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nation: writingempire,underwriting discursive histories of KabyleBerberoraltexts

JANE E. GOODMAN Indiana University In this article, I explore how colonial, nationalist, and media interests converge around the collection of oral texts. Moving from the French colonial project of collecting native lore to the nationalist project to recover indigenous heritage to the embedding of village songs in contemporary world music, I examine how oral texts from Algeria's Kabyle Berberregion have been variously configured as signs through which social differences are imagined and hierarchically ordered. I foreground the history of intertextualpenetration between North Africanpoetic productions and Westernaesthetic categories. [genre, intertextuality,oral text, colonialism, world music, Algeria] French Colonel Adolphe Hanoteau had a mission. As partof the pacification program France was carrying out during the 1860s in its newly conquered territory of Kabylia, Hanoteau had been charged with finding out what the natives in this recalcitrant Algerian Berberregion were up to. In addition to monitoring their activities from his various administrative positions in the Bureaux Arabes, as the offices for indigenous affairs were known, Hanoteau set out on a personal quest to collect Berber poems and songs.1 The result: a nearly 500-page collection of more than 50 poems and songs through which, the colonel maintained, the Berberspirit could be unveiled. A century later, Kabyle geology student Hamid-soon to be better known through his stage name Idir-set off on a related trek. School vacations would find him journeying to Berber villages to mine not stones, but songs. Polished, set to guitars and percussion, and engraved on vinyl, Idir'ssongs hit the world music stage in 1973, launching a cultural revival through which Berberswould "rediscover"their identity and origins. During the hundred or so years between the two figures, several dozen collectorsKabyle and French alike-traced a similar path, generating a plethora of anthologies and recordings of Berber"oraltexts," as they are called today.2 In this article, I critically examine the shifting relationship between claims of unmediated transparency and configurations of social difference. I suggest that a collector's claim of transparency-whereby an oral text is thought to capture unreflexively an essence or spirit of a people-is the very place where an investigation into the construction of difference should begin, for such a claim presumes ratherthan problematizes the relationship between a poetic text and its producer(s). In addition, it distracts attention from the contingent relationship between the collector and the situation of collection. Attending to these relationships, I show how poems have been entextualized, recontextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990), or replicated (Urban 1996) in ways that allowed them to participate in constructions of Berberdifference at discrete historical moments. In so doing, I situate oral texts as constitutive ingredients of three major metadiscursive traditions: the French colonial and social science literatures,
American Ethnologist29(1 ):86-122. Copyright? 2002, American Anthropological Association.

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the discourses of Algerian nationalism and Berbersubnational identity, and the world music circuit.3 Scholars from several disciplinary perspectives have recently been paying renewed attention to the ways cultural texts figure in constructions of identity.4Benedict Anderson attributesto "culturalproducts"the power to generate the attachment, love, and even willingness to sacrifice themselves that peoples feel toward their nations (Anderson 1991:141). This works in part, he suggests, through the "primordialnessof languages," which "loom ... up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past" (Anderson 1991:144) to produce a deep sense of attachment and affiliation. Anderson goes on to propose, in true Herderian fashion, that people imagine themselves as connected through language via their understandings of and experiences with shared texts, especially poetry and songs, which produce "a special kind of contemporaneous community" (Anderson 1991:145) that is generated largely through a common semantics: Only English readers (or Indonesian, as the case may be) can understand particular culturally resonant phrases, which "bring goose-flesh to the[ir] napes" (Anderson 1991:147) but remain untranslatable and thus impenetrable to outsiders. Anderson touches on the important notion that poems and songs may simultaneously evoke an unmediated, "primordial"quality of language and foster feelings of community. He remains locked, however, in a Saussurian model of an ideal speaker-hearer and a homogeneous linguistic commons that prevents him from addressing the more compelling questions of how, by whom, and in relation to what agendas such texts are semiotically crafted so as to produce an impression that they are unmediated while generating powerful effects of identity and difference. Moving from national to transnational imaginings, Arjun Appadurai has proposed that scholars attend not only to shared texts but also to the ways particular "communicative genres" are valued-to the "pragmaticgenre conventions [that]govern the collective readings of different kinds of text" (1990:10). He allows for the possibility that texts may be translated and reinterpretedwithin different contexts and that the social uses of texts may vary. He does not, however, address the initial question of why communicative genres should constitute a site where identity is negotiated. Appadurai calls attention to the fact that the pragmatic uses of texts merit attention, but he never pursues such an analysis, merely hinting at its possibilities.5 Scholars of postcoloniality-Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989) and Bhabha (1994), among others-have complicated anthropologists' understandings of how cultural texts serve to configure social relationships in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Ashcroft, Griffiths,and Tiffin draw attention to three textual processes through which colonial selves and others are interrelated:silencing (of the postcolonial voice by the imperial center), abrogation (rejection of the metropolitan power and refusal of its categories), and appropriation (adaptation of the metropolitan language to describe alternative cultural experiences and expectations). These processes can act together, opening up the possibility of ambivalent and sometimes vexed relationships to colonial regimes of power-and to the modes of identity they enable-that Anderson's framework closes off. In a similar vein, Bhabha (1994) describes the condition of mimicry that colonialism fosters, whereby the colonized Other must be imagined as both radically different from the colonizer yet similar enough to require continuous surveillance. This process can be turned on its head, as the language and tools of the colonizer are used to undermine colonial domination (even as their usage signals an irrevocable penetration of colonial practices). Although these scholars allow for the possibility that one can simultaneously identify with and against dominant modes of power, their concern (as with much of cultural studies) is primarilywith the literature

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produced and published by individual authors (typically elites) in response to colonial situations. They implicitly retain a Eurocentricdistinction between literatureand oral texts (more typically referred to as folklore). Oral texts figure not at all in Bhabha's work and appear in Ashcroft, Griffiths,and Tiffin'saccount only insofaras they inspire alternative modes of organizing narrativestructurein indigenous writing (thusfurnishing "raw material"-supposedly unmediated-for more critical accounts). My analysis is grounded in the proposition that oral texts derive symbolic power from their ability to move between both sides of a potent metadiscourse on text/writing and speech/orality. This metadiscourse assigns fixity, authority, and consciousness to text/writing while attributingto speech/orality an ephemeral, unmediated, and natural status. Such a dual association endows oral texts with fluid signifying possibilities. As texts, they are invoked to demonstrate the existence of a shared culture or subculture and to formulate representations of group identity (Silverstein and Urban 1996). Because they generally contain features that set them apartfrom the flow of ordinary discourse (for example, rhyme, rhythmic parallelism, framing devices, etc.), oral texts can easily be decontextualized, or lifted out of one interactionalsetting, and recentered or recontextualized in another (Bauman and Briggs 1990; see also, Bauman 1992, 1993, 1995; Briggs 1993a; Briggs and Bauman 1999; Hanks 1989; Kapchan 1996; Raheja 1996; Urban 1996). These easily manipulable signs of group identity have thus been of special interest to a range of parties, from colonial collectors to nationalist cultural leaders to ethnographers. As oral productions, oral texts are thought to move directly from producer's breath to collector's pen, untainted by either the producer's conscious awareness or the collector's touch (see Herzfeld 1996). Because oral texts are assumed to originate in their producers, the ways in which collectors participate in their construction are easily camouflaged. The focus, in other words, is directed to the text itself as a fixed, preexisting cultural object, and not to the complex strategies through which it is recontextualized or recreated. Oral texts are thus powerful and persuasive naturalizing devices: Through sophisticated rhetorical strategies that make the texts seem authentic, the broader agendas that motivated their collection to begin with are masked. I focus my discussion around five arenas in relation to which Berber oral texts have been constituted: the French pacification and civilizing missions of the late 19th century, European liberalism, modern Western literature, folklore and nationalism, and postcolonial identity.6 I conclude with an analysis of New Kabyle Song (la nouvelle chanson kabyle), as Kabyle Berberworld music has come to be called. In setting New Song in relation to previous collection practices, I foreground the ways in which its creators both drew on and broke with earlier entextualization processes, opening a new passage from collector to author. civilizing mission: Colonel Adolphe Hanoteau Adolphe Hanoteau (1814-97), colonel in the French army, officer in the Legion of Honor, and a member of the Order of Leopold de Belgique, published Poesies populaires de la Kabylie du Jurjurain 1867, ten years after the conquest of Kabylia.7 The seal on the book's cover announces its mission: Two cherubs surround an oval capped with a crown, with an eagle at its center and the letter N (for Napoleon) on the bottom. Framingthe eagle, and curving up the sides of the medallion, are four words: Administration, Law, Science, and Art. The spirit guiding the colonial missions of Hanoteau's day-the heyday of France's mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) could not be more clearly depicted. Administrative, legal, scientific, and cultural knowledge had become as importantto the colonizing enterprise as militaryforce.

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Over the course of Hanoteau's army career, he became an expert in all four areas inscribed on the medallion.8 His impressive three-volume set La Kabylie et les codtumes kabyles (Kabylia and Kabyle Customs [Hanoteau and Letourneux 1872-73]) lays out Kabyle "customs" in the areas of agriculture, industry, medicine, administration, and law at a level of detail that no work has tried to capture since.9 In the work discussed here, Hanoteau's primaryconcern is literature-one of the branches of art. Knowledge of a people's literature required mastery of the corollary domain of language, for which Hanoteau had already developed a grammarand devised a romanalphabet transcription system (Hanoteau 1858).10 Hanoteau states these twin objectives in no uncertain terms: Inoffering the publicthis collection ... I had a dual objective:to furnish to original textsto those wantingto studythe Berber language,and to makeknownthe populationswho speakthislanguage,notbythe appreciations-alwayssubjectto error-of a but the foreigner, through worksof thespirit.[1867:i, emphasisadded]' What does Hanoteau mean by "worksof the spirit,"and what does he think these "works"are communicating? His interest in poems rests on the premise that poetry constitutes an unreflexive site in which Berbers unknowingly unveil the state of their souls, all the while believing themselves "sheltered from our curiosity ... depict[ing] themselves naively and unselfconsciously" (Hanoteau 1867:i). Hanoteau outlines two basic uses for these unconscious revelations. First,they allow the Frenchto glean insight into native perceptions of the colonial presence and serve as a benchmark against which progress in the pacifying mission could be measured (especially valuable because the natives had "no sense of history" [Hanoteau 1867:vi]). Second, Hanoteau looked to the poems to assess the level of the population's primitiveness, which would in turn justify the colonizer's presence. Hanoteau makes these twin goals of the civilizing mission seem naturalthrough the classificatory device of genre, as he allocates to each goal its own genre of poems. Part 1 contains "historical or political poems" in which "the expeditions of our colonizers, the acts of our administration are presented from the Kabyle point of view ... a kind of counterpart to our bulletins" (Hanoteau 1867:xi). Part 3 is said to contain "women's poems and poems about women"; it also includes any poem related to marriage, magic, or sexuality, whether authored by men or women. Despite its mixed authorship, Part 3's topics are indexed to women and used to assess the degree to which the Kabyles would require civilizing. Opening Part 3 is a long essay decrying the status of Kabyle women, which Hanoteau considered "among the most miserable, a testimony to the degree to which this society is lacking in civilization" (Hanoteau 1867:287). Between these well-defined sections lie the poems that would not fit neatly into Hanoteau's classificatory rubric, grouped in Part 2 under the unassuming title "Poems of different genres." Although Hanoteau claims that Berber poems are unmediated "works of the spirit"(1867:i), the way he entextualizes the poems makes salient the mediating categories through which he views Kabyle society. He injects these categories into the poems through titles and authorship attributions. The "political and historical" poems are attached, with one exception, to named male authors.12More than half were marabouts (religious clerics, indicated by the title "Si")or had accomplished the pilgrimClaiming descent from the Prophet, age to Mecca (indicated by the title "El-Hadj"). marabout men generally received some form of Quranic education and had some knowledge of Arabic; those who had completed the pilgrimage often enjoyed high social standing and greater-than-average wealth. The poems attributed to women, in

