more in depth translating work, like a real project, where the poet and the translators (English, French etc), sit down over days, weeks even, and discuss meaning and word play and all those issues. A Scottish poet called Don Paterson, who I really admire, recently published a book of poems by Rilke. His essay on the great German poet seemed to imply that trying to achieve literal translations of poetry is a useless exercise. You can only ‘version’ the original into something approximate in a new language, like a DJ doing a remix of a song, or a Jamaican dub master creating a version excursion. I like that idea. It injects real creativity into the job of translating.

Anyway, let’s hope the opportunity presents itself soon. In the meantime, look out for the Tamikrest album, which will be out sometime later in the year on Glitterhouse Records. And don’t blame me for the translations…I did my best, honest!

Andy Morgan (c) 2011

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Touareg artisan in Assaghan Association workshops, Tamanrasset. (c) Andy Morgan

This is an extract from a pamphlet / article / short book (fate will delete as applicable) that I’m writing about the Touareg blacksmith or artisan. It’s a complex subject and I’m approaching in my usual journalistic and non-academic way. This is bound to ruffle some scholarly feathers…an enjoyable sport in itself. I’m writing this piece for my wife Kate, who runs Saharan Arts, a company that imports Touareg jewellery and sells it on the internet or at UK Festivals like WOMAD and Latitude. Anybody who wants to know more, or buy a lovely present, please visit www.saharanarts.com.  Enjoy…)

In the old days, the Touareg artisan blacksmith (enad sing., inedan pl.) lived towards the bottom of the social heap.  His status wasn’t quite as lowly as that of the slaves (iklan) or even freed slaves (iderfan).   But there’s no doubt that he was subservient to the warrior nobility (imajeren), the tribute paying vassals (imrhad) and the marabouts and judges (ineslemen).   There’s an old Mauritanian proverb which says that the artisan must always be tah-ktab or tah-erkab, either under the power of the ‘book’, in other words, the holy man and his Qur’an, or under the ‘shield’, in other words, the noble warrior.  Nevertheless, like most social relationships in this ancient feudal world, the artisan was tied to his superiors and inferiors by bonds of reciprocity that made each class indispensible to the survival of the whole.  It was a supple system of give and take that gave society its unity, its strength and sinew.

The artisan made almost everything that was necessary for daily life and survival in the desert; tents, bags, saddles, swords, pottery, padlocks, keys, shields, lances, beds, musical instruments and, of course, jewellery.   But his usefulness extended beyond that of a craftsman, a maker of objects.   In fact, if you list every role ever attributed to the artisan class, you end up with an extraordinary array of trades and skills; jeweller, saddle-maker, leather-worker, carpenter, sword-maker, cobbler, potter, bead-maker, tanner, mat maker, teacher, historian, musician, nuptial negotiator or matchmaker, wedding organiser, midwife, messenger, diplomat, adviser, general repairman, knife-sharpener, circumciser, cattle-brander, hairdresser, surgeon, dentist, doctor, vet, apothecary…even magician!

Of course, no single artisan ever performed all these roles.   To begin with, some of them were reserved for female artisans or tinedan, notably tent making, leatherworking and bead making.    And there was also a hierarchy of activity within the artisan class itself.   Jewellers were considered to be the masters, below them came the potters, then the woodworkers and so on.   But it was not uncommon for a master jeweller to also be called on to fix a broken sword or saddle, pull a tooth, circumcise a young boy, take part in the negotiation of a wedding between the offspring of two noble families, or play music and recite epic poetry at some grand feast or event.

The most important characteristic of the artisans is that they belong to a hereditary ‘closed’ caste.  You are born an artisan, you cannot become one.  Your career choices are limited, albeit within the extraordinarily wide range of traditional artisan activity.  Boys usually start their apprenticeship at around the age of seven, working the bellows while their fathers, uncles and elder brothers melt down and fashion the medial, tidying up around the workshop, making tea.  After a few years the apprentice might be allowed to finish off a cross or a bangle, or make a very simple ring or earring.   Gradually, after about fifteen years gradually ascending the hierarchy of skills he becomes a master artisan.

The artisans even had their own special language called Ténet.   Nicolaisen concludes that Ténet is an invented language, like cockney rhyming-slang or Parisian verlan (backslang), which gave the artisans the means to communicate secretly in the presence of non-artisans, thus increasing their chances of boosting business and surviving.   Most of the time the artisans spoke Tamashek, even when amongst their own family.  Ténet seems to have been only an supplementary form of linguistic ‘armour’.   Strangely, Gabus makes no mention of Ténet at all, stating merely that the artisans generally spoke too much, with lax manners of speech and a smaller vocabulary than the nobles.

In traditional society there were both nomadic and sedentary artisans.   The nomadic artisan would live in the camp of a noble, vassal or marabout, travelling with them from pasture to pasture which his own family.   They would make a huge number of goods and provide other services to their lord in return for protection, food, millet, milk, sugar, tea and clothing.  He would also work for inhabitants of other camps in the vicinity, always in exchange for food and goods rather than money.  His collection of tools was perforce small and easily portable from place to place.   Gabus lists the usual barter price for different jewels, according to an artisan from the Hoggar region of southern Algeria:

A tchérot amulet pendant = 1 young camel

Two rings = one kid goat

A small padlock = one goat

A large padlock = two goats

A dagine style bracelet = two goats

A veil weight / padlock key = one goat

It is said that the nomadic artisans were generally less skilled, and their work was more basic and primitive than that of their sedentary counterparts, who lived in houses in towns like Boutilimit, Oualata, Timbuktu, Agadez, In-Gall and Tahoua.  These Sahelian ‘ports’ were linked by trade routes to the sophisticated urban centres of North Africa, the Middle East and even Europe.   New ideas, complex skills, tools, metals and other raw materials travelled with the caravans into the deepest Sahara via these trade routes and enriched the repertoire of the sedentary artisans.  Out in the bush, the nomadic artisans lived a remoter and more isolated existence, and therefore found it harder to benefit from imported ways.

The origins and character of the artisan blacksmith.

The artisans themselves have their own set of poetic origin myths.   They claim that their tools, especially their hammer, tongs and anvil were handed down to them by Father Adam and the Prophet David or Sidna Daouda taught them the dark art of iron smelting, and other less problematic skills like stone-cutting, moulding and engraving.

Other non-artisan members of desert society recount less charitable legends about the origins of the Kel Inedan.   The great Jean Gabus was told the story that one day the Prophet Mohammed was bathing, and some children happened to see him.   One of them mocked the Prophet and that wayward youth was the ancestor of the artisans.   Another story he heard tells how the angel Gabriel asked Eve to show him her children so that they could be blessed.   Eve dutifully brought out all her offspring except one, whom she hid away from the angel’s beatific gaze.   That child was the ancestor of all artisans.   In Mauretania, Gabus was also informed that the artisans took lessons in magic from the Ehel Belhamar or ‘People of the Devil’ so that they could protect themselves from the evil influence of the metals with which they were obliged to work.

Academics have searched for metaphorical truth in these myths and legends and some have come to the conclusion that the figure of Saint David proves the theory that the artisans are descended from Jewish jewellers from the Souss and Drâa valleys in the southern Atlas mountains or the Touat and M’zab regions north of Tamanrasset, all of which did have sizeable Jewish populations in the middle ages.    It seems almost certain that some desert clans or tribes do have Jewish origins, notably the Kel Gress and the Daoussak (‘Sons of Issac’), and it must also be remembered that the whole of North Africa has ancient roots in Jewish culture, thanks to the Phoenicians and later cultures from the Levant who colonized most of the Mediterranean littoral before and during the days of the Roman empire.

Artisan at Assoc. Assaghan (c) Andy Morgan

However, the theory that all Touareg artisans are descended from Jews who came down from the north is tenuous.   What is most striking about many Inedan is their Negroid appearance, or rather, their completely distinct physiognomy, in which Negroid traces are often very clear.   A Touareg can identify an artisan merely from his facial features, even if he comes from a region thousands of miles away across the desert.   This has lead to speculation that the Inedan are descended from an ancient black race who lived in the desert before the Berber tribes of the north came south and who were subsequently subdued and forced to work for their new ‘whiter’ overlords.

At times the assertion that the craftsmen who make such beautiful and sophisticated jewellery could only be descended from Jews or maybe Arab jewellers who came to the desert from Cairo and Baghdad in the early middle ages, smacks of mild racism and a reprehensible disbelief that such artistry can have its roots in black Africa itself.   But if you consider the extremely sophisticated societies that existed in sub-Saharan West Africa, from the end of the Roman Empire right through to the 17^th century, such as the Ghana, Mali and Songhai Empires, all famously rich in gold, as well as the extraordinary bronzes that were produced over 900 years ago in the Yoruban city of Ifé, in modern day Benin, using precisely the same lost wax technique that the Touareg artisans employ to make their famous crosses, then it seems perfectly possible that the source of the artisan’s craft lies to the south, rather than to the north.

Helen Hagan champions yet another origin theory, which holds that the Inedan’s ancestors came from the Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia in the east, that they had a red ochreish skin colour and that they were conquered by the fairer-skinned imajeren.   It’s true that some Touareg bear a striking resemblance to native Americans, and that they are often referred to by their southern black neighbours as les peaux rouges, ‘the redskins’, but once again this theory is tenuous.

The fact is that all artisan origin theories are tenuous, and will probably remain so until same serious DNA ancestry-tracing work is done in the region.  Despite the ‘closed’ endogamous nature of the artisan clan, I prefer to believe that a variety of different racial and cultural traits are bundled together in the modern-day Inedan.   No doubt the skill and knowledge of Jewish jewellers from the Anti-Atlas and the Algerian plateaux did filter further south gradually over the centuries, no doubt grandees who travelled to the Sahara from Cairo, Jerusalem and Baghdad brought their own artisans with them, no doubt Berber craftsmen from the North travelled south in baggage trains of successive military conquerors, no doubt there were already considerable metal working skills amongst the black peoples of the Niger Rivers and since the Peulh or Fulani people who populate the whole of West Africa almost certainly came originally from what is now The Sudan and Ethiopia, there was probably a major influence from that region as well.   What we probably have in the Touareg artisan of today is a mongrel racial and cultural mixture that has been created over centuries of Saharan interchange or brassage, as the French say.

Some further clues about the origins of the Kel Inedan can be wrung from the attitudes of Touareg society towards the artisan caste.  Disdainful, mistrustful, fearful and mildly racist, these attitudes are a remarkable echo of baser cultural prejudices in our own society, especially towards Jews, Gypsies, immigrants and manual labourers.   The litany of derogation that appears in the academic studies makes for potent reading.   In the eyes of decent Touareg society, the artisans are crafty, mischievous, lazy, greedy, indiscreet, loose-tongued, ill mannered, badly dressed, duplicitous, untrustworthy, stupid, in league with evil spirits and tangled up with dark magic.

I remember chatting with some Touareg friends about a common acquaintance of ours who had apparently embezzled a small sum of money.   “What do you expect,” one of my friends said without the slightest shadow of shame or embarrassment.  “He’s a fourgeron (a blacksmith)!”  The man whose reputation was thus being sullied came from the artisan caste, but wasn’t in fact involved in any of the traditional artisan activities.   He was a driver, car-mechanic and odd-jobber.   My friend flung this mild insult his way with no malice or rancour, and the artisan was back amongst us laughing and joking that very same evening.   A subtext of the insult was that our artisan friend just couldn’t help who he was!   It’s just the way he was born, and there was nothing that anyone, least of all the artisans themselves, could do about it.  But it didn’t mean that the artisan was to be ostracized or rejected in any way.

Kel Inedan - the masters of fire. (c) Andy Morgan.

The episode illustrates a very strange symbiotic relationship between the artisans and other Touareg.  The majority image of the artisan mixes disdain, mistrust, fear with a kind of respect and dependency.   If the artisan is descended from a conquered clan of aboriginal inhabitants who lived in the Sahara before the arrival of the Berber tribes from the north, then the disdain that Touareg society feels towards him is perhaps an echo of the original hauteur that the victor felt toward the vanquished.   Perhaps their mistrust can be attributed to that universal contempt which dominant social groups feel towards subservient ones, especially if they are racially different and ‘closed’.   Maybe this antipathy is also attributable to the natural arrogance of the warrior nobility towards those who depend on their manual labour for their livelihood.   And perhaps the fear comes from a superstitious wonder at the ‘magic’ of metalworking, the fiery transformation of base raw materials that were once locked up inside soil and rocks into wondrous jewels, swords and other objects, using processes that are deeply entwined with very ancient, possibly animist, religious beliefs.  One can almost picture the Berber lord shuddering, proud in his racial, cultural and religious superiority, as he looked down on the black animist metal-worker coaxing some wondrous object out of the primordial fire using mysterious and opaque gris-gris and evoking the names ancient and unknowable spirits.   After all, this terror of those who work with fire, who mould and sublimate nature itself, is common amongst many early or pre-industrial societies.

But it’s the respect and licence given to the artisan, which makes their relationship with the rest of Touareg society so strange, even unique.   Gabus recounts how artisans sometimes became the trusted friends and advisors of clan chiefs or other noble persons, and how they were often asked to go on delicate diplomatic missions, or to negotiate the bride price and dowry for an important wedding.   Like the court-jesters of medieval Europe, the artisan was given much freer licence to express his own opinions in the presence of the rich and powerful than other members of society.

Paradoxically, the artisans were also deemed to be wise and knowledgeable, especially when it came to tribal and clan history or the useful properties of the natural world.   They were respected for their extraordinary ability to produce all the good necessary for life in the desert, and their wide range of their skills and know-how.  They were often prized for their loyalty and friendship.   The very fact that they were not of a noble caste, and were therefore excluded from the politics and power-struggles of tribes and clans probably made their friendship less ‘dangerous’ and more secure than that of other clan members.

Like their counterparts south of the Niger, the griots of Manding, Songhai and Bamana society, the artisans were the repositories of society’s oral history and were excellent musicians.   Nicolaisen tells how many noble Touareg despised and shunned Inedan for much of the time, except at weddings, feasts and ceremonies when the artisans were called on to sing and recite poetry and thereby oil the social machinery.   Furthermore it was considered bad form to loose one’s temper with an artisan or his provocative words and extremely dishonourable to hit or wound one.   In some ways, the artisan’s freedom to speak his mind was useful in as much as it could deflate potential conflict, thereby maintaining harmony and strengthening the equilibrium of the clan.  And this free speech was more often that not softened and nuanced by a high degree of humour and hilarity.   The comic genius of the Touareg is something that is very often ignored or overlooked by outsiders who fail to see beyond their characteristic haughtiness and reserve.

Gabus also claims that the artisans themselves were fully aware of and accepting of their own unique place in society.  “An artisan who never asks for what he wants, or tries to get it, is worthless,” Gabus was told by an artisan.   In other words, it was all about give and take.   The artisan played a game of survival with his Touareg neighbours, providing them with their necessities, but remaining apart on an equal-but-different footing, accepting taunts and jibes in return for custom and grudging respect, earning the most he could for himself and his family with his keen sense of opportunity, his acute bargaining skills and his nose for a good deal.

Jewellery and the Artisan in the modern age

However timeless, anchored and ancient Touareg society might seem to the visitor who leaves the bustling frenzy of a European city and arrives in the apparently infinite calm of the Saharan bush, it is hard to overestimate the radical and painful changes that have gripped the desert in the last century.  And these changes have also fundamentally affected the role and business of the artisan.

