Satirical Election Candidate National Contest

Dear compatriots, elections are nigh and the new political parties laws are out and it is time those of you who are thinking of presenting themselves in the next elections start thinking about what the hell they should do to win the democratic game. MnarviDZ has been deploring the utter lack of amusement which renders our national political life rather boring on top of being useless. In the past and up to the early 90′s, we did have glimpses of amusing candidates for the elections and during the single party epoch, there were many actually funny jokes. Not anymore. It’s all gone stale. I am quite grateful however when

Book Review: Andrey Kurkov

First of all I have to apologise for the misleading title. I am not going to talk about Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov nor am I going to review one of his books.

I am fascinated by Eastern Europe, I’ve visited all those countries except the ones that really matter to me (Russia and Ukraine). Instead I do read their authors’ novels which probably come 2nd in my reading list right behind Algerian ones.

Kurkov is one of my favourites. I feel I know many of Kiev’s streets just because of the description he made in his novels. But I do not like Kurkov only because of his writing style and his black humour. I do love his novels because they remind me of my own country, Algeria.

R.I.P. Cherif Kheddam

This is a quick post to give tribute to one of the most important Kabyle singers, Cherif Kheddam (a longer biography here in Kabyle), who passed away yesterday at the age of 85.

I had shared one of his songs here, and

Tartag vs. Khashkhash

Several years ago, an Algerian newspaper reported that some Western secret service, which I cannot remember, had posted an ad to hire its new director. I remember I found the news “funny” as I thought of Algerian DRS. I mean nobody expects such a move from the DRS especially when you know that no more than two pictures of its current director, General Toufik, are publicly available.

Everyone in Algeria knows the DRS but most of this knowledge is based on interpretation, interpolation, extrapolation, imagination… Basically everything but proven facts – you’d say it’s normal as their activities are supposed to be well secret. Just browse the internet and you’ll find so many theories on how the DRS clan(s) rule(s) the country.

How to Run a Filthy Rich Country

[The content of this post is fictious and any resemblance with anything or anybody is a little bit coincidental.]

URBAN MANAGEMENT
- The most important thing you have to do as soon as you seize power is to ensure that as many streets and roads as possible are unnamed and all houses and flats are unnumbered. This serves two purposes: it will ensure that intelligence services can communicate without fear of revealing anything intelligent and also will save you considerable amounts of money by cancelling the need for postal services or written communication.

[DZBlogDay] Agir pour l’Algérie

[I did not know about this, so I didn't prepare anything to post. I found out about it accidentally when I visited the blog of Chatnoir. I am going to cheat a little bit and set the publication date to the 14th of January. Yes, even cheating is permissible when it comes to acting for Algeria - which is the theme of this year's DZBlogDay.]

There are many ways an Algerian could decide to act for Algeria:

How Algerian women lost their moment of triumph: Deconstructing war discourse

Part 1

This post continues in the same theme of my previous posts here and here, but it is concerned with a section of Algerian society: women. It is about the role Algerian women played in the revolution and the social and cultural tensions which were experienced during the revolution and then after gaining independence. A while ago, MnarviDz sent me an interesting video about this issue. Here it is:

There are many more on YouTube (all in French though). The interesting thing about this video and many others, is that one gets the sense that very little has changed since (this video was filmed in 1962). It is an eerie feeling indeed. Actually, one has to be

50 years after independence: what went wrong?

This is a follow-up and synthesis of the comments posted in response to my previous post. I quite enjoyed the various comments which were posted and I think that, together, they do depict a multidimensional structure of what ‘independence’ means to us as Algerians in light of what happened afterwards. Obviously, every single Algerian will have a different answer to this question and different factors will enter into play (age being perhaps the most important). But I think the themes that emerged from the contributions of our readers do span at least a portion of how ‘independence’ might be constructed within the Algerian psyche (I guess of a certain age-group). I think that all Algerians agree that independence was (is even! ;)) a good/ positive thing. As Chatnoir put it, independence put an end to the slaps directed at the Algerian face. An end to a 130-year humiliation. The Algerian people awakened to

Poll: Algerian protests slogans

I have always considered that Arabs, from Egypt and eastwards, had a sort of gift for slogans. I admit I like watching them in demonstrations supporting the Palestinians and lately in the “Arab Spring”. I don’t know where this gift comes from; I mean the words they choose and the way they chant them create a sort of resonance and push you to react. It may have something to do with the nature of the language, its musicality and perhaps the very reasons they protest for (usually against).

The slogan which I grew up with is definitely the very famous “…بالروح بالدم نفديك يا“, translating as “we sacrifice our souls and blood for…“, which has been associated with so many people and things such as Palestine, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and more recently Bashar Al Asad. Then you have the recent “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام“, translating as “the people want to bring down the regime“, which started in Egypt, or was it in Tunisia?
The readers probably know more slogans and they are invited to share them in the comments section.

The true meaning of ‘independence’

I was stuck in traffic the other day and I saw this on the back of a truck:

And I thought of the type of questions they used to ask us in high school in philosophy:

“حلل و ناقش“