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contrast, are never connected to individuals but are deemed to be either collectively or anonymously authored: "[This song] is the exclusive product of women ... it would be very difficult to find the author" (Hanoteau 1867:397 n. 1). Further, Hanoteau names each poem in the male genre ("political and historical"poems) to evoke Europeanjournalistic or historical genres: for example, "Campaignof 1857" or "Insurrectionof 1856." By contrast, poems in the section on women are unspecified and undated, entitled simply "Song,""Poem," "AnotherSong." Clearly, in the eyes of Hanoteau, Berbermen could be at least minimally differentiatedaround the emerging liberalist criteria of education and religious training, while women were seen only as part of an undifferentiated mass. The gendered way in which Hanoteau handled questions of genre, authorship, and naming also provides clues to his own position in Kabyle society and hints at the kinds of collection strategies he may have employed. He apparently did not have disaid to animate rect access to many of the poems themselves, let alone to the "spirit" them. Poems passed through at least two individuals, author and transcriber,before reaching Hanoteau (1867:v-vi). Women's poems are further mediated: Because about half of the poems in the "women's" section are attributed to named male authors-including some that are recognizable today as part of a female repertoireit is likely that men recited for Hanoteau's informants the poems that they thought women sang.13Given that Hanoteau, as a French Christianmale, was triply distanced from the social contexts in which women would sing these poems, he may have cast his own lack of access to the women as their lack of original authored material. His undifferentiated treatment of women's poems may also relate to a Western aesthetic notion that original creation can only be individual; Hanoteau was probably not looking for collective processes of poetic authorshipthat might transpireamong a group of Kabyle women. That mediation of poems was far from transparentis furthersuggested by the understated presence in the collection of Hanoteau's friend and informantSi Moula n Ait Ameur, a marabout with whom he worked intensively for three years (and who was a primary informant for Hanoteau's 1872-73 work). Although Hanoteau officially acknowledged Si Moula in the volume of poetry only for furnishing transcriptions in the Arabic alphabet, it is likely that he was among the marabouts who, as Hanoteau indicates (1867:v-vi), recruited poets, wrote down their poems, and transmitted them to the colonel-no doubt with their own spin. A later account by Hanoteau's son Maurice suggests that Si Moula may not have been trusted by the community: He lived in a two-story house built by the genie militaire (army corps of engineers) that featured three outward-facing windows (Hanoteau 1923)-almost unheard of at the time, when Berberhouses typically opened onto an interiorcourtyard (see Maunier 1926). This house was burned to the ground during a regionwide uprising in 1871 (Hanoteau 1923), four years afterthe poetry collection was published-a telling commentary on the tenuousness of the marabout's, and perhaps the colonel's, acceptance by the society. In short, classing poems by genre, title, and author implicitly encoded and naturalized imperial constructions of an imagined Kabyle social order. By evoking an unmediated native spirit, Hanoteau was able to mask his own presence and locate the need for the French mission in the Kabyles. Through the entextualizing devices discussed above, Hanoteau also began to constitute the natives in relation to emerging bourgeois criteria such as educational and religious training, a sense of history, or the civilized treatment of women. These goals are rearticulated in an extensive subtext of and prone to exaggerationand violence. footnotes, which construct Kabylesas irrational

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Forexample, "Lamentfor Dahman-ou-Me:al" (1867:154-160, Poem 16, Part 1) was sung by women following the firing-squad execution of a Kabyle man named Dahman after he had shot and wounded a French lieutenant. The women accuse the French of executing Dahman in front of his mother. In small type below, Hanoteau rewrites the story, claiming that Dahman's execution was carried out appropriatelythat is, with no family members present (1867:154 n. 1). Hanoteau's outrage in the face of what he perceived as native fanaticism leaks into the otherwise descriptive tone of the account: "Dahman . . . was simply a fanatic indignant to see Christians dirty his village with their presence" (1867:155 n. 1). This is the only poem in Part 1 ("historical and political poems") attributed to women. Hanoteau is so caught up in setting the record straight that he does not appear to realize that through this genre (which he correctly labels adekker),women have a forum to comment on political affairs. Hanoteau's attempt to justify Dahman's execution clearly addresses readers beginning to conceive of themselves as bearers of civilization through pacification. Gratuitous violence had to be expunged from the French self-image and cast onto the Kabyle as irrationality, fanaticism, or overdramatization. Hanoteau addresses (and constitutes) the emerging French bourgeoisie in such asides throughout the work. In Hanoteau's representations, it would be hard for any reader to miss the Kabyles' crude sexuality: 23 of the 25 poems in the section on women deal with love, desire, and sex. So crude is their sexuality, in fact, that Hanoteau does not translate some poems into French but glosses them in Latin-not because there is no French equivalent but because Hanoteau would no doubt blush to repeat them before a civilized audience. The attentive reader will also discover that the Kabyles never wash their clothes and don't take them off until they disintegrate (1867:26 n. 3; 398-399 n. 2); that when the French captured native women, they "gave them new clothes, of which they were in dire need" (Hanoteau 1867:29 n. 4); that the Berberstry to exorcise demons, believing that they are the cause of illness (1867:415-416 n. 2); or that the Kabyles think women without men are vulnerable to fleas (1867:428 n. 1). In short, the work's subtle embedding of intimate details about bodies and beliefs shows readers not (only) who the Kabyles are but also who the French are not. Such commentary suggests that the civilizing mission Hanoteau purports to be describing may have done as much to constructthe civilizer as the other way around (see Stoler and Cooper 1997). In sum, Hanoteau's poetry collection participated in France's mission civilisatrice in several ways. On a basic level, Hanoteau sought to devise subtler, bourgeois means of controlling the population by claiming to monitor its spirit. Art-one of the four measures of civilization-would enable him to discover how the Kabyles thought, what they believed, what motivated them, and how they perceived the French. To find out, he attempted to observe the Kabyles in a place where he imagined them as showing their spirit unawares: their poetry. Finding out how they thought was important not only to monitor them better but also to explain the civilizing mission to the readership. Hanoteau's selection and entextualization of poetry targets an emerging French bourgeoisie receptive to the suggestion that its nation's conquests rested on humanizing principles, not brute force. By imagining their nation as a provider of clothing to women "in dire need," Hanoteau's readers could comfortably justify their capture in the firstplace.

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liberalism: Si Ammar Ben Boulifa Thirty-fiveyears later, Kabyle schoolteacher Si Ammar Ben Boulifa (1865-1931) would look in on Hanoteau and craft a trenchant response.14In his 1904 Recueil de poesies kabyles (Collection of Kabyle Poems), Boulifa sought to complete and correct Hanoteau's perception of Kabyle women-and through them, of Kabyle society. By Boulifa's day, the concerns of the colonial enterprise were shifting from pacification to a liberalist focus on inclusion and exclusion (see Mehta 1997). France's Berber politics was a primary site where this debate unfolded, as scholars, administrators, and missionaries scoured Berber regions for signs of proximity to Europe-republican institutions, secular laws, entrepreneurial spirit-that would make them appropriate candidates for assimilation (inclusion) (see Ageron 1960). The primaryproblem area, and the one where the exclusionary argument was made most powerfully, was the status of Berberwomen (see Clancy-Smith 1996, 1998). Boulifa entered this debate by erecting a densely authoritativescholarly scaffolding punctuated with references intended to demonstrate Kabylia's inherent democratic spirit by linking Berber institutions and practices to the classical civilizations of antiquity.15In an introductoryframing essay, he describes Kabyles as "borrowing... from Roman law its spirit" (Boulifa 1990:47); as being "at the sides of the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Arabs" (Boulifa 1990:47, citing medieval chronicler Ibn Khaldun);and as displaying a "purely secular" character (Boulifa 1990:51).16 Citing works on Kabyliaby authors from Straboand Sallust to Ibn Khaldunto the Frenchorientalist Masqueray, he contends that since ancient times, his society had operated on democratic and egalitarian principles: "The basis of Berber society rests, today as in the past, on equality and individual freedom, without distinction of rank or sex... Animated by the most democratic spirit, the Kabylesdo not forget that individual liberty is the most sacred thing" (Boulifa 1990:52, 56, emphasis added). Boulifa contested the accuracy of Hanoteau's knowledge of Kabyle society, but he shared the colonel's conviction that oral poetry was a transparent medium that transmitted the spirit of the people: "In songs ... [the Kabyle] betrays himself.... [T]here, he paints himself just as he is.... It'sthrough the cry of the heart ... that the poet communicates the character and spirit of the people as a whole" (Boulifa 1990:58). What Hanoteau got wrong, argues Boulifa, was not the notion that poems unveil the soul. Rather, Hanoteau's interpretationwas flawed. Drawing on selected poems in Hanoteau's corpus, Boulifa attempts to demonstrate how Hanoteau could have reached opposite conclusions.17 Although Boulifa's introductoryessay presents Berbersociety in unabashedly liberal terms, the way he entextualizes the poems seems to contradict the lofty republican principles to which he professes allegiance. Boulifa's primary corpus contains 108 poems of Si Mohand, a late 19th-century bohemian figure who developed a new genre of personalized poetry about love and loss (see Mammeri 1969). This is followed by a second corpus of 161 poems of a similar genre whose authorship Boulifa could not authenticate, and a brief third section of one poem, which critiques the French administration.18 The poems are annotated by nearly 400 footnotes, addressed to an educated, French-speaking readership and containing detailed social and religious histories, reflections on the colonial presence, and evaluations of Kabyle practices. The footnotes do not depict an "essentially secular" (Boulifa 1990:51, citing Sabatier)society but one structuredthrough saint veneration and religious orders (see, e.g., Boulifa 1990:171 nn. 12, 13; 174 n. 41; 175 n. 48; 178-179 n. 81; 182 n. 112; 183 n. 119; 185 n. 141) and punctuatedby prayerand religiousholy days (Boulifa1990: 178 n. 80; 180 n. 95; 191 n. 195). They do not describe a society "withoutdistinction

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of rank or sex" (Boulifa 1990:52) but a stratified and heterogeneous mix of black slaves (1990:175 n. 51), Ibadites (1990:187 n. 161), and Jews (1990:187 n. 162), as well as a hierarchy of maraboutic lineages, some more noble than others (1990:180 n. 99; 193 n. 216). They do not emphasize transcendent principles but the minutiae of which lives are constituted: how to make clove necklaces (1990:176-177 n. 64), apply kohl to the eyes (1990:196-197 n. 248), smoke kef (1990:173 n. 33), or concoct a hashish mixture (1990:175 n. 50). The footnotes also supply detailed etymologies revealing that the Berber spiritto be read in poetry, far from pure or unmediated, was shaped by the region's Roman (1990:185 n. 146), Arab (e.g., 1990:185 n. 146; 187 n. 166; 189-190 n. 184), Spanish (1990:188 n. 170), and French (e.g., 1990:183 n. 125) histories. When it comes to women, Boulifa's notes are contradictory. At one point Boulifa comments on a love poem, arguing that the poet depicts men and women as equal partners in love (1990:196 n. 240) and using this alleged equality to counter Hanoteau's claim that in Kabylia a woman is seen as only "an object of luxury, a being made solely to satisfy men's desire" (Boulifa 1990:196 n. 240, citing Hanoteau). Boulifa also attempts to interpretwhat might be considered problematic treatment of women by casting Berber society in evolutionary terms in relation to Europe's own past: Kabyle women were no worse off than, say, women in 18th-century France or imperial Russia (Boulifa 1990:49). But most footnotes on women, too numerous to list, describe them as beautiful but distant, provokers of unrequited love and desire. For example: "It was for [Saadia] that the poet sought to commit the worst sinsdrinking alcohol, smoking tobacco-in order to calm his tormented heart that could do nothing but beg for Saadia" (Boulifa 1990:195 n. 236). When women refuse the poet's love they are described as loose, even prostitutes(1990:188 n. 169). In sum, both Boulifa and Hanoteau locate oral poetry outside the social order in an unmediated, unreflective, transparent realm where the people's spirit could emerge unfettered. Attention to the way they entextualize the poems, however, shows how their collections work to construct specific political and ideological agendas. If Hanoteau looked to poetry to help him justify a need for pacification, Boulifa used poetry to depict Kabyle society through a liberalist lens that would set it on equal footing with Europe. His professed adherence to republican ideals rests, however, on a palpable tension surrounding what-through liberalist eyes-would constitute basic inequalities and exclusions at the heart of his own society. These exclusions leak out, disorganized and almost unreadable, in footnotes, where the split between the lofty and the local is underscored, where descriptions of the dense web of social habits and practices, of the complex interactions between religion, race, and gender, challenge the ideal-typical principles of freedom, equality, and rationalitythat Boulifa's framing essay so carefully erects. literature, folklore, and nationalism: Jean and Taos Amrouche Forbrother and sister Jean Amrouche (1906-62) and Taos Amrouche (1913-76), collecting poetry became a way to position Berber culture on a par with European culture, not in terms of liberalist criteria but in relation to supposedly universal categories of literatureand folklore. At the same time, collecting poems began to define a new kind of otherness located within the self. Jean and Taos Amrouche situated poetry in relation to a sense of fragmented duality within their own psyches, a state of internal otherness at the core of their being. "Iam a cultural hybrid; cultural hybrids are monsters," Jean would say (Faigre 1985:134).19 Forthem, Berber poems-especially the songs of their mother-were a means of transcendingexile to reach a state of cultural