When Jean Gabus was carrying out his research in the 1940s and 1950s, he observed this changing world at first hand.  The artisans were relying more and more on cash transactions and less and less on the old bartering system.   In certain ways, cash freed the artisan, making him less indentured to his overlord and master higher up the Touareg hierarchy.  The old tribal and clan chiefs, along with their noble retinues, were loosing influence year by year, thanks to the French ban on traditional raiding and the careful colonial management of inter-tribal conflicts.  The French more or less ruled the desert through acquiescent Touareg chiefs, but this policy also weakened their reputation, at times making them appear little more than puppets and collaborators of the colonial power.   The decrease in traditional inter-tribal warfare meant less demand for the once indispensible swords, daggers and lances, and the decreasing power of the nobility meant that the artisan was able to look further afield for his living.

Another new and strange activity was selling to foreigners and tourists, who were less conversant with the price of goods in the desert and therefore often happy to pay more for jewels and other mementoes than local people.  Furthermore tourists have tastes that aren’t necessarily shared by locals, and this had already begun to skew the production choices which the artisans made.   The raw materials also began to change.   Purer silver became more easily available, as did better tools, procured via mail-order catalogues from France.

Local tastes and customs were also changing.   The wearing of jewellery had always been relatively regulated in traditional society.   What you wore depended on your sex, your marital status and your position in society.   A young girl would receive a small ‘ear-drop’ earring at the shortly after birth.   As she reached puberty she would be allowed tesabit bangles and ankelets, as well as all manner of beaded jewellery.   When she started courting she would don a chatchat or celebra necklace, both of which were associated with young love and flirtation.   A khomeissa pendant was more appropriate for a married woman, because of its associations with fertility and protection.   The large triangular teraout pendants were often part of the bride price for a wedding, thereafter forming the centrepiece of a jewellery collection.   ‘Lower’ caste women were wore relatively modest jewellery that was in no danger of upstaging that of their ‘superior’ caste peers.

Men were expected to wear jewellery in a sober and dignified fashion, especially if they were nobles.  A silver, or silver and brass tchérot pendant around the neck and a few others adorning their tagelmoust or turban in addition or a tanfouk ring, with its red carnelian or agate stone which was deemed to help heal wounds and coagulate the blood, were the limits of ‘decent’ adornment.  A boy would receive both his tagelmoust and his tchérot when entering puberty.   They were the armoury of his manhood, and were solemnly passed down to him by his father or guardian.   Qur’anic verses and other protective writings were also kept in leather pouches that hung around the necks of both men and women.

Furthermore, silver, or at worse silver and bronze, were the only acceptable metals in traditional jewellery making.   Gold was proscribed by the Qur’an, especially as an adornment for men, and feared for its malicious properties.   Iron was also believed to be imbued with dark and malevolent forces.   Silver was pure, clean, holy, luminous and warm, like the heart of a true believer.

The Touareg have the same word for both silver and money: azrouf.    In the pre-cash society that existed in the desert before independence, jewellery WAS money, and vice versa.   Women literally wore their wealth, in the form of pendants, earrings, bracelets, earrings, rings, anklets and head adornments.   Rings and crosses were sometimes just strung along a piece of leather and worn as a necklace.   When it came to paying for something, one of these items could just be detached from the rest and handed over.

To a certain extent, jewellery still serves a variety of interlinked purposes; status symbol, public display of wealth, means of exchange, protection against evil spirits and mishaps, beauty enhancement and token of flirtation.   But cash has taken the place of bartering except in the remotest parts of the desert.   Moreover, along with many erstwhile nomads, most artisans have now relocated to towns and cities, often grouping together to form associations or trading cooperatives, which allow them to deal with modern bureaucracy, regulation and taxes.

The artisan’s clientele has also changed considerably.   Mohammed from the Association Assaghan in Tamanrasset told me that 60% of his sales are now to tourists and visitors, and 40% to locals.   As in days of old, the locals order their jewels, rather than buy from existing stock.  They will go and see the artisan and discuss the exact specifications, size and materials of the piece they want to buy, pay a portion of the price up front and then the balance on delivery.    The artisan must make sure that the quality of the work is of an acceptable standard, otherwise his client will refuse to pay the balance and demand his deposit back.  Sometimes clients come in with existing jewels and ask the artisan to melt down the silver and refashion it into an entirely new piece.

The most cataclysmic upheavals in desert life took place in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, due to the terrible droughts that afflicted the entire southern Sahara in 1971 – 1974 and 1984 – 1985.  The transformation of traditional society which had begun with the arrival of the French was accelerated a hundred-fold, as the animal herds died and pastoral nomadism became almost impossible.  Many Touareg men and their families left the region of their birth, to begin new lives, with different allegiances and imperatives in other parts of the desert.  It’s impossible to say how many jewels and heirlooms were sold during these dark and desperate days to pay for food or transport to a refugee camp or a different country.   Gabus compares these old jewels to the piles of shoes, glasses or wristwatches in the photos taken in concentration camps during the Holocaust in Europe.

The wealthier Touareg who were able to seek refuge in the cities of North Africa, Nigeria and even the Middle East, returned with mutated values.  Gold, which is more favoured in the Arab world than it is in traditional Berber societies, became more fashionable and desirable.   Women, who had traditionally worn a sober mixture of dark blue and white robes, or shiny luxurious indigo on special occasions, adopted the multi-coloured fashions of Mauretania, Algeria, Libya or Burkina Faso, where many Touareg families took refuge during the worst parts of the famine.   The old restrictions on the appropriate wearing of jewellery according to age and status began to fade and disappear.

It must be said that the artisans reacted to these changes with considerable ingenuity, resourcefulness, self-reliance and a fatalism that Europeans find hard to understand, but which is necessary psychological armour in times of hardship.   God willed it all, and there was nothing more to be said.    In the absence of the old symbiosis with his noble lord, and his exclusive mandate to manufacture all the objects necessary for desert existence, the artisan was faced between the stark choice of adapting to the new realities, or disappearing.

From the 1950s onwards boutiques began to appear in Tamanrasset, Agadez, Timbuktu and further afield, catering for the tourist trade and offering a wide range of jewellery, leatherwork, swords, saddles, padlocks, souvenirs and knickknacks.   Today, almost any desert city or town of 5,000 inhabitants or more has its artisans’ association, usually with a purpose built premises in the centre of town with a showroom and a salesman or two conversant in English, French and German, at the very least.

Since the late 1970s the market for Touareg jewellery and crafts has become global.  Many artisans’ associations will elect a trusted person to become an international representative and send him to Europe or North America with several suitcases laden down with stock for international retail clients.  These same reps will attend international tourism and crafts fairs and exhibit their wares at museums and festivals.   The number of shops and websites the world over offering Touareg jewellery has grown exponentially in the last two decades.

Thomas Seligman has written a detailed account of how the revered French fashion house Hermès commissioned Touareg artisans to make a range of silver clasps, buckles and other objects, as well as using Touareg motifs and designs across all manner of expensive fashion goods in the early 1990s.  With the help of an intermediary facilitator and fixer called Jean Yves Brizot, Hermès even set up and funded an entire workshop of artisans in Agadez, which employed over thirty craftsmen for a number of years.   Touareg jewellery, crafts and clothing have also been used by fashion designers such Jean-Paul Gautier, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent for high-end photo shoots and as the inspiration for new ranges and models.   Touareg chic is a good option for those western fashionistas who desire to ‘go ethnic’ and yet remain sober, minimal and elegant.

How easy and yet somehow futile it is to mourn the gradual loss of paradise.   It’s a pastime that not only preoccupies the minds of westerners who come to the desert in search of some kind of pre-industrial ideal of human nobility but also, in an admittedly different way, the minds of the Touareg themselves, especially those over the age of 50.   I have always been struck by the potency of nostalgia for the past in Touareg society.   It’s as if the process of assimilation into the modern world has occurred so suddenly, so brutally and in such an unwarranted way that many older Touareg just can’t cope with it, and prefer to dream of bygone days when there was more water, more respect, more peace and more freedom.   Things today are just kerzat kerzat, a comical piece of Tamashek slang meaning ‘shoddy’, ‘cheap’ and ‘worthless’.

The artisans, however, cannot afford to indulge regrets, even though they might still lurk deep inside.  They know that survival is a matter of looking ahead, not backwards, of using cunning and instinct to find customers and make the goods that those customers want to buy, whether they’re desert dwellers or tourists browsing idly at shops or stalls in Mopti, Tamanrasset, Tangiers, Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, San Francisco or on the world wide web.  An acute and unsentimental instinct for survival whatever context God provides has been hardwired into their mental circuitry

And it could be argued that this survival instinct has served Touareg culture better than many Touareg themselves realise.   For it is in part thanks to the artisans that the skill, range and depth of Touareg crafts survive and even thrive when the social context that first gave birth to it has long been consigned to history.   The ingenuity and resourcefulness of the artisans, their ability to travel and assume the role of desert ambassadors in far-flung parts of the world, their talent for dealing with strangers, their openness and autonomy have preserved the essence of the Touareg cultural identity, keeping it alive, vital, breathing and even growing.   The Touareg owe their artisans a great deal.

Gabus expresses the misunderstandings and tensions of modernity very well, and remember, he was writing about the desert of the 1950s!:

“Preservation at all costs of the traditional heritage by means of a kind of isolation, of egotistical protectionism, false romanticism and backwards thinking bears no relation either to the desires, nor to the reality of the people themselves (the artisans).   These people, like everyone else all over the world, dream of something other, want to earn money, live better and be in harmony with the times.”

Andy Morgan, (c) 2010

The post KEL INEDAN – The Touareg blacksmiths appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“Silence is death and yet if you speak you die.  If you keep quiet you die.  So then speak and die.” Tahar Djaout

“I want to speak and I don’t want to die” Matoub Lounès

A grave between an olive and a cherry tree

Death finally caught up with him on the lonely bend of a mountain road.   The bullet-strafed car was still smoking and the pools of blood on the asphalt were still warm when the news broke.   Telephones lines crackled and the Internet came alive.   “They’ve killed him.”   “He was with his wife and two sisters in law.”  “They were hit too.”   “It happened just after 1pm.”   “On the Tizi Ouzou road.”  “It was a false road block.”   “It was an ambush.”  “It was the GIA.”  “It was Chenoui’s men.”   “It was the government.”   “He’s dead.”  “He’s gone.”  “Matoub has gone.”  Some even whispered, “It had to happen.”

Within hours angry mourners in their thousands had gathered around the Mohammed Nedir hospital in Tizi Ouzou, where Matoub Lounès’ bloodied remains were taken after the attack.   Their shouts boomed like mixed-shot salvos of anger, desperation and grief. “Government…Assassin!”   “Zéroual…Assassin!”   “Islamists…Assassins!”   “The generals…Assassins!”   Over the next few days youths took to the streets of Tizi Ouzou, Akbou, Sidi Aïch, Bejaia, Aïn el Hammam and Tizi Guénif and unleashed their rage on government buildings, party offices, banks and shops.   The police and security forces retaliated nervously with water cannons, tear gas and bullets.   Three protestors were killed.   The Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia appealed feebly for calm.    Kabylia was burning.

In Paris, thousands gathered in Place de La République, in front of an immense black and white portrait of Matoub.  Actors, politicians, community leaders, writers and musicians took to the stage to say a few words or sing a song.  The great Berber singer Idir denounced the new Arabisation law which was due to be passed on July 5^th making Arabic the compulsory language of almost every official or semi-official transaction in Algeria.  The crowd stood smouldering under the fluttering yellow, blue and green flags of Kabylia, arms raised to the skies, chanting his songs.  “Matoub was the Bard of Kabylia.  They wanted to shut him up so they killed him,” said one mourner.   “He sang for freedom, our freedom, Berber freedom,” said another.  “He was our Che Guevara,” said a third.

The Berber Cultural Movement (MCB) called for a general strike and the response was overwhelming.  Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Kabylia, was enveloped in a sepulchral silence on Sunday 28^th June 1998, three days after Matoub’s murder.  Boarded up shops and businesses looked like mausoleums lining the paths of a huge cemetery.   Many of the city’s inhabitants had left before dawn and made their way up the mountain to Taourirt Moussa, the village where Matoub was born.   They stuffed themselves in cars or braved the 25km on foot.  The roads were hopelessly jammed.   This, for once, was a real roadblock.   In every hollow, on every ridge, down every street or path and on every rooftop around the Matoub villa, as far as the eye could see, a sea of mourners stood simmering under a hot and ripening sun.  The presence of women, dressed defiantly in their colourful traditional dress or western threads, all of them unveiled, surprised many.   Traditionally, funerals in Algeria are all-male affairs.

The heat was intense, the atmosphere even more so, and many fainted.  Militants from the various Berber political groups and local village defence associations policed the gathering. Their work was light because no one was in the mood for trouble making.  Placards bearing Matoub’s intense and troubled features were held aloft.   Banners broke the silence and the sobs.  “Remember and Revenge!”   “No Peace Without Tamazight”   “Arabo-Islamism, the shortest way to HELL.”   Eventually Matoub’s body was brought out, wrapped only in an Algerian flag, and laid tenderly in a grave just in front of his family home, between an olive and a cherry tree, facing the majestic Djurdjura Mountains which he had loved with such a passion.  His mother Aldjia fired two shots in the air and his sister Malika made a short speech which ended, “The face of Lounès will be missed but his songs will dwell forever in our hearts.  Today is a day of great joy.  We are celebrating the birth of Matoub Lounès.”


*      *      *      *

One God?  One Nation?  One People?

Like a young adult who has just broken free from parental chains, any newborn nation state must grapple with the fundamental questions “Who am I?  What is my identity?”  Sometimes the answer comes easily.  Countries whose territory is already blessed with linguistic and cultural coherence have little trouble establishing a national identity.  But for many of the huge amorphous nations of Africa, which were often carelessly cobbled together from a chaotic patchwork of tribes and ethnicities by civil servants in the oak-panelled ministries of Paris or London, the question of identity has always posed huge problems.   In the end one political group, tribe or clan usually imposes its rule, its ideology and often its culture on the rest of the country, by force if necessary.  Proud, defiant but still politically immature, the new leaders of these fledgling states find they cannot entertain progressive notions of federalism and live-and-let-live cohabitation for fear that the weak mortar that binds their nation together will just crumble into dust and anarchy.  The grail of national unity becomes an end that justifies the most violent and oppressive means.

Algeria’s birth pains were brutal and severe.  The war of independence that ended in 1962 was one of extreme hatred and extreme violence.  It combined a Gestapo-like approach to civilian control – many former resistance fighters turned French army officers were all too familiar with the Gestapo’s methods – with the kind of all-terrain guerrilla shock tactics that would later find favour with the Viet Cong, the Mau Mau, and many other popular people’s armies.   The French used napalm, torture, mass civilian executions, and a scorched earth strategy, anything to defeat their invisible opponents.  The rebel mujaheddin answered in kind.  Europeans killed Muslims.   Muslims killed Europeans.   Muslims killed Muslims and eventually Europeans killed Europeans.  The scars went very deep.   It all ended with the birth of an independent Algeria and one of the greatest mass exoduses of the 20^th century.   Over one million people of European descent left the country in the few months before independence; businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and civil servants, taking with them the very foundations of a functioning civil society.   The country’s new leaders were left with hopes and ideas but few of the skills necessary to turn them into reality.

As long as the war was taking its murderous course, the rebel nationalist movement managed to maintain at least an outward appearance of unity.   But beneath this veneer there were deep divisions which began to surface even before the ink was dry on the Evian Accords of March 1962 which guaranteed Algeria her independence.   Various factions had very different answers to that “Who are we?” question.   The émigré revolutionary council lead by Ahmed Ben Bella, who eventually managed to seize power and become Algeria’s first effective head of state, were inspired by three overarching ideologies.   The first was command and control socialism, Soviet style.   The army and the state had a duty to commandeer the economic, social and natural resources of the country and manage them for the good of the country.  The second was more a reaction than an ideology.  Algeria would slowly and surely purge French civilisation, the French language and French cultural values from society.  In time, Arabic would take over as the language of education, the judiciary, science, technology, culture and commerce.  French notions of égalité, fraternité and liberté would be strictly controlled and curtailed.  Muslim Algerian intellectuals and thinkers, who had all hitherto used the French language as their vehicle of expression, would now have to think, dream and cry in Arabic.

