The Homes of the Absent Following in the Footsteps of Those Who Dwell in Absence

Description

“My story is like a stream; I told it to the children of the masters…” This refrain—as the author recounts—is preserved by all the grandmothers in the Kabylia mountains of Algeria. It is echoed by the young during cold winters around a charcoal hearth, where stories flow like clear mountain streams, their murmurs among the branches sounding like a lullaby that transports us into the enchanting forests of today. This book chronicles a journey through the world of the Algerian city of Tizi Ouzou, visiting homes once inhabited—in the not-so-distant past—by iconic figures whose creative endeavors and struggles came to embody the very spirit of the city. Through them, the city itself shines: the writer and singer Taos Amrouche (described as the Nefertiti of Algeria); Lalla Fatma N’Soumer (the Joan of Arc of Algeria); the writer Mouloud Mammeri; the filmmaker Abderrahmane Bouguermouh (the “Summer Bird”); the national leader Hocine Aït Ahmed (the revolutionary of the century); the singer Hanifa (the Édith Piaf of Kabylia); the filmmaker Azzedine Meddour (the “magician of history”); and, finally, the singer Lounès Matoub—a rebel who played to the rhythm of the mandole. What these figures—through whom the author revisits the setting of her own childhood—share is a spirit of rebellion, creativity, and patriotism.