From village to vinyl: genealogies of new Kabyle song

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Notes

A vava inouva (Idir and Mohammed Benhammadouche, 1973) was released in Algeria on a 45 rpm vinyl record by Oasis‐Disques (no. 11.001) in 1973, and in France and Algeria on an LP of the same name by EMI/Pathé Marconi (C 066‐14334) in 1976 (Idir, 1976). I have retained the orthography found on the record jacket. Using contemporary orthography, the title would be written as follows: A baba‐inu ba.

Kabylia is a mountainous region in northern Algeria where much of Algeria's Kabyle Berber population — a linguistic and cultural minority — is concentrated. A 1986 census estimated 3 million Kabyles of a total Algerian Berber‐speaking population of at least 4.5 million (the population of Algeria was then 22 million) (Chaker, 1989). On 1 January 2003, the Algerian population was 31.54 million (Office National des Statistiques, 2002). Maintaining the same percentages, the Kabyle population would now total 4.3 million.

The documentary was later turned into a commercial video: Ramparts of Clay (Remparts d'argile) (Bertucelli, 1970). This was filmed in Algeria, but not shown there (Etienne and Leca, 1975, p. 65).

Unless otherwise indicated, Ben Mohamed's remarks are drawn from interviews I conducted in Paris on 1 December 1992, 23 December 1992, 21 June 1993, 18 August 1994 and 30 October 1996, as well as several follow‐up email exchanges.

This strike was ultimately unsuccessful (see Duvignaud, 1970 [1968]; Bertucelli, 1970).

Ben initially wrote these remarks as part of a course paper. Later, he used this paper as part of a text responding to the 1976 referendum on the creation of a new Algerian Constitution; the text was published anonymously in France (Anonymous, 1976); Ben's section was subtitled ‘Constitutive Cultural Elements of the New Algerian Man’ and drew explicity on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Joseph Ki‐Zerbo.

Unless otherwise indicated, remarks by Idir are from interviews I conducted with him in Paris on 10 February 1994 and 4 November 1996.

A version of the tale can be found in Amrouche (1979 [1966], pp. 111–113). In some versions, including the one used by Idir, the ogre is replaced by a more generic monster (lwac).

Scott (1999, p. 8) defines ‘problem spaces’ as ‘conceptual‐ideological ensembles, discursive formations, or language games that are generative of objects, and therefore of questions.’

In a further layer of triangulation, the same report reminded French proponents that at one time, French itself had been found wanting, as German was seen as the only European language able to handle philosophy.

The triangulation among Arabic, Berber and French has a long colonial history. In what became known as the ‘Berber Myth,’ the French initially saw Berbers as more apt candidates for assimilation and conversion than Arabs. Although this did not dictate policy for more than a brief period, the myth lingered in the popular imagination (see especially Ageron, 1960; Chaker, 1989; on how this ‘myth’ has been taken up in the diaspora, see Silverstein, 1996).

The term ‘Tamazight’ refers to a standardized pan‐Berber language that can be written and would ideally be understandable to all Berber speakers in Algeria, Morocco and the diasporas. It correlates with the term ‘Amazigh’ (plural ‘Imazighen’), which refers to a transnational community that includes all Berberophones. Amazigh and Tamazight are becoming the choice terms of reference within the large Berber diasporas of Western Europe or North America. Tamazight also refers to a discrete variety of Berber spoken in Morocco's Middle Atlas Mountains, but that is not the sense evoked here.

These quotations are drawn from newspaper accounts of Algeria's 1973 seminar on music, but they dovetail considerably with how Ben and Idir talked to me about their project.

On music festivals, see Déjeux (1975).

The term ‘intertextual gap’ describes the relative fit or lack of fit between a particular text and the broader genre with which it is associated. Some intertextual strategies minimize the intertextual gap, or the distance between a situated text and its generic precedents; this imbues a text with the authority associated with its genre. Other strategies maximize the gap, producing disjunctions between what is expected and what transpires in performance. Generating wide intertextual gaps can be a way of resisting the structures of authority to which a text is typically oriented and proposing an alternative (see Briggs and Bauman, 1992).

Oasis Disques no. 11,001; the flip side of the recording contains the song Tamacahuţ n tsekkurt.

In exchange for promoting the album, Chappell took 25 per cent of the royalties earned by Idir and Ben. This kind of arrangement, exploitative from the perspective of the artists, was apparently common, especially with singers coming from the Third World (see Wallis and Malm, 1984, p. 79).

The ‘Big Five’ recording companies included EMI, RCA, CBS, WEA and Decca. According to a Decca producer, for a recording to break even, it needed to sell at least 30,000 to 40,000 copies (Wallis and Malm, 1984, p. 89).

Cassettes entered the market in the late 1960s and within a decade were found virtually everywhere (Wallis and Malm, 1984, pp. 5, 277).

Personal interview, Paris, 27 June 1994.

The phrase ‘moves through the world’ comes from Urban (2001).

Feld (2000) provides a genealogy of the term ‘world music.’

18 August 1994, Paris.