The Algerian singer Idir, who was one of the main ambassadors of Kabyle song around the world and the interpreter of the famous “A Vava Inouva”, died Saturday at the age of 70. We are republishing this interview he gave us in 2008 when he came to Lorient interceltic festival.
Redneck. “I feel close to the Bretons because, like them, I felt despised at one time. I consider myself to be a “redneck,” a son of a shepherd, born 59 years ago in the mountains of Kabylia. At that time, there was no high school in my house, so I came to Algiers to continue my studies. And this is where I suffered the first quarrels of my classmates. They laughed because I rolled the “r”, because they were city dwellers and I was a country man; because they listened to “refined” music, French or English varieties. But I was lucky, at that time, to meet a French cooperant who taught me some “modern” chords on the guitar. Music was in me because it has always been part of my daily life. I started to create new sounds from Kabyle rhythms, and it worked from the fire of God. The funny thing is that the people who took my guitar from my hands because I was doing “native music” then tried to find Kabyle origins. You can imagine my revenge! “
Kabyle and Breton heart. “I really like Brittany, I feel so much at home here. I cannot forget that it was this region that welcomed me for the very first time as an artist. It was the time of big shows in Brest and demonstrations in Plogoff. It was also in Brittany that I met my wife, Alicia, twenty years ago, during a concert in Ploufragan, near Saint-Brieuc. Bretons and Kabyles, we have so many affinities! Here, I remember, I was in a barracks in Algeria where I was performing my national service. We were six or seven in the room and we listened to the radio. Suddenly, we all jumped out of our beds when Alan Stivell’s first concert was broadcast at the Olympia: who was this Kabyle who is not Kabyle, but who sang in a way that was so familiar to us? “
Identity. “Breton belongs to the Celtic world as Kabyle belongs to the Berber world. Your cousins are the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh … Ours are called Chleuhs, Touaregs … With us, in our songs and our poetic imagination, we refer to the mountain, like you to the ocean. You have the bombarde and the biniou, we have wind instruments that look like them, probably because, at the start, all were cut from the same reed. The Celts were great travelers, the Berbers too. The proof is that many Bretons have married Kabyle women, Kabyle to Breton women, and all these little people live today on both sides of the Mediterranean. But what brings Bretons and Kabyles even closer is the rebellious side and the quest for cultural and linguistic identity. Paradoxically, here, Breton culture has many means of expression through festivals like that of Lorient, by the media too, which is less the case for us. But when Kabyle is spoken everywhere in Kabylia, here we mainly speak French. So, when I come to sing in Carhaix for the 30th anniversary of the Diwan schools, it is a normal, logical process, of friendship and support. I believe that there are cultures that are more endangered than others. The important thing, in my eyes, is neither to stifle them nor, on the contrary, to impose them, it is simply to let them express themselves. After … it will be up to children born to these cultures to show whether they want to support them or not. “
He will live! “My real name is Hamid Cheriet. But many Kabyles have the first name Idir, which means “he will live”. It was women who gave it to their children at a time when there were no hospitals, no health care, with epidemics ravaging populations and attacking newborns first. Their parents then called them Idir, in the hope that their little ones would escape the scourges. So I naturally chose this stage name, because I want and need my culture to live. “
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