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and spiritual wholeness that they could imagine only through its absence (see Ivy 1995). Their move was not idiosyncratic but part of a broader anticolonial nationalist current emerging during the 1930s and 1940s, in which folk productions were indomain of culture that was considcreasingly associated with an "inner"or "spiritual" ered impervious to colonial penetration (Chatterjee1993). Algerian BerberChristiansby birth,Jean and Taos were raised primarilyin Tunisia, where they received a classical French education. They accentuate some of the contradictions that came to characterize French-educated native elites throughoutAfrica. Jean was a teacher of French literature,a French-language poet, and a literary critic; Taos was a singer and one of the first Algerian female French-language novelists.20Both served as radio hosts in Tunisia, Algeria, and Paris,where Jean produced a series of dialogues with prominent Europeanliteraryfigures and Taos developed sevSitueral shows, including one in Kabyle entitled "LetUs Remember Our Country."21 ated within an avant-garde intellectual milieu peopled primarilyby Europeans,Jean developed a lifelong friendship with Andre Gide, had regular correspondence with Claudel and Mauriac, and communicated occasionally with DeGaulle; Taos was well-acquainted with classical musicians Yehudi Menuhin and Olivier Messiaen, among others. Both collected, published, and recorded the songs of their mother as a means of simultaneously orienting themselves to and demarcating themselves from the Europeanculture that surroundedthem. Jean In an introduction to Chants berberes de Kabylie (BerberSongs from Kabylia),his 1939 collection of the traditional poems sung by his mother, Jean Amrouche maps the doctrine of man's fall from grace onto his own experience of exile, imagining a lost paradise where body and soul are at one with nature and the cosmos. He endows the songs of his mother and his forebears with the power to reconnect him with the ancestral land and thereby restore him to a state in which duality is absent, to an "ineffable origin, a Wholeness from which we are cruelly separated" (J. Amrouche 1988:36). Jean's discussion rests on a blend of Herderian romanticism, Durkheimian binarism, and elements of Christian doctrine. At one pole, the conflation of mother-naturechildhood-innocence produces an epiphany that Jean associates with divinity. At the other, Europeanculture and civilization are linked to exile, fragmentation,and duality. Ifthrough poems Jean seeks a returnto an unmediated wholeness, he effects this returnthrough highly mediated metadiscursive techniques that reveal the ambiguities of his own positioning in relation to both Kabyle and French societies. Foreven as he associates Kabyle poems with an unmediated natural realm, he simultaneously attempts to place them in a classificatory hierarchy of genres in which literatureis associated with high culture and characterized by original expressions of universal, humanist themes, while folklore is seen as low culture, particularistic,and unoriginal. Seeking to demonstrate that Kabyle poems are comparable to Europe's high culture, he invokes similarities with the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Claudel, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Ungaretti. Jean also employs translation strategies and genre attributionsto configure the poems as literatureratherthan folklore. Forthe firsttime, the Berbertext is erased. To constitute the poems as literature,Jean makes them stand on their own in French. On a visual level, the absence of Berbermakes the book indistinguishable from any other volume of original French poetry. This is reinforced by the generic framing of the collection: Jean groups the poems into sections titled with such familiar Europeanheadings as "Love,""Satire,"or "Exile"(the lattersection dedicated to Gide). Further,as in

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European books of poetry (and unlike earlier Berber collections), no footnotes interject sociological or linguistic commentary, which tends to orient the poems as items of folk culture through which readers can supposedly understand an indigenous population. Erasingthe Berbertext also starklyreveals Jean's own unstated adherence to a central metadiscursive premise that was an integral part of a more widespread European linguistic ideology: that the essence of a poem resides in a realm of pure signifieds, outside its concrete realizations not only in individual performance but also in the signifiers associated with a specific language. To reach this realm, Jean first detaches a poem or song from the discourse of the individuals who recited it (here, his mother) and claims that it constitutes a shared item of Berber culture (see Urban 1996); he then extracts it from a particular language and situates it in a transcultural realm of universality, where it is thought to belong to humanity.22At times, one wonders whether Jean felt that the universalist themes he saw in the poems were better captured by French than Berber: "To express an idea or a sentiment, or more precisely, that constellation of sentiment and thought that animates [the poems], [the poets] do not call upon an abundance of forms, but on a brief suite of images and symbols. There is no formal link between these images, no term of comparison. No doubt the [Berber] language itself did not put at their disposition a very developed grammatical apparatus"(J.Amrouche 1988:31-32). Attending to Jean's French translations of the poems reveals, however, not a universal spirit but particular, culturally specific modalities of interpretationthat can be understood in relation to Urban's notion of transduction-the transformationsthat occur when carrying over one instance of discourse to a new context with intent to replicate the original discourse (Urban 1996).23Working between Jean's French texts and the Berbertexts that were restored in the 1988 edition reveals that-in an attempt to replicate the spirit of his mother's poems-he erased Berber metapragmatic conventions and substituted French ones (in an intersemiotic conversion). For example, poem 17 in the "Love"section (1988:122-123) describes a lizard on a wall watching a lovely young girl, burning desire filling its silent eyes. The French poem opens with an added line that injects a first-person narratorwhose presence must be inferred in the Berbertext: "Ifonly I could become a lizard" (J'aimeraisI6zard devenir). The entire French poem is then voiced in the first person, culminating in lines that would violate communicative norms associated with cultural standards of modesty if so voiced in Kabyle:"Iwill kiss your tiny mouth, I will awaken you if you sleep." In contrast, the Berber text voices the poem in the third person, desire distanced from the speaker through its displacement onto the lizard: "He will kiss her tiny mouth, he will awaken her if she sleeps." Whereas a Berberspeaker would understandthat the poet's desire was voiced in the third person, Jean apparently feared that a love poem in the third person would be unconvincing to a French reader, so he translated Berber metapragmatic understandings into French through voicing and semantics. Such a move has crucial implications for any claim that the poems represent an unmediated realm of Berber culture, for the Other-here, the French reader-is metadiscursively embedded in the texts themselves. These poems are not the same as the ones Jean's mother sang to him but have been saturated by and ultimately rewritten through the conventions and expectations of another cultural universe. Evenas he orientsthe poems to the conventions of Frenchliterature, Jeancontinues to claim that they are unmediated expressions of the divine that enter the world through the words of those seen as most in harmonywith the cosmos-peasants, and especially, peasant women. The poets, for Jean, are conduits, unaware of what flows through their poems: "It is certain that Kabyle peasants . .. never dreamed for a minute ...

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that they were singing the great pain of man expelled from Paradise"(J. Amrouche 1988:36). Song and poetry are not learned, acquired, or the product of conscious reflection, but rather "unstudied," "instinctive," and "effortless," emanating from a d'enfance) through which divinity manifests in the world "Spiritof childhood" (I'Esprit (J.Amrouche 1988:44-45). In order for this spiritto shine forth, Jean effaces the interpreter (in this case, his mother):"Her [his mother's] voice is present only to the degree that it is necessary for the birthingof the melody on the sea of silence.... The listener is put into direct contact with the beauty of the music and the naked richness of the words. The message is transmittedto him without the voice that's singing or the interpreter denaturing it by refracting it" (J. Amrouche 1988:55). Likewise, his mother's style of singing is "not the result of study, is not created from without but is formed instinctively and from the interior " (J.Amrouche 1988:59); her voice contains an "angelic naivete" (J.Amrouche 1988:58). And the melodies are "untranscribable,"conforming "not to any canons but to the requirementsof the heart,the ear, and the spirit" (J. Amrouche 1988:52; see also 38, 51). Echoes of Hanoteau? Kabyle poetry- even for an educated poet-is still unselfconscious and unmediated. In sum, if Jean were convinced that his mother's poetry could help him to recover a lost sense of oneness, to transcend the uncomfortable hybridityhe experienced as a Tunisia-raised ChristianBerberAlgerian writing in French, he could reach this state of communion only through the very Europeancategories from which he sought escape. Further,by locating his mother in unmediated relation to the cosmos, he precludes the possibility that her experience might also be hybrid. Her own complex subjectivity is utterly negated by Jean, for whom his mother's poems evoke only his own lack of wholeness. In his eyes, his mother had a single culture; he did not.24 Taos Taos Amrouche also situates herself as a "hyphen between Eastand West" (Amrouche 1968b). On one side, she claims to be but a repositoryfor an age-old, unmediated oral tradition. Her mother's songs, which Taos recorded on six albums and performed throughout Europe, simply passed through her, she claims, as they had already flowed through countless prior generations. So as not to disrupt the purity of this age-old tradition, she refused to study solfege or vocal technique (Amrouche 1968c). But while claiming that pure tradition flowed from an unmediated realm of orality, she configured the songs in complex relation to Europeanfolklore, nationalism, and the performance practices associated with classical music genres. Taos displays less intellectual tension than her brotherJean when she categorizes her mother's songs as folklore because she associates folklore with the prestigious scientific and nationalist projects of accumulating and classifying historical, linguistic, and cultural knowledge.25 Her conviction that there was inherent value in classifying the songs of her ancestors was shaped in part by the nationalist notion that a public domain containing items of shared cultural heritage should be filled with Berberstock (see Goodman in press). Taos grouped the songs her mother may have sung for a variety of occasions into an authoritative corpus of "95 prototypes," had them transcribed, and registered them in her name with the French copyright agency SACEM (Society of Authors and Composers of Music), where they acquired a new legal status.26 The scientific, classificatory discourse through which Taos situated her mother's songs also drew authorityfrom the emerging disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, which erected such criteria as age, authenticity, or demonstrable kinship with other folk specimens as evidential tests to which scholars should subject

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specimens in order to discern their cultural worth. Taos often invokes these legitimating criteria in her metadiscourse about the corpus: Kabyle songs, she reports, were considered by "expert musicologists" to be "among the most authentic and venerable messages in the world"; these specialists situated the poems far back in time-"thousands of years, perhaps even to ancient Egypt"(Amrouche 1956).27This association of age, authenticity, and value was already present in the scientific community at the time of Taos's first public performance, at the 1939 FirstCongress of Moroccan Music, where she reportsthat linguists and other "people of science" were interested in "what was authentic" in her songs (Amrouche 1968c). Taos also orients the songs to the requirements of scholarly and nationalist projects for a local folklore by situating them as oral. She does so in partvia the discursive techniques through which her recordings are presented. The recorded songs are given French titles that generally identify each song with a broad universal theme: "Song of Exile," "Love Song," "Meditation Song."28The French translation follows. The presence of the Berber language remains primarilyoral; although she sings in Berber, no Kabyletext is furnished. Berberprintappears only in a discussion of six "styles" identified in the liner notes, which describe not the universal themes suggested by the French titles, but discrete melodic and rhythmic features. The notes also briefly discuss the kinds of occasions at which a song would be sung. Each song is linked to a Berber style, the name for which is listed parenthetically after the title. The style indication is generally the only Berbertext on the album. Afterher first recording, the Berber styles are never explained but simply appear under the (French)song title, authenticating devices that marka song as folk. In her performance practices, Taos displayed a more ambiguous relation to the folklore project. Although she appeared at major internationalfolk festivals, Taos traveled primarilyin a classical music circuit. Her performance venues included the prestigious Theatre de la Ville in Parisand prominent churches and concert halls throughout Europe,where she cast herself as a cultural ambassador, a mediator between East and West: "I sing with the knowledge that these are great works of art, and I sing because I bear witness, and because I would like to awaken both the Eastand the West, obtain an awakening of consciousness both among North Africans and among Westerners, and particularly the French"(Amrouche 1968c, emphasis added). Although she claimed that her vocal style was instinctive and unaltered by learned techniques, her singing sounds far more operatic than folk; when I spoke with him in 1994, Kabyle music video producer Ammar Arab told me that her songs are unrecognizable to some Kabyles, and French talk show hosts De Beer and Cremieux compared them with Gregorian chant when they interviewed Taos (Amrouche 1968c).29 In short, although Taos may attempt to replicate the Berber texts, she takes significant liberties with the music-the very substance that was supposedly unselfconsciously flowing through her. AfterAlgerian independence, Taos's songs were increasingly situated as signs of a precolonial Pan-Africanidentity. Thus, in a 1966 interview with DakarMatin before her appearance at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Taos quotes Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor as saying: "What interested me the most was the unity of African civilization ... to which the songs bear witness" (Institutdu Monde Arabe 1994:106). In Algeria, however, Taos's work also began to be associated with the problematic rise of Berbersubnational consciousness. By 1969, she was barredfrom representingthe Algerian nation at the FirstPanAfricanCultural Festival. In sum, the Amrouches' claims that poems index a realm of unmediated cultural and spiritual wholeness are articulated through metadiscursive techniques that speak

