L
he Kabyle singer, author of the world hit “A Vava Inouva” in 1976, died Saturday in Paris at the age of 70. Despite a long exile in France and militant Berberity which cut him off from the Arab-nationalist narrative, this Algerian embodies the history of a new country in search of union and success.
We know the propensity of Mediterranean societies to unite behind the dead. Mourning is the time of the truce. So you have to live, to have the pretext for peace, around the deceased. This day has come for Algeria and the Algerians. Idir, the Kabyle singer, is dead. He died Saturday in Paris of a lung disease unrelated to Covid-19, his family said. He was 70 years old. He was one of those artists marked by exile, like many of his listeners who pay tribute to him
He was a poet, a politely committed man, a defender of Berber culture, a critic of the military regime, a slayer of Islamists, a supporter of hirak, the democratic uprising started in early 2019 in Algeria. He conceived of identity as a part of yourself mixed with others. He sang fraternity, peace, made politics in his own way, in his albums, solo or with others. As after the victories of the Blues in the world football, as in 2007 when the debate focused in France on national identity.
He had taken the tangent in 1975, at the end of his military service. Direction Paris. Boumediene glorified Castro and Che while mistreating his Kabyle minority. The Algerian Revolution, born with the insurrection of 1954, had sunk into authoritarianism, the cult of personality. Idir was not a model of third worldism, nationalism, so present in the ideology of independence, had become for him synonymous of oppression.
Very little apparently was consensual, in Idir, of his real name Hamid Cheriet, born October 25, 1949 in Ait Yenni, in Grande Kabylie. This convinced Berber challenged the notion Arabity, one of the pillars of the Algerian nation. Today, however, he is fully recognized by this country which he had only seen in 2018, after thirty-eight years of absence. In a tribute to the missing, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said on Sunday that “Algeria [venait] to lose one of its monuments” Clever words that will appeal to the diaspora, made up of many binationals, a bit discredited in the last years of the Bouteflika era.
A song made Idir known far beyond Algeria and France, his second country. Written in Tamazigh, the Berber language, like almost all of his songs, it is called “A Vava Inouva”, “Mon petit papa”, in French. It is an ode to the father, to the family, to work, to simplicity, to hardness softened by love. It’s a lullaby.
When he came out in 1976, Idir had long hair and wore glasses, an air of intello, like quite a few text singers at that time. The melody, sometimes co-interpreted with the Kabyle singer Mila, is a spellbinding perfection. The tempo, the grain of voice, the accompaniment on the guitar reminds of Maxime Le Forestier at the same time. So-and-so who lived in Algiers before settling in France, remembers that as a child, his grandmother sang to him “A Vava Inouva” to help him fall asleep. Just thinking about it …
Idir, already, no longer belongs. It is now this post-mortem material that makes the icons. It becomes the property of the Algerians, and of many others, whether or not they shared his peaceful ideas. It embodies a history and a condition: the history of a new country, the condition of the Algerian. In particular that of the exile, sung before him, differently, by Slimane Azem, another Kabyle. But Idir undoubtedly has an additional modernity in him, in the sense that he did not arouse resentment, even to his defending heart, resentment in particular towards France. He was beyond any nationalism, any camp, displayed himself with Jewish musicians, had sung in Berber with Enrico Macias, unloved by a part of the Franco-Maghreb people for his support for Israel. But the main thing was not elsewhere, in universality music, as well as in this Algerianity where the Jews have their place?
Tributes are raining. Atheists, believers, secularists, Islamo-leftists, Zionists, anti-Zionists, centrists, extremists, apolitics, the union around Idir is made of everything. The legendary Zinedine Zidane, a Kabyle who presented the most beautiful football in the colors of France, went there with his word:Sad news, today we have just learned of the disappearance of a man we deeply love, a courageous man and an example! You marked my childhood as a family. I will never forget our meeting. Rest in peace.“
Idir has become the “little daddy” he sang a long time ago.
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