The comparison between the struggle of the Kabyle people and the myth of Sisyphus is a daring one, but I’m going to take the risk. Is history a perpetual restart? Are the Kabyle people condemned to eternally push the boulder imposed by a domination as absurd as Sisyphus, who has accepted his fate?
The Myth of Sisyphus :
Briefly: According to the Iliad, when Zeus, the king of the gods, kidnapped the daughter of the river god, Sisyphus denounced the kidnapper to the girl’s father, thereby incurring the wrath of Zeus, who decided to kill him.
The story of Sisyphus is one of condemnation for a fault: the hero thought he could cheat death. This is a reminder of the finiteness of man, who cannot be a god. Sisyphus was condemned to a torment in the Tatars (underworld): he had to roll a large boulder to the top of a mountain, which immediately rolled back down the slope once he reached the top, before he had reached his goal (Odyssey, Canto XI). A punishment of unparalleled sadism and cruelty.
While some interpretations see Sisyphus as the embodiment of the perpetual movements of nature and the cosmos, others see him as the personification of man’s misfortune and the absurdity of life. This is the view expressed by Albert Camus in his “Myth of Sisyphus” (Gallimard, Paris 1942), in which the character of Sisyphus embodies the mechanical repetition of life. Sisyphus became, in a way, a symbol of the absurdity of man’s existence.
In this absurd task, Sisyphus becomes aware of the tragic aspect of his existence by completing his punishment. He chooses to live by making his rock his thing. His attention is focused on completing the task he is undertaking and not on the meaning of the task, which gives a tragic aspect to the myth insofar as the character of Sisyphus is aware of this. He knows that his destiny is up against an irrational punishment. But does this awareness of the absurd, this realisation of the existence of meaninglessness and the absurdity of life, necessitate suicide? The writer answers: No; it requires constant confrontation and revolt. But does this awareness of the absurd, this realisation of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life, necessitate suicide? The writer answers: No; it requires constant confrontation and revolt.
What this myth tells us is that even if life is absurd, man is constantly searching for coherence and meaning in his life. But what meaning, and at what price! From a philosophical point of view, this ordeal means that we are living a repetitive absurd situation whose end or outcome we can never see. “Sisyphus’ boulder is a metaphor for a never-ending task, yet Sisyphus sees his ability to endure the punishment as a form of victory. This is the notion of the absurd borrowed from the philosophy of Kierkegaard, which is the expression of man’s powerlessness to find meaning in existence. This notion is echoed in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, where the actors repeat the same situations and conversations, revolving around the vain expectation of someone called Godot, whom the characters keep waiting for but who never comes.
Georges Bernanos wrote: “Slavish obedience will be our undoing”. In “Le journal d’un curé de campagne” (1936), he wrote: “I have long thought that if one day the increasingly effective methods of destruction end up wiping our species off the planet, it will not be cruelty that will be the cause (…) but docility, modern man’s lack of responsibility, his vile and servile acceptance of the slightest public decree…”.
This last vision brings us back to the struggle of the Kabyle people. Are we Sisyphus?
For decades we have accepted a repetitive movement of domination and contempt. A framework of infantile naivety laid down by our elders. The Kabyle, the victim of official exclusion, assumed racism and programmed ethnocide, has continued to roll away like Sisyphus trying to build a country that he thought was his own, imagined in his projection with his model of socio-political organisation and his way of life. The spirit of Sisyphus, this fighter of the absurd, takes hold of his soul. Neither the violence of a pathological system, nor the visceral hatred of which he is a victim, and which could lead to his annihilation, dissuade him. He has been fed lies, he has seen his children degraded, deported, tortured and killed. He tried so hard to persuade those who were doing it not to do it; but can you persuade a representative of an ideology designed to destroy you? Something in him has been destroyed by the spectacle of years of conditioning. With his head pressed against the rock like Sisyphus, his gaze fixed on the summit, he forgot that the mountain was not his. He needed the torments of the Algerian military-police regime’s unlimited hatred of Kabylity. It needed murder, assassination, mass slaughter, the scorched earth policy, the burning of humans, fauna and flora, the embalming, the terror, the military encirclement, the killing of free thought, the negation of the human condition to understand that dialogue is frozen, that the hydra can only be sated by the annihilation of Kabylity, which reflects back to it the image of what it can never be, drifting in a fog of mediocrity, nonsense, absurdity, bestiality, absence of identity and legitimacy, and whose kingdom is crime. It was necessary to reach this stage to become aware of existential reality!
