Algeria: For Aziz Smati on Valentine’s Day
Karima Bennoune
Twenty years ago, on 14 February 1994, the Armed Islamic
Group sent a Valentine’s Day message of hate to Algerian performing artists and
the youth who loved them by gunning down Aziz Smati, beloved producer of the
local equivalent of MTV. His legendary show, Bled Music (Bled means “country”
or “homeland”), burst onto our screens in 1989 during a unique moment of
political opening in post-independence Algeria .
As the country lurched away from single party rule, and single party thinking,
the program was an intoxicating glimpse of what a truly North African freedom
could look and sound like. It featured unmistakably Algerian tunes introduced
in uniquely Algerian argot by the dreamy Samia Benkherroubi, a college student
who effused a very Algerian warmth from the small screen.
Meanwhile, the Muslim majority country’s late 80s democratic
experiment was exploited by fundamentalists who flourished in the petri dish of
instant multi-partyism and in the 90s declared a jihad against the entire
society that would kill as many as 200,000 people (and to which the state also
responded with further abuses).
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/k...
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/k...
Looking back at that period, Samia remembers that “We
thought our revolution was done. But we were had by the Islamists who were much
better organized than we were.” As fundamentalism burgeoned, one of its targets was music.
In the municipalities the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) controlled after the
1990 elections, the party banned music at weddings and public dancing. Samia
and Aziz received threats and insulting letters. “Stop this show. You are
against the Qur’an. Music is forbidden. You’ll see what happens to you.”
I asked them whether there was something inherently
antifundamentalist about creating their programs in such an environment. “For
us, making a show about music was completely normal,” Aziz answered. “Music has
always existed in Algeria .
Even our parents never said it was haram. Just because extraterrestrials come
and tell you it is forbidden, I will not believe them. And I continued to do
what I was doing.”
Things got worse. The Islamists sent threatening letters to
merchants who sold cassettes. Finally, as they unleased widespread violence in
1993 and 1994, they would assassinate singers like the working class “Cheb
Hasni” whose hit about heartbreak, “Don’t cry for me, just say this is my
destiny,” (“Metebkish Hada Mektoubi”) took on a whole new meaning. “He sang
especially about love,” Aziz reflects. “He was loved by the youth. It was to
make people afraid. ‘Everything you love we will kill.’”
In such an environment, what Aziz Smati and his colleagues
did became a life threatening endeavor. The producer’s reward for giving young
people an hour a week to forget the turbulence around them in front of the TV
ultimately came in the form of four bullets, paraplegia and a wheelchair. Aziz had started on the radio as the director of a show
called “Le Local Rock,” but he dreamed of creating a bona fide “Hit Parade à
l’Algérienne” on television. As Aziz tells me, “there were very few Algerian
singers who had access to the TV. They played a very Middle Eastern music, but
the music of chez nous, the Raï, wasn’t heard. They said it was a vulgar music
and shouldn’t be on TV.”
Raï – whose lyrics often cover worldly topics like love and
wine- is a sort of North African hybrid hip-hop that started as Bedouin music.
Aziz Smati’s Bled Music played the first Raï clips shown on ENTV, the national
station. Everyone loved Bled Music. I was a huge fan from the moment
I stumbled across the show one night in my father’s living room on the
outskirts of Algiers . When I first
met Aziz and Samia in 2008, I had to keep myself from asking them for their
autographs. Back in the day, the show’s creators and cast were inundated with
fan mail. There was no Billboard chart in Algeria ,
so Samia asked viewers to write in with their preferences, and they used those
to rank the songs. “The show tried to make Algerian songs accessible,” Samia
told me. “It became very popular, because it was watched by all the social
categories and ages.”
Bled Music and the 1993 follow up Rockrocki revolutionized
both the music and the language considered ready for prime time. On air
presenters and guests both spoke like real people did, rather than sounding as
though they were in 7th century Arabia . As Samia
explains, “to be on Algerian TV you had to sing in classical Arabic that we
learn in school.” Aziz recalls that on his shows they “wanted to speak Arabic
as it is spoken in the street and that everyone understands. It was a mix of
Arabic, Kabyle [Tamazight] and French.” They also covered cultural news and
interviewed breakout performers. “Artists and singers gave their vision of
things,” Samia says. “And they couldn’t do that elsewhere. They had freedom of
language, a new and free expression. This was possible because of who Aziz was.”
