The Language of my Heart - Tamazight

Three writers on what the spoken language of Tamazight or Berber means to them: Ahmed Essadki, El-Mahdi Acherchour and Rachida Lamrabet. Presentaton: Asis Aynan. In Dutch.

20090123133728

Information

Date and time Saturday 17 January 2009 20:10 tot 21:00 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - kleine zaal

In the programme 'Taal van mijn hart' the three authors - Ahmed Essadki, El-Mahdi Acherchour and Rachida Lamrabet - read and talk about the role of Tamazight or Berber in their writing. Berber is spoken in Morocco, Algeria and Libya. During this programme a fragment was shown of a documentary on Essadki. In addition the new novella Landwee (Land Woe) by Acherchour was presented. The programme was hosted by Asis Aynan.

Asis Aynan

(Haarlem, NL, 1980) studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Aynan, the son of Moroccan immigrants, is an active advocate of Berber culture. His debut Veldslag en Andere Herinneringen (Battle and Other Memories) was published in 2007, about his youth or, as he calls it, his "Catholic-Islamic-Berber background". Aynan is the creator of the Berber Library, a series of classics from Berber countries translated into Dutch. He further wrote Ik, Driss  (I, Driss, together with Hassan Bahara), the short-story collection Gebed zonder eind (Endless Prayer, 2014) and Linoleumkoorts (Linoleum Fever, 2019). Aynan works as a teacher at Hogeschool van Amsterdam; his articles have appeared in the NRC, Het ParoolFolia and Trouw.
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El-Mahdi Acherchour

(Algeria, 1973) was invited to come to the Netherlands by Stichting Amsterdam Vluchtstad in 2005. The Dutch translation of his second novel Pays d’aucun mal (2008), will appear in January 2009. Pays d’aucun mal is a subdued chronicle of an exile returning to the village of his birth. There he returns to the people he used to know, with their 1001 stories, some of which can only be told from behind a door. Acherchour's prose is poetic and mysterious; his characters often live in a dreamworld in which absurd and mythical things happen. Acherchour lives in the Netherlands and has written two volumes of poetry and two novels.
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Ahmed Essadki

Ahmed Essadki was born in Ait Bouayach in the Moroccan Rif in 1959. He studied political science at the Universtity of Fez. Owing to the political, social and economic circumstances in Morocco he could not make a living and left for western Europe like many of his compatriots. Right now he works as a cultural worker in The Hague. By the end of the 1980s Essadki began writing poetry in Tamazight (Berber). In 1997 he published his first volume, The Battle Cry of the Earth with thirteen stories, translated into Dutch by Roel Otten. His second volume The Depth of Life is ready for publication. His poetry is characterised by a critical relationship with life, and deals with themes like oppression, abuse of power, migration, uprootedness and the value of one's own culture. In recent years Essadki has taken part in various cultural events both in the Netherlands and abroad. In the spring of 2008 a festive programme was organised in Antwerp as a tribute to the poet.
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Rachida Lamrabet

(Morocco, 1970) is a fiction and theatre author, lawyer and teacher. She won the 2008 Flemish debut prize for her novel Vrouwland (Women's Country; 2007) about migrant youths dreaming of a better life. In 2006, her story Mercedes 207 was awarded the Kif Kif Literature Prize. Her short story collection Een kind van God (A Child of God) was published in 2008, followed by the novel De man die niet begraven wilde worden (The Man Who Didn't Want to be Buried), awarded with the Ultima, the Flemish state prize for culture. As in her debut, issues such as identity, religion, migration and the position of minorities play an important role. Her novel Vertel het iemand (Tell Somebody, 2018) deals with the life of a Berber boy and the deliberately concealed role played by Moroccan soldiers in the First World War. Lamrabet is a member of the writers' collective Fixdit, which aims to raise awareness of gender inequality in literature. She is a practice assistant in discrimination law at the Legal Clinic of the Law Faculty of the Ghent University and also teaches at the Odisee College in Brussels.
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