Notwithstanding the programmed annihilation of their being, a category of Kabyles is pursuing the ghost that is clearly expressing its exclusion in a perverse game of influence, lies and submission, of the narcissistic pervert and his victim. These people have left the Kabyle imaginary; they have left the bedrock of ancestrality, the foundations of Kabylity. I’d go further and say that they are outside themselves. As this metaphor in the Kabyle language expresses it: ‘d aɣyul yeččen di tavarḍa ines’. It was their active complicity that opened the doors to the murderous ideology of a system in the hands of psychopaths.
One wonders whether these Kabyles have been struck by blindness, amnesia or Stockholm syndrome. Albert Einstein once said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. The absurd task deprives them of their reasonableness, weakens their spirit and takes away control of their own destiny. The people are once again reliving the nauseating drama of colonisation, this time internal, of injustice, misery, dispossession, the assault on history and memory, murder, massacre and death. A more ferocious, more blind, more tyrannical, more pernicious form of internal colonialism, which has a genocidal plan for the nations of the world, which does not hesitate to shoot young people with explosive bullets in their bare hands and chests, to conduct a scorched earth policy, to burn people to death, to eradicate livestock, fauna and flora. A coloniser who leaves young people and the elite in all its breadth no choice but death, the dank jails of power where humanity is absent, or forced exile.
The tragedy of a history that is repeating itself more insolently, more incomprehensibly, more intolerantly, more intolerably. What is even more revolting is the wilful oblivion, the fact that the victims make sure that nothing filters through from their wounds. Are these people, it bears repeating, blind or amnesiac? Or are they that masochistic? All it took was for a few puppets to be thrown into the political spotlight and the burnt-out inhabitants, the imprisoned children and the ashen flora and fauna were sequestered in complicit silence. Has the eternal mountain, the silvery Mons Ferratus that once gave us strength and hope, become “Sisyphus’ rock”, and Kabyle the person condemned by the gods? The Kabyle who fights eternally against an invader, a colonist, a tyrant who, once the fight is over, returns to his lair only to be attacked again by another.
Sisyphus feels himself gradually slipping away, moving further and further away from the probable outcome of his previous life, his greatness, his strength and his vitality. His pulpit is torn, his spirit is worn, his soul is tested. All around him, birds of ill omen cry out his doom, while predators lie in wait and scavengers await the kill.
Exhausted, on the verge of abandonment, he turns his gaze and is suddenly reminded of the silvery reflection of his sacred mountain, the ineradicable Mons Ferratus, the eternal Djurdjura. An amorphous attitude can put you on the road to extinction. He can no longer bear the idea of happiness dissolved in a thought other than that which inhabits him in the depths of his being. So he calls for an awareness of the absurd in order to overcome his condition of being encircled by mortifying thought and rediscover the fullness of his love of freedom by drawing on the root that nourishes him, on the history that has shaped his being, on the memory in which he is inscribed.
The shrill cries of the women being chased by the flames, the groans and tears of the men, the naked hands facing the blaze, the faces distorted by pain, the haggard looks of the children – all these images of an orchestrated crime turn in his mind to crush his skull. They will haunt him and remain engraved in his memory forever.
Defying the gods of Olympus, he stood up straight and, with one blow, swept away the cursed spell he had donned. He charged straight into the history of his people, whom he promised to lead to victory. The call of his eternal mountain reaches the very depths of his being. The only viable path he sees lies in respecting the right of his people to decide their own future, to express themselves freely about their destiny.
And so it is with the Kabyle struggle, which after decades of procrastination and hesitation has moved from the folklore and culturalist stage, driven by individuals, groups, associations and the political parties that have made it their business, to the stage of the political struggle of a people and a historic nation. Under the embers smouldered its word, and this word could not accommodate the forgetting of the crime. From the mountains of the Djurdjura, millions of voices rise into the firmament, resounding like thunder that the wind brings to the ears of intelligence, heart and reason.
History has shown that oppressed and threatened peoples can only continue to exist by taking their destiny into their own hands. No, we are not Sisyphus! We will fulfil our destiny; we will move towards freedom; we will live free in the land of our ancestors, despite the ominous birds, the scavengers, the predators, the narcissistic manipulators, the power-mad and the financial gluttons. We will do our part in the saga of human history. Fadma N Summer’s sermon is echoed like a boomerang, bringing to the world the rebirth of her being, the resilience of her people. So reads “THE TWENTY APRIL BOOK”.
Raveh Urahmun, exiled on 11 August 2024