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to the profound contradictions and dualities that characterize Jean's and Taos's experiences as expatriate intellectuals during a time when anticolonial nationalism was on the rise throughout the colonized world. Theirwork begins to situate poetry as partof an "inner domain" of "culture"(Chatterjee1993) in which expatriates could find renewal; as Chatterjee describes for India, culture is increasingly gendered female and associated with women's expressive forms. The Amrouches' relationship to poetry collection also suggests the emergence of a new kind of otherness located within the self and characterized by a fantasy of cultural wholeness that is imaginable only because it is already lost. In 1988, Mouloud Mammeri, a Kabyle intellectual who launched the postcolonial Berber press Awal, selected Jean Amrouche's Chants berberes de Kabylie as one of the firstworks to be reissued-with restored Kabyletexts.30 postcolonial identity (1): Mouloud Mammeri

On March 10, 1980, Mouloud Mammeri (1917-89) was to give a public lecture on the role of poetry in traditional Kabylesociety-the subject of his newly published book Poemes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle poems).3' The talk was to take place at Hasnaoua University in the city of Tizi Ouzou, the intellectual and commercial hub of Algeria's Kabyle Berberregion. A crowd of more than a thousand had gathered, but Mammeri never arrived: He was stopped at a police roadblock, brought before the region's governor (wali), and informed that the event had been cancelled. The reason: "riskof disturbing the public order."At schools, universities, and businesses, the cancellation sparked demonstrations and strikes that would rock the Kabyle region for more than two months. Matters came to a head on April 20, when, at 4:15 in the morning, riot police stormed university dormitories, a factory, and the local hospital. Armed with tear gas and clubs, they arrested hundreds and wounded many more. Subsequent demonstrations, often violent, swept the region. Echoes were felt as far away as Paris, where some 600 demonstrated before the Algerian Embassy.32 Widely discussed in the French press, the events were reportedto human rightsorganizations including Amnesty Internationaland the InternationalLeague of Human Rights.33 Mammeri hoped his book would "serve as an instrument in the transmission of Berberculture" (1980:47), but he could hardly have foreseen the catalytic impact the cancelled lecture would have on the BerberCulturalMovement. Although the period of violence resolved, its memory mushroomed: The Berber Spring (TafsutImaziyen), as April 20 is now called, is commemorated unofficially in Algeria as well as in the Berber diaspora in Europe and North America where, among other things, the works of Mammeri and other poetry collectors are displayed. "TraditionalBerber poetry" has become a key signifier at such gatherings. At BerberSpringcelebrations from TiziOuzou to New Jersey, from Marseille to Montreal, crowds gather around exhibits of poetry anthologies new and old, searching the works for signs of their history. Volumes of verse out of print since the colonial era are reappearing on the market, newly prefaced and annotated, and in some cases restoring"original"Kabyletexts to poems initially published only in French translation. The books themselves seem at least as compelling as the poems they contain-the claim to a Berberhistory documented by texts almost transcends interest in the contents of the texts. Mammeri's 1980 collection of poetry represents a break with the works of his predecessors in two fundamental respects. First, Mammeri attempts to extricate Kabyle poetry from an ahistorical, essentialized realm, which he recognizes as a fabrication of colonial science. Second, via framing devices and translation strategies, Mammeri segments readers into two distinct audiences (Berber speakers and French

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speakers), and for the firsttime addresses a contemporary Berber readership in Berber exclusively. In other ways, however, Mammeri perpetuates notions about an authentic realm of oral poetry, seeing his written collection as a necessary but impure transformation of this body of oral lore (Mammeri 1980:55-57). An introductory essay in French is oriented primarily to colonial science, taking up nearly every major ethnological theory put forth about the Maghreb, from 14th-century writer Ibn Khaldun to British social anthropologist Gellner. Composed during the same years that Said was writing Orientalism (1978), the essay seeks to refute the ways in which Western science had turned Kabyle culture on its head. Mammeri was perhaps also trying to extricate himself from orientalist forms of knowledge about the Maghreb that had informed his own early writings, which described Berber social organization as unreasonable, illogical, incapable of evolving, lacking the prerequisites for nationhood, and eternally condemned to remain outside universality because of blind enslavement to family loyalties and clan ambitions (Mammeri 1991). By the 1980 volume, Mammeri had come to recognize that ethnology-and its allegedly scientific study of African oral literatures-was a tool with which "Western tribes" (Mammeri 1980:13) built up a primitive Other with which to contrast themselves: Ethnological peoples can serveto enlightenmen, the true,civilized ones, aboutthe times of theirsavage past.... It is we who have demarcated off-limitIndianrethe serve, where provisionalhumanitiescontinue to die while elsewhere unfold the the gamesof the truecivilization.... Freedom, powerto act on a colhighlyrational lectivedestiny,was the weightyprivilegeof the Westernman;the otherswere never more than the unconsciousprotagonists a preexistingharmony.... Our poems of in were dead objects, mere arguments the conceptualedifice erected by the West bothto confineus and to understand itself.... Butas subjectsof thisso-calledobjecIt that tivitywe were in completedisarray. wasn'tjustourskinor oursentiments were it this attacked, was our reason.... Itis to reverse processthatIwrotethisbook, in the so the for of hopesof preparing grounds moreradicalprojects, thatone daythe culture will ancestors flywith itsown wings. [Mammeri 1980:14, 15, 47] my In Poemes kabyles anciens, Mammeri appropriates social science's theoretical arsenal to spin Kabyle poetry into a new story. Drawing from major theories of North African social organization, Mammeri sets Kabyle poetry into a four-part periodization of North African history: "TheTime of the States"(16th century), "TheAge of the Tribes" (16th-19th centuries), "The Colonial Trial" (1830-1962), and "The Present Moment" (1962-present).34 With this framework, Mammeri appropriates Western categories (relying, for example, on linear notions of time and on such dichotomies as tribe versus state) in an attempt to give Kabyle poems the kind of history that earlier collectors denied, demonstrating not a transcendent "native spirit"but rather poetic genres that shifted radically in form, style, and content from one historical moment to another. At the same time, like his predecessors Jean and Taos Amrouche, Mammeri situates the poems as living documents passed down through sages (imusnawen), the last of which (he claims) was his father. Yet, the social situations in which he himself heard or read the poems figure very little in his analysis and are never part of the frames in which the poems themselves are presented. Positioning himself (as had Taos) at the end of a long chain of poets, Mammeri sought to provide-via his book-an "echo" (Mammeri 1980:57) of the nights he spent with the sages in his village. If this echo was "impure"(Mammeri 1980:56) because fixed in writing, it was

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also the only way for "Berberculture today [to] be an instrumentof emancipation" (Mammeri 1980:56). Although Mammeri geared his framing essay largely to French-educated audiences, his preface addresses a new kind of Berber reader-one capable of learning about and transmitting Berber culture through a medium of print. Written in Kabyle Berber, the preface is structuredas a letter from Mammeri to Muhed Azwaw, a symbolic figure who represents the Kabyle.35The letter emphasizes the contemporary relevance of tamusni (traditional wisdom transmitted orally through imusnawen), concluding that although its form has now changed, it remains a torch, a light that must not be allowed to die but rathermust be continuously passed from one hand to another, albeit via a different medium: "Thereare no meetings or reunions where you and your generation can learn tamusni in the way your ancestors learned it. Now, tamusni is found in books. I wrote this book for you and your fellow travelers, Azwaw, so that it might serve as a pillar of support, a pillar upon which to build" (Mammeri 1980:60). Mammeri further segments French- and Berber-speaking audiences through metadiscursive framing of the poems themselves. The pages with Berberpoems contain not a word of French. Even the footnotes are in Berber, and they are not translated. The Berber notes include variants of the poems, parenthetical asides from Mammeri's informants, or Mammeri's explications of particularwords, grammatical points, or interdialectal relationships (e.g., Mammeri 1980:100 n. 39). On the pages that contain the poems translated into French, the notes (in French) identify place or tribe names, people, and events for those unfamiliar with the Kabyle geographical and historical landscapes; notes on this side also reference earlier collections (Hanoteau makes frequent appearances). Mammeri also constitutes the two audiences in the way he introduces the poems. He presents many Berber poems through reconstructed direct quotations, producing the impression of a dialogue out of which a poem seems to emerge spontaneously. The use of everyday speech forms makes the poems seem "live":One can almost hear the old poets conversing. In contrast, when he presents the poems in French, Mammeri reproduces the overly generalizing framework he critiques elsewhere. Rather than using reconstructed dialogue, he often provides brief descriptions of the context, using the French passe simple, a formal literary tense (which by definition is never employed in speech). In a particularlyvivid example, Mammeri introduces poem 20 in Berber as follows: "One day Yusef was reciting poems. No sooner had he finished speaking, than a widow said to him, "And my [own] son, why didn't you speak of [praise, i.e., in your praise poem] him?" Yusef replied: "[Here Mammeri inserts the poem]" (Mammeri 1980:98). When Mammeri presents the poem in French, this dialogue is not reproduced. Rather,an intertextuallink is established with the preceding poem in the collection (and not with an imagined situation of enunciation) via literary terminology; the speakers are distanced through indirect reportedspeech. The French introduction to the same poem reads: "The drama is not only a tragedy [reference to previous poem], it is also a game. To a woman who complained that the poet hadn't mentioned her son in his verse: [Here Mammeri inserts the poem]" (Mammeri 1980:98). Moreover, in the French part of the text, Mammeri engages the French practice of using single poems to make ethnological pronouncements about Berber society. A good example is Poem 21 (1980:98-99), introduced in French as follows: "The acts of an individual, in a society without organized political power, engage the whole group." This sentence is absent from the Berber side, which delves right into the particularsof the situation in which Mammeri imagines that the poem was recited.

