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2 Refracting Berber Identities In 1973, the song A vava inouva1 (“Oh my father”) galvanized the Algerian population. Composed by a young, unknown musician who called himself Idir (“to live”), from a text penned by poet Ben Mohamed, A vava inouva is built around the sung refrain of a story told by old women throughout Kabylia. Idir’s song depicts a grandmother seated at the hearth,spinning tales far into the night as the snow falls outside. Idir harmonized the story’s familiar refrain on an acoustic guitar, using an arpeggiated chord style associated with popular western folk stars such as Joan Baez or Bob Dylan. The song literally stopped Algerians in their tracks. A friend from the capital city of Algiers reported seeing people walk backward down a department store escalator to hear it playing over the ground-®oor speakers. Nor did the song’s allure stop at the Algerian borders. A vava inouva was the ¤rst Algerian hit in Europe and the ¤rst to be played on French national radio, and it made the news in such prestigious French publications as Le Monde (Humblot 1978). It reached me in the United States in 1980—well before I imagined that I would one day visit the village where the song was born—when an Argentine friend living in Paris sent me a cassette of some of the most popular tunes on the Parisian airwaves. More than twenty years after its release, the opening notes could still produce a roar. When I heard Idir play at the Zenith Hall in Paris in November 1996, he turned this song over to the immigrant crowd, strumming his trademark accompaniment as 7,500 spectators sang the refrain by heart. A vava inouva’s effect on Kabyle Berbers was electrifying. The song engendered simultaneously a sense of deep recognition and a feeling of novelty. For many of the older women storytellers whose repertoire inspired the song, A vava inouva mirrored back to them their own practices: “When they hear the song, they see themselves,”as my language tutor put it.2 For postwar generations raised in Kabylia, the song produced a new form of cultural memory. Many of my interlocutors would tell me of how the song evoked the evenings they spent as children listening to their grandmothers’ tales, snow blocking the doors. For those raised in the diaspora, A vava inouva came to stand for the homeland, taking on the mantle of tradition that it purported to represent. The song also provided a subtle yet signi¤cant counterweight to the Algerian state’s discourse, which positioned Berber culture as backward and at odds with the state’s modernizing projects. A vava inouva enabled Kabyles to see themselves from an entirely new vantage point. Songwriter Ben Mohamed called this new way of seeing an “internal perspective” or an “internal gaze” (le regard intérieur), informed by neither the East nor the West but by indigenous modes of knowledge. It is the construction of this “internal gaze” that most interests me. Developing a socio-semiotic history of A vava inouva, I argue that the song worked as both palimpsest and prism. On the one hand, the new song wrote over the older women’s story in such a way as to enable the previous text to acquire new signi¤cance. Yet if the older text gained new visibility, it was also because A vava inouva worked in a refractive capacity. That is, it displayed the women’s story through the lenses of distant products, styles, ideologies, and circulation networks in a way that made the story—and “Berber culture” more generally—interpretable in an entirely new manner (cf. Feld 1996). In short, the song’s “internal gaze” was in fact a kind of bifocal vision, through which Berber culture was brought into new focus by being set in relation to distant geopolitical events and entities. This can be seen in four linked sites of discourse production and circulation to which the song was oriented: ethnographic projects, postcolonial rediscoveries of tradition , Algerian cultural politics, and an emerging market for what would come to be called world music. Ethnographic Projects: An Encounter with Duvignaud The Tunisian desert village of Shebika would seem an unlikely place to begin A vava inouva’s history. Seemingly bypassed by modernity, the village was falling apart when French sociologist Jean Duvignaud ¤rst visited it in 1960. Nondescript houses, their roofs collapsing, a cemetery with crumbling grave markers, a mosque, a saint’s...

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