The third ideology was Arab nationalism.   Ben Bella and his crew had delved deep into the same well of political inspiration as Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria or the Ba’athists in Iraq.  They all believed that if a nation state in North Africa or the Middle East was to stand proud, defiant and spiritually self-sufficient in a post colonial world, then it must draw on the glorious history and culture of Arabic civilisation, the unifying power of classical Middle Eastern Arabic and the bedrock of Islam in order to succeed.   ‘Petty’ regional and ethnic differences must be buried or obliterated.   Unity was paramount.

These ideologies only began to make a small difference to daily life in Algeria during the short reign of Ben Bella, who was ousted in a military coup by his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Colonel Houari Boumedienne in 1965.   Boumedienne was an Arabic Literature teacher turned steely military leader and staunch command and control socialist.  He was also a die hard Arab Nationalist and it during his reign that the process of Arabicising and nationalising the country really gained momentum.   Apart from his agrarian and industrial revolutions he also instigated a cultural revolution with the aim of ‘decolonising the mind’.   He knew that Algerian society was fundamentally fractious and partisan with a historic tendency to splinter and implode.  Only the discipline of the great revolutionary army and unifying forces of Islam, state socialism and the Arabic language could hold the nation together.  His programme of Arabicising all walks of Algerian life was continued after his death in 1978 by the new president Chadli Bendjedid and into the 1990s by Presidents Lamine Zéroual and even the present incumbent Adelaziz Bouteflika.   All these men were loosely affiliated to the nationalist clan who took power in 1962.  Their ideas have softened and shifted over the decades but many of their core beliefs about identity have remained unchanged.

There was, however, a very different answer to the question “Who are we?”  The problem with this pan-Arabic, nationalist, ‘Ba’athist’ inspired vision of Algeria was that at least 25% of the country didn’t even speak Arabic at all.   They spoke Berber.  Instead of looking to the Middle East for an answer to the country’s identity, these Berbers looked to their own past.   They saw that their ancestors, the original inhabitants of North Africa, had a heroic tradition of defying the might of successive invaders – Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks and French – even though they never prevailed long enough to establish their own Berber nation.   They revered their own heroes like Jugurtha, Massinissa, Kahena and Koceila and took an intense pride in the riches of their own poetic and musical traditions.   Their vision of Algeria was that of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Mediterranean country, which possessed more affinity with neighbours like Spain, Greece, or Yugoslavia than far-flung Middle Eastern nations like Egypt, Syria or Iraq.   They recognised the fact that the Algerian territory had long been home to a highly nuanced patchwork of different cultures – Berber, Arab, Spanish, Turkish, Jewish and French – and that the local Arabic dialect reflected this mongrel past.   This was something to be cherished and preserved, not brutally eradicated by the artificial imposition of the classical Arabic of the Koran, a language that hardly any Algerian speaks in daily discourse to this day.   Their proposed solution was to establish Algerian Arabic, Berber and even French as the three official languages of the nation, and to let each be used according to habit, convenience or necessity.

There are Berber communities with different social and cultural characteristics dotted all over Algeria, and North Africa as a whole, but the largest and most significant are the Kabyles who inhabit a mountainous region of unparalleled beauty called Kabylia which is situated south east of the capital Algiers.   Dour, rugged, tough, free, ungovernable, honour-obsessed, dignified, home-sick, democratic, music loving, these are some of the characteristics, some would say clichés, perennially associated with the Kabyle.   For a long time their idyllic country has been neither large nor fertile enough to support all its sons, and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience.   The first Algerian Muslims to emigrate to France at the beginning of the 20^th century were Kabyles and they became the largest North African immigrant group in France before the 1960s.   Consequently it was the Kabyles who adapted quickest to the French language, to French ideas of egalitarianism, socialism, democracy and nationhood.   The first recognisable Algerian nationalist movement, the Étoile Nord-Africaine founded by Messali el Hadj in the 1920s, comprised mostly men of Kabyle origin.  The movement went through several tortuous mutations to emerge eventually as the Front de Liberation National or FLN in the 1950s.  Kabyles played pivotal roles in this evolutionary process.  They fought hard in the war of independence.  Kabylia itself with its remote valleys, ravines and mountaintops is classic guerrilla country and as such it suffered some of the worst brutalities of the conflict.   A body with its throat slit is said to be wearing a ‘Kabyle smile’ to this day.

Nevertheless it soon became apparent that many Kabyles in the nationalist movement had fundamental disagreements with their Arabic co-revolutionaries.  They were not prepared to see their Berber identity and their own dialect of the Berber language, known as Tamazight, disappear under the authoritarian umbrella of an Arabic socialist über-state.  They also had very different ideas about democracy and the future shape of Algeria’s government.   The traditional system of Kabyle village and clan politics, with its djemaat or village councils and aarouch or tribal councils, instilled a raw but visceral feeling for democracy and the values of community involvement and egalitarianism in many Kabyles.   This went against the grain of the authoritarian, centralised and top-down ethos of Arab nationalism.   Many Kabyles also recognised the importance of Islam but they preferred to let faith be a personal matter, between the individual and God, rather than something decreed and formulated by the state.   They increasingly feared that state-sanctioned Islam and an insistence on Arabic, the language of the Koran, as the only vehicle for education, would roll out a red carpet for extreme political Muslim fundamentalism, which was already making its presence felt in Egypt, the Middle East and Algeria by the 1960s.   The fundamentalist Muslim ulema or ‘scholars’, a revolutionary movement founded by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis in the 1920s, had already denounced Kabyle and Berber aspirations as “a reactionary doctrine born of imperialism.”   All in all, the answer of many Kabyles and, it has to be said, a fair number of other non-Berber Algerians to the question “Who are we?” could not have been more divergent to that supplied either by Ben Bella and his allies, or the fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries for whom an Islamic state was the be all and end all.

Almost as soon as the independent flag of Algeria was fluttering freely over the skies of Algiers, the Kabyles were on the move.   There was a gradual purge of dissident Kabyle elements in the nationalist movement already underway by 1962 but a year later a senior Kabyle revolutionary called Hocine Aït Ahmed formed the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), as a vehicle to promote social democratic ideas and the rights of Berber minorities.   A full-scale revolt flared up in Kabylia against Ben Bella’s government, with skirmishes and reprisals as bloody and brutal as anything that had been seen during the war of independence.   Eventually Aït Ahmed was captured, sentenced to death, reprieved and exiled.   With his departure the entire Berber movement in Algeria collapsed or went underground.   The emphasis of the struggle moved to France where gradually throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Berber cultural awareness grew like a storm cloud in the ex-pat Algerian community.  Thanks to the activities of numerous Berber cultural groups, notably the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB), the language, history, literature and music of the Berbers started to become a major force in the Diaspora.

What’s striking about this struggle is its essentially cultural nature.  Most Berbers aren’t fighting for autonomy or an outright Berber Algeria.  Nor is their struggle predominantly about trade union rights, women’s rights, cheap food, better schools and hospitals and an end to corruption although, like most other Algerians, they long for these things too.  Their overriding cause is simple; first and foremost the recognition of Tamazight as an official national language, suitable for use in schools, commerce and government business.  And secondly, a general acceptance that Algeria should be governed along secular, egalitarian, multi-cultural and democratic lines.   That in a nutshell is the Berber struggle.


* * * *

Childhood and strange fruit

Musing on his early childhood in the pages of his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ (Éditions Stock, 1995), Matoub Lounès wrote, “I was turbulent, I still am.  I’ll be a rebel for the rest of my life.”   In many ways his beginnings were that of the Kabyle Everyman.   He was born in 1956, in the middle of a bitingly cold Kabyle winter, in Taourirt Moussa, a village of great beauty on the northern flanks of the Djurdjura Mountains.   His father had been living and working in France for the past ten years and so he grew up among women, strong women, the kind who can bear the responsibility of raising a family and keeping a home without their men around in the midst of a full blown war.  It was also the women of Matoub’s childhood, especially his mother Aldja and his grandmother, who mixed music with the blood in his veins.  Music-making went on everywhere, at work in the fields during the day, at home in the evenings, at weddings, henna feasts, parties; music and old Berber tales of Kings and princes, heroes and villains.  Matoub’s mother was illiterate, but like many Kabyles she possessed a trove of rich and evocative words with which to paint the world.

From the start ‘trouble’ was Matoub’s middle name.  School was death by boredom and he preferred to be off in the fields with his mates, trapping rabbits and running wild.  “I made the bush school into a way of life,” he wrote.  Nevertheless he did appreciate the way in which the French Christian Fathers who ran many rural schools in Kabylia would inculcate a sense of Berber history and identity, along with many of the positive aspects of French culture and thought, into the minds of their young charges.  Matoub’s schooling was entirely in French, and at home he spoke only Tamazight.  He never learned more than a few words of Arabic in his whole life.   This preponderance of French teachers in Kabylia and the fact that it was French historians and French philologists who did much to revive the study of Berber poetry, languages and the ancient Tifinagh alphabet in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, lead many a staunch Arab nationalist to claim that “the Berber is a creation of colonialism.”   Despite his respect for certain French teachers however and like many a young boy in the Kabyle Mountains, Matoub venerated the freedom fighters, the mujaheddin of the Independence struggle, who would sneak into the village late and night and pay their visits.   They were heroes, and the war of Liberation was a heroic struggle.   There was no doubt about that in Matoub’s mind.  The shelter that the impenetrable contours of their territory gave to the freedom fighters was Kabylia’s pride.

One day on the way back from school the young Matoub saw the bodies of three men hanging from a tree.  They were harkis, the name given by Algerians to traitors who collaborated with the French, and they had been executed by the mujaheddin.  Their skin was already black and sun-cracked.  Flies covered their eyes and faces, buzzing morosely in the evening heat.  The sight of these strange fruit stayed lodged in Matoub’s mind for the rest of his life.  It was his first encounter with death; close, intimate and real.   A haunting life-long flirtation had begun.

Matoub belonged to the generation of Algerians who grew up believing that their Revolution was a beacon for the world.  It was one of the greatest victories of a colonized people over its colonizers that the late 20^th century ever saw.  During the 1960s, Algeria seduced many into thinking it was model socialist state, a dynamo of new thinking and new ideas and a natural leader along with Cuba of non-aligned nations everywhere.  Che Guevara and Fidel Castro came to visit.  The youth were proud to be Algerian and free.   But under the surface, trouble was brewing.  For many Kabyles, Aït Ahmed’s uprising of 1964 had a traumatic effect, radicalising them and making them reject all things Arabic.  The result of this failed adventure was that Berbers became pariahs in their own country, afraid to speak their own language except in staunchly Berber enclaves.  The forced Arabisation of schools in 1968 was also traumatic.  Many, like Matoub, who spoke only Berber or French, were effectively robbed of their education.   In order to fill the vacancies left by sacked French teachers, the state had to import thousands of second-rate teachers from Egypt and Syria, who taught in a Middle Eastern form of Arabic, which hardly anyone understood.   This blind and destructive policy broke the momentum of a generation.  “It was then that Algeria’s descent into hell began then,” wrote Matoub.

Matoub’s own revolutionary dream finally turned into a nightmare when he was sent to Oran for his compulsory military service in 1975.  Algeria had just provoked a war with Morocco over the question of the Western Sahara.  Matoub saw Moroccan families, with many fellow Berbers among them, being rounded up and forcibly evicted from their homes in Oran and western Algeria and sent back over the border.  The treatment they received disgusted him.   Army life itself was a nightmare.   Matoub witnessed the cynical corruption of the high command and officer ranks.  He also suffered the prejudice of his fellow Arab conscripts.  His lack of Arabic and his Kabyle origins marked him out and attracted a plethora of insults: ‘peasant’, ‘yokel’, ‘backwoods kid’, ‘enemy of national unity’, ‘traitor’ and ‘idiot’.   Boumedienne’s secret police lurked in every dingy hole and corner.  The heroic vision of the great Algerian revolutionary army, scourge of the coloniser, liberator of the people, father and unifier of the nation, dissolved into nothing.   Matoub came away more disgusted, disillusioned and rebellious than ever.

For solace and mental survival, Matoub began to compose poems.  Back in Taourirt Moussa he had already made himself a guitar out of an old oilcan, a length of wood and some fishing tackle.  He mastered a few songs and even started playing at parties and gatherings.   When Matoub’s father eventually came back from years of economic exile to settle down with his family, he bought a beautiful mandole with him, a kind of large elongated mandolin popular in modern Kabyle music, as a gift for his son.  It had been bought with Matoub senior’s hard earned cash at the Paul Beuscher music shop in Paris.  Matoub was so awed by this splendid object that he didn’t even dare touch it for a while.   Eventually, with the help of some older local musicians, he began to master the instrument and even build a lively local reputation as a party and café entertainer.   However Matoub was also a regular at the card table and after a particularly bad run at poker he lost the mandole on a busted flush.  The shame was excruciating, but honour bound him to pay the debt.  His father was broken by the news.

This one dolorous little tale paints Matoub in all his vividness and darkness.  His wayward heart ruled his hand, and his mouth too.  In fact ‘Big Mouth’ was a title that would attach itself doggedly to him throughout his life.  His mouth made him many enemies, but it was also the vehicle of his greatness.  For him, pain, shame, danger and fear were there to be tested, confronted and then just brushed aside if they became too much of a barrier to living a full life.   An almost savage passion drove Matoub’s inner engine, spurred by a quick-fire temper.

In ‘Rebelle’, Matoub talks of an incident in a barber’s shop, when he sliced someone with a razor for some lost insult.  He was given two nights detention in a local jail and then brought in front of the magistrate.  “Because you are a minor I will release you, but I never want to see you again.  Have you anything to say for yourself,” said the magistrate.  “Have you got a spare cigarette?” asked Matoub.   The answer was one month in jail for contempt of court.  That was Matoub, a rare combination of intensity, cheek, courage and foolishness.   ‘Rebelle’ is a striking self-portrait inasmuch as Matoub’s failings and weaknesses are never glossed over but constantly revealed and even underlined with a kind of devil-may-care honesty.


* * * *

Exile in Paris and The Berber Spring

After the army had crushed his dreams, and life in Kabylia seemed to offer no future for a young man with a stunted education and a head full of songs and poems – all in Tamazight too which ruled out a career as a public performer in Algeria – Matoub did what so many Kabyles had done before; he left for France.  In the town of Annemasse in the French Alps he was astonished to discover that he could earn money, good money, by playing his songs in émigré cafés.   Soon after he moved to Paris where he slowly became a fixture in the cultural life of the ex-pat Kabyle community, playing in cafés and hanging out.  Idir, who was probably the most famous Kabyle singer alive at the time thanks to his enormous international hit ‘A Vava Inouva’, took Matoub under his wing, showed him the ropes and even gave him shelter when it was needed.