Hamid Baroudi, (http://www.hamid-baroudi.com/) the Algerian ethno-pop
singer whose haunting anti-Gulf War song Caravan to Baghdad
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQjD...)
topped the Bled Music charts for a long time agrees. He wrote me this week to
say: “During the 90s, Aziz was a visionary. He was twenty years ahead of his
time.” For Baroudi who has gone on to tour the world with Peter Gabriel’s Womad
Festival, Aziz’s achievement was not only creative but also civic. “I saw a
child of the radio use his microphone with no holds barred to give voice to a
society that was living the darkest years of its modern history. He wrapped all
of this in unprocessed music, before entitling it with the slogan -“Bled Music”
- made in Algeria .
Twenty years later I realize that this show is still relevant.”
Given the significance of his work, and his personal
popularity, the attempt to kill Aziz Smati on 14 February 1994 terrorized the entire country. Neither he
nor his presenter had the means to take special security precautions. After
being shot four times on the street on his way to work by a young man he
mistook for a fan, Aziz was rushed to Beni Messous hospital outside Algiers .
Junior doctors wept outside the operating room where their colleagues fought to
save the producer’s life from 11 AM
until midnight .
Samia learned of the attack, which took place during Ramadan
when the fundamentalists killed the most, as she arrived at the studio to film.
“Time stopped for me. In those days, we were afraid all the time because every
day we learned of the assassination of one of our friends. However, we
continued our work, like automatons. We continued to work because it was our
only way to fight back. Still, I think that until 14 February we were blind to
the dangers we ourselves were facing every day.”
That same day Samia’s then-fiancé, the well-known radio host
and actor Mohamed Ali Allalou who had long worked with Aziz, was in Berlin
and - despite a fierce hangover from drinking to forget the violence that had
forced him off the air and into exile – was promoting a film called Youcef at a
festival. “In the hotel lobby, there was a famous Indian star. I knew I had
been a fan of this face since childhood, but couldn’t remember his name. Shashi
Kapoor?” As Allalou collected himself in preparation for his screening, someone
interrupted. “Mister Allalou. Telephone.” It was a friend calling to say
simply, “They shot Aziz this morning.” Allalou remembers that as he heard this
news from his “martyred city of Algiers ,”
he “fell into the arms of Shashi Kapoor and cried just as they do in his
films.”
Still, like Algeria
itself, Aziz would not let the fundamentalists kill him. After a 12 hour
operation, he came back to life. As the newspaper Le Matin said on its front
page the next day, “Today, Samia and the Rockrocki team are not in mourning.
Although the perpetrators of this attack and the supporters of fundamentalist
terrorism might not like it, Aziz remains with us. To produce other shows, to
strive for another culture.” But he would never walk again.
In keeping with the stubborn artistic determination that
enabled him to take on Algeria ’s
cultural establishment, he has not allowed even an assassination attempt to
derail him. While he lives every day with the harsh, life-changing
consequences, he has never given in. Aziz now makes art from his wheelchair,
and so has beaten those who sought to silence him. “Yes, I am not going to stay
in a wheelchair doing nothing,” he asserts. “If I fought for life, It is to
continue doing what I was doing.”
He directed a stylish and moving clip for a campaign against
Algeria ’s
discriminatory family law by 20 Ans Barakat (Twenty Years is Enough!), an
Algerian women’s rights group. http://www.imow.org/wpp/stories/vie.... Remaining defiant, Aziz shows bareheaded women protesters on
the streets of Algiers , and Hassiba
Boulmerka , Algeria
In recent years, he collaborated with Mohamed Ali Allalou
and writer Mustapha Benfodil
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/m... on a multimedia
book project about the city of Algiers
called Alger Nooormal. http://www.amazon.fr/Alger-nooormal... Aziz compiled the soundtrack that accompanies the text, a CD
“of the noises and songs of Algiers
– young people who scream, chanting in stadiums, all mixed together.” In
addition, he has produced a related video whose evocative images and haunting
soundtrack trace the post-independence history of Algeria .
President Boumediene proclaims the start of the 70's agrarian revolution to the
sound of oud; the ruling National Liberation Front’s 1980s corruption is
denounced in Algerian rap; and the victims of FIS and Armed Islamic Group
atrocities in the 1990s are memorialized to the beat of outraged Algerian
rock. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6nd...