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Mammeri, in short, configures two separate contexts within which the poems could be interpreted. In so doing, is he unselfconsciously reproducing literarynorms instilled by his Frenchtraining?Or is he slyly crafting a double message, decodable only by bilingual readers (almost exclusively educated Berbers):that he can write with the best of the French (who, he apparently assumes, don't care about the particulars of performance) while offering performative specificity to those who can interpretit? Although seeking to reclaim the poems as "living documents," as "partof the reality that gives meaning to the group that created them and, through the group, to [his] own existence" (Mammeri 1980:7-8), Mammeri tacitly acknowledges that they are no longer part of a "realitythat gives meaning" (Mammeri 1980:8): "The book is intended not just to preserve [the poems] as 'indifferent documents' but to serve as an instrument in the transmission of Berber culture, like the poems themselves once were" (1980:47, emphasis added). But as Mammeri knew, because the Berber language was not taught in Algeria, only a fraction of the population would be able to read his collection in Berber. Was it for that reason that he began to provide traditional texts to Idir and other contemporary singers? Perhaps Mammeri realized that Berber culture was not ready to "flywith its own wings" from the printed page alone. Itwould require another medium. postcolonial identity (2): Idir and Ben Mohamed

In 1970, a young Berber student-who would soon become known throughout North Africa and the diaspora by his stage name, Idir-found himself crisscrossing the Algerian hinterlands in search of the poems and songs of his ancestors. A year before, in July of 1969, he had attended the FirstPanAfricanFestival, held in Algiers to celebrate the end of colonial rule.36The PanAfrican Festival was conceived around the principle that "culture, [once] an arm of domination, is now a weapon of liberation" (Revolution Democratique Africaine 1970:41). Festival organizers invoked neoMarxist ideology, embraced by almost every new state, to shift the locus of cultural production from a privileged, European-educated elite to "the people" (see, e.g., the statement of Guinean President Ahmed Sekou Toure [Revolution Democratique Africaine 1970:11]; see also Fanon 1963:206-248). Festival publications appropriated anthropological definitions of culture formulated by Malinowski, Sapir, Herskovitz, Levi-Strauss,and others, if at times ambivalently, both to attest to basic human similarities and to locate under the universalizing rubric of culture a range of practices that had been labeled "primitive"or "backward"during the colonial era (Organisation de I'Unite Africaine 1969).37Although independence markedthe end of overt colonial control over such "material"domains (Chatterjee 1993) as state administration, economic policy, and social welfare, it also opened up a propitious ground upon which a new form of subjectivity could emerge (Goodman 1998). As articulated by political and cultural leaders throughout the African continent, this project involved two dimensions. First,a "new man"would be decolonized through developing a critical inventory of colonialism's effects.38 The emergent self, a cultural tabula rasa, could then be inscribed with a new identity predicated on a selective rediscovery of the value of its own cultural heritage (see Societe Nationale d'Edition et de Distribution 1969:41-42).39 Idirwas powerfully moved by Festival events. When I spoke with him in 1996 about the Festival, he told me: "I saw other human dimensions. I saw sweaty, satiny black skin, tremendous expressive power in the music .... I asked myself, what is this great power that has swept down on us, this great nation that has arrived with such unbelievably rich folklore.... And I said to myself, but we too, we must have this

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dimension somewhere, hidden, we just need to draw it out." So it was that vacations found him immersed in traditional music and poetry, learning new instrumentsand percussion styles, discovering the rhythms of his own nation: "the spaces, the sounds ... that make us vibrate, through which we can forge a personality" (Idir 1996). On returning from one of his cultural pilgrimages, he composed a tune inspired by the refrainof a story told by old women throughout Kabylia. He asked his friend, poet Ben Mohamed, to write new verses. While Idir was crisscrossing the countryside, Ben Mohamed was learning to write the Kabyle language in an unofficial class taught by Mammeri. He was also reading the works of Hanoteau, Boulifa, and Jean and Taos Amrouche, along with any other Berberpoetry that fell into his hands. Ben, too, had attended the PanAfricanFestival: "It was there," he told me in a 1996 interview, "that I began to grasp what it meant to belong to a culture." Immersed in African cinema and theater during the festival, Ben didn't have time to attend the dozens of talks on postcolonial culture, identity, and politics that took place over the 12-day event. Butwhen these texts were subsequently published (Societe Nationale d'Edition et de Distribution 1969), Ben devoured them, connecting his own experience to writings by Memmi (1969), KiZerbo (1969), AmilcarAlencastre(1969), and Rene Despestre(1969), among others.40 As Ben pondered Idir's request, he recalled a talk he had recently attended by French ethnologist Jean Duvignaud, who had just made a documentary film about the Tunisian village Shebika.41As Ben relates it, Duvignaud described how the film had helped Shebikans to transform the image they had of themselves. Duvignaud no doubt drew on his 1968 ethnography Change at Shebika: disdained Our investigation broughtabouta notablechange in the village. Hitherto beliefs regaineda sortof vitalityfromthe objects, devaluedacts and half-forgotten recorded them in his notebook.... Through repeated the very fact thata researcher to whichwe subjectedhim,the manof Shebika a new perspective scrutiny developed of himself.... Itwas dramatization the activitiesof daily life], in which Shebika [of played the roleof Shebika... thatled the villageto the extremepoliticallimitof selfaffirmation.... The manof Shebikagave himselfa name in the larger contextof the in lifeof Tunisia when he discovereda language whichto give his new experienceex1970:296-2981 pression.[Duvignaud For Ben Mohamed, the lecture sparked the desire to create a forum that, like Duvignaud's film, would serve as a mediating mirror, enabling Algerians to develop what he calls an "internal perspective" or an "internalgaze" (le regard interieur)on their own culture. "Oursystem of reference," he explained to me in a 1992 interview, had been "either the Eastor the West, [but] we didn't have our own lens" (see also, Arnaud 1993). Idirconcurred: "The historyof NorthAfrica has always been written by others.... We have never looked at ourselves except in relation to the outsider" (Humblot 1978). In the nine songs that Ben and Idir would author together, they sought to create this "internalgaze" that would enable them simultaneously to revalorize and critique their own society. The genre that Idirand Ben launched-New Kabyle Song-provides a compelling example of the use of intergeneric and intertextualrelationships to develop a new vision of Berber identity. Itdoes so through a creative interminglingof genres, blending the harmonies, instruments,performance modalities, and technologies associated with folk rock with rhythms, melodies, and texts drawn from Berber village repertoires. Because the vision of Berber identity mediated by New Song was at odds with official state ideology, which defined Algeria as exclusively Arab and Arabic speaking, New Kabyle Song has generally been depicted as oppositional-a form of protest

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song-in both the media and the scholarly literature(see, e.g., Chaker 1987a, 1989b; Lacoste-DuJardin1978; Mehenni 1983; Zoulef and Dernouny 1981). In examining New Kabyle Song solely as a form of synchronic engagement with adjacent cultural discourses, however, scholars have not considered the new genre in diachronic perspective-that is, in relation to earlier processes of collection and transformation of Berber oral texts.42My focus here is on the way New Song reconfigures the poems and songs that Idirand Ben collected from village women. In looking at Idir'sand Ben's collection processes against the practices of earlier collectors, a key difference emerges: Earliercollectors did not intentionally alter what they thought they had found. Their relationship to the poems they gathered is articulated through such strategies as genre attributions,framing essays, and footnotes. Ben and Idir,in contrast, collected with a desire to transform.Their relationship to the poetry they gathered is not presented around the text but is folded into the new poems themselves. How does this process of folding occur? How do Idirand Ben draw on village poto develop an "internalgaze" that simultaneously constructs and critiques what etry they imagine as traditional Berberculture? Such questions go to the heart of my own ethnographic and theoretical concerns, inviting detailed examination of the specific entextualizing operations in which Idirand Ben were engaged. My focus lies with the minutiae: the specific intertextualchanges, line by line and word by word, that songs have undergone in their journeys to the world stage. By examining how Ben and Idir read texts from one genre and rewrote them within another, I invoke Briggs and Bauman's notion of intertextualgap-the interpretivespace within which a particulartext is linked to a broader genre (Briggsand Bauman 1992). How do Ben and Idirbuild intertextual relationships with older poems that enable their songs to resonate as "profoundly Berber" (Ben Mohamed, personal interview 1994)? Are these to be understood as "minimal" gaps, which imbue the new song with the authority or aura associated with the old genre, or as "maximal"gaps, which can resist this authority and propose an alternative vision (see Briggs and Bauman 1992:149)? By invoking or challenging generic authority,in what ways are intertextual gaps also deeply ideological, bound to claims of power or negotiationsof identity(see Briggsand Bauman1992:148)? To address these questions, I turn to the song Isefra,or Poetry (see Text 1), which is generally acknowledged as one of Idir's most traditional.43At first glance it seems almost identical to women's versions of the song. When I told Kabyle women that I was looking for their versions of Idir's songs, they would typically launch into this one, indiscriminately mingling his verses with their own. During trips to Ain-el-Hammam and At Yenni (Idir'snatal village) in 1993, I collected more versions of this song than any other.44 TEXT 1 Isefra (Poetry)
Text copyrighted by Mohammed Benhammadouche (Ben Mohammed). Reproduced with permission.

Verse1 A nekker nebducekkran a a ncekker da kra kec,ini a bab n tmeyra a mmi-sn tnina Letus riseand beginto singpraises We will praiseeveryonehere in You,forwhom we aregathered celebration, Oh son of Tanina

104 yis-eki nedhenttezzyiwin di tizi lyila Verse2 Lalehhuyludaluda yejjujegumezzir atanieeddan-d yemnayen s rrekba zzhir d aeawdiw a yuzyinserrej ezwir ay itbir Verse3 n A timehremt lehrir a m' tballiwin Ibaz yeqqen-ikem-id ukyis sennigteeyunin ism-isinudaleerac yernatimdinin

american ethnologist It'syou to whomyourcomradeslook Inthe hourof need.

Iamwalkingin the field Thelavender in bloom is Thehorsemen passedby in a thunderous stampede Oh handsomegroom,mountyourhorse, bird. oh of Go to the front theirranks, beautiful Oh silkscarf, adorned beautifully Theeagle hasattached you above his brows Hisnameis knownin everytribe Andeven in the cities.45

The similarities between Idir'sIsefraand the women's renditions are evident. The formal (syllabic, rhythmic, rhyme) structuresmatch: they employ Verses of 6 lines, divided into 3 couplets; each couplet has alternatingVerses of 7 and 5 syllables; the "b" lines of each couplet rhyme. Lexically, the songs are very close-in some cases, the words are almost identical. Melodically, they resemble each other as well. The village songs-which belong to a genre of praise songs (known as tibuyarin)-can be used to laud the qualities of either a newborn male baby or a man about to be married. They often open a village celebration, and Idirhas retained their annunciatory position, frequently beginning concerts with Isefra. Idir'sversion of the song appears to show minimal intertextualdistance with its village predecessors. In what ways, then, has it been transformed?When I asked Ben this question in 1993, he responded: The of Themeaningof the song,first all, it isn'tby accidentthatItitledit "Poetry." drivit's idea [I'id6emotrice], the old poems,Itriedto look [inthem]forthe valuesthat ing we like in our cultureand to emphasizethem. Whatis it that makesus respectthis the leader,this person.... I took some of [theold poems],I extracted values,then I putthem intomytext.Thereis the ideaof physicalbeautyandof the beautyof acts,of conduct,of the abilityto be a leader. We then listened together to what Ben took as his "original"-a cassette tape that his friend's grandmother had recorded for Ben, and that he considered representative of women's repertoires. He at first had a hard time extracting from the tape those verses that he had altered, but he finally found one verse (Verse 2), which he wrote next to his own (see Text 2). As we began to compare the two versions, the entextualization strategies that guided him began to emerge. TEXT 2 Fromsource tape used by Ben Mohamed,recordedby his friend's in grandmother in Ain-el-Hammam the early 1970s. Yaxitestewhecluda umezzir yeJjujeg Oh, how the fieldcausesfear The lavender in bloom is

writing empire, underwriting nation ataniceddan-d yemnayen s rrekba zzhir d ay isli serreji weawdiw ezwiray itbir

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The horsemen passedby in a thunderous stampede Oh groom,mountyourhorse, Go to the frontof theirranks, beautiful oh bird.