In a recent interview Idir gave an intriguing character assessment of his former protégé:  “It wasn’t so much his activist side which interested me.  It was above all his intimate side, the suffering and the inner pain.  That’s the part of him I liked.  I saw that he was a man, more in the ilk of Verlaine, in his non-conformism and in his ambiguities too.  Later he came to be considered a myth, hero, a brigade commander.  But that intimate side of him could be felt in certain songs, a side that had nothing to do with being militant and everything to do with the wounds of the heart.   He had this sensitive streak which was the root of his talent. ”

Not long after he arrived in Paris, Matoub attended a concert of Kabyle music at La Mutualité.  There he met one of his great heroes, the singer Slimane Azem, who, along with Cheikh El Hasnaoui, was responsible for laying the foundations of modern popular Kabyle music in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Like most Kabyles of his generation, Matoub had grown up in the thrall of these two singers and his meeting with Azem was charged with emotion and wonder.  The foundation of Matoub’s music are the Kabyle songs of Azem and Hasnaoui, amongst others, and chaabi, or the popular music of Algiers which dominated Muslim tastes in Algeria until the 1970s and even beyond.  “I’m following in the steps of Cheikh El Hasnaoui,” he once told the Le Matin newspaper.  “The precision, the accuracy in his tempo and scales dazzle me.  Technically I belong to him.  But in terms of the message, I’m closer to Slimane Azem and to the spirit of rebellion in his music.  Chaabi was also the music of my childhood.  I feel myself gliding when I hear El Anka or Fadela Dziriya.” Mohammed Hadj El Anka and Fadila Dziriya are among the greatest chaabi singers ever.

But the truth was that no previous Kabyle singer had gone as far as Matoub wanted to go in terms of the simplicity, power and provocation of his lyrics.  “When I started, modern songs didn’t carry that need to express anger,” he once said.   “They didn’t have any convincing protest lyrics.  I shouted out my anger in my songs.  Music is my anger.”   Many Algerian journalists who wrote about Matoub’s music often referred to the ‘violence’ of his songs.  To a western ear his lyrics don’t seem violent, just challenging in the manner of early Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg.  But their bare-knuckled spirit of confrontation is extreme in a North African context, where musicians and songwriters had always previously pulled back from head on confrontation, and couched their protest in rich and symbolic imagery.  That wasn’t Matoub’s style.  His words came from his own mountain world, simple, unadorned, rich in their colours and allusions, but often stark in their meaning.  “I don’t censor myself,” he once said bluntly.

Fame followed fast on the heels of the release of Matoub’s first album ‘Ay Izem’ (‘The Lion’) in 1978.   By 1980, he was already headlining Paris’ legendary venue L’Olympia, scene of memorable visits by the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Edith Piaf and Genesis among many others.   It was almost as if the timing of the concert was divinely ordained.   Trouble had been brewing back home in Kabylia towards the end of 1979 and the early part of 1980.  The political submissiveness that had descended like a blanket of lead on the territory after the defeat of the uprising in 1964 was finally beginning to lift and crack.  In the end, typically, it was a cultural contretemps that lit the fuse.

The revered Kabyle writer and Berberist, Mouloud Mammeri, was due to give a lecture on traditional Berber poetry at the University of Tizi Ouzou.  At the last moment the authorities sniffed Berberist subversion and banned the lecture.  The resulting student protests grew into an all out revolt, which was brutally repressed by the security forces and denounced by the new President Chadli Benjedid.   Over thirty people were killed and more than 200 injured.  This uprising, which became known as the ‘Berber Spring’, was enormously significant.  It was the first overtly popular large-scale show of dissent since Algerian independence.  It radicalised a generation and the anniversary of the uprising on April 20^th each year, known as ‘Tafsut’ in Berber, has become a day of protests, marches, parties, gatherings and celebrations ever since.   Kabyles felt that they were the conscience of the Algerian nation, expressing the anger and frustration not only of Berbers but of all Algerians.   Like Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the Soweto Uprising in South Africa, the Berber Spring was a pivotal event which strengthened the political sinews of the Kabyle nation and boiled the passions of its people.

In the midst of the uprising Matoub took the stage of L’Olympia dressed in army fatigues, thereby expressing his solidarity with the “war” that was raging in his homeland.  The event was highly charged.  The Berber Spring elevated the new breed of Kabyle singers, “the guerrillas of song” as the Kabyle writer Kateb Yacine called them, to a status of extraordinary power.  Due to the lack of any credible coverage or analysis of events in the state-controlled Algerian media, Kabyles in France were forced to rely on ex-pat Berber publications and the odd radio station to keep them abreast of the unfolding drama.   But for inspiration, insight, zeal and courage they turned to singers like Matoub Lounès, Ferhat Mehenni, Aït Menguellet, Djamel Allam and Idir.  They were the bards of the gathering revolt.  They were the pied pipers of the movement.   After Mitterand’s election as President of France in 1980, a new system of political and cultural associations became available to immigrant populations.  This new opportunity spawned the ‘Beur’ movement, a flowering of North African culture, politics and media in the old colony, France.  New radio stations, newspapers, theatre groups, publishing houses, sporting clubs, record labels and community groups appeared like blooms after a flash flood, offering new channels of information and cultural education which allowed Algerians to circumvent the oppressive state control of culture and media back at home.

Matoub Lounès rode this wave like a rebel surfer.  His plainly spoken words of revolt hit the bull’s eye of the times.  His message was clear and passionate.  North Africans, especially young Berbers, fed on that clarity and that passion.   A reviewer who attended one of a series of nine Matoub Lounès concerts at L’Atlas in Paris in the early 1990s, wrote in Parcours Maghrebin, “How does one describe the perfect symbiosis between the artist on stage with an audience completely dedicated to a cause…  The concerts of Lounès have the grandeur of a rite, a rite full of flowers which are offered every ten minutes by overwhelmed fans.  The presence of Matoub at L’Atlas, a total event in itself, has brought a ray of hope to people crushed by the cost of living, the riots, the deadly raids, corruption and the proliferation of ills in our country.  Cheikh Lounès sings about their pains and their hopes which have been tragically blighted thanks to a system made gangrenous by a bunch of criminals.”

As the eighties progressed Matoub’s big mouth also had occasion to make life intensely exciting and dangerous for all the wrong reasons.  Once he picked a fight with a music producer who owed him money.   The producer’s insults had to be avenged – Kabylia and Corsica have worryingly similar attitudes to revenge and retribution.   Matoub rushed up to his hotel room and fetched a knife while the producer ranted in the lobby.  During the ensuing street brawl Matoub stabbed the producer in the abdomen.  He thought he’d killed him.  He was arrested, beaten, showered with racist abuse by the police and spent one month in La Santé prison in Paris.  A few years later Matoub wrote a song denouncing the London Accords between Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed, two men who had fought each other mercilessly in the early sixties but had now decided to make up for purely pragmatic reasons.  Matoub felt that this “false reconciliation” was a betrayal.   The left-wing Libération newspaper called Matoub a fascist and accused him of wanting to throw the Arabs into the sea.   Matoub couldn’t find a single producer in the North African music community who would release the album featuring the song.  All of them received threats not to touch it.   In the end a Tunisian Jew agreed to put it out.  It was deleted soon afterwards and has never been available since.  A few weeks later Matoub was shot at by a group of North Africans in a passing car in the rue d’Amsterdam.


* * * *

Five Bullets and The Dangers of Homesickness

Despite these unnerving incidents, Matoub Lounès might still be alive today if he had only desisted from visiting Algeria.  But homesickness was an unbearable affliction, as it was for many Kabyles.  “That country is my refuge, my bolt hole, my consolation and the only place where I feel really good,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’.  The problem with going back however was that Matoub was now famous in his home country, despite the fact that RTA, the national Algerian state-owned radio and TV company, never ever broadcast his music until the day of his death when they suddenly realised that they didn’t possess a single piece of live footage, studio recording or taped interview of one of the greatest Algerian singers who ever lived.   However, thanks to the ‘alternative’ media of cheap cassettes and French associative radio stations, Matoub’s fan base among young Kabyles and other Algerians in Algeria itself was now huge.   But fame in Algeria was a dangerous, even deadly curse when it brought you notoriety among the security forces, the government and the Islamists as a troublemaker, a shit stirrer and a no-good protest singer.

Matoub experienced the downside of his fame in a very dramatic way in October of 1988.  It was a time of radical unrest when the tectonic plates of Algerian society were shifting in the most explosive way and immense geysers of dissent were spurting up everywhere.  On October 9th, Matoub decided to join a group of students in front of Tizi Ouzou University to distribute flyers calling for a two-day national strike in support of rioting students and workers in Algiers.  Together with a couple of students, Matoub then decided to drive to the nearby town of Aïn el Hammam to distribute more flyers there.  On they way they stopped passing trucks and cars to hand out more flyers.  All of a sudden a police car appeared in front of them, speeded past and then turned and sped after them.  After a brief chase along the snaking mountain roads, Matoub, innocently expecting nothing more than a verbal drubbing or a bit of rough stuff at the local gendarmerie, stopped the car and confronted them.  When he saw that they were from the quasi-military Défence Nationale, rather than the somewhat more lenient local police, Matoub began to worry.  He was handcuffed and treated to a broadside of abuse from his furious pursuers.  Then suddenly, without any clear cause or reason, one of the policemen took out his revolver and shot Matoub in the arm, after which he emptied four more rounds into the body of the horrified and astounded singer.  Matoub collapsed.  He was taken to Aïn el Hammam, every bump in the road doubling his agony, and then to the hospital in Tizi Ouzou.  After three days he was evacuated to the Clinique des Orangers in Algiers, a city still smouldering with unrest.

Matoub’s body was a wreck.  One of the bullets had sliced through his intestine and shattered his right femur.  The under-equipped and hygienically atrocious Algerian health service was in no position to put him back together again and their interventions often made matters worse.  Infections multiplied and Matoub spent his days in constant and excruciating pain.  The nurses started to administer Dolossal, a morphine based painkiller, to which Matoub eventually became addicted.  He also had to cope with deep depression, black moods, and moments when he just wanted to destroy everything in sight.  Eventually, after tortuous bureaucratic wranglings and needless, not to say intentional, delays, Matoub was given a permit to evacuate to Paris.  There, with better treatment, his recovery gathered momentum, although morphine-deprivation drove him to the brink of despair.  His scars were atrocious.  One of his legs was badly set after an operation in Algiers and it ended up measuring five centimetres shorter than other.  He would limp for the rest of his life.   And to cap it all, his bowels and intestine were permanently damaged, forcing him to carry around a colostomy bag, an indignity which the proud and sensitive Matoub bore with extreme difficulty.   It was only the ardent and sustained support of Matoub’s family and his fans, together with the time spent singing and composing songs that saved his sanity through the long months of recuperation.  In Algiers he received literally hundreds of well-wishers by his bed-side, and many more letters and gifts from far and wide.

Those five bullets sublimated his reputation, turning him from a popular singer with a big mouth into an existential hero, a man who had danced cheek to cheek with death, and whose words thereafter carried special magnetism and power.  As murder and violence became daily facts of Algerian life, Matoub was the one singer who could speak of its horrors from direct personal experience.  People loved and venerated him for that.  He was no longer a theoretical artist, but one who knew pain and suffering as intimately as it was possible without loosing a life.   “When one has flirted so closely with death,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’, “you feel this kind of debt which obliges you to respect life.  Suffering, it’s true, helps to appreciate happiness.”

After six weeks at the Beaujon hospital in Paris, Matoub discharged himself and went back to Kabylia with his crutches and colostomy sack, to perform at an emotional concert in Tizi Ouzou’s football stadium.  Such was his defiant headstrong gluttony for life and its inevitable punishments.  “Aggression, which could have annihilated me, ended up reinforcing me.  That day I knew that the five bullets of Aïn El Hamman were defeated,” he wrote.  Needless to say, the cop who had almost murdered Matoub was never brought to trial.


* * * *

Fundamentalism and the Descent into Hell

Meanwhile Algeria was plunging into hell.   When oil and gas prices plummeted in the mid 1980s, the country’s only real source of hard currency dwindled.  The state could no longer pay its bills and what had always been a fragile society, even at the best of times, began to disintegrate.  Forced by the massive nation-wide unrest of 1988 to take drastic measures, President Chadli Benjedid announced the first free multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections since independence.  The first round was held in December 1991.  The voter turnout was low, with many Algerians decidedly unenthused by the choices on offer. The Front Islamique du Salud (FIS), an ascendant fundamentalist Islamic party led by the imprisoned Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, won an overwhelming victory.

Like many extremist political organisations, the FIS offered simplistic starry-eyed solutions to complex deep-rooted problems.  Their ultimate goal was clear; an Islamic state run according to the precepts of sharia law in which democracy, the rights of women and the aspirations of ethnic minorities would have absolutely no place at all.  This programme held definite attractions for certain sections of a population crushed by years of poverty, corruption, and the mismanagement of the one-party FLN state.  It also seemed to provide an alternative to failed western ideologies like socialism and communism, an alternative that was defiantly Arabic and Islamic.  The more oppressed and socially deprived a people, the more inclined they are to cling to the rock of an unambiguous and proud identity, however bogus it may be. The FIS seemed to provide the answer to people’s needs, although many votes cast in their favour were more like gut rejections of the previous regime than positive endorsements of their programme.  The FIS were also masters of grass-roots organisation and they used mosques and religiously inspired welfare programmes to seduce the populace.

But in the fundamentalist mind, democracy is a heresy and a sin against God.  The first-round victory of the FIS presented the Army generals, who still held ultimate power in Algeria, with an excruciating dilemma.  Should they allow the second round of the elections to go ahead and thereby herald a fully-fledged Islamic state in Algeria?  Should they let democracy destroy democracy?  Was it worth sacrificing their own political dominance for a democracy that they had never felt comfortable with anyway?  The strong man of the ruling army council, Major-General Khaled Nezzar, had little doubt in his mind.  He purposefully provoked a constitutional crisis by forcing Chadli Benjedid to resign and appointed a High State Council to rule in his place.  Their first act in office was to annul the second round of elections.  It was a military coup d’etat, all in the name of democracy.  The FIS and their followers felt cheated and robbed.  The political system had betrayed them.  The time had come for direct action.  The gun, the bomb and the knife took over from the ballot box and the Islamic movement went underground.

Matoub had even less love for fundamentalist Islam than he did for Arabic nationalism.  “I’m neither an Arab nor a Muslim,” he once famously said in TV documentary, in a blatant refutation of the FLN’s rallying cry at independence; “One Nation – Algeria!  One People – The Arabs!   One Faith – Islam!”   As far as Matoub was concerned, the fundamentalists wanted to destroy anything that might help society evolve; intellectuals, doctors, journalists, teachers, young women who refuse the veil and of course, musicians.  The FIS and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) were unequivocal in their view that music is a sin and musicians are enemies of God.   Furthermore, Matoub liked to drink.  He loved spending time in cafés, chatting to friends.  It was his way of keeping touch with the people he loved most.  None of this helped to improve his image as a good Muslim.   In any case, he had never had any time for the marabouts, or holy men, who controlled traditional Kabyle society, preying on the simple faith of the people and enriching themselves in the process.  He suspected them of aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism in Kabylia and beyond.  “Religion exploits consciences,” he wrote.  “I don’t want it to exploit mine.”


* * * *

The Only One who Lived to Tell the Tale

Although Matoub spent a lot of his time in France and touring abroad with the help of an international network of Berber groups and activists, he could never stay away from Kabylia for long, and he always tried to be there for the annual ‘Tafsut’ celebrations commemorating the Berber Spring.  In 1994, when fundamentalist terrorist violence was reaching its murderous apogee, Matoub began to hear rumours that he was on the terrorists’ black list.  Friends urged him to go back to the safety of Paris.  Posters began to appear in Tizi Ouzou proclaiming that Matoub was next.  But he bluntly and stubbornly refused to leave.  It would look too much like a climb down, a loss of courage and a defeat.  Instead he took the precaution of avoiding main roads, where the GIA often set up false roadblocks.  But he still went to cafés to talk and drink late into the night with friends.