Samia Benkherroubi’s assessment of Aziz Smati’s
achievements, and the meaning of this 2014 anniversary, is that “the Islamists
and the terrorists did not manage to destroy everything. There are many of us
who are still around, fighting against their obscurantist ideas.” Their story
is not just a history lesson. Across Muslim majority regions of the world
today, artists remain on the frontlines. Other Aziz Smatis spin dreams of
music, words and light, whether in Mali ,
Somalia , or Afghanistan .
They defy extremism and offer hope and even humor to its opponents, and all too
often, like Aziz, they become targets for fundamentalists. The danger is not hypothetical, but these artists understand
the criticality of their mission. For example, Pakistani playwright Shahid
Nadeem
http://global.oup.com/academic/prod... and his Ajoka Theatre Company
http://ajoka.org.pk/ have tackled everything from blasphemy laws to burqas and faced banning and bomb threats. Why continue? As Nadeem said recently after a 7 February performance of his play “Burqavaganza,” “if we abandon this space, there will be nothing left.”
http://global.oup.com/academic/prod... and his Ajoka Theatre Company
http://ajoka.org.pk/ have tackled everything from blasphemy laws to burqas and faced banning and bomb threats. Why continue? As Nadeem said recently after a 7 February performance of his play “Burqavaganza,” “if we abandon this space, there will be nothing left.”
History repeats itself. Shahid Nadeem’s colleague,
distinguished theater professor and playwright Asghar Nadeem Syed survived a
gun attack in Lahore on 21
January. http://tribune.com.pk/story/661464/...Shahid Nadeem
explains that Syed has long been an opponent of religious extremism, and three
years ago wrote a popular TV series called “Khuda Zameen se Gaya Nahin Hai”
(God has still not left the Earth)
http://www.nation.com.pk/lahore/21-... about the threat of Talibanization in Pakistan. According to Nadeem, this is one possible motive for the attack on his colleague. Thankfully, like Aziz Smati, Syed remains alive.
http://www.nation.com.pk/lahore/21-... about the threat of Talibanization in Pakistan. According to Nadeem, this is one possible motive for the attack on his colleague. Thankfully, like Aziz Smati, Syed remains alive.
In any case, such crimes have primary and secondary victims.
Those around the targeted person are also dramatically affected. Samia
Benkherroubi had to flee into exile shortly after the attempt on Aziz’s life,
leaving behind her beloved family and work. Today, she says “I want to believe
that what happened to us will not happen again. But, I am aware that this is
just a dream. All you have to do is look at what is happening in Egypt ,
in Libya , in Syria
to see the same methods being reproduced.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/k... But we also are
continuing to fight, in my case through feminism and the promotion of equality
between men and women.” She now trains new generations of Algerian women’s
rights advocates for the Mediterranean Women’s Fund
In honor of the determination of people like Samia
Benkherroubi, Mohamed Ali Allalou, Shahid Nadeem, Asghar Nadeem Syed, and most
of all Aziz Smati, we must support all those who like Aziz wield song against
suicide belt, or wage art against fundamentalism. That is why on 14 February 2014 , we should send this
Valentine’s message of love for Aziz and his work from the countless thousands
of us to whom he brought improbable joy in harrowing times. The forces of
regression put him in a wheelchair and took away the use of his legs, but still
he stands taller than most ever will.
Karima Bennoune www.karimabennoune.com is
a Professor of Law at the University of California at Davis School of Law, and
author ofYour Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight
Against Muslim Fundamentalism
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fatwa-Do... which, inter alia, tells the stories of Aziz Smati, Samia Benkherroubi, Mohamed Ali Allalou and Pakistan’s Ajoka Theatre. http://www.salon.com/2013/08/31/you...
See also:
Interview with Karima Bennoune, author of 'Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism
AMEL GRAMI and KARIMA BENNOUNE - Tunisia’s fight against Islamic fundamentalism
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fatwa-Do... which, inter alia, tells the stories of Aziz Smati, Samia Benkherroubi, Mohamed Ali Allalou and Pakistan’s Ajoka Theatre. http://www.salon.com/2013/08/31/you...
See also:
Interview with Karima Bennoune, author of 'Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism
AMEL GRAMI and KARIMA BENNOUNE - Tunisia’s fight against Islamic fundamentalism