First,Ben excised the specificities of name or place that index the song to particular social relationships. More importantly, he sought to give his text linear cohesiveness, whereby one image would flow "logically" into the next, with all terms subordinated to the message or value he sought to portray. He changed the first line of the woman's Verse 2, for example, from "Oh, how the field causes fear"to "Iam walking in the fields" because, as he put it, I neededto inscribe line inthe overallmeaningof the text.... Ididn'tsee the relathe tionshipbetween fearand the bloominglavender[thenext line].... It isn'tbecause the lavenderis in bloomthatone is afraidin the fields..... Butto say "Iam walkingin the field, and the lavenderblooms"-there I'mdescribingthe stateof a place-and arrive.46 then, in frontof these flowers,the horsemen Ben seems to be reading and writing in relation to a Western literaryaesthetic in which action stands out from a static, naturalbackdrop. Does the grandmother'sverse conceptualize these differently?It is possible that in the grandmother's verse fear (despite its placement in the line) is related to the stampede of horsemen ratherthan to the field.47If so, then the grandmother'sverse had already anticipated this impending event, but in nonlinear fashion, by inscribing emotion within the setting. Even if Ben had read the grandmother's verse in that way, however, he still would have changed it, he said, because "Idid not want an image of fear in my text." What about Verses 1 and 3? They were reproduced directly from the grandmother's version of the poem-almost. Ben excised religious references, changing the opening words of the song from "In the name of God let us begin to sing praises" (bism'lleh a nebdu cekkran) to "Letus rise and begin to sing praises" (a nekker a nebdu cekkran). As he explained it to me, such "formulaic" phrases simply take up space, get in the way of talking about "real"problems, and make no sense in relation to the "main idea" of the text: Therewere, in the old texts ... these religiouslines ... used as stop-gaps(bouchewith a religious trou).Theessentialis said in two lines,then you start thing (truc), you end with another,and it'sjustto garnish.Itsometimesmakesno sense in relationto the main idea (I'ideemaltresse).... So I said to myself,why not enrichthe text, dethese garnishings have nothingto do with that velop its idea ... insteadof including the text. As the new opening words resonate against a space where most Kabyle listeners expect to hear religious invocations, they simultaneously evoke the earlier phrase and call attentionto its suppression-a Bakhtinian double-voiced utterance(Bakhtin1981).48 The new text can also be read in relation to the dozens of verses that Ben did not select. Why were these three verses chosen? What might have been left behind? I did not have the heart to ask Ben to transcribe for me the grandmother's entire tape, and he had promised not to lend or copy it. However, I recorded two similar songs during visits to the Ain-el-Hammam and At Yenni regions of Kabylia in 1993. I examined these two field recordings against Ben's criteria, as I understood them from our many conversations. A later discussion of these field recordings with Idir (1996) largely supported my interpretations.49 Looking at Text 3, the boldface lines in Verses 2 and 4 immediately stand out to me: They laud the young man's qualities via reference to the strength of previous

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foreign occupiers of the region-the French, the Turks.Such references to foreigners would have found no place in Ben's poem. Yet, as he sought to (in his words) "extract cultural values" that are "specifically Kabyle," he would risk erasing the historical memory that such verses contain. TEXT 3 November1993. Fieldrecording byJaneGoodmanin Ain-el-Hammam,
1. A timehremt n lehrir

a m' tballiwin weqcic ukyis yeqqen-ikem sennigteeyunin ism-ikinudaleerac yernatimdinin 2. A timehremt lehrir n ism-im[Lluja] [unclear] wecqic ukyis yeqqen-ikem sennigtwenza ism-isinudaleerac yerna-dFransa 3. A taxuxetyelluggWin yef yiribb wamdun bab-isdi tsulla [unclear] attwennec leeyun a SidiSidiMurad acruruqelmun 4. Axitsewhec luda tejjujegIfakya atanieeddan-d yemnayen s rrekba t-twiya[unclear] a Muradserreji waEwdiw tezwireda laya 5. Axitsewhecluda yejjujegumezzir ataniEeddan-d yemnayen s rrekba zzhir d a Lhamid serrej aeawdiw tezwireday itbir

1. Oh silkscarf, adorned beautifully Thehandsome groomhasattached you Abovehis brows Your[groom's, sing.]nameis knownin m. everytribe Andeven inthe cities. 2. Oh silkscarf, [unclear] yournameis [Lluja] Thehandsome groomhasattached you Abovehis forehead Hisnameis knownin everytribe Andeven in France. 3. Oh ripepeach On the banksof the pond [trans. unclear] [trans. unclear] A SidiMurad withtasselson yourhood. 4. Howthe plaincausesfear Thefruits in bloom are Thehorsemen passedby in a devastating [unclear] stampede Oh Murad, mountyourhorse, Go to the frontof theirranks,oh "agha." 5. Howthe plaincausesfear Thelavender in bloom is Thehorsemen passedby in a thunderous stampede Oh Hamidmountyourhorse Go to leadthem,oh beautiful bird.

In Text 4, the kind of selective reading process Ben would probably engage in is even clearer, as eight of the 12 verses would fail to meet his criteria. Verses 1 and 2 would most likely be excluded for their licentious references to sexuality, associated with the loom and with manipulating the bamboo wood, described as "too long" or "too stiff"(cf., Genevois 1967 and Messick 1987). Removing such verses de-genders the song, suppressing links to the female domain of weaving. Verses 4, 5, and 9 contain explicit referencesto the Quran, popular religiouspractices,or God-unacceptable from Ben's secular, modernizing vantage point. Verses 8, 9, and 11 do not have the correct number of syllables for Idir's music. Others contain personal names or other

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particularities that would not support a generalized cultural message. Although the suppression of such verses may not have been noticed, their inclusion would be unacceptable to listeners who shared Ben's quest to bring Berberculture into "modernity." References to religion, the Turks, or the French clearly would not evoke the kind of Berberidentity that Ben outlined in his conversations with me. TEXT 4 Fieldrecording ane GoodmaninAin-el-Hammam, November1993 by 1. Eyyamt ngerazetta a yef yiribb wasif eyyamta ngezm i uyanim bezzaf i_gwezzif a SidiSidiMurad aeeqq'uzarif 2. Eyyamt ngerazetta a yef yirig_geyzer eyyamta ngezm i uyanim bezzaf i geeejjer A SidiSidiMurad n Aeerjun ttmer 3. Wi-t-ilanIhara-yinna yessans weblad urt-id-ikecem yiwen hac' AtSebbad {a SidiMurad Sidi a Ibazinmewwer} 4. Ay Ixir-inu Rebbi i mmi zewjey-as huretlein bbwiy-as-d lehruz timmi yef Rebbiketter-as-d iqcicen a nehdera nili 5. Ay Ixir-inu Rebbi zewjey-asi waras huretlein bbwiy-as-d lehruz ammas yef Rebbiketter-as-d iqcicen at tehderyemma-s n 6. Atimehremt lehrir a m'tballiwin Sidi yeqqen-it-id Seid sennigteeyunin ism-isinudaleerac 1. Come [f.pl.], let'sassemblethe loom On the banksof the river Come, let'scutthe bamboo It'stoo long O SidiMurad Seedof wild geranium. 2. Come [f.pl.], let'sassemblethe loom On the edge of the ravine Come,let'scutthe bamboo It'stoo stiff. Oh SidiMurad Cluster dates. of 3. Towhom does the housebelong thatis standing large,flatstones? on No one can enterit exceptthose wearingshoes. Oh SidiMurad Luminous eagle. 4. How greatis myjoy, oh Lord I have married my son. off I brought one of the beautiful him women of Paradise fromthe evil eye] by amulets [protected on herforehead. God, granthimsons We will all be witnesses. 5. How greatis myjoy, oh Lord I have married my brown-skinned off boy. I brought one of the beautiful him women of Paradise fromthe evil eye] by amulets [protected on herhips [i.e., belt]. God, granthimsons Hismotherwill be present. 6. Oh silkscarf, adorned. beautifully SidiSaidhas attachedit Abovehis brows. His nameis knownin everytribe

108 yernatimdinin n 7. A timehremt lehrir a m' tballucin Sidi yeqqen-ikem-id Murad sennigtEeyunin ism-isinudaleErac yernatimdinin 8. Eyyamt teddumt nruh at a s azayara-d-nerr ulli a Sidieeziz Murad a taqadumt tecba lemri akk'iqqaren watmaten-is d amerbuh gma Ihenni a 9. Eyyamt teddumt nruh at a a-d-nawiIhecc yer wedrar nniy-aske(; ay isli tecbatnefcic taqadumt krai nmennadi Rebbi arqabel a nesrebh aqcic 10. Ay Ixir-inu turafukkenimettawen a nkkesakw lehzen yellanseg wachaluyen a [unclear] Murad amzunyekker-ed yemmuten wi' yef yiribb wasif tebean-t-id iseggaden heddur-t-id-yettif wi t-idyettfend AtXaled imawlann nnif
1 1. A tasekkurtyecrurden

american ethnologist Andeven inthe cities. 7. Oh silkscarf, adorned beautifully SidiMurad attachedit has Abovehis brows His nameis knownin everytribe Andeven inthe cities. 8. Come,let'sgo [f.pl.]together to bring sheepto pasture the Oh, dearSidiMurad whose face resembles mirror a As his brothers say, the oh "May hennabringyou prosperity, brother." 9. Come,let'sgo [f.pl.]together to the mountain, bringbacksome herbs to [Isaidto myself,]Oh bridegroom whose face is precious we Everything desirecomes fromGod Inthe comingyearwe will gaina son. 10. Howgreatis myjoy Now the tearshaveceased We aregoingto removeall the sorrow thatwe have knownforso long oh [unclear] Murad It'sas ifthe dead havearisen. 11. Oh partridge walkswithtinysteps who on the banksof the river Thehunters followedit butno one could catchit. Thosewho got it arethe AtXaled A familyof honor. 12. Iamwalkingon the plain Thelavender in bloom is the [unclear] horsemen in a thunderous stampede Oh handsome groom,mountyourhorse, Go to the front theirranks, beautiful of oh bird.

12. Lehhuy lucdlucd yejjujegumezzir [unclear] amnayen s rrekba zzhir u a Murad serreji wacewdiw tezwired itbir ay

Read against verses that would be eliminated from consideration, the verses Ben selected take on new meaning. Although they almost exactly match some verses in the women's songs, Ben's verses were explicitly culled from dozens of "rejected"ones. Their selection thus contains within it a series of evaluations that imbue the chosen verses with new expressive value (Bakhtin1986), making them subtly double voiced. In sum, although Isefraappears to show minimal intertextualdistance from the village songs out of which it is inspired, it rests on a number of gaps in relation to the older texts. I suggest that it is in these intertextualgaps that a new "internalgaze" is emerging. This is constructed through sophisticated entextualization practices, starting

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with a radical rereading of the older texts that already announces a new relationship to them. Here, the women's texts are read against a contemporary notion of cultural values and are inscribed in a linear logic. Words are seen as detachable from one context and inscribable in another because their referents can be double voiced or overlaid with new expressive meanings. Not all words can undergo this operation, however. Some are so tainted by links to situations that are problematic from a secular modernist vantage point-women's sexuality, religion, foreign occupation-that they require suppression. Despite these importanttransformations,Idir'sIsefraresembles the older versions somewhat more than do other New Songs inspired by village repertoires. Some songs employ overt parody and hybrid juxtapositions, setting, for example, a traditional verse about the presumed power of local saints against the singer's critique of saint veneration (e.g., Idir and Ben's song Muhend-nney, discussed in Goodman 1998). Others imbue locally resonant words with larger meanings by embedding them in new semantic surrounds: The word tagmaf (brotherhood), for instance, which in village contexts can index patrilineal loyalty and its attendant rivalries, is set into a new frame (Idir1976, 1991) where it acquires a meaning of "universalbrotherhood"in Idir and Ben's song Cfiy (Goodman 1999). Finally, in relation to earlier collections, New Kabyle Song is distinctive in that the Berbertext stands alone, untranslated, but is set into a musical idiom that is both familiar and palatable to Western listeners. If the song texts are organized in part through French aesthetic concerns and the melodies rendered in Western scales and harmonies, New Kabyle Song is nonetheless immediately recognizable as "ours"to most Kabyles, for whom it serves as a vibrant symbol of the contemporary relevance of their culture. Here, Western forms have clearly been appropriated in the service of constructing a Berber cultural modernity that is, as Ben Mohamed put it, inherently "of our time." conclusion Through this brief metadiscursive history of Kabyle oral texts, I have sought to identify some of the ways in which oral texts have been variously constituted and made to serve in debates about Berberdifference at discrete historical moments. Poems-in a few cases, the same ones-have been alternately read as signs of Berber incivility or high culture, as traces of a pure and untainted precolonial past or as carriers of regressive social practices that need to be altered in order for Berberculture to enter modernity. All of the poems I examine in this article are considered traditional by their collectors in that they supposedly originate in the unmediated and transparent words of an Other located in that most pristine of sites, the Berber village.50This presumption both facilitates and masks the reorientation of the poems to divergent ideological horizons: the civilizing mission, liberalism, anticolonial nationalism, and postcolonial identity. In looking at the ease with which oral texts can be oriented to opposing agendas, I have foregrounded connections between genre, intertextuality, and ideology. Although genre is typically invoked as a neutral classificatory device, I have been inspired by recent work in linguistic anthropology that explores how genres can operate as fluid and mutable components of a society's metadiscursive landscape, providing an arrayof conceptual frames and narrativepossibilities through which perceptions of self, other, and world are mediated (see especially, Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hanks 1987; Kapchan 1996; see also Bauman 1992, 1993, 1995; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs1993a, 1993b; Briggsand Bauman 1999; Hanks 2000; Raheja 1996; Silverstein