One night in late September, Matoub and a couple of friends were driving back to Tizi Ouzou when they decided to stop off at a road-side café for a pick me up.   All of sudden, fifteen men armed with knives, hunting rifles and sawn off shotguns burst into the bar.   They searched the place, pistol-whipping the proprietor with the warning that if he continued to run such an ungodly business he would be shot.   Eventually they found the gun that Matoub kept for self-protection in his belt.  The cry went up.  “It’s him. It’s Matoub!”   Their leader, whose war name was Hamza, said to Matoub, “Now you’re getting ready to die, have you decided to pray?”  “Obviously,” replied Matoub.  “Lounès,” came the stern answer, “it’s better to be alive and scared than heroic and dead.”   After taking the proceeds of the till and beating some of the other clients, the guerrillas departed into the rainy night with Matoub.

No one had ever survived being kidnapped by the GIA.  Throughout the two weeks of Matoub’s captivity, death was a constant presence.  His own execution seemed to be forever only a few hours away.  The young members of the GIA group who were holding him captive spoke about death all the time.  They revelled in it, boasted about it and glorified it.  They were also completely resigned to the idea of their own martyrdom in the cause of Islam and subsequent entry into paradise.  Matoub was astounded by how little political analysis or discourse went on in the stinking remote mountain camps of the GIA.  The will of God was the simple motivation behind their every thought and the justification of their every action.   Matoub felt his only possible survival strategies were wit and cunning.  He even joined in with the tearful prayer sessions which the guerrillas held five times a day.

Eventually Matoub was tried by two ‘Emirs’, or GIA leaders, and sentenced to death.  His trial was recorded on tape, so that his own expedient contradictions of his core beliefs could be used later to discredit him.  His judges had an intimate knowledge of his poems and lyrics, even though they claimed that they never listened to his music, or any music for that matter.   “You are the enemy of God,” they told him.  “Because of you and your songs, Kabylia is wallowing in darkness.”   Their arguments were simple and without nuance.   They urged him to follow the example of Cat Stevens, aka Youssef Islam, who had renounced the ungodly life of a musician and embraced the true faith.  Paradise awaited him if he started praying and adopted Islam.  Looking down the barrel of a gun, proverbially and literally, Matoub said anything to stay alive.  He promised to give up singing and open a respectable business, to which end the guerrillas in turn offered to lend him some money.   He also promised that he would try and persuade the Berber movement to give up its political aims.

In the second week of his captivity Matoub began to hear rumours that he might be released.  He refused to believe them, and kept telling himself that death was nothing to fear because he was dead already.  Part of him suspected that the GIA might be planning to manipulate his popularity and use his taped promises and declarations to influence his fans.  As part of this scheme they might just want him alive.  But mostly it was death that dominated his thoughts.  He pictured his own end obsessively, in the minutest detail.  “I imagined my assassination one hundred times,” he wrote.  “One hundred times, I lived my own death.”  A captured policeman was executed only ten feet away from him.  His captors considered Matoub responsible for the moral degeneration of Kabylia and they had fun playing games with his state of mind.

Eventually, on October 10^th, Matoub was driven to the village of Ath Yenni and released.  His joy and relief were unbounded.  After rejoining his family in Taourirt Moussa, where thousands of well-wishers gathered to greet him, Matoub began to find out what had happened during his absence.  The MCB had sent an ultimatum to the GIA, threatening all out war if Matoub was killed.  Groups of youths had braved the dangers of the remote mountain areas to look for him.  Tens of thousands took to the street of Tizi Ouzou and Algiers chanting “Matoub or the Gun!”   In the end, his execution was too hot, even for the GIA to handle.  Matoub was unequivocal about the significance of his own escape from the clutches of the fanatics.  “My liberation was their first set back,” he wrote.  “The terrorists freed me because they had no choice…  For the first time a whole region mobilised, arms in hand, to show that they would not give in to intimidation…  My songs, my music, my struggle will be even stronger now.”


* * * *

The Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Soon afterwards, Matoub released his album ‘Kenza’.  It was dedicated to the daughter of the Kabyle writer Tahar Djaout, a close friend of Matoub’s, who was murdered by the GIA in 1993.  Life, precarious as it was, went on.  Matoub now suffered from regular panic attacks for which he took valium.  Composing songs and writing his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ were the only forms of therapy he allowed himself.  Of course, his traumatic encounter with the GIA had been far from unique.  It is estimated that almost 200,000 people were murdered in Algeria in the decade after 1992.  But the fact that he was able to express his experiences and feelings in songs of such clarity and power set him apart.  “The essential thing for me is to fulfil the link between my life and my ideas, my struggle and my songs,” he wrote.  “My life is a permanent search for that equilibrium, from which I take my strength and my inspiration.”

Nothing in Algerian politics is simple and pure unsullied Algerian heroes are almost non-existent.  Matoub had his doubters and his enemies.  In the early 1990s the Berber movement had split into two factions.  One supported Aït Ahmed’s FFS party and the other a new political movement called Rassemblement pour La Culture et la Démocratie (RCD).  The FFS believed that ultimately peace and stability could only be won through dialogue with the FIS and other fundamentalist groups.  The RCD rejected this notion outright, and even went so far as to ally itself with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the army Generals in favour of an all out war on religious fanaticism and terrorism.  Kabyle society split along these party lines, turning neighbour against neighbour and friend against friend.  Matoub always claimed that he was a poet and that political machinations held no interest for him.  Nevertheless he was a fervent and declared admirer of Saïd Sadi, the man who had founded the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB) in the late 1960s and was also behind the creation of the RCD in the late 1980s.  Matoub was an MCB loyalist through and through.  “It represents that which is most important for us Kabyles: our identity,” he declared.  By association, he was also considered to be an RCD supporter, and this dragged him into the political fray, despite himself.

Soon after Matoub was released by the GIA and the joyous celebrations in Kabylia, Algiers, Paris and the rest of the Diaspora had died down, dark mutterings began to be heard.  Certain parties accused Matoub of ‘staging’ his own kidnap, in order to enhance his reputation and that of the RCD.  For them it was the only logical explanation for Matoub’s escape from the GIA, an organisation whose record of murdering all their kidnap victims had been hitherto watertight.  The singer Ferhat expressed his own doubts publicly, and many others did so privately.  With great insight, the journalist Catherine Simon, writing in Libération, pointed out that doubt was one of the few political reactions left to the Algerian people.  “In this theatre of shadows into which evil has plunged the country,” she wrote, “the only freedom left to the populace, pressured to choose between one camp or another, is to doubt, without let up, everything and everybody.”

Aït Meguellet, a singer revered by many Kabyles and Algerians, refused to comment on Matoub’s kidnapping when pressed by journalists.  For Matoub, his silence was a grave insult.  He went onto Beur FM, the biggest North African radio station in France, and accused Aït Meguellet, who continued to reside in Kabylia throughout the troubles, of buying his own protection from the GIA.  Matoub even claimed to have proof of this arrangement.  The normally reserved Aït Meguellet went public and denounced Matoub, accusing him of mythomania and megalomania.  “In the future, for each proffered lie, ten truths will be told about his person,” he said.

This sorry debacle became known as the Matoub affair.  Claim and counter-claim dogged him right up until the day of his death and beyond.  The French TV channel Canal+ even broadcast a documentary throwing doubt on the assumption that the GIA were Matoub’s killers.  Matoub’s sister Malika, and the Matoub Lounès Foundation are still trying to expose the dark forces which they claim were responsible for his eventual murder.  Ironically, her suspicions are focused on the RCD, the one political party which Matoub was supposed to have supported during his life.  Her argument is that since the RCD allied itself with the regime, it had the means and the motivation to eradicate her brother.  The party was only doing the government’s dirty business for them.  Once again Malika claims to have evidence to back up her accusations.  The RCD are suing her and the Matoub Lounès Foundation.  The case continues.

It’s easy to imagine the army Generals, the mafia who rule Algeria, rubbing their hands in glee at all this fractious in-fighting at the heart of the Berber movement.  And despite his natural tendency to mouth off and call a spade a spade, it’s equally hard to imagine that Matoub himself would have looked on this controversy with anything other than frustration and despair.  All Kabyles, whether FFS or RCD, share a similar dream and ultimately it’s the dream that suffers while the accusations fly.  But that’s the nature of crime and punishment in modern Algeria.  Army, FIS, Government, GIA, this party, that party – they all sometimes blend into one deathly and impenetrable medusa.   As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscínski wrote way back in the 1960s; “Algeria is unique.  At every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts.  Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.”

A perspicacious journalist once wrote that Matoub’s final end was like “the chronicle of a death foretold.”  People thought he was mad to even contemplate returning to Algeria.  They even told him so.  But Matoub couldn’t stay away from his beloved Kabylia for very long.  After he had put the final touches to what became his last album “Lettre ouverte aux…”, the thirty sixth of his career, he decided to accompany his new wife Nadja back home, in order to help her get a visa.  He knew the risks he was taking.  “I know I have been reprieved,” he wrote.  “Popular pressure saved me from the nightmare.  Next time my kidnappers will have my skin, and without any warning, of that I’m certain.”  But in the end, for Matoub, risks were just like red rags to a bull.  Contrary and stubborn to the last, Matoub turned a deaf ear to all the warnings and travelled back home for his final rendez-vous with death.  Ensnared like a brave but doomed insect in a tangled web of fate and foreboding, Matoub Lounès climbed into the car with his wife and her two sisters, and drove off up that lonely mountain road.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2003
First published in ‘Shoot The Singer! Music Censorship Today’ Zed Books, London, May 2004

The post MATOUB LOUNES – A lifetime dancing with death appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The Merlins of this particular hit machine are Magic System from the Ivory Coast.  Their ability to glamorize and internationalise hip-to-the-minute afro-disco styles like zouglou or coupé décalé, has made them just about the most popular African band in the world…for the time being at least.  Back in 2007 they teamed up with top North African rap combo 113 to record the massive hit “Un Gaou Oran.”   A few months ago Magic System returned with “Même Pas Fatigué,” which topped the French charts over the summer.   But this time their partner from the Maghreb was no ‘junior’ rap crew with milk teeth.  Rather they bagged (or was it vice versa) the most famous North African pop singer of all time, the King of Algerian rai music himself; Khaled, sporting a sober but stylish ‘gangster’ suit, a louche tache and that legendary smile.

A few cold winter months short of his 50^th birthday, Khaled, who was once revered as an icon of youth and teen rebellion, albeit the a-political and carelessly hedonistic North African brand championed by rai music, is no doubt overjoyed to be the voice of choice in the French banlieues once again.  The last time he found himself in such a state of showbiz grace was in the mid 1990s, when his tearful love song ‘Aisha’ was the biggest thing since croissants au beurre, and Khaled the most beloved and popular Algerian in French history.  Considering the loveless, well-nigh psychopathic relationship between France and it’s former colony, this was quite an achievement.  His fame then spread to the unlikeliest places, like Brazil, Turkey and India, where it still reportedly rivals that of any US girl or boy wonder you’d care to mention.

After dizzying peaks of success came a series of falls however.   Khaled was harassed by well-publicised matrimonial bust-ups, alcoholic misdemeanours, wrangles with his record label, taunts for being a fat irrelevant tax exile…in short, the usual snarling furies that harass rich and famous pop stars as they stumble gracelessly into middle age.

Not only did Khaled survive this extended slide into hell, but he came out of it smiling and smelling of some very expensive eau de cologne.  For whilst “Même Pas Fatigué” has hoisted his banner amongst French ‘ghetto’ kids who probably weren’t even born when the young Khaled, or Cheb Khaled as he was then known, first came to France from his native Oran in Western Algeria back in 1986, his new album ‘Liberté’ has spruced up his reputation amongst fans and cognoscenti of rai.   Produced by the veteran Frenchman Martin Meissonier, who last worked with Khaled on his landmark album ‘Kutché’ back in 1989, ‘Liberté’ is a back to basics exercise aimed at proving to all and sundry that Khaled’s voice need fear no rival in contemporary Arabic music as it soars like an eagle on a thermal joyride, and that his rai-stew of raw trancey Maghrebi roots and French, Spanish and Middle-eastern pop is best served as simply as possible, with little or no studio frippery and electronic garnitures.

Khaled, who is one of the easiest interviews ever to have blessed the anxious music journalist thanks to a conversational engine that just sparks ups and motors in all weathers, emitting generous expletives and guffaws as it races along, tells me over the phone that ‘Liberté’ encompasses many different definitions of the world ‘freedom’.

“Martin Meissonier knows me too well.  Twenty years after ‘Kutché’, he made me an offer I didn’t dare refuse.  He said, “Listen, Khaled, I’d really like you to sing the way you sing on stage.  I’ll let you be free and I won’t give you a click,”” he says, referring to the computer-generated metronome that some producers use to tie their wayward musicians to the beat.   In effect, ‘Liberté’ relies solely and courageously on good microphones and great musicianship to achieve its epic power.

However, the album’s honesty doesn’t merely reside in its production values.   As he nears his half-century, Khaled has clearly spent some time looking at the man in the mirror; mulling over his rebellious past, the apocalyptic sufferings of his Algerian homeland during the 1990s, his relationship to God and Islam and his tussles with his father, a stern car-mechanic who considered the phrase “a career in music” to be an impossible absurdity.

“I also called the album ‘Liberté, because of the freedom which my father provoked in me.  I wanted to prove something to him, because he always used to say that being a musician means getting involved in drugs, drowning in alcohol, being a tramp, never marrying, never having kids…all that kind of stuff.  Maybe it’s thanks to him that I became Khaled who is known the world over.  I wanted to prove to him that with music you can go far, do great things, and treat it as a profession.”

Khaled has also been busy contemplating the tragedy of Algerian history.  Like most of his contemporaries, born in the euphoria of the early 1960s, when the young Algerian state had only just emerged victorious from its dark and bitter struggle with France, Khaled can’t help looking back with dumbfounded bewilderment and ask, “What the hell went so wrong?”   A deep-seated need to find heroes and mentors untainted by the murky horrors of the civil war of the 1990s has led him to the avuncular embrace of the rai legend Blaoui Houari, who was singing in the bars and cabaret’s of his native Oran when Khaled’s parents were courting back in the 1940s.  During the independence struggle Houari shared a prison cell with a young freedom fighter by the name of Ahmed Zahana, aka Zabana, to whom Khaled dedicates a song on ‘Liberté’.   “He was the first martyr to be guillotined by the French during the war of independence,” Khaled explains.  “Zabana means freedom to me.  He sacrificed his life for freedom, so that’s why I wanted to pay homage to him.”

A national treasure, who has always taken the trouble to stay out of big ‘P’ politics, Khaled has no problem flirting with power.  He’s a good friend of the current Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and defends his friend’s decision to play loose with the constitution and seek a third term.  “People like him because he bought security,” says Khaled.  “He’s a real politician, not a mere soldier like our other presidents.  And no one talks about Moubarak in Egypt or that guy in Tunisia, who have decided to be Presidents for life, after all!”

But there’s one specifically north African interpretation of the word freedom that Khaled can really claim to be his own, his offspring, his life’s work, his greatest pride.   It’s the freedom that has always been the cause célèbre of rai music, ever since the original pop-rai revolution of the late 1970s, when Khaled was just a youth with bum fluff and monster flares, burning bridges all over the fizzier parts of Oran, singing his heart out at weddings and baptism parties whilst drowning his sexual, social, and spiritual frustrations in free alcohol.

