Algiers – Prayers and the Din of Translation
By Peter Olney
Algers promenade: The Martyr’s Monument is on the hill, left side of the image. Photo: Peter Olney
I was privileged to spend three October days in Algiers, the capital city of the northern African state of Algeria. I participated in two days of meetings and press conferences hosted by the Algerian Workers Party and their dynamic leader Louisa Hanoune. Louisa turned 60 this year and as she likes to say she is as old as the Algerian uprising, which began in 1954. While she leads a small left wing party she plays bigger than the numbers of militants in the Parti des Travailleurs (PT) (here, here and here). The press conferences during our meetings were widely covered in both the Arabic and French media. Television and newspapers the next day carried reports of her remarks and positions.
There are two memories that transcend the substantive discussions with delegates from Germany, France, Catalonia, India, Pakistan, South Africa, the United States and Palestine.
Prayers – Having never spent time in a Muslim country before I had never heard the prayers. In Algiers as in the rest of the Muslim world, there are prayers six times a day. In the time I spent there I did not hear prayers until the final morning of my stay. On that morning I arose early to get ready to go to the airport for my flight to Paris. I finally heard the haunting, amplified sound of the first prayer of the day, Fajr at 5:19 AM. I opened the window of my room at the El Safir, a former French colonial luxury hotel and looked out over the Port of Algiers. The architecture I was looking at was the same as the architecture I would see in the tourist centers of Paris except that in Algiers the old palatial dwellings of the “pieds noir” (here and here), the French colonizers, were now occupied by the people with their laundry flying from the windows to dry. Friends have told me that the same phenomenon exists in other cities in countries liberated from European conquest like Hanoi in Vietnam where the same French architecture was predominant prior to liberation.
I confess that I never heard the other five prayers of Sunrise, Dhur, Asr, Maghrib and Isha. There was no competing street noise or meeting discussions to muffle the prayed of Fajr.
The Din of Translation – The international labor meeting of course needed to be translated. Budget did not permit the use of remote headsets and booths ala the United Nations so simultaneous translation was done by expert translators sitting with clumps of participants who required a particular language. We were part of two press conferences conducted in Arabic by Louisa Hanoune. Arabic was translated into French and then a French speaker translated into Russian for a trade unionist from Byelorussia. Simultaneous translation was done into English. An English speaker translated into Spanish, the second language for the delegate from Catalonia. All those languages floated and palpitated in the air as the Algerian media filmed and audiotaped the words of the leader of the Parti des Travailleurs. The noise was a deafening din of Babel but all in service of international solidarity and understanding.
I had viewed the classic movie directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers. The film was made in 1966, only four years after liberation (here and here. It was filmed right up the street from my hotel and in the Casbah in the hills of Algiers. On my last night in Algiers we were given a tour of the Martyr’s Monument dedicated to the liberation struggle that is the subject of Pontecorvo’s film. I have never seen a museum quite like it. The walls are covered with photographs of men and a few women all of who were under thirty at the time of their martyrdom. The museum is a source of national pride and our guides; members of the Workers Party took great pride in leading us thru all the exhibits. Then they drove us down the hill to our hotel at breakneck speed dodging women in shawls and headscarves crossing the street. Their parliamentary plates enabled them to fly through police roadblocks while we all held on for dear life. Our driver, a member of the PT spoke Arabic and some French, but his native language is Berber (here, here and here, the first language and ethnic roots of the vast majority of Algerians.
Leaving Algiers I flew to Paris where I spent a fabulous week with my wife, Christina. We stayed in a tiny studio in Montmartre. A friend had tasked me with finding some Algerian fabric for her, but my meeting schedule didn’t permit me to do so in Algiers. There is of course a huge Algerian community in Paris so I figured I could find the fabric there. I was hunting the fabric in a street market in the Belleville section when I stopped and in my halting French, asked, “Where do I find Algerian fabric? The African woman I was speaking with responded without pausing, “Stalingrad”! Stalingrad is a Metro stop and neighborhood with a large Algerian community. How ironic that I was hosted by the Trotskyist PT in Algiers and was directed to Stalingrad in Paris! Algiers deserves more time and another visit. I barely scratched the surface.
