Mediterranean: sea of death (2014-2016)

From the International Organization for Migration's Missing Migrants project. Check it out here.

Salah Sadaoui's Scopitone: "Nezouedj Ouahdi"

I love this Scopitone from 1968. The Algerian Kabyle singer Salah Sadaoui, who migrated to France in 1954 and made his career as a singer there, appears in this scopitone as an Algerian immigrant who gets all dressed up, goes out, picks up a blonde chick, gets into a fight with a guy over the girl, beats him up, is arrested and jailed, and gets beat up by the French police. He shows a comic flare through the piece. It all happens in 2 minutes and 19 seconds.

Sadaoui often sang about the problems of the migrant, including the difficulties that ensued from trying to hook up with European women. The title of the song, "Nezouedj Ouahdi," means, roughly, "I'll get married on my own," that is, I'll arrange my marriage by myself, like a "modern" European. It won't be an arranged marriage. The real point, however, seems to be the very typical mistreatment of Algerian immigrants by French police. I find it surprising that Scopitone allowed the filming of such blatant racist cop violence. 

Read more about Sadaoui here. And here for a documentary in French about Scopitones in Arabic and Berber, called Trésors des Scopitones.

List of 17.306 migrants who died trying to enter Fortress Europe

List of documented deaths, courtesy United for Intercultural Action.

Map courtesy United Against Racism.

Fortress Europe: In last 13 yrs, 23000 people died trying to reach it

This statistic, and this map, from a tweet on April, 2014 by the Migrant Rights Centre.

And more about the phenomenon, the stats, and how they were arrived at here.

Rachid Taha's new one

Rachid Taha has a new album out, called Zoom. It's available in Europe, but not issued yet in the US. Not even on iTunes or emusic. Damn. Based on this track, it promises to be a good one. (I wasn't so taken with Taha's last outing, Bonjour.)

The song is a basic blues, and the basic lyric goes, "I don't have a passport, I don't have a visa, I have nothing baby." The typical lament of the undocumented migrant. Love it.

Kamel Daoud, Raina Raikoum & Merzak Allouache: Harraga/s

Kamel Daoud is a celebrated columnist for Le Quotidien d'Oran, a daily paper from Oran (Arabic, Wahran), Algeria. His column is called "Raina Raikoum," which translates literally as Our Opinion, Your Opinion, but it also of course resonates with the famous genre of music that originates in Oran, rai, as well as with the naem of the well-known rai group Raïna Raï, founded in Paris in 1980.

In April, Berfrois published English translations of several of his columns. I particularly liked his column about harragas, (from حراقة), the name for North Africans who migrate to Europe illegally, by boat. Harraga (in Algerian colloquial) means, literally, those who burn, and it refers to the symbolic act committed by many of these migrants, who burn their papers before they depart, so that it will be difficult for the receiving countries in Europe to repatriate them. It is a quite remarkable act, as it means, in a quite literal way, the destruction of one's "identity" before departure. It is also remarkable, given how essential one's papers are in everyday life in Algeria.

Here's the translation (by Suzanne Ruta), from Le Quotidien d’Oran, October, 2010:


Our harraga don’t leave the country because they are poor or jobless or can’t find a storefront to rent, even if that’s what they say. They leave because here, in this country, their lives are pointless, there’s no room to dream, and worst of all, there’s no fun, no laughter, no kissing, and no color. Men grow old before their time. It’s simple really. If you want an expert on emigration to understand the harraga, take him, empty his pockets, take away his cell phone, his address book, his salary, give him a pair of plastic sandals and two cents, an empty village and ask him does he get the point and by the end of two months he’ll say Yes. Because although rumor has it that Algeria is made up of cities, observation tells us it is made up primarily of villages and that in these villages – you have to see it to understand it – the boredom is unrelenting, unbelievable, unbearable, and inhuman. You have to be there to see the visceral nothingness, a boredom with no exit, an idleness that chills even the reproductive instinct… There’s nothing to look forward to but the post office at the end of the month and the mosque the rest of the time and the dull routine of burials and water trucks and brief, restless, unhappy marriages and the ailments of old age. Nothing youthful, nothing Technicolor, no joy, no enthusiasm. And this is the most simple, obvious and overlooked explanation for the harraga: the lack of leisure, not only in the childish sense of entertainment, but in the broadest, anthropological, anciently human meaning of the term.


In the villages, whose total square footage exceeds that of Algeria itself, no one has any fun… There are no swimming pools, no guitar music, no parties, and no winning soccer matches that are not controlled by hostile police. The mayors are glum and voracious, the mosques offer an inadequate response to the call of life, the roads are potholed, power outages are frequent, suicidal violence is latent. It’s only in the internet cafes that you sometimes see faces aglow with reflected light and get an inkling of another world that exists elsewhere. Otherwise there’s only sadness, ennui, the void. The same void that drove the younger generation to grow their beards and take up arms, today sends them to sea…ready to leave a country where even the president never smiles and is always angry about something.

I attended a conference last week at Georgetown University (Porous Nations? Migrants, Transnationals and Illegals in the Cinemas of Maghreb, Quebec and France) and heard a very interesting talk by Hakim Abder-razzak (University of Minnesota), entitled '"To Sea” or “Not To Sea”: North African Clandestine Crossings in the Mediterranean.' He stated that in contemporary Maghrebi cinema, the beach no longer functions as a space of leisure but instead, as a place that Maghrebis go to in order to look at and to imagine a different future, in another place, across the sea. He stated that, according to a recent study, 72% of Moroccans dream of expatriating. (So much for the happy kingdom.)

In addition, Abder-razzak discussed three films that deal with clandestine migration. Visa, a 30 minute Tunisian film, can be viewed (only!) on youtube. (Here's a link to part one; the other two parts can be easily found.) L'enfant endormi (2004, Morocco) deals with the women, and the fetuses, left behind.

Harragas (2009) is from the acclaimed Algerian director (Omar Gatlato, Bab El Oued City), Merzak Allouache. I have not yet watched it, but I am very keen to. As of this writing, you can view it here, online. With English subtitles, amazingly enough. Or you could purchase it through amazon.fr. From Abder-razzak's description, it sounded well worth a look. According to Abder-razzak, however, the film is somewhat inauthentic, in that, due to the funding sources, there is a lot more French dialogue than there would be in normal, everyday life.

Tiariq Teguia's "Rome plutôt que vous"

I saw this film at Georgetown last week and I want to put in a very strong plug for it. It's not been released for the English-speaking market, so it's only available with French subtitles. It's a kind of road movie, with a very New Wave feel, telling the story of Zina and Kamal trying to find a guy who is going to supply Kamal with a fake passport, so he can migrate to Europe.

One of the the elements of the film that I was interested was in how rai music plays an important function, at key points in the film. The film rarely has a music soundtrack, it's quite bleak, sonically, just as is the urban and suburban environment, much of the time. Only once do we hear some rai music, while Zina and Kamal and Kamal's friend Merzak are caught overnight in a suburb of unfinished housing, and they take refuge with