“The history of rock’n’roll with Elvis Presley and the history of rai are one and the same thing,” Khaled explains with explosive enthusiasm.  “ Rai was banned from television and radio because they said it was misogynistic music which couldn’t be listened to by the family.  It’s also a music that men dance to with their hips, which for a Muslim country, was outrageous.  Only women are allowed to dance with their hips.  Rai was a music that upset people who were a little bit stuck up in the way they lived, or I could also use the word ‘fascists’.”

In truth, the fact that Khaled has survived with his two primary weapons, his voice and his smile, sharp and potent, for so long, is quite extraordinary, illogical even.  Hedonistic, outspoken, devil-may-care, a North African rock’n’roller par excellence, Khaled has walked a tightrope for decades, with angry imams, po-faced politicians and lethal fundamentalist emirs baying for his blood.  This is no exaggeration.  In the darkest days of the civil year, fellow rai-singers and musicians were assassinated fairly regularly, and Khaled himself received numerous death threats.

It’s the smile, the impregnable bonhomie, the voice that transports every North African to some essential and indefinable place where myths and ancestors lurk, that have been his sword and shield from his earliest days.   Khaled was right never to play real Politics.   It’s a strategy that has allowed him never to appear like a real threat, whilst he shook, rattled and rolled his homeland to its moral core.

“I was brought up in a country that was very closed,” Khaled remembers.  “But I was always free thanks to music, because I was communicating the message of love and I’ve always fought for freedom.   The problem is that in a place like Algeria, when you sing about love or about the beautiful things in love, it almost makes you a protest singer.   But you mustn’t fall into the trap of Politics.  Politics is for politicians.  Each has their role to play.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009
First published in The Independent – Sept 2009

The post KHALED #2 – Freedom and pop appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Khaled knows that kind of fame, not only in France, but also throughout North Africa, its diaspora and strange unlikely places like India, Brazil and Japan.  After the release of his second to last album ‘Kenza’ in 2000, it seemed that fame was beginning to take its toll.  There had been stories in the papers about bouts of alcohol-fuelled mayhem, violence towards his wife, niggling paternity suits, drink driving.  There was the very public sparring with his record company Barclay / Universal and its charismatic boss Pascale Nègre, who had signed Khaled was back in ’91 when he was still little more than a North African ghetto hero and then engineered his worldwide success.  There were some atrocious concerts with a bored looking backing band, which registered frighteningly high levels of schlock.  There was the fall-out of 9/11, which made life harder for all Arab singers and musicians, however disarming their smile and virulent their laughter.  There was the very public Internet debate amongst North Africans about whether Khaled had grown old, fat, lost his touch and fallen out of favour with his core constituency. There was Khaled’s own dissatisfaction with ‘Kenza’, and the way in which it had been manufactured piece meal by a gamut of hired-hand producers.  All in all, it was a troubled time; a dark hiatus in what had been an unrelenting hi-gradient climb to stardom over the past decade.  It was a severe test of that seemingly indestructible mischievous smile.

Khaled does a good job of persuading you that he can brave out the pressure, and eyeball the furies of fame, especially the media attention. “When you’re well known you attract that kind of rubbish,” he says with that 24-carat grin.  “It’s very very very hard.  It’s not even hard, it’s hellish.  It’s hellish when I open a paper or my wife opens a paper and reads stuff.  And sometimes she falls into the trap of believing what she reads, even though I’ve been married…legitimately!…to her for ten years now and she’s my one and only wife.  People think I’ve been married to loads of women.  That kills me too.  As for the drink, I’ve been teetotal for eight years now.  When you’re a good artist, you have to have the courage to stand up to all the criticism, because if you answer back, if you react, it will never end.  You just fall into a vicious circle.  And as I always say…the caravan passes and the dogs bark.”  That last little epithet is one of Khaled’s favourites, and he throws it in several times during our long interview, as if to underline the fact that people can talk if they want to, but their words won’t penetrate his defence systems, which are armour plated and impregnable.

In fact, if you consider the long pot-holed road that Khaled has travelled to reach his present state of grace, and tax exile in Luxembourg, where he currently lives, you start wondering what exactly these defence systems are made of.  What is the secret of his survival?  After all, it hasn’t been easy.  Back in Oran in the early 1970s, Khaled’s police mechanic father took a dim view of his burgeoning flirtations with music.  Music was emphatically not a family concern, not even on an amateur level, and like all solid self-respecting Algerians, Mr Hadj Brahim considered the phrase ‘a career in music’ to be an oxymoron.  His young tearaway son saw things differently.  For starters, the only time and place where unbridled hedonism and good times were officially sanctioned by Algerian society, outside of cabarets and brothels, was at weddings, and if you were a musician, you tended to do a lot of weddings.  Khaled always loved to party, still does, so a career in music held a certain unassailable logic for him.  What’s more, being a musician at a wedding conferred a certain ‘useful’ status…people would procure alcohol for you, and treat you well.  In any case, Khaled was already hooked to music and musicians, and was working at emulating, even surpassing his heroes: Johnny Halliday, Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby and Bellemou Messaoud.  The pure raucous innocence of the Spanish boy idol Joselito also stirred his innards, together with the raw emotional power of Spanish pop and flamenco in general.  Critics and commentators often omit to mention this crucial component of rai music.  “Oran is an Andalusian town,” confirms Khaled.  “We’re opposite Almeria and back in the day, rai had more to do with flamenco than anything else.  I was born in La Calera, which is the name for the old port.  It’s Spanish.  Everyone speaks Spanish, all the older people at least…except me ha ha ha.   And the old people used to say, including my father, that flamenco is a ‘cry of love’.  There were taboos in our society and only flamenco said those words of love.  There was even the dance of the Toreador…it was an erotic dance.  Well that’s rai.”

So flamenco was the only means in town to say things straight, at least until the blunt plain speaking sounds of Nass El Ghiwane crossed over the border from Morocco and hit the youth of Algeria, including Khaled, like a tornado.  This epoch making invasion occurred in the early 1970s just before the conflict in the Western Sahara brought Moroccan-Algerian relations to a bitter low.  Khaled remembers the authorities rounding up truckloads of Moroccans living in Oran, including some of his close school friends, stripping them of their goods and property, and shipping them back over the border.  “Oran was full of Moroccans. I grew up Moroccan. Although I was only small, I remember the shame and the hatred of those times,” says Khaled.  “It still upsets me today.  I can’t get it out of my head.  I’ve even said as much to the King of Morocco, who’s a friend.”  With his newly formed group, Noujoum El Khams (‘The Five Stars’), Khaled would play Nass El Ghiwane songs at weddings, even though Moroccan music was frowned on for a time.  “With Nass El Ghiwane, for once, we had a group that were committed to singing about the reality of what was going on,” remembers Khaled.  “They weren’t scared.  They were the business as far as I was concerned. I had this small accordion, and when I played at weddings I would play with Noujoum El Khams, but after midnight I would take my accordion and sing rai.  And that’s how I was discovered by this cassette producer who invited me to make a record.  My challenge, when I went into the studio, was to bring together three cultures: the rai of Cheikha Remitti, the reality lyrics of Nass El Ghiwane that broke the taboos and the sax and trumpet of Bellemou Messaoud.  And I recorded ‘Trig Lycée’, which means ‘The road to the Lycée’.  It goes ‘The road to the Lycée bores me’.  And on the b-side I sang, ‘We’re watching the girls climbing up into the mountains, so that we can look at their bums from behind’ …hahaha…and we would shout out “Come on wind!  Lift up their skirts!  Come on wind!””

I’m bored with school.  Wind, lift up the girl’s skirts.  It’s hard for us, living in our carefree havens of western liberalism to appreciate how utterly shocking such sentiments were in the Algeria of the mid 1970s.  But Khaled was doing nothing more than vocalising the appetites and frustrations of a generation; his own generation.  He was born on the cusp of independence when the whole nation still had the lustre of hope and expectation in its eyes.  He came of age at a time when that hope was turning sour and rancid.  “Rai music back home was about breaking taboos and talking about everyday things,” Khaled remembers, “talking about life that’s lived back home by a teenager who says, “I’m fed up.  I’m pissed off.  I’m here.  I’m propping the wall. I do fuck all.  I haven’t got any pastimes.  The government shuts me in.  If I want my passport I have to do two years of military service.”   I talked about all of that, me.   I talked about it all.”  By the time Khaled left for France in 1989, he was already a big star in Algeria, crowned ‘King Of Rai’ at the 1985 Rai Festival in Oran.  And fame was already forging irons for his feet.  Bitter jealousies were biting at his heels.  Stack’em’high and sell’em’cheap cassette producers were throttling any real musical talent he had.  The army wanted him to do his military service to set an example to the rest of the youth.  Unlike his hero Elvis, he refused, and his musical career was saved.  Instead he left for France, signed a deal with a subsidiary of Polygram, the biggest record label in the world, recorded ‘Didi’ with Don Was and sold a million copies.  With ‘Aisha’ and the album ‘Sahra’ he sold a million more.  The 90s were his decade.  And just when Algeria was plunging itself into a civil conflict of barely imaginable bitterness and horror, his own songs of love, life and good times were becoming the internationally recognised musical emblem of his homeland.  But the irony never killed him, although fellow countrymen were being murdered in their thousands.

Four years ago, after the release of  ‘Kenza’, the second album named after one of his daughters, Khaled hit turbulence.  He had just turned 40, a difficult age for an erstwhile pied piper of youth.  His father died in August 2001.  He was forced to go back to Algeria to answer charges brought by a cassette company called Zeid El Youm, who claimed that he had broken a contract signed way back in the 1980s.  He played his first concerts in Algiers and Oran.  His third daughter Röhsen was born.  He argued with his label.

What next?

Somehow during all those years in France, working with the best producers in the best studios, Khaled had never had the opportunity to really indulge his instrumental talents in the studio, and prove to the world that he was a musician as well as a singer without equal.  The French producer Philippe Eidel, who had worked with Khaled on and off since the beginning, coaxed Khaled back into this central role.  After Khaled had worked out a few very simple ideas on his Apple Mac at home, he brought them to Eidel and they then went into the studio with a few choice musicians, with the aim of turning these ideas into the songs in situ, live and direct, with a minimum of cut’n’paste and trickery.  “We get eaten up by electronics and we forget,” says Khaled. “We forget the old sound, like some really well arranged rock’n’roll from the sixties.  Or in France, it’s musette, it’s the accordion, and now they’re beginning to lose all of that.  The youth are forgetting it.  Machines are good for creating and working fast on a demo.  But when you finalise your work you have to bring along real musicians.”  Thus a new heartbeat was reintroduced into Khaled’s music, stripped bare of the anxieties of infinite choice that synths, sequences, midi et al can bring, featuring the convivial warmth and groove of a tight coterie of musicians and a faithful posse of producers; Eidel, Don Was, the young Algerian talent Farid Aouameur and ex-member and founder of Caribbean zouk giants Kassav, Jacob Desvarieux. The new album ‘Ya Rayi’ was taking shape.   Its opening track ‘Mani Rani’, a languid tale of despondency and heartbreak, set the tone beautifully with it loose sepia shuffle and dreamy piano intro.

But there was a deeper tale unfolding.  Something in Khaled’s state of mind was impelling him to revisit old fires, old loves, old longings.  Maybe it was that inevitably painful entry into middle age.  Maybe it was the death of his father.  Maybe it was need to rekindle the flickering warmth of family, friendship, community and ‘bled’ or home-country that had succoured him as a child in the bright hopeful days of the 1960s.  Maybe he wanted to reaffirm the lifeblood of rai music: fun, partying, good times and hope.  Like other journeys back to the roots, to the source, by Buena Vista Social Club, Salif Keita, The Gypsy Kings and others, Khaled’s was motivated by a desire to revisit a golden age so that some of its glow could light up an otherwise grey present and even bleaker future.

Khaled reunited two childhood heroes to help him travel back into the past.  The first was Blaoui Houari, le papa du rai, a singer and songwriter from Oran who had cradled the hopes and dreams of his parents and grandparents back in the 1940s and 50s.  The second was Jewish pianist Maurice El Medioni, the keel of the cabaret style of 1950s Oran which blended US boogie, Latino syncopations, Arabic inflections and the sentimentality of French chanson. “I wanted to come back to 100% rai songs,” explains Khaled, “that’s to say, the style of the old timers, in order to hope, to talk about the same things that they talked about.  That’s to say, we still don’t have that rosy life that they had, or that they were expecting to have soon.  It was also to show that there wasn’t any racism in Algeria.  That’s a Jew and an Arab who knew each other in Algeria even before I was born.  What’s more, they were mates back then.  I still love that old music today.  There was a purity there.  There’s stuff we can learn from that time. “

Khaled paints a picture of this epic meeting with child-like wonder and enthusiasm.  “You should have seen it.  I created this surprise.  They didn’t know that they were going to meet each other again after a space of forty years.  I invited them both to this studio in Paris to play on ‘H’mama’, an old Blaoui song, which means ‘Dove’.  Blaoui almost had a cardiac arrest, the poor guy.  He’s an old bloke and he brought along this guitar that he’s been playing for more than fifty years.  There’s was Medioni on the piano, Blaoui on the guitar, and I was in between, the little boy, with my little percussion.  I asked them to play an intro and I just improvised some singing and we recorded it on tape.”

A short film about the recording that comes packaged with initial copies of the new album ‘Ya Rayi’ shows Khaled buzzing around in the studio, orchestrating the individual parts of the musicians, banging out rhythms on a derbouka, or sparring on his favourite instrument, the accordion.  His smile is constant, beaming, switched on, like the red recording light by the studio door.  He looks like he’s having the kind of ball that he hasn’t had in a long time. He looks like he has rediscovered something important that had been missing in his art.  And this conviviality, this party atmosphere has soaked into the music.

Houari, Medioni and Khaled are all names that are synonymous with Oran.  So is ‘Ya Rayi’, the title of the new album.  It’s the age old holler of rai music, its equivalent of “check one, check two” or “let’s rock” or “ain’t it funky now”, and it could be heard over a century ago in the guttural cries of rural rai cheikhs who would entertain the masses in the squares and cafés of the Medina Jdida, or old Arabic quarter of Oran.  Rai is the child of Oran, and it was born with the same characteristics, the same soul as its hedonistic parent.  “You know, when there was the terrorism in Algeria, Oran was a town that wasn’t touched,” Khaled explains.  “In other parts of Algeria, especially the triangle of death near Blida, people would refer to Oran as ‘Geneva’.  Because it’s neutral.  There’s no war.  Since even before independence, Oran was known as being a port city and a city for music.  You can never change that mentality…the showing-off, the youth, the flirtation, the cabarets and that desire to show you’re the most beautiful things on earth.  That’s Oran.  They don’t give a fuck about the government, as long as they live well.  That’s why Oran is a special place.”

Khaled is also a child of Oran, unmistakably so.  “My politics is making music, making people happy, giving them joy, and doing beautiful things,” he says emphatically.  In conversation, it slowly dawns that his core values are actually quite conservative, with a very small ‘c’, and tied to respect of family, of religion, of country and community.  He admonishes the famous Kabyle singer Matoub Lounes, who was murdered by the GIA in 1998, for having worn a T-shirt proclaiming his atheism and recorded a protest song based on the Algerian national anthem.  “That man had guts and I take my hat off to him,” says Khaled.  “We were like mates together, but when I saw some of the things he was doing I said, “Stop.  Stay as you are.  You’re the symbol of the Kabyle people.  You’re fighting for a cause which is real.  Those people have made the whole world tremble.  Don’t touch that.”  You don’t muck around with the national anthem.  He became the man to strike down.  One mustn’t antagonise those people.  One mustn’t publicise their cause.  You have to know how to fight them with kindness.”

