Idir in the Midwest of the US

Alek Baylee Toumi
University of Wisconsin, Stevens-Point

Abstract: Idir in the Midwest talks about how Algerian Kabyle singer Idir and Berber music came to be played on WORT radio station in Madison, WI, and in the Midwest of America.  This is also a humble acknowledgment and tribute to Idir and the generation of modern Kabyle singers, such as Imazighen Imula, Yugurthen and the feminist band, Djurdjura, who followed on Idir’s footsteps.

Keywords: A Vava Inou va, Berber culture, Kabyle music, Resistance, Imazighen (Free men), Indians of North Africa.

On Saturday, May 2, 2020, the Berber singer Hamid Cheriet, known as Idir, passed away at the age of 70. The Kabyle singer and musician came from the village of At Lahcène, At Yenni in Kabylia, the largest Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic in America, Spring 2020 was a very difficult semester from a professional point of view, as well as socially and intellectually. As a Professor of the French language and French and Francophone ​​literatures at the University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point, I started by teaching my classes normally. But with the coronavirus spreading at such high speed, we had to change mid-March, right at the start of spring break, and teach the second half of the semester online.  On Sunday, May 3, a week before the end of classes, I learned on the internet of the death of the singer Idir. Skeptical and quite suspicious, especially with the spread of fake news that had become constant on the internet, I contacted my old friend Hamid Djessas,[1] who confirmed the tragic news to me. Known in France, Europe, and Canada, Idir had less recognition in the United States—he had, however, been very well known throughout the 1980s in the Midwestern US, thanks to the radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Flashback

In 1977, Idir’s 33 rpm album A Vava Inou va was sold—miraculously—in Algeria.[2]  The following year, while an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I received this great album from a friend in Algiers, which arrived safe and sound. It wasn’t broken! After listening to it, many Algerians and Americans wanted a tape of the album and asked me to make a copy for them.[3]  Jim Haas, an American friend of mine who was the host of the international music program On the Horizon on the commercial-free radio station WORT,[4] started by playing songs by Idir on the radio, notably A Vava Inou va, Ssendu, and Zwit Rwit. Some time after listening to the whole album and relistening to A Vava Inou va several times, he said to me:

I do not understand the lyrics, but the music is so beautiful, the way Idir plays the guitar and sings, then how the woman joins him ... It’s great, amazing!

Even if Jim Hass did not understand the lyrics of the Kabyle songs, he liked this “humble and noble” music, as he said, so much that he decided to use A Vava Inou va as a “theme song” to start On the Horizon. The show was then aired on the WORT radio station Monday through Friday, every evening at 5 p.m., which is dinner time in the US, when there are many listeners.  Jim explained to his audience that Algeria was, of course, an Arab country, but that the natives—the first inhabitants—were the Berbers, and that their language and culture, more than two thousand years old, were different from the Arabic ones.  And that this song A Vava Inou va was inspired by a Kabyle tale and that the title could mean My Father, the Protector.  After six months, much of the University of Wisconsin, along with the city of Madison and surrounding areas, knew Idir through the program’s theme song. Listeners called regularly to ask if it was the soundtrack to a film and where they could get the album.

April 1980 and the Kabyle Spring

The ban on the Kabyle writer Mouloud Mammeri that prevented him from holding his conference on Ancient Kabyle Poetry was the spark that set off the powder kegon April 20, 1980.[5]  A series of demonstrations and strikes began at the University of Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Great Kabylia. After that came the turn for the universities of Algiers, then all of Kabylia, to go on strike. The students demanded the recognition of the Berber language and culture, which had been declared forbidden to exist.[6] Another friend, Walter Lane, who hosted the political-historical program World Views on WORT, invited us to do a program on The Berbers: History, Language and Culture, and on the Berber people, whom he considered to be “the Native Indians of North Africa.”[7] One of the consequences of this movement for the safeguarding and promotion of Berber culture was the development of Kabyle music, with the emergence of new singers and modern music bands. By wanting to definitively erase Berber culture, Le Pouvoir ended up exploding it, like a time bomb that had been just waiting to go off for too long.