Écrits berbères en fragments
by Mohand Saïd Lechani

 Reviewed by Walid Bouchakour
Trinity College

Mohand Saïd Lechani, Écrits berbères en fragments. Édition bilingue français-kabyle, Méziane Lechani & Kamal Naït Zerad (éds), Geuthner, Paris, 2024, 248 pp.

For lack of a better chronology, Mohand Saïd Lechani (1893-1985) is often classified in the prestigious yet vague category of “precursors” of Berber Studies and activism in Algeria. However, reading his writings collected in Écrits berbères en fragments, we realize that his trajectory and productions spanned the century. His multiple interventions chart the evolution of Amazighness as formulated from Algeria. Lechani would be well placed among the Indigenous intellectuals in contact with colonial ethnography as well as counted among the great postcolonial Berber Studies scholars. In effect, he was a student of Saïd Boulifa at the École Normale Supérieure in Algiers under French rule and transmitted his work in linguistics and pedagogy to Mouloud Mammeri, contributing to the activities of the CRAPE (the Anthropological, Prehistoric, and Ethnographic Research Center) in postcolonial Algeria. His career’s trajectory outlines the awakening of a decolonial consciousness, expressed from within an indigenous experience and culture. The collection of texts edited and annotated by his grandson Méziane Lechani, recently published by Geuthner, offers important insights into the Algerian Amazigh Movement—called the Berberist movement—and its historical evolution, across both very specific Kabyle questions and potential transnational connections.

Méziane Lechani’s preface provides an excellent biographical overview, informed, precise and instilled with filial admiration, showing how Mohand Saïd Lechani assumed the dual mission of teacher and activist. Sharing an experience common to many Amazigh intellectuals, the systemic injustices suffered by his people under colonialism, later the marginalization of Amazigh identity in postcolonial nation-states, pushed him to become an activist in spite of himself. As a teacher, Lechani’s career started in 1912 and was marked by his criticism of segregation of the French colonial  education system. This job and the repercussions of two world wars forced him to travel several times—opportunities he used to broaden his knowledge of different Amazigh-speaking regions in Algeria as well as in Morocco, where he studied the Ntifa dialect. Inspired by his first stay in Morocco in 1920, he authored an interdialectal lexicon comparing Kabyle words (from his native region of Irjen) with words in Moroccan Tamazight, which is reproduced in the appendix to Écrits berbères. His “Considérations et commentaires à propos du sens et la morphologie des mots dans le parler des Irjen,” based on his intimate knowledge of the Kabylia region, also benefited from his ability to travel transnationally. This text includes specific examples of obscure expressions that gain meaning via transregional comparison of dialects.

Mohand Saïd Lechani could be said to have formulated his views on the Amazighness of the Maghreb in a straightforward and consistent manner very early. The collection opens with a 1926 text he penned on the notion of a common Amazigh spirit, “L’âme berbère.” Four years before the centenary of the French invasion, Lechani undertook to enumerate and refute the colonial clichés about Amazigh people. He also expressed his views in competition with Pan-Arabist perspectives during this period of rich critical production on the part of Algerian intellectuals. In this article, he affirmed that the Berber Spirit comprised all the indigenous populations of North Africa, regardless of the state of conservation of their languages and traditions: “Despite the various foreign invasions, Berber customs and traditions have therefore been preserved almost intact almost everywhere, but especially in those elevated spaces where the influence from outside has not been accentuated—Djurdjura, Aurès, Grand Atlas, Rif, Middle Atlas, M'zab, etc.”

The texts from the period when Lechani edited and contributed to La voix des humbles (a monthly magazine initiated by the association of Algerian Indigenous teachers) carry the marks of  the affirmation of Amazigh identity outlining a distinct political horizon (La plus vieille des démocraties mondiales). At the same time, he formulated a critical perspective onto his own society (Çofs et vengeance, la notion de l’honneur). Even in the texts in which the reader may sense nostalgic undercurrents (Le bon vieux temps), there is a genuine expression of a situated knowledge (Lorsque j’étais enfant/Asmi Meẓẓiyeɣ). Lechani did not shy away from confronting the multiple challenges engendered by social change. We encounter this thoughtful criticality, for example, in La Femme Kabyle, a text presented at a conference in 1937, in which he sought to demonstrate the advantageous position of women in Kabyle society. While recognizing a range of inequalities between men and women, he underlined the urgent need for cultural and economic reforms to improve the Amazigh populations’ material living conditions and their access to education.