Fighting with kindness.  That’s Khaled all over.  When he talks about his ‘enemies’, his words are always wrapped in smiles, punctuated by chuckles or spiced with loud guffaws.  He has the knack of making confrontation look like partying.  You just don’t feel like being aggressive towards him.   It’s easy to interpret his stubbornly a-political musical approach as a cop-out, a piece of cowardice.  But if you consider that his name has no doubt been high up on the hit list of the GIA or the radical Salafist militias that still exist in Algeria for more than a decade, then this worldview seems smarter and craftier on reflection, like one belonging to a man who is determined to have the last laugh.  Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s Khaled spearheaded an a-political youthful rebellion, anchored in sex, alcohol, fun and good times.   Middle Algeria reacted to him just like the good folks of Mississippi and Arkansas reacted to Elvis in the 1950s.   But politics wasn’t part of the mix. “One mustn’t fall into the trap of politics,” he says firmly.  “Politics is for politicians.  Each has their role to play.”

Fame is dangerous in Algeria.  Music is dangerous in Algeria.  Partying in dangerous in Algeria.  Khaled has epitomised all three, and yet managed to survive.  Those who have dismissed him as an intellectual lightweight have completely missed the point.  The game of brinkmanship he has been playing since the age of 14 is truly wondrous.  It’s one that declares, “I am a Muslim and I party.  I am an Algerian and I love good times.  I respect my family and my country and I’m a musician.  I’m a man of the people and I’m famous.”   The new album ‘Ya Rayi’ proves that Khaled is still up there on the high wire, and still smiling like there’s no tomorrow.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2004
First published in fRoots – May 2004

The post KHALED – The fame and the furies appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Rachid Taha

Joan Baez sang “where have all the flowers gone?” back in 1964.  Forty years later, it’s more a case of “never mind the flowers, where have all the protest singers gone?”   In a time of unprecedented global chaos, conflict and anger it seems that rock’n’roll has abandoned its rebel stance, taken the king’s shilling and contented itself with dancing the corporate two-step.    No doubt there are voices of dissent out there, but you have to be either very hip or very persistent to know anything about them.   Come to think of it, who was protesting in ’91, except the Rolling Stones?  And who was there in ’82, except Robert Wyatt?   Maybe that whole rock rebel stance has been nothing more than a hollow gesture, ever since ‘Street Fighting Man’ slipped down the charts and John and Yoko got out of bed.  There was Crass I suppose and the Clash of course.  Yes, there will always be the Clash.  But before we all decide to slit our wrists or go down to Wall Mart to shop and forget, it might encourage us all to know that musical protest, not diatribe, but sincere self-questioning protest with soul, still lives and thrives in the strangest of places.

“I dreamed of singing about my own nightmares,” was Taha’s succinct answer to my question about the creative genesis of his new album ‘Tékitoi’.   For most of us, there are two types of nightmare, the introspective type, in which our inner loneliness and doubt suddenly become monstrously scary, and the external type, in which the potential dangers of the world haunt us to the marrow of our bones.  ‘Tékitoi’ deals with both types of nightmare.  Its lyrics dovetail the personal and the universal, with the gouging power of a hawk’s beak.   In the track ‘H’asbu-hum’, a title taken from a slogan meaning ‘Get rid of them’ which Taha spotted on a banner at a protest march in Algeria which he saw on TV, the people responsible for Taha’s outward nightmares are neatly listed, in Arabic of course.  Translated, the list goes something like ”Liars, thieves, people who humiliate others, murderers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the corrupt, diggers, propagandists, destroyers, slave drivers, the lazy, the racists, the undecided, the ignorant, the preachers, the profiteers, the boasters, the dirty.”  He follows the list with the words ‘Get rid of them!   Bring them to account!”

If ‘Tékitoi’ comprised solely of such lists, mixed in with big boombastic words of vitriol and anger, then it wouldn’t really amount to much more than a kind of emotional enema, in the style of 1980s skinhead ‘Oi’ bands.  Thankfully, it’s so much more than that, because Taha has the courage, and even the humility, to confront the other type of nightmare, that’s to say, the dark quick sands of his inner self.  Even ‘Tékitoi’, the title of the album, a deft piece of French street lingo which translates as something like “Who the hell are you?”, has a troubled existentialist ring to it.  “The song is an attempt to explore the identity of the person in front of me,” explains Rachid. “In order for tolerance to have any hope of existing, you have know who you are, and you have to know who the person you’re dealing with is.   That’s what the song is about.”   It’s worth noting that these slices of angst are fried on a backing track that makes you think Cramps, Clash and North Africa simultaneously, without any visible joins in between.  The album then dances and moshes onwards, throwing up more questions than answers, coming back again and again to the bleak and dirty victory of experience over innocence, the wilful corruption of the world versus the desperate attempt of the individual to find some kind of goodness in their lives, the anger and frustration which Taha himself shares with the ‘ordinary’ man in the street all over the world.

Taha has long been recognised as a perceptive thinker and a courageous mental guerrillero, but what is really astounding is that he has always been fighting a war on two fronts.   His stand against the racism and bigotry of his adoptive France, so neatly expressed in anthems like ‘Voilà Voilà’, or the corruption of western governments and war-mongerers, has already been widely hailed and documented.  What it less appreciated, is Taha’s struggles with his own Arabic roots, with his inherited North African culture and especially with the age-old tendency to metaphorise musical or poetic discourse in the Arabic world.  Taha considers this metaphorical muzzling to be a product of a generalised puritanism and lack of democracy, which has always been the scourge of free thinkers form North African or the Middle East, like himself.   For any Arabic poet or musician, to abandon metaphor automatically means to shock.  “Metaphors are so dangerous,” Taha asserts.  “The problem with a metaphor is that it can usually only be understood by a minority, an educated elite.  But I want to communicate directly with the man on the street, even if that means talking in a brutal way sometimes.  Too many metaphors lead to war.”

It’s no surprise therefore that Taha has always been a master of the provocative gesture, the act that pulls no punches.  Famous early examples were his decision to call his first band ‘Carte de Séjour’, which means ‘Resident’s Permit’.   As a moniker for a bunch of young North African immigrants, singing in Arabic and French, this was as neat and succinct a piece of provocation as any. Then there was Carte de Séjour’s cover of ‘Douce France’, a wistful and nostalgic classic of the French chanson canon by Charles Trenet.  Think of Asian Dub Foundation doing a cover of ‘White Cliffs Of Dover’, back in the early ‘80s, and you might get a measure of its provocative value.  At the time, Taha also persuaded the renowned French minister of culture, Jack Laing, to distribute copies of ‘Douce France’ to every member of the French parliament.   A few years later, on the cover of ‘Olé Olé’, an album whose electronic approach revolutionised North African music, Taha died his hair beach blonde and sported Aryan blue contact lenses.  It was a visual v-sign to all the TV producers, Radio programmers and chicken-shit journalists who didn’t dare touch Taha because he was Algerian.  But it was also an attempt to rib the macho prejudices of North African manhood, to whom the very idea of homosexuality and gender bending, are a complete anathema.  Taha himself feels certain affinities with the gay underground “because minorities need to stick together” and has been seen serving drinks behind the bar of his favoured Parisian club ‘Pulp’, also popular with the city’s gay and lesbian community, on a regular basis.

The real joy of Taha is the unpredictability of his thoughts and opinions, and his refusal to conform to any rigid and reductive dogma.  In an interview, his answers surprise you constantly.  Talking about Epargnes sur Vologne, the idyllic little village in the eastern French province of Alsace, where his parents moved to in 1968 when they left their home near Oran in Algeria, Taha says “I felt like a rat in a cage, looking for an escape route.  But racism wasn’t really a problem because in a village like that, everyone hates each other anyway.  Real racism starts in the cities, when you’re older, and you can’t get a job or a flat or anything.”

Leaving and home and community for Lyons, and a crap job in a heating appliances factory, was a decisive journey for Taha, and a prerequisite for the kind of intellectual development he yearned for.  “Communitarianism is the worse possible thing,” he says with emphatic zeal.  “It’s the way wars start.  When I go out, I see the youth of the same neighbourhood and same origins sticking together.  I never wanted that to happen to me.  You have to be an adventurer.  Staying stuck in your own community comes down to laziness.  It’s conformism.  It’s great to spend time with your family but the best way to find freedom is to get the hell away from the family.  The alienation and racism of the Socialist Party in the 1980s caused young North Africans to retreat back into their community.  This breach was then exploited by the National Front and Le Pen.  Le Pen isn’t in power but his ideas are.  The self-proclaimed fundamentalist Imams and preachers also exploit the situation for their own ends.  This reinforces conservatism, laziness and nostalgia rather than curiosity, and a desire to look outwards and understand others.  Nostalgia is a kind of pathology.  I always want to move forward, and never retreat into nostalgia.”

This forward, outward and upward philosophy is at the core of Taha’s musical approach.  Even though he was born in Oran, and raised in the nearby town of Sig, Taha has always felt either bored or alienated by the excessive nostalgia and barely disguised tendency to ape Julio Iglesias in the pop-rai music of Khaled, Mami et al.  In Lyons he started a club for all the people who weren’t allowed into the city’s more established nightspots, called ‘Les Refoulés’, which means ‘The Rejects’ or ‘The Frustrated’.  There he would spin everything from Oum Kalthoum to Kraftwerk, and spend many absorbing hours creating little samples of Arabic or rock music to run over beats stolen from some other sources.  During the day I spent with him recently, Taha made allusion to an impressive list of musical heroes and influences, thereby hinting at a deep musical curiosity and open-mindedness.  These included Led Zeppelin, The Clash, The New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders, The Who, Bo Diddley, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Giorgio Moroder, The Meters, Dr John, Suicide, Laurie Anderson, Farid El Atrache, M’hamed Hadj El Anka, Nass El Ghiwane and Leo Ferré.  “My music is like a Pakistani corner shop,” Taha is fond of saying.  “You can find everything in there.”

The Clash were an especially big influence, mirroring as they did Taha’s taste for revolt and spectacle.  Taha went to see the band at The Mogador in Paris in 1982.  He met up with them for a brief couple of minutes before the gig and handed over a tape of Carte de Séjour.  Although he never heard from them again, Taha maintains that it’s possible that Joe Strummer had Carte de Séjour and Taha in mind when he wrote ‘Rock The Casbah’.  Taha’s cover of the song on the new album, which he sings in Arabic and has cheekily renamed ‘Rock El Casbah’, is a tribute to Strummer.  “I liked his sincerity and maladroit humour,” he says.  “He wasn’t part of that cynical punk thing.  The song is very ironic, maybe even racist.  It’s seems to be a parody of the west’s view of the Arabic world as an oil pump and nothing more, completely devoid of culture.  It was that attitude that lead to the Baghdad museum being sacked whilst troops guarded the oil ministry last year.”

Unlike many other musicians of Algerian origin, who get all excited by the idea of working with a long string of “trophy” producers at the behest of their record companies, Taha has sustained a remarkable 22-year long bond of creativity and friendship with the English producer Steve Hillage, a man whose love of North African and Arabic music was already well advanced by the end of the 1970s.   Hillage heard Carte de Séjour by chance when he was visiting the offices of Virgin France in Paris sometime in the early eighties.  He ended up producing the first Carte de Sejour album.  Since then, on albums like ‘Olé Olé’, ‘Diwan’ and ‘Made in Medina’, Hillage and Taha have effectively rewritten the instruction manuals for North African music, by approaching it with an unabashed spirit of modernity and excellence.  On ‘Tékitoi’ their collaboration scales new peaks, forging a totally original sound with Arabic melodies sparring against rock riffs and north African percussion skirmishing with deftly programmed rhythms and sequences, all crowned with Taha’s ruff neck and percussive Arabic vocal, which are close in style and texture to the voices of the cheikhs, or male singers of rural roots rai.  “Rachid has always had a very consistent vision of where he wants to go musically,” says Hillage.  “I remember visiting him in his dressing room after a Carte de Séjour gig in Lyons in 1982.  He put on a tape of the famous Algerian chaabi singer M’hamed Hadj El Anka and said, “Hey, listen to this.  C’est le blues!”  The rock element in the last album, ‘Made in Medina’ was a little bit retro.  We’ve evolved and our technique is more advanced on ‘Tékitoi’”

The fusion on ‘Tékitoi’ is sometimes so perfect that it makes a mockery of the word ‘fusion’.   On final analysis, it’s just a superb rock album, spiced with a world of flavours, with lyrics in Arabic.  If that’s just too hard for blinkered editors and radio programmers to accept, then they need to get out more.  It’s also a very dark angry album, a raw and gutsy reflection of a world that’s “going head-on into a brick wall” to use Taha’s own words.  Sometimes the gloom of the lyrics is so pervasive that it’s hard to imagine how Taha gets out of bed in the morning. “When I have black moments, I try to say to myself that black is a colour, despite everything, and that the colour black is made up of all the other colours.  Black is almost like the curtain which hides the window.  But life is seductive.  You have to seduce and be seduced.  It’s all about loving life, and all that’s around you.  You must never be blasé or bitter.  That’s the worse possible thing.  After that comes death.”  “And is there anything you’re still yearning to do before you depart this life, “ I ask, “like jump out of a plane with a parachute or something like that.  “No, that’s not it,” Taha retorts.  “It’s jumping from a plane WITHOUT a parachute.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009
First published in Songlines – Dec 2009

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Rachid with Damon Albarn and friends, Africa Express 2009. Photograph by Simon Phipps.

My gaze glues itself to one of today’s most eccentric rock’n’roll rebels as he stalks the stage in front of the flirtatiously grand Mairie de Paris like a demented scarecrow, a defrocked undertaker, a panto miscreant of the kind that haunts young children’s dreams.  Rachid Taha is probably the most recognizable person on that bursting stage in the collective eye of the 18,000 strong French crowd, who are both tired and ecstatic after a six hour orgy of African and western musical coupling under the hot Parisian sun.

“Weeee don’t laaahhk it!!!! ROCK DA CASBAH!  ROCK DA CASBAH!!!”   Taha’s voice whines atop the rousing racket like the white spume on a towering wave, which teeters and totters but somehow manages not to crash.  Pork pie hatted Damon Albarn leads the charge together with Rachid.  Behind them storm a mob-happy crowd of musicians, all rat-arsed on the 90 per cent proof joyousness of the moment.  I can see Jamie T, Romeo and Michele from the Magic Numbers, the Kooks, Patrick Wolf, The Kick Horns, too many to register in those incalculable seconds of unity.  Africa Express, Rachid et Damon, you, me, white, black, Africa, Europe, roots, pop, rock’n’roll, altogether now…”ROCK THE CASBAH!!”

A few sobering months later, I’m on the blower to Rachid as he sits in the offices of his record label in Paris early on a cold blue-eyed September afternoon, a head tightening hour for a nocturnal incubus like Taha, who grudgingly goes through the motions of yet another promotional stint for his new album ‘Bonjour’.   So hey, let’s warm the conversation up over the flame of those sweet memories of the Africa Express gig in Paris.

“I don’t think Africa Express had much impact you know,” comes the cold shower. “It was a sort of Rotary Club gathering, but it didn’t go far. In fact, to begin with, what is Africa Express?  What’s it for?”

Erm…to promote African music to a wider audience. Come on, Rachid, mate, you can go along with that can’t you?

“Well it isn’t the case at all pal!”  My skin turns a chicken texture.  “Nothing’s really changed.  I don’t see many African artists making it in France right now, or Arabic ones.  We’re still in the era of the West and America holding on to their role as the arbiters of pop music, of Africa and everything else, even the economy and life itself.  Africa is just left to die, just as African culture is just left to die too.”