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1996; Silverstein and Urban 1996). Of greatest interest here are the pragmatics of genre attributions-that is, when, why, how, and by whom a genre is invoked. Briggs and Bauman (1992) contend that in order to identify a situated text with a broader genre, both producers and receivers make an interpretive leap that depends not only on their knowledge of the genre's formal and stylistic features but also on their own positioning within particular historical, social, ideological, and political-economic contexts. They refer to this interpretive space as an intertextualgap, a term that describes the relative fit or lack of fit between a particulartext or performance and the broader genre or genres with which it is associated. Some intertextualstrategies minimize the gap, or the distance between a situated text (token) and its generic precedents (type); this tends to imbue a text with the authority associated with the genre. Other strategies maximize the gap, challenging the genre's authorityand perhaps furnishing an alternative vision. Selecting the genre to which a particulartext is linked is itself ideologically motivated: The same text can be construed as belonging to entirely different genres and thus made to serve opposing interests. Oral texts-taken as natural,seeming to belong to no one, yet available to everyone-provide especially potent sites for collectors to manipulate intertextualgaps in order to position themselves and their audiences in relation to those in whom the texts are allegedly located. Because the entextualizing strategies through which oral texts are constructed remain largely invisible, the texts can serve as ready receptacles of ideology and vehicles for self-constitution. The device of genre is an especially powerful means of orienting the poems ideologically. In virtuallyevery case, collectors invoked a genre that was not associated with local modes of ordering texts and then constituted the poems in relation to the conventions of that genre. They attempted, in other words, to minimize the gap between text and genre so as to promote particular interpretationsand to suppress others. A close analysis of their entextualization strategies, however, reveals not minimal but maximal gaps. In the interpretivespace where the collector tries to make the poetic text fit the genre to which it is assigned, the collector's own relationship to the colonial project becomes legible. Hanoteau invented his own genres ("political-historical"and "women's" poems) in which the goals of the civilizing mission were embedded; through genre, he sought to construct Berbers as an uncivilized Other against whom the French could define themselves and justify their presence. The strength of this generic orienting framework (Briggsand Bauman 1992; see also Bakhtin 1986) meant, among other things, that a women's poem that might be understood as political commentary within local generic conventions was resituated as a sign of Kabyle incivility. Boulifa entered this argument from the other side; although he did not invoke particularpoetic genres, he did set his poetry collection in relation to the classical civilizations of antiquity in order to illustratethe similarity between Berber and European civilizations. This presumed similarity disintegrates, however, in Boulifa's extensive subtext of footnotes. Both Jean and Taos Amrouche situated poems through the genres of Western literature,folklore, and classical music as they debated the relationship of Berberculture to universal civilization. Here, the poems became signs of a lost wholeness, and they served as a foil against which a new kind of otherness-one located within the self-could be articulated. Yet, this wholeness was imaginable only from a position of complex hybridity to which framing essays, genre attributions,poem titles, and performance practices give expression. Mammeri employed genre to restore to Berberpoetry a historicity lacking in previous accounts. If his historical periods and categories mimic European ones, the segmentation of his readership into two distinct audiences may signal an attempt to limit the power of the Other's gaze.

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Whereas in earlier works, intertextual relationships are located between the poems and their entextualizing surrounds (essays, footnotes, titles, and so on), the authors of New Kabyle Song enter into and interruptthe poetic text, retaining some ingredients but discarding others. Here, the authors' relationship to traditional poetry moves into the text, where it is articulated through a series of intertextualgaps in relation to the earlier poem that take the form of double-voiced utterances, erasures, or hybrid juxtapositions. Following Mammeri, Idirand Ben Mohamed sought to develop an "internal gaze" toward Kabyle Berber society. This gaze, however, is mediated through a world music genre that digests (Bakhtin 1986:62) and then refracts traditional poetry through a modernizing lens that incorporates some elements of culture while leaving others in its wake. This brief account reveals a long history of intertextualpenetration between Berber and European aesthetic categories-a history that has been denied by most collectors, who seek to read in the poems a realm of Berberauthenticity that is alternately cast as "spirit,""essence," or "identity." In order to make such claims, however, collectors put into play a range of metadiscursive strategies that ultimately reveal the limits of their efforts to define a realm of Berber difference-however variously that may be constituted. For in order to evoke a pure and unmediated Berber culture, the collectors displace poems from one genre and social field to another. The "Berber spirit"located in the poetic text emerges as dialogically constituted at the intersection of genre, intertextuality,and ideology. notes Acknowledgments. Researchin Algeriaand Francefrom 1992 to 1994 was generously Institute Maghribi for the Institute International of Studies, Fulbright supported the American by the the Education, SacharFoundation, SocialScience Research Council,andthe Wenner-Gren Foundation. rudimentary of this articlewas firstpresented the "Aftermath Empire" A draft at of seminarat the University Michigan-Ann of Arbor March14, 1997 underthe title "Colonial on RockStar." of Colonel,Missionary, Hybridities: Ethnologue, Specialthanksto the Institute AdvancedStudy to the seminar and NicholasDirks, Frederick and organizers-AnnStoler, Cooperforinvitingme to presentmywork,andto the seminarparticipants theirinsightful tolerfor and ant commentson my earlyattempt grapplewith this material. laterversionappearsin my to A dissertationas a chapterentitled "Collection:DiscursiveHistoriesof Berber'Oral Texts'" was in format the (Goodman1999, chapter3). Thematerial againpresented close to itspresent and the Construction Difference," of held at Ben GurionUniversity Context, workshop"Text, on of (Israel) May 16, 2000. Specialthanksto the Ben GurionDepartment MiddleEastStudies for hostingthisevent,to workshop for participants theirvaluablequestionsand comments,and for In and especiallyto SamKaplan his insight, encouragement, generosity. its long history,this articlehas benefitedfromclose readings CarolGreenhouse, Judith Irvine, Messick, by Brinkley RichardParmentier, SusanSlyomovics,three anonymousAEreviewers,and AEguest editor Barbara Baumanofferedwelcome encouragement just the Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Richard at to rightmoment.I am grateful BenMohamedforthe manyhourshe spentdiscussinghis poetry with me and to Idir talkingwith me abouthis songs. I also thankBoualemRabiafor his grafor cious assistanceon so manylevels.Anyremaining lapsesor lacunaearemy sole responsibility. 1. Correspondence fromMarchto October 1865 indicatesthat Hanoteaureceivedperof missionfromthe French Ministry Warto publishthiscollectiononly on the conditionthathe the had the refrain frommentioning the Ministry authorized publication. that Moreover, Ministhat becauseof right trydid not grantauthorization away,fearing the timingwas notopportune unrestin the region(Fonds Ministeriels n.d.). oral 2. Othercolonialcollectionsof Kabyle Berber poetryinclude:H. Basset1920; R.Basset 1892; BenSedira1887; Layer 1899, 1900; and Rinn1887. Early 1913; Luciani postcolonial Mammeri collectionsinclude: 1969;Ouary1974; Savignac1964;and Nacibn.d. Kabyle poetry

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also features prominently in the more than one hundred volumes that the missionaries (White Fathers, or Peres Blancs) produced about Kabyle society between 1946 and 1975; see Lanfry 1974. See also Ait Ferroukh 1994 and Mahfoufi 1991. Kabyle Berbers inhabit the Djurdjura mountain region on Algeria's northernMediterraneancoast to the east of Algiers. For locations and sizes of Berber-speaking populations in North Africa, see Brett and Fentress 1996, and Chaker 1989a. In this article, I employ two terms of reference: Kabyles (or Kabyle Berbers)and Berbers. In employing Berbersas a stand-alone term, Ido not mean to elide the importantdifferences between Berber speaking regions. Rather,I follow both historical and contemporary usage, in which Berber speakers from different regions may identify themselves alternately as "Berber"or through an indigenous term of self-referral.I do not employ the newer term of selfreference Imaziyen (which evokes a transnationalBerber-speakingcommunity alleged to share a common language and history) because it does not figure in the works I examine. Although both Idirand Ben Mohamed do use Imaziyen in some songs, in conversation we always used the terms Berberor Kabyle Berber. 3. Thanks to Asif Agha for helping me to bring this convergence into focus. I am well aware that in focusing exclusively on collections of Kabyle Berberoral texts, I risk re-entextualizing several unfortunate associations. First,I may reconstruct the very association of Berbers with oral poetry that the works Iexamine help to produce. Second, I may unwittingly reinforce a separation between Berbersand Arabsthat a comparative analysis of collections of their poetry could help to mitigate. Finally, in highlighting the Berber-Frenchrelationship, I do not take into account the intertextualitiesthat are no doubt found between Berberand Arab oral texts; nor do I consider poetry collections from other Berber regions of North Africa. Although my focus in this article is motivated in part by the limitations of my own linguistic and ethnographic expertise, I hope to address these importantconcerns in futureresearch. Moreover, in highlightingthe shifting and contradictory relationships between claims of transparency and constructions of difference across a 130-year collection history, I skirtequally compelling issues that a longer study would allow me to pursue. A more extended engagement with each collection would no doubt reveal additional complexities and ambiguities vis-a-vis the colonial situation that cannot be addressed in this article. 4. The relationship between cultural texts and constructions of identity has been a central concern since at least the time of Herder. See Bauman and Briggs 1999 for an insightfuldiscussion of the language ideology informing the work of Herder as well as references to Herder's work and to furtherHerder scholarship. 5. See, however, Appadurai's(1996) study of the transformation cricket in colonial India. of 6. Works I consider include: Poesies populaires de la Kabylie du Jurjura(Popular Poems from Kabylia of the Djurdjura [mountains]), produced in 1867 by the aforementioned Hanoteau; Recueil de poesies kabyles (Collection of KabylePoems), a response to Hanoteau's collection published by Kabyle schoolteacher Si Ammar Ben Boulifa in 1904 and reprinted in 1990; Chants berberes de Kabylie (1939 text rereleased in 1988, and sound recording released in 1966) by two Kabyle Christian intellectuals raised in Tunisia, brother and sister Jean and Taos Amrouche; and Poemes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle Poems), the 1980 poetry collection of novelist and ethnologue Mouloud Mammeri. In organizing my account around the published collections of a series of creative agents, my intention is not to provide a literaryhistory of Berber poetry collection. Rather, I draw on the works of these individuals to build a biography of texts and textual forms that brings into focus the ways metadiscursive strategies are implicated in wider social agendas. Moreover, in highlighting these arenas, I do not suggest that the poetry and song collections should be understood as simply reflections or expressions of shifting ideological or intellectual currents (see Stoler and Cooper 1997:16). Rather,I take these collections as "productsof socially, politically, and historically constituted processes of discourse production and reception" (Briggs 1993b:420; see also Silverstein and Urban 1996). These processes emerged through the ongoing, sometimes tentative effortsof specific, historically positioned individuals to situate themselves in relation to a range of colonial others (including previous collectors) as well as to the societies they called their own. 7. The French conquest of Kabylia, a mountainous, Berberophone region in northeastern Algeria, took place in 1856-57, 25 years afterAlgiers was captured from the Turks.