Evolving within the leftist circles of his time, Lechani anchored his reflections within a strong materialistic approach, not only regarding social and political questions but also in his interpretation of Kabyle traditions and culture. The brief but dense text entitled Les portes de l’année/Tiwwura Ussegg°as pursued anthropological approaches to analyzing the organization of time and space in Kabyle society. As early as 1963, the author formulated the importance of an indigenous positionality in the study of Amazigh culture:

Inutile de trop s’appesantir sur les travaux plus ou moins suspects de savants occidentaux sur ce point. Seuls les Algériens eux-mêmes, en travaillant à comprendre le sens des symboles et des rites dont sont tissées nos traditions les plus anciennes, sauront mettre en relief, un jour, les vrais caractères de la pensée maghrébine.

The reader might find his radical rejection of Western works surprising, given Lechani’s collaborations with French Berberists including Emile Laoust and René Basset. But we must not underestimate the impact of the experience of decolonization and its effects on his perspective. Lechani had initially campaigned for reforming the colonial system, but when he joined the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) as a representative of Kabylia, he took up the cause of decolonization. It is not surprising that he expressed a radical critique of colonial knowledge in 1963, a few months following Algerian independence. This passage also reveals an inclusive perspective through a collective subject “we” identified as “Algerian,” while projecting a Maghrebi horizon. From the first year of independence, the problem of Berber cultural and linguistic affirmation within postcolonial nationalism arose.

In addition to their historical and political dimensions, Lechani’s texts reveal his talents as a poet and storyteller. Écrits Berbères en Fragments brings together creative translations of tales, proverbs, and anecdotes concerning the lives of important figures from Kabylia, such as the poet and mystic Cheikh Mohand-ou-Lhocine. A large part of the texts in this collection are in draft or fragmented form and could have benefited from longer introductory notes situating them in the author’s biographical and historical contexts to better appreciate their novelty and larger individual implications.

It is worth dwelling on the texts contained in the “Poèmes” section. In addition to poems collected by Lechani (one is drawn from the henna ceremony at weddings, and the other is an epic poem documenting the 19th-century popular insurrections against French colonization in Kabylia), the collection comprises seventeen poems written by Lechani himself. Composed in Rabat (Morocco) during the Algerian war of National Liberation (1954-1962), these poems convey the pain, revolt, and hopes of the author in a prosody and style reminiscent of isefra. Lechani drew on this poetic form to express the suffering caused by his estrangement from his family while also chronicling contemporary events. He sings the praises of freedom fighters, rejoices in the role of women in the struggle, while also commenting on specific events such as the 1957 assassination of Abane Ramdane in Tetouan in Morocco. The last poem, entitled “Tamurt” (the country), announces the internal dissensions of independent Algeria with an allegorical and enigmatic first verse: “Ttejra yurgan tafsut/ ḥesb-itt kan temmut/ Deg uẓar y tuɣ tiyita” / “The tree that dreams of spring/ Is as good as dead/ Its roots affected by evil.”

Lechani’s work illustrates the inextricability of poetry, research, and activism for Amazigh intellectuals engaged in the debates of their time and concerned by the fate of their people. One should recall that the spark that ignited the Berber Spring in 1980 was the cancellation of a conference on ancient Kabyle poetry by Mouloud Mammeri. In this regard, Lechani, then in his eighties, was intimately familiar with the productions of the Berber Cultural Movement in the wake of the popular uprising. An entire century of war, revolt, and political upheaval marked the author's career. These unstable conditions inspired a renewed self-reflexive questioning over the tools and approaches he used but also prevented him from consolidating his writings into a more developed oeuvre. But then again, this is the very point of this collection of “fragments”—offering an overview of the multiple projects, interventions, and key ideas that marked his career. Écrits berbères en fragments is a welcome addition that will enrich both the research on and the teaching of the Amazigh dimension of colonial and post-colonial Tamazghan societies