I should have known better.   Rachid Taha has never gone in for cosy certainties or hippy-hugging harmony.   He lives, he fights, he stumbles and burns bridges for breakfast, all according to Dylan’s famous dictum: To live outside the law you must be honest.  And Rachid is the embodiment, a strange growling Franco-Algerian Stetson-wearing rock’n’roll animal embodiment, of the outlaw archetype.

Journalists with only a shallow knowledge of Franco-Algerian complexities are prone to misunderstand Taha.  They call him a rai artist, alluding to the grinning Algerian pop music style that has dominated the North African Diaspora for three decades.  It’s a bit like calling Iggy Pop a New Romantic.   The misclassification used to irk Taha but not any more apparently.  “I couldn’t give a toss, I’m beyond that now,” he says.

They miscast Rachid as a defender and proselytiser of Algerian and North African culture.  In fact, a bit like John Wayne in the desperate low-point of a John Ford western, Taha is an intellectual loner firing his Winchester at smug hypocrisy and half-baked platitudes on all sides.  He despairs of most of his fellow North African artists, regarding them as little more than the lazy pilferers of a great musical tradition.   He insists that the likes of Khaled, Mami, Faudel and other pin-ups of the Maghreb make him feel sad rather than angry.

“There’s no infrastructure in North Africa equivalent to the one in the west,” he explains. “Over there, you don’t record a cassette, you just fill it up.   Singers are still considered buffoons.  There’s no real intellectual or cultural interest in what they do, so they’re content to just sing for important personages and nothing more.  And when they become stars, they bourgeoisify themselves very quickly.”

Taha went back to Algeria, a country which he left with this parents at the age of ten to go and live in a hick village in eastern France, for a series of concerts back in 2006.  It was a dispiriting experience.  “We did about six dates,” he remembers reluctantly.  “They were in French cultural centres yet again.  It’s always frustrating to play in places like Algeria.  I always come back dissatisfied with a suitcase full of pain.  Either it’s all very intellectual and bourgeois, or you go popular and play in stadiums.  Or it’s nothing at all, except weddings perhaps.  But can you see me playing at barmitzvahs and weddings?”

You might have expected all these brain-burning struggles and disillusionments to turn Taha into a moody cynical man.  But the opposite is true.  He protects himself by staying on the eternal offensive, shooting from the hip with little regard for the consequences and remaining determinedly in lust with life.

Back in the late 1970s, when Taha was in his early twenties and working in a heating appliance factory in a suburb of Lyon, he started a club called ‘Les Refoulés’ (‘The Rejects’) where he would splice bits of Oum Khalthoum and other Aarbic pop classics onto Led Zeppelin, Bo Diddley and Kraftwerk backbeats.  His first serious group, ‘Carte de Sejour’ (‘Resident’s Permit’) was a kind of Maghreb-punk shock machine who stuck it to the French Man with a remake of Charles Trenet’s classic ‘Douce France’.  Imagine Asian Dub Foundation gobbing out ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ in the early 1980s and you should get the feel of Taha’s talent for upsetting cosy collective sanctities.

Then came hits like ‘Voilà Voilà’, a flame-fisted techno-rant against the rise of the extreme right in France, and Taha’s rocking cover of ‘Ya Rayah’, a classic elegy on emigration written by the great Dahmane El Harrachi.  Taha’s version remains one of the most popular hits of modern North African music.   Both these songs, and a clutch of revolutionary albums, were the product of Taha’s twenty-two year association with the British producer Steve Hillage, a marriage that recently broke up when Taha decided to work with Gaetan Roussell, a close friend and lead singer of the massive French rock band Louise Attaque.

“You have to leave home at some point, you have to kill your daddy,” Rachid says about the breakup.  “I can thank that relationship for where I am today, but to be honest, I was totally fed up.  I think of Steve from time to time, and maybe I’ll go back to him one day, but I don’t look back.  Nostalgia is not for me.”

But where exactly is Rachid Taha today?   With the success of ‘Voilà Voilà’, ‘Ya Rayah’, and his participation alongside fellow Khaled and Faudel in the epic ‘1-2-3 Soleil’ concert at the Bercy stadium in Paris, which yielded a million-selling live album, Rachid was definitely a big star in France in the 1990s.  But he never bothered to capitalise on that status.  Commercial strategies and speculations are just bore him frigid.  When I ask Taha about the collapsing recorded music industry in France he just quips, “hang on, I’ll pass you my Financial Director and you can talk to him.”  Ok, ‘nuff said.

The truth is, Rachid Taha is on the same solitary road that he’s always walked. ‘Bonjour’ is an optimistic album, with songs of love, respect, hope and yes, a little anger too, riding astride his signature pounding rockabilly beats and Bo Diddley stomps, all meshed together with swirling Arabic riffs and motifs.  One remarkable song called ‘Selu’, exhorts all of us, and no doubt Taha himself, to “consult the angels”, who he then proceeds to list:  Khalil Gibrain, Mohammed Darwish, Naib Mahfouz, Cheikh Hamada, Youssef Chahine, Blond Blond, Kateb Yacine, Frantz Fanon and Camaron de la Isla.

I ask Rachid about Camarón, the doomed poet-hero of Spanish Flamenco.  “He was the greatest singer of all time, alongside Elvis Presley,” answers Rachid.  “He was also the last punk.”   I almost say, “except you Rachid, except you,” but my skin is still feeling like cold chicken so I just keep schtumm.  We can’t all be honest outlaws.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009
First published in The Independent – Nov 2009

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Iness Mezel

It was one of those perfect moments, when passion burns up the concept, and Iness Mezel’s words begin to canter excitedly as she remembers it: “You arrive at the studio with all your baggage and paraphernalia and you lay them out and something just happens, beyond all expectations. Beyond trance. Beyond consciousness. And I love everything about that invisible world beyond, into which you travel with music, because you’re no longer here. We had plenty of moments like that in the studio, when we were just shouting out, “YEAH!” It wasn’t self-satisfaction, it was just about “Wow!””

The concept had already been around for years; a fearlessly modern blend of North African Amazigh or ‘Berber’ music and other styles that inhabit the flipside of Iness Mezel’s complex identity, such as funk, soul and jazz. “My music was there,” says Iness, “but it just needed something or someone to optimize it.” That someone was Justin Adams, English guitarist of blossoming fame, sideman to Robert Plant, half of the award-winning duo Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara, producer of Tinariwen, Natasha Atlas, Lo’Jo and many more. “I looked up Justin’s profile on the web,” Iness continues, “and I thought to myself – he’s going to understand!” And the result of this marriage made in some musical heaven?; ‘Beyond The Trance’

It’s taken a long time coming; seven years since Mezel’s previous album ‘Len’ and thirteen since her debut ‘Wedfel’.  “I want to be sincere and I don’t want to compromise my artistic choices so I work slowly. I can’t really say more than that,” Iness states by way of explanation. Her life story doesn’t lend itself to easy conclusions and a flat-pack quick-assembly musical identity. Woman, North African, Berber; there’s so much there to defend, to be proud of, to proclaim but so many pitfalls too, so many easy dead ends and clichés to avoid at all costs.

Fatiha Messaoudi, aka Iness Mezel, was born to a Franco-Italian mother and an Algerian-Kabyle father. The Kabyle are the largest Amazigh minority in North Africa, descended, like all Berbers, from the tribes who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the French. They speak their own language, and are fiercely proud of their distinct culture, which is Mediterranean rather than Middle Eastern or Arab. They inhabit the lofty heights and foothills of the Djurdjura Mountains that rise up to the east of the Algerian capital Algiers. The land is beautiful but hard to cultivate and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience. Kabyle women are strong, proud and independent. Not for them the veiled subservience prescribed by fundamentalist Islam. Like all Berbers, the Kabyles love music and poetry.

Iness Mezel’s father was born and raised in Ighil I Azzouzen, a tiny Kabyle village not far from the Kabyle capital Tizi Ouzou. He came to France in 1954, on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence.” My father was involved in the struggle,” reveals Iness. “But it was his battle. I can’t really talk that much for him.” Her mother was born and raised in the Auvergne, the wild, remote and hilly heartlands of central France. Iness’ maternal grandfather was an Italian, from the hills of Lombardy. Thus Iness’ blood flows in from hills and mountains on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, from people who worked the land and lived a tough life softened only by poetry, music, food, family and cultural pride.

For the first seven years of her life, Iness lived in the working class suburb of St Ouen, to the north of Paris, where her father worked as a taxi driver, and her mother as a nurse. Then, at the age of seven, she went to live in Algeria. For two years she spent her holidays with her grandmother and aunts in Ighil I Azzouzen, and went to school in Algiers. “Algeria has left an imprint on me like a tattoo. The strongest memory is the colour of the earth and the grasses, which were dry and brown. I remember my aunts in long dresses with soft materials and simple prints, their bare feet grazed and scratched. I remember the ceremonies and rituals like the jdev, when the Cheikh and other village elders comes to bless a house that has just been built and there are processions of women holding torches. It was just village life. Anything musical was linked to feasts and village occasions.”

At the age of nine the family moved back across the Mediterranean and lived with Iness’ grandmother in the town of Riom es Montagne, deep in the green hills of the Auvergne. Iness and her sister Malika were given the keys to the clubhouse of the local brass band, and they spent many weekends having fun on the instruments. “I didn’t have much of an idea about who I was, but on the other hand I realized that I was absorbed by music. It was like a lifebuoy for me.”

Iness’ grandmothers taught her some profound lessons, not in the literal sense but sub-consciously, by their presence and their actions. “My Algerian grandmother is the archetype of the woman who won’t let herself be pushed around, who runs the household and commands her world. And it wasn’t just her, because my aunts were like that too. My French grandmother was a very very strong woman, whose life was even harder in some ways. I was very close to her.”

After two years of life in the hills, Iness returned to Paris with her family and settled in the suburb of Levallois. She fell in love with pop, disco and funk and remembers the thrill of buying her first record, “Don’t Blame It On The Boogie” during a school trip to London at the age of 14. Other early favourites were Christopher Cross, Elton John and Donald Fagen.  Her own musical life was discreet and home-based, mucking about on the piano or cutting up and changing the melodies and lyrics of favourite songs like ‘Yellow Brick Road’ by Elton John with mates from school.  She also studied piano at the local conservatory throughout her teens, a rock solid grounding for future musical adventures.

Studying law at the University of Paris, Iness realized that a straight and narrow career path in one of the liberal professions would never satisfy her soul. “At that moment, I asked myself – what’s the most important thing for me?  And it was then that I started getting into music more seriously.”  She took lessons in lyrical singing with Nicole Maison, a baroque singer with the Camerata de Paris.

Iness had been composing at home on the piano for some years, but now she started to work professionally, mostly as a stand-in singer for various African, jazz and covers bands. Her musical territory became the bars and clubs in the Châtelet area, especially one called the ‘Caf’ Conc’, where she learned the unavoidable lessons of stagecraft and met a new world of musicians, some of whom like bassist Étienne Bapé, drummers Paco Séri and Christopher Henry, pianist Dominique Fillon and guitarist Eric Sauviat became key players in her solo career. Another important teacher was Claude Cesaire, nephew of the famous Antillean poet Aimé Cesaire, who taught Iness the jazz songbook and the inner workings of jazz chord progressions.  She also learned jazz improvisation with the Paris-based American singer Sarah Lazarus.  After a huge variety of ‘solo’ experiences, Iness formed a vocal duo, which began to earn a useful reputation as a backing vocal unit on the scene.

It was when the established Kabyle singer, writer and film-maker Djur Djura asked Iness to join her group that Iness’ diffuse musical ambitions were suddenly redirected towards a new and compelling objective.  Djur Djura was already a name of some renown in the world of Algerian and Amazigh music. With her, Iness started to perform in major concert halls and festival, and gain a privileged access into the heart of the Amazigh music scene. “When I was approached by Djura it was like an answer to my self-searching as an artist,” Iness remembers. “I discovered the music of my brothers and sisters and I discovered what it meant to sing in Kabyle. I also began to develop a political conscience. Things began to make sense.”

Djur Djura also introduced Iness to her life-long friend, manager, mentor, percussionist, adviser and rock in troubled times:  Nora Abdoun-Boyer.  Iness, Nora and her sister became a unit of musical adventurers, like a family of like-minded sisters with shared origins and creative ambitions, who would spend many hours working together, inching towards a new and very personal idiom that mixed Kabyle music and lyrics with the most extraneous styles. Iness and her sister would compose songs together, and Nora was the sounding board, the trusted ‘ears’ of the trio. After many months the trio performed together with a violinist and a second percussionist at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris supporting Idir and many other Amazigh ‘greats.’ “They must have thought we were a UFO which had just landed,” Iness recalls with a resigned chuckle. “Admittedly, we were heading the right direction, but we hadn’t gone deep enough.”

The trio worked at home, whilst Iness was still going out to sing with a range of different artists, including the avant-garde singer Tamia Valmont. The grail was a modern, North African, Mediterranean but intensely personal style, in other words, a true reflection of Iness’ identity. The first album ‘Berber Singing Goes World’, released on Auvidis in 1997, was only a partial realization of this dream, despite being warmly received by the critics.  In 1999, the album was released under the title ‘Wedfel’ with extra tracks on the the French label Naïve.

After the release of the album and a series of concerts in Morocco and Canada, her sister quit. “She left without warning,” Iness admits reluctantly. “I think she was searching for herself at the time.” It was a difficult period, but calamity turned into a strange kind of blessing. “It’s almost as if I was reborn after that incident,” she says. “I had to walk on my own two legs. I had to define myself. Nora and her father Boussad helped me a lot. They’re Kabyle, and he’s very open and young at heart. At one point I asked him to ‘dub’ me, like Kings used to do to Knights in the old days. And he suggested the name ‘Iness Mezel’, which means, ‘Tell him never to despair’.”

The next album ‘Len’, which Iness calls the first real Iness Mezel album, with its ever closer marriage of Kabyle with funk,  pop and western classical music, was recorded in 2001 and released in 2003.  “It’s the album on which I really began to express my whole self for the first time, to lay my guts on the table,” she says. “I had things to prove, technically, musically. It was more radical than anything I had done before. I was no longer looking for myself. I knew which ideas I wanted to pursue and I was very proud of the result in fact.  I needed the recognition which that album gave me.”

Nora and her father also helped Iness to crystallize her attitude towards Tamazight, the loose collective name for the many distinct dialects of the Berbers. It became a precious tool that Iness felt the need to defend.  “I love the musicality of Kabyle but I don’t master the language in a poetic sense of the term,” says Iness. “So I write in French, and then translate that into Kabyle and base my lyric on that translation. I used to freak out about the idea of singing in French because I feel completely naked when I do. But singing in French is also a way of expressing all aspects of my personality. It allows me to be more objective. I’ve also used poems by Si Mohand ou Mohand, a famous wandering 19^th century Kabyle poet, in some of the songs. I wanted to pay tribute to him”

So, in many ways, ‘Beyond the Trance’ is a reaffirmation; a reclamation of confidence, “of giving myself to myself, ” as Iness describes it.  “I was able to see myself how I am, and express the whole me; French, Kabyle, Parisian, everything.” Not only was there the new-found courage to bare her soul more fully in her everyday language of French, but also the strength to allow others into her creative process without fear of loosing control. “I’ve tended to operate in quite a solitary way at times. And I’ve never been part of a group in the classic sense. So this meeting with so many new musicians is wonderful and interesting. I feel I’m liberating myself.”

Self, identity and musical style walk hand in hand, each one defining the other. For Iness Mezel, none of the three has been easy to grapple, to pin down and define. In many ways, it was a feat that could only be achieved when her music stopped asking so many questions, and demanding so many answers. It could only be achieved when the music broke free of the concept and went into that space beyond; joyful, confident and complete.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2010
Artist Biography written for Wrasse Records – Dec 2010

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