Algerian literature
The historical roots of Algerian literature trace back to the Numidian era, when Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass, the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety.
Countless such writers, including Kateb Yacine, Mohamed Boudia, Anna Gréki, and Leila Djabali, were arrested and imprisoned by the colonial regime during the 1950s.
As Karina Eileraas[5] puts it in "Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance": Sherazade is a victim of her "persistent inability to access the past" which "traumatizes her life as a Maghrebian immigrant in France, and precludes successful mourning".
As Karina Eileraas develops, his photographs "equip Sherazade with a supplemental shortcut to the past, the allow her to temporarily mourn her (lack of) Algeria".
Recent notable works include Swallows of Kabul and The Attack by Yasmina Khadra, Memory in the Flesh (originally in Arabic) by Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Nowhere In My Father's House by Assia Djebar.
[1]: 60 A good example of this classic style is Mohamed Saïd El-Zahiri's “Greeting of the Oulémas.” This excerpt shows the characteristic religious themes: Numerous were the brotherhoods, each obeying its sheikh in everything he declared.
[1]: 63 This type of poetry, with varied themes and structures, can be exemplified by an excerpt from Mabrouka Boussaha's “I Stay Awake”: The candle has faded So much so that I don't see anything Burdened by the night, While it was still young It melted… [9] Since Arabic was not taught or allowed in schools before the Algerian War, Algerian literature in Arabic before 1962 was sparse and mainly in short story format.
Ahmed Reda Houhou wrote several acclaimed short stories in this period including his famous satire: In the Company of the Wise Man's Donkey.
[1]: 55 In fact, until 1971, with the publishing of Abdelhamid ben Hadouga's The South Wind, most Algerian Arabic literature was in short story format.
[1]: 57 By the 1980s, however, the themes of Algerian Arabic literature were largely similar to their French counterparts, discussing bureaucracy, religious intolerance and patriarchy.
Būqālah designates at one and the same time a material ceramic object as well as the immateriality of ritually performed poetry embedded in the traditional divinatory pastime of Algerian women.
[12] Given this credence, despite women's illiteracy at the time, many of them seemed gifted enough to come out with poetic verses that touched various themes such as love, work, travelling, social status, state of mind, aspirations, hopes, wishes, incoming dangers, news, reunions, break ups etc.
There is, when looking at the wider literature as a whole, very little known about Būqālah artists during the colonial times and the ritual itself is still, to some extent, difficult to understand and shrouded in Algerian feminine secrecy.
Although collectors may have given pride of place to their use of oral sources direct from the mouth of the "native", at the same time they effectively elided creative female interlocutors, thereby rendering them unknown, and hence muted.
[11] Many folklore-collectors trained in their home countries in Europe would export to their colonies a bias towards the written against the oral in general, and consequently in Algeria, there was an orientalist tendency to set literacy Arabic in opposition to Algerian dialect in their research.
[11] Fifty years after Desparmet labelled Algerian Arabic the linguistic medium that assuages the colonised, a similar sentiment is articulated by Sarah, the protagonist in novelist Assia Djebar's 1980 novel Women of Algiers in their apartment.
[11] Beyond therapeutic, consulatory and sentimental emotions attributed to Būqālah, trends in research began to document the increasing deployment of oral literature and performance in the service of Algerian independence.
During Algeria's war of Independence (1954-62), French ethnologist Pierre Bourdieu tracked the rising potential consciousness to be found within innovative expression of oral literature and folk songs that possessed the same social clout and emotional power as a newspaper, heroic epic or historical account.
[11] Scholar and professor of Arabic Amin Bamia, who lived in Algeria and taught Algerian folklore at the University of Constantine in the early 1970s, recalls the first, albeit short-lived national campaign spearheaded by the Ministry of Culture, then headed by Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi.
For Ibrahimi, "national culture is preserved in proverbs, folk songs and all this oral literature that continues to reflect life and the struggles of the peoples".
Audience attendees and the Būqālah pitcher pass though fumes of white and black gum benzoin, resins, aloe wood, coriander, incense and myrrh.
[11] The audience, including young female assistance, are asked to think of a specific person and knot a belt, kerchief or handkerchief while they focus their thoughts on the absent desired beloved.
Once the objects owner is identified, the time has come for poetic inspiration and interpretations on behalf of the ornaments wearer, who is apprised of the poem, its meaning and how it applies to her and the person in her thoughts.
[11] Būqālah poems are famous for resorting to complex rhetorical, narrative flourishes in which playful exchanges between two lovers are voiced that set the scene for erotic encounter.
