When I was introduced to T’s family on my first visit to Algeria, I was told his uncle, his father’s younger brother, was called Akli. I became slightly confused at this point, as T had always referred to him as D’Akli. So which was it? Akli or D’Akli? The names of T’s other uncles and the elders in the family also seemed to begin with a D, whilst older women’s names all began with N. But then again, other uncles and aunts, seemingly belonging to another category, were called respectively Khali and Khalti.
How to find my way through this maze of names, and not offend someone? The smiling faces surrounding me were already starting to merge into a blur, so their names, strange to my European ear, were just meaningless sounds. I was coming to envision the Kabyle language, takabaylit, as a tide beyond my control, inundating me in waves of alien noise.
Later on that evening, T explained that putting the prefix Da– in front of a man’s name was a sign of respect and deference towards one’s elders. Na– in front of a woman’s name meant the same thing. So Akli’s given name was just that, but, as a sign of respect, he was always called D’Akli. Sometimes older or more respected relatives were simply called Thada and Nana.
As T himself was the eldest in the family, all of his brothers and sisters deferred to him by calling him Thada, with only the brother second in line allowed to use his given name. To omit the Da– or Na– in front of someone’s name showed a complete lack of respect for that person and could even be interpreted as a calculated insult.
Khali and Khalti were simply loan words from Arabic, meaning a maternal uncle or aunt. So T’s youngest uncle, Belaïd, only two years his senior, was always called Khali Belaïd or Belilli, never DaBelaïd. Confused? I was. My brain was beginning to overload. It didn’t seem as brave as I wanted it to be, for this little voice inside my head kept asking me what on earth was I doing there.
The meaning of the name “Akli” is “black man.” This seemed an improbable name for a Kabyle, as they were notoriously racist regarding skin colour. The paler the skin, the better. I can remember my mother-in-law delightedly stroking my new-born daughter’s soft skin, as translucent as white rose petals, and nodding her approval.
So why give a Kabyle baby a name meaning “black man”? Quite simply, it was to ward off the evil eye. At that time, when so many children died at birth or in their infancy, giving a new-born baby a name like this was generally a Kabyle mother’s last resort, especially if she had previously lost children. Giving her baby a name that was considered undesirable would, in theory, dissuade the Angel of Death from taking it. The same logic led to male Kabyle babies being called “Arab,” or more generally, Mohand Arab.
This attitude probably stems from the fact that many Algerians had black house slaves originating from sub-Saharan Africa and brought to the slave market in Algiers by slave traders. If you look at nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings of Algerian interiors, there is inevitably a black servant hovering in the background. In fact, the Arabic word ouassif, meaning a black person, gradually came to be just another word for servant.
Akli was the the next to youngest of five brothers, and when T’s father, older by a couple of years, died at the age of forty-two, D’Akli had been appointed as guardian to the fatherless family, as T was a minor, only sixteen, and his widowed mother illiterate. As such, he was responsible for managing T’s father’s estate, including the bakery on the main square in Maison Carrée. Of course, this gave him the opportunity to dip into the till and take the lion’s share of any assets. For the moment, T was courteous in his dealings with his uncle, but beneath his mask lay years of resentment. His was a forced resiliency, the kind he’d had to have since his father’s death simply in order to survive.
Akli and his wife, Zaoua, had played a vital role in preparing our traditional wedding. He was a benign presence in his borrowed role as family patriarch and NaZaoua – I still call her that, although she rapidly transformed into The Witch Downstairs once her wishes were thwarted – had been the one to organise everything down to the last detail, to prepare delicious meals throughout our stay, and to ensure our bed was always spread with crisp new bedsheets. She had also managed the less enjoyable aspects of a traditional Algerian wedding, protecting me from the prying of the female members of the family. The less said about that, the better.
When the rest of T’s extended family had finally gone home after the four days’ festivities, we had a few summer days to ourselves to sightsee, or to visit other family members. We would wake to the dawn chorus, the sky showing a pale band of oyster shell in the east and with the adan, the call to prayer, echoing mournfully over the sleeping city.
As the mornings wore on, the pleasant warmth of the sun would melt into a beating bronze bell, and whenever we stepped out of the car into the afternoon heat, the pavements seemed like ripe fruit, bruising beneath our shoes. Most sensible people preferred to stay at home, with all the shutters closed, and take an afternoon nap,, but we wandered around, stopping at one of the many ice-cream parlours to eat an ice-cold lemon sorbet (créponné), and listen to the remote and gentle breathing of the sea.
The stifling afternoons would gradually fade into glorious summer evenings, that fleeting moment between day and night. The sky would be haloed in brightness, deepening from molten gold to a fiery red, setting the sea on fire. It would then take on the distinctive deep turquoise of an Algerian twilight, a huge apricot moon rising in the east.
Akli was the only one of my father-in-law’s siblings to have received some sort of formal schooling. My father-in-law had been preparing to sit his Baccalauréat when his father, a school teacher, had died, and he was forced to return to the village. Akli had not attained these scholastic heights, but was an avid reader of French thrillers and romances – which eventually proved to be his downfall.
He and his younger brother, Lounès, had married two teenage sisters from the neighbouring village of Taourirt Menguellet. The sisters were strong-minded and opinionated, their mischief-making often descending into downright bullying, especially towards their mother-in-law, already slipping into dementia, and T’s mother, blessed with a mild and conciliatory nature.
Lounès was illiterate, taciturn and ineffectual. So much so, that my father-in-law had nicknamed him “Ewe Ears” (imzorghen netikhssi) – in other words, no use to anybody. As nature abhors a vacuum, his wife, Ghenima, quickly became the driving force in their family. Akli, however, steeped in the romanticism of his French paperbacks, began to treat his new wife as a European would – as an equal. My mother-in-law, scandalised, and not without a naughty giggle, would whisper that he had actually brought Zaoua breakfast in bed. The very idea!
The result was that Zaoua had taken her husband’s kindness for weakness, erasing any respect she might once have had for him. She despised him, the situation gradually worsening until she finally relegated him to a shed in the garden, banning him from setting foot in the house. He had his bed there, and a camping stove to cook his meals. T’s mother would hang over the terrace wall, listening to their arguments below with a look of satisfaction on her face. It was payback time.
One day, towards the end of the eighties, visiting relatives found him seriously ill in his shed. He was taken to hospital and died there alone in great pain. A sad end for a man who was basically decent, but weak and easily influenceable.
An Englishwoman in Algeria 