Today is the day of commemoration of Mouloud Mammeri, the father of the Kabyle revival, of all the Amazigh peoples in fact. He left us returning as usual from a conference that he gave in Morocco, killed by the Algerian colonial state which disguised this murder as a road accident. They believed that they were depriving us of light while still shining a thousand lights that illuminate tens of millions in his Tamazgha who will never forget him.
Here is a translation of one of his eternal poems
Mouloud Mammeri “When I look back”
When I look back, I have no regrets, I would not have wanted to live otherwise … Anyway, a fantasy is never anything than that. I did not say to myself: I would have liked to be a citizen of Athens in the time of Pericles, or a citizen of Granada under the Abencerges, or a bourgeois of the Vienna of the waltzes.
I was born in a remote canton of a high mountain, of an old race which for millennia has not ceased to be there, with some, with the others … who, under the sun or the snow, through the sands of garamants or the old cities of Tell, unfolded its saga, its trials and its splendours, which contributed in history, in various ways, to make the lives of men more human.The supporters of a suffering chauvinism can go deploring the too wide opening of the fan: Hannibal conceived his strategy in Punic; It is in Latin that Augustine said the city of God, in Arabic that Ibn Khaldun explained the laws of the revolutions of men.
Personally, I am pleased to note from the beginning of history this ample faculty of reception. Because it is possible that the ghettos secure, but that they sterilize for sure.
That’s where I’d like to finish. Those who, in order to leave the stage, always wait until they have recited the last reply in my opinion, are mistaken: there is never a last reply – or each replica is the last – We can stop the noria at about any cup, the ball to any figure of the dance.
The number of days I have left to live, God alone knows. But whatever the point of the race in which the term reaches me, I will leave with the certainty that whatever the obstacles that history brings to it, it is in the direction of its liberation that my people-and with it, other – will go. Ignorance, prejudice, and inculturation may for a moment impede this free movement, but it is certain that the day will inevitably come when the truth will be distinguished from its false pretenses.
Everything else is literature.