Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video

4. Collecting Poems

4 Collecting Poems “What arms were found on you?” “Books.” —Kabyle prisoner of conscience during a trial, Tafsut 4 (March 1982) Collecting poems and proverbs, songs and stories, hardly seems like a political act. Yet for more than a century, indigenous texts have served as lenses through which Berber identity and difference have been construed. They have been put to the service of almost every military, political, or ethnographic initiative toward or by Berbers since the conquest of Kabylia in 1857, from civilizing missions to ethnographic enterprises to the development of nationalist and subnationalist aspirations. Ben Mohamed and Idir were able to imagine that a village story about a monster in the forest might be a place in which Kabyles could see their own re®ection, in part because oral texts (as anthropologists call them today ) had already served to showcase Berber culture for well over a century. The movement of so-called oral texts into new ideological spheres was made possible because of a deeply rooted belief in their purity and authenticity. In order for oral texts to be taken as signs of a collective Berber identity, they had to be understood as immutable objects whose essence traveled with them as they moved from performance to print. Collections of Berber poems and songs produced from the 1860s to the 1980s all share the premise that oral texts carry what has been variously termed the Berber soul,spirit,or (in contemporary parlance ) identity. This spirit could not be altered, collectors thought, by the supposedly neutral practices of collection, writing,or translation.Indeed,oral texts were 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 (Herzfeld 1996). Since oral texts were assumed to originate in their producers, the ways in which collectors participated in their construction could be easily camou®aged.The focus,in other words,was directed to the text itself as a preexisting cultural object, and not to the complex strategies through which it was recontextualized or recreated. Oral texts have thus been powerful and persuasive naturalizing devices. Through sophisticated rhetorical strategies that make the texts seem authentic, the broader interests that ¤rst motivated their collection are masked. A collector’s claim that poems provide transparent re®ections of an underlying native spirit is the very place where an investigation into the construction of difference should begin. Such a claim erases from the text the performance of the poet and the situation of collection. It also obscures the ways indigenous texts have been implicated in the development of wider social and political agendas. These include the French paci¤cation and civilizing missions of the mid-nineteenth century, European liberalism, nationalism, and postcolonial identity. Analyzing the entextualizing practices—that is, the framing essays, genre labels, titles,annotation practices,and translation strategies through which oral poetry has been rendered in print—can bring these agendas into focus. My interest lies not with the poetic text qua text but rather with the ways Berber poetry collections serve as repositories of social history and as locations where branching interconnections can be precisely tracked. Understood in this way, the history of Berber poetry collection tells a story of the Kabyle-French relationship. Despite signi¤cant differences among them, the poetry collections—including those produced by Kabyles—are remarkable for their orientation toward the metropole. Indeed, the French presence was woven into the collections themselves—not just in the explicit ideological discourse found in framing essays or introductions but also through the entextualizing practices outlined above. In foregrounding the Kabyle-French relationship , the volumes tacitly worked to divorce Berber and Arab poetic traditions from each other. This helped to set the stage for subsequent triangulations in which Berbers and Arabs could be linked only in hierarchical relationship to a These tables of books about Berbers, most dating from the period of French colonialism, were a popular display at the April 20 Cultural Exhibit in Tizi Ouzou in 1993. Today, Kabyles search these books for signs of their history. 98 Texts third term, “French.” Yet the fate of texts written to serve colonial agendas is not stable (Goodman 2002b). That the poetry collections were produced with particular objectives in mind is no guarantee that they will not be read against the grain. While my focus lies with the initial collectors, I also acknowledge the possibility of later appropriations...