Djamila Debeche - Leila, A Young Girl from Algeria (novel)

 

 

 

 Djemila Debeche (1926-2010) was born in Aïn Oulmene (Setif), Algeria, on 30 June 1926. She became early on an activist in defense of women's rights in Algeria. She was a radio journalist from 1942. In 1947, she launched a feminist monthly magazine. In that year, she also published her first novel, Leïla, jeune fille d'Algérie. The main character is like the author, is originally from the Sahara (the origin of her maternal family, about which Debeche spoke to the Algerian novelist Taos Amrouche in a radio interview here.

She continued to publish essays about the need for Algerian girls to go to school as early as 1950, when Algeria was still held back by French colonisation. In 1955, she released her second novel Aziza. Both novels are today impossible to find. 

 

Djemila passed away in 2010, forgotten by most.

 

Zeinab Laouedj - The Palm Tree (poem)

 

Algerian poet Zeinab Laouedj was born in 1954, in Maghnia (Tlemcen).  She writes in Arabic and is translated in French (all be it seldom). I have not found her translated in English.

The latest French translation of her work I've found is in this collection of texts by Algerian writers and poets called Paroles d'Algériens : Ecrire pour résister dans l'Algerie du XXè Siècle (2003).

In the above collection, you can find her poem 'Le Palmier' [The Palm Tree] dedicated to Abdelkader Alloua, the Algerian playwright assassinated on 10 March 1994, and to the poet Youcef Sebti assassinated on 27 December 1993:

"Mon pays	My country
Je suis un Lion	I am a Lion
Et je vous ferai trembler	And I will make you tremble
Jusque dans vos forêts	Up til your forests
Moi le Fou	Me, the Crazed
Fou par amour de sa patrie	Mad for the love of his land
Où nul fou	Where no other madman
Ne me ressemble	Resembles me
Ma	My
Stature	Stature
Est grande	Stands tall
Votre	Your
Tombe	Grave
Ne peut	Cannot
La contenir ...	Contain it…
La terre tourne	The earth turns
Même allongé	Even lying
Je	I
Suis
Dressé	Rise
Tel	Like
Un	A
Palmier	Palmtree
Dans	In
L'humus	The soil
De la terre."	Of the earth.
Zineb Laouedj	(Eng. trans. by Nadia Ghanem)

Zeinab Laouedj is married to Algerian novelist Waciny Laredj.  If you are in Algiers, you can find her poetry collections in the Librairie du Tiers-Monde (at the very bottom of the "Algerian Lit in Arabic" section, at the very back of the "poetry in Algerian" section , above the dust).