Idir’s Music and the Encounter of Globalism: Hybridity and the Aesthetic of Dissent

M Kamel Igoudjil
DCPS English Educator

Abstract: This article examines the main contribution of Idir, a pivotal figure in the Kabyle culture. He is globally acclaimed as a songwriter and singer, and he represents one of the counterculture's poetic voices from the nineteen seventies to the twenty-twenties in Algeria. His songs seek to unseat the mainstream establishment that seemed obsessed with conservative ideals and religious nationalism. Idir emerged onto the scene, ascertaining a dominant voice about the importance of Imazighen's (Berber) identity. His lyrics epitomize a counter-narrative that establishes the “true, authentic identity” of Imazighen. He empowers Imazighen with the notion of identity and heritage by allowing them to connect with culturally relevant songs. His lyrics create a collective consciousness about the Imazighen identity with a specific purpose to empower the foundation of one’s heritage and denounce any hegemonic discourse. This paper seeks to underscore Idir, the artist who exemplifies a hybrid of various forms of sonorities and genres, resisting the dominant discourse.

Keywords: Aesthetic of Dissent, Cosmopolitanism, Discourse, Folk Songs, Globalism, Hybridity, Idir, Kabyle, Tamazight.

This paper offers a brief study of the pivotal Kabylian folk singer Hamid Cheriet, known as Idir. He represents one of the counterculture's poetic voices from the 1970s to the present day in Algeria. His songs sought to unseat the mainstream establishment that seemed obsessed with conservative ideals and religious nationalism. Idir emerged onto the scene to assert a dominant voice about the importance of Imazighen (Berber) identity, and his lyrics epitomize a counternarrative that establishes the “true, authentic identity” of Imazighen.

Idir’s artistic talent advanced new modes of poetic expression and genre. His audience does not read the lyrics, though some may read them as a supplement to the oral text. However, Idir’s songs exemplify a hybrid of various forms of sonorities and genres. The notion of hybridity represents an ambiguous term in the postmodern era. This term has adopted a more elastic meaning that serves as a critique of binary, reified thinking about cultures and those who belong to them. It focuses on the dynamic complexity of the in-between space created by the interaction of the colonizers and the colonized. It is important to note that the French colonial encounters paved the way to the hybridity of the present. Acknowledging the complexity of the past helps us understand dynamic traditions, nationalism, and plurality. In this sense, Amazigh cultural hybridity is deeply marked by the colonial encounter, which included French political expansionism and the dissemination of its culture. While criticism has yet to study Idir’s work from a hybrid perspective, his lyrics and music reveal two types of narrative discourse: the importance of the oral tradition and the secular world. He wrote as a displaced artist––however connected he may have been by education, Idir scrutinized the marginalized socio-cultural predicament in postcolonial Algeria. Thus, situated in what Homi K. Bhabha referred to as a “Third Space,” he resisted the dominant culture by using social diversity to subvert its controlling structures. Idir’s song “Isfra” [Voyage], from his first album, A Vava Inou va [Father Inou va] (1991), denounces the postcolonial condition by attributing a dominant position to the subaltern. In “Isaltiyen” [The Celts] and “Twareg” [The Tuareg], from Les Chasseurs de lumières [The Hunters of Lights] (1993), he captures the palimpsest of different minorities who experience similar conditions, inspiring a continued fight that will persist into the future.

As a transnational, his experience in the city informed the storylines of all his lyrics, which paint the ambiguous compromise between the sense of self and identity discourses. These two spaces differ according to the aspirations and preoccupations of the Amazigh people. The city, however, symbolizes the gateway to modernity. Idir captured the Amazigh transition from rural and traditional society to an urban and modern one. In the album Idir: Deux rives, un rêve [Idir: Two Shores, One Dream] (2002), the lyrics' social and cultural dimensions present an ambivalent relationship between those who leave and those who stay. Curiously, Idir portrays a cosmopolitan space, a space that denotes a potential for contact, where people “previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures” might meet and their “trajectories now intersect” (Pratt 7). His songs underscore multiple dimensions of diasporic spaces.

The notion of hybridity is historically loaded—initially, it was associated with impurity. It was introduced in postcolonial discourse to challenge the essentialist models of culture and identity. In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha famously conceptualized the rejection of any idea's validity based on cultural authenticity. For Bhabha, the social reality of hybridity translates into liminal space or “Third Space,” wherein complex forms of identities are formulated:

It is only when we understand that all statements are systems constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or “purity” of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity. (Bhabha 54-55)

Bhabha’s argument resonates with Stuart Hall’s view that identity is experienced in terms of “dispersal and fragmentation,” or historical and cultural positioning:

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past. (Qtd. in Ashcroft 4)

Hall explains this divide by suggesting that cultural identity is not a fixed essence but rather a matter of positioning. Idir’s albums, particularly Identités [Identities] (1999) and La France des Couleurs [France of Colors] (2007), offer an exciting perspective on identity as a constant negotiation and re-enunciation of self. Idir’s persona, rooted in Amazigh identity, affirms itself in all his albums.

One aspect of Idir’s music transcends his global audience: the oral form that is hybrid turns out to be artistically rewarding for the audience in terms of aesthetic pleasure, which transforms many lives (Goodman 11). Interestingly, his songs serve as a poetic, avant-garde medium that resists the dominant discourse. He portrays various discourses––moral as well as lyrical––from social materials by exploring the complexity of Imazighen culture. Regarding political unity, Idir unified the Amazigh language and culture to produce a dialogic subversion of the political power as both an Algerian and transnational. He captured the intricacy of Kabylian society with the rapid economic and social changes it has been undergoing since the 1970s.

References:
Ashcroft, Bill. Postcolonial Transformation. Routledge, 2001.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Goodman, Jane. “Idir: A Personal Remembrance.” Amazigh Voice 22(1), 2020-2021, pp. 2, 11.

Idir. A Vava Inou va [Father Inouva] (Music CD). Blue Silver, 1991.

Idir. Les Chasseurs de lumières [The Hunters of Lights] (Music CD). Blue Silver, 1993.

Idir. Identités [Identities] (Music CD). Sony Music, 1999.

Idir. Idir : Deux rives, un rêve [Idir: Two Shores, One Dream] (Music CD). Sony Music Entertainment, 2002.

Idir. La France des couleurs [France of Colors] (Music CD). Sony BMG Entertainment, 2007.

Idir. Ici et ailleurs [Here and Elsewhere] (Music CD). Columbia, 2017.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992, p. 7.