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8. In1859, afterhavingservedfor 13 yearsin the Bureaux Arabesin Algiersand Medeah, Hanoteauwas nominatedto head the Bureau Arabein the Kabyletown Dra-el-Mizan (Gouvernement of generalealgerienn.d.).Therehe soughtto developa betterunderstanding Kabyle lawsand customsin orderto further abilityof the French communicate the to withthe natives. to these years,Hanoteaufrequently visAccording his son, who accompaniedhisfather during ited outlyingvillages,where "thelocals, verytalkative," were "happy speakwith a military to officer"(Hanoteau1923). In 1860, Hanoteaurelocatedto Fort-Napoleon, the heartof in wherehe remained until1862. Hissuperior Daumas,withwhom he workedinAlgiers, Kabylia, had also writtenextensivelyon Kabylia the positionof Algerianwomen (Daumas1855, and 1971; Daumas and Fabar1847; on Daumas'swork on women, see also Revue Africaine 1857-58, andClancy-Smith 1996, 1998). 9. Thisworkis best knownforitsattempt systematize to law Kabyle customary withinthe rationalized framework the NapoleonicCode. Extensive of footnotesprovidea fascinating subtext:Foreach Kabyle its withinthe NapoleonicCode. law, Hanoteaureferences counterpart 10. Prior and in the earlydaysof, French in transcribed Berber to, colonization,foreigners Arabiccharacters. for example,the translation transcription partof the Gospel of and of See, SaintLuke(SocieteBibliqueBritannique Etrangere et romanalphabettranscrip1833). Later, tionswere added:Boththe firstgrammar the Berber of de 1844) and language(Venture Paradis Hanoteau's1858 grammar On manuprovideArabicand French transcriptions. early Berber see 1988 andVanDen Boogert 1997. scripts, Ould-Braham 11. All translations fromFrench English fromBerber English my own, unless to or to are otherwiseindicated. 12. Theexceptionis Lament Dahman-ou-Mecal; my commentary for see below. 13. Sometimes, is explicit:Hanoteau this saysthatPoem2 in Part3 ("women's poems")is a male attempt reconstruct women's poem aboutsorcery(1867:308 n. 1). In most cases, to a to however,women'spoemsaresimplyattributed men-such as poem 18 (1867:405),laterrecordedby the popularfemale singerCherifa stillpartof a female repertoire; Mecheriand see Saada1979. 14. Bornto a marabout familyof modestmeans,Boulifa,orphanedearlyin life,was sent an uncleto Kabylia's publicschool, established 1875. He latertaughtprimary in first school by and, beginningin 1890, beganto teach the Berberlanguageat secondaryschool (EcoleNorat of male)and subsequently the university Algiers.Inadditionto the volumeof poetryconsidered here,Boulifa's worksincludetwo Kabyle of books,a history the Kabyle grammar region,a collection of Berbertexts from Morocco'sAtlas Mountains,and numerousarticles.Chaker 1987b providesa full listof Boulifa's and matepublications furnishes previouslyunpublished rialby Boulifa. 15. On locatingthe colonized Otherin relation Europe's to past,see Fabian1983. 16. Boulifa's in 1904. workwas originally published 17. Forexample,a line fromHanoteau's corpusreads,"Do not take a woman fromyour about this (1867:257).Boulifa interprets as a statement village,she will makeyou too unhappy" women's power, in that men's happinessdepends on how women manage the household (1990:59). 18. Boulifaexplainsthatthe poems were collected by studentsand otheryoung people them by reading themto the poet fromthe villageof Adni,andthathe thentriedto authenticate himself(in a few cases)or to those who knewthe poet well. He relegatedto Part2 the poems See thatcould not be authenticated, alongwith poemsfromotherauthors. Boulifa1990:67. in in 19. Jeanmadethisstatement an interview Tuniswiththe publication Afrique-Action, sont culturels suis culturel.Leshybrides 13, February 1961. Thefullquote reads:"Je un hybride maisdes monstressans avenir.Je me considere des monstres.Des monstres interessants, tres donc comme condamnepar I'Histoire am a culturalhybrid.Cultural [I hybridsare monsters. monsters,but monsterswithouta future.I thus consider myselfto be conVery interesting demnedby History]." 20. JeanAmrouche'smajorbooks of poetryinclude Cendres(1983a) and Etoilesecrete in and (1983b).Hiscollectedwritings radioworkarereferenced Faigre1985:177-188. He also wrote extensivelyon the colonial experience;Amrouche1994 reproducesthese texts. Taos

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Amrouche's novels include: Rue des Tambourins (1960); Jacinthe noire (1972b); L'Amant imaginaire (1975a). She also published Le Grain magique: Contes, poemes, proverbes berberes de Kabylie (1979), which appeared originally in 1966. Her recordings of Berbersongs include: Chants berberes de Kabylie (1966; winner of the Grand prix de I'Academie du disque francais); Chants de procession: Meditations et danses berberes (1968a); Chants de I'Atlas:Traditions millenaires des Berberes de I'Algerie (1971); Incantations, meditations et danses sacrees berberes (1974); Chants berberes de la meule et du berceau (1975b); and Taos Amrouche au Theatre de la Ville (1977). She also recorded traditional Spanish songs on Chants espagnols archaiques de LaAlberca (1972a). Fora full list of her publications, see Institutdu Monde Arabe 1994. 21. See "Livres:Rue des Tambourins."In Afrique Action, December 5, 1960, reproduced in Institutdu Monde Arabe 1994:73. 22. Of course, the belief that some languages [i.e., French] were universal while others were not was also part of the broader metadiscursive ideological landscape informingJean's work. 23. Urban's "transduction"carries a sense that exact replication is the goal; a more general term such as "recontextualization"(Bauman and Briggs 1990) need not imply an intent of replication. 24. As her extraordinaryautobiography testifies (F. Amrouche 1988), jean's mother experienced profound alienation from and marginalization within her native Kabylia.A child born out of wedlock in a society where civil status and moral stature are conveyed through paternal lineage, Fadhma At Mansour (1882-1967) had no choice but to enter the mission schools at the age of four; at age 1 7, she converted to Christianity.Her literacy skills-rare for a woman at the time-allowed her to serve in the highly unusual function of a female public scribe. Aftermarrying a Christianman, she spent 40 years outside of her country, in Tunisia. There she penned her life story as well as several original poems. 25. See Bendix 1997 fora historyof the concept of authenticityin folkloreand anthropology. 26. Taos discusses the 95 prototypes in Amrouche 1968c. According to a representativeof SACEMwith whom I spoke in 1994, she registered these songs with the agency in the early 1960s. I believe the songs would have been declared in the public domain but cannot verify this. Transcriptionswere by French ethnomusicologists Yvette Grimaud and Georges Auric. At the time Taos was working, there was no Algerian copyright agency. 27. This article was reprinted in Institutdu Monde Arabe (1994:89). 28. These songs also appear in print (French translation only) in either Jean's 1939 work (reprinted in 1988) or Taos's 1966 collection, Le grain magique: Contes, poemes, proverbes berberes de Kabylie (reprintedin 1979). Legrain magique: Contes, poemes, proverbes berberes de Kabylie provides stories, poems, and proverbs in French translation only, with very limited metacommentary (a two-page prologue situates them in relation to such collections as the Mother Goose rhymes). 29. In one example, when AmmarArab played a cassette of Taos Amrouche's singing to a Kabyle hitchhiker, the hitchhiker was shocked to learn that the song was from Kabylia.As Ammar remembered it, the hitchhiker firstasked, "Whywould you think I should understandthis?" On learning from Ammar that the song was in Kabyle, he said, "No, that isn't Kabylethat she's singing. People don't sing like that in Kabyle." 30. In France, Jean Amrouche's Chants berberes de Kabylie was released in 1988 by in L'Harmattan conjunction with Awal. AfterMammeri'suntimely death in a 1989 car accident, his student Tassadit Yacine continued to reedit older volumes (including Boulifa's 1904 collection) as well as to produce anthologies of the works of more recent Berber poets and singers such as Ait Menguellat, Cherif Kheddam, and Nouara. See Yacine 1990a, 1995a, 1995b. 31. Published in France, the book has never been officially available in Algeria. Collecting poetry was only one of Mammeri's multiple culturalengagements: With a background in letters, he was a university professor of literary studies and a novelist. Born in the Kabyle village TaourirtMimoun (AtYenni), Mammeri migratedwith his family to Morocco at age 11, where he began a classical education, continued four years later in Algiers. Inspiredby the study of Greek and Latin,Mammeri began writing down the Berberpoems he heard: "Ifelt that writing Berber

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verse was like Homer, who had composed the Iliadand the Odyssey" (Yacine 1990b:76). Mammeri was also imbued with the poetry of his father and uncle; according to Mammeri, the latter claimed to be able to recite 72,000 lines of Arab poetry (Yacine 1990b:76). His father, Mammeri recalls, knew Waterloo, but "didn'tconsider Victor Hugo and Waterloo any different from [Kabyle poet] Youssef ou Qaci" (Yacine 1990b:77). From 1969 to 1980, Mammeri directed Algeria's major ethnological research center, the Centre de Recherches Archeologiques, Prehistoriques, et Ethnologiques (Center for Archeological, Prehistoric, and Ethnological Research was one of the only cen[CRAPE]). Although Mammeri was not trained in the field, the CRAPE ters where the study of Berber language and culture was tolerated-albeit under the guise of or "prehistory" "ethnology"-in independent Algeria. Committed to developing the Berber language as a modern instrumentof communication, Mammeri continued work on a transcription system in the roman alphabet, produced a grammar of Kabyle Berber (Mammeri 1986) and a dictionary of neologisms (Mammeri 1973), and taught an unofficial Berber language course at the University of Algiers from 1965 until 1972 when it was halted by the government (many singers and songwriters, including Ben Mohamed, learned to write Kabyle Berber in this course). A lifelong collector of Berber verse, he published a volume of the works of the late 19th-century poet Si Mohand-ou-Mhand in 1969. In 1980, the infamous title Poemes kabyles anciens (Old Kabyle Poems) was released. 32. The potential crowd had been estimated at 10,000, but the demonstration was officially cancelled by French authorities (Chaker 1982:421). Although the events of 1980 constituted the first significant Berber uprising in independent Algeria, the rise of Berber consciousness began earlier in the century. See Ouerdane 1990, for a history of Berber participation in the Algerian anticolonial nationalist movement. See also Chaker 1989a: chapter 2. 33. Forfull press coverage of the events of 1980, see Imedyazen 1981. 34. The theories of North African social organization Mammeri draws from are: Ibn Khaldun's (1925) pendulum model; the alleged makhzen-siba (center-periphery)phenomenon (Montagne 1930); and Gellner's (1969) segmentary theory. 35. According to Ben Mohamed (personal communication, September 17, 2001), Muhed Azwaw is not an individual but a symbolic figure who represents Kabylia. Ben furtherinformed me that the name Azwaw comes from the same root as Igawawen, the name of a large region of Greater Kabylia (See Dallet 1982:280-281). 36. A list of festival participants, guests, and observers can be found in Societe Nationale d'Editionet de Distribution 1969:193-208. 37. Festival publications are liberally peppered with quotations from the anthropological literature,but they also critique anthropology's links to colonialism and its use of an "an unscientific cultural pluralism"to "dilute"issues of historical materialism, class struggle, and cultural imperialism. See Revolution Democratique Africaine 1970:23-25. 38. The phrase "new man" was employed extensively in postcolonial Africa to describe a desire to create new "mentalities,"or ways of seeing the world, in the aftermathof colonial rule. The phrase can be found in the writings of a diverse range of authors, from Fanon, who discusses a "new type of man" (1963:241), to national ministers of information or culture. For example, Algerian Ministerof InformationMohamed S. Benyahia used the phrase in his inaugural speech at the FirstPanAfrican Cultural Festival (Societe Nationale d'Edition et de Distribution 1969:53). 39. Portions of the previous paragraphare drawn from Goodman 1998. 40. Ben drew on some of these texts in 1976, when he coauthored (anonymously) an article as partof ongoing debates about Algeria's Charte Nationale (National Charter).See Bulletin d'etudes berberes 1976. 41. The documentary was later turned into a commercial video, Rampartsof Clay (Bertucelli 1970). This movie was filmed in Algeria but never shown there (Etienne and Leca 1975:65). The movie's soundtrack features songs by Taos Amrouche; there is no dialogue. 42. Chaker connects New Kabyle Song to earlier Kabyle poetry by situating it within a "traditionof resistance and struggle" that characterized "a dissident society" (1989b:1 1). He does not look specifically at collection processes.

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43. Isefrawas released in 1976 on EMI/Pathe Marconi (Idir1976) and in 1991 on Blue Silver (Idir1991). Both albums are titled Avava Inouva, but their contents are not identical. An earlier analysis of this song is found in Goodman 1999. 44. The song also circulates in the missionary literature;see Yamina 1960, 1961. 45. Tanina (Versel, line 4) is a mythical female birdwho chose from among all the birds to mate with an eagle, who was the strongest. See Mammeri 1980:226-257 and Genevois 1964. 46. I found the line "Iam walking in the fields" in what women presented to me as a traditional poem, and it also occurs in Yamina 1961:115-117. Ben may have heard this line and substituted it here; often, he said, he could no longer tell what was his and what was traditional. 47. In discussing why Ben removed the reference to fear, I told him that I had been struck how afraid Kabyle women were of walking alone in the fields outside the village. He counby tered that the women were afraidwhether or not the lavender was blooming, so there was no relationship. In explaining the next two lines to me, however, he acknowledged that the horsemen made a lot of noise and that the noise could produce fear. 48. Not all listeners, of course, interpretthe new verses in the same way. See Goodman 1998 for an account of how some old women restore religious phrases when they sing along with Idir'ssongs. 49. Elsewhere (Goodman 1999, chapter 6) I show how my interpretationof Ben's relationto women's texts unfolded temporally and as part of a dialogical process. I now recognize ship that in looking exclusively at the textual elements of women's songs, Iextracted them from their contexts of production much as had earlier collectors. 50. On constructions of the Berber village as idyllic chronotope, see Goodman 1999, chapter 4.

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