Poetry
إلياذة الجزائر
Not translated into English
Moufdi Zakaria · 1972
Synopsis
One thousand and one verses that go back through the country's past, from the Numidian kingdoms to the conquests, from the rural revolts to the war of liberation, in one hundred stanzas that name the places, the tribes, the saints and the fighters. The poet addresses time itself, stops it and questions it about vanished peoples, then compares his country to the nations of old.
Context
The commission came from Mouloud Kacem Naït Belkacem, minister of religious affairs, who wrote to the poet at the beginning of 1972; the poet accepted at once, then found himself facing historical material that an exile could not gather alone. Naït Belkacem from Algiers and the Tunisian historian Othman Kaak from Tunis supplied him with the facts. The count is exact and meant to be so: one hundred stanzas of ten lines, the third having eleven. The text was recited the same year before the seminar on Islamic thought, in Algiers, and it was this public reading, not a bookshop, that made it known.
Who it is for
About a thousand lines of classical Arabic, never translated. It helps to know that the poem assumes the whole history of the country to be familiar, that it enumerates as much as it narrates, and that it is recited more than it is read.
Prizes and reception
The text has become the school monument of national history, learned by heart and recited in public for half a century.