The spelling is wrong, another illustration of our trilingual illiteracy, but the question remains valid. “Where is our future?” it says. I took the below picture in Bejaia, and next to that wall were sitting five or six young men, in their twenties. They played with their mobile phones and commented on the girls who passed by.
If they’re not the authors of the question, they do not have the answer. I wonder if they’re looking for one. 
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I decided to buy this book the minute I heard of its publication, but I hesitated once I got to the bookshop and read Abdelhalim Abbas’s (the author’s son) text on the back cover. He wrote that his father had asked him to publish the book only when a democratic system would be installed in Algeria and when the word freedom would fully bear its meaning. He added that it was therefore the right time to publish the book. I cannot deny that our public expression limits have been released since the end of the 80s; but saying that we have a real democratic system in Algeria is a plain lie. Our political system is as despotic as before and the red lines nobody is allowed to cross move only according to the system’s confidence in its power and to its paranoia level. Perhaps Abdelhalim Abbas feared to die before he publishes the book…
I found it interesting that in 1985, Ferhat Abbas thought his son would live and witness the democracy’s advent in our country. It looks like he’s always had and kept this excess of optimism and faith in humans, just like he had thought for a long time that the French would award the Algerians equal rights without waging a war against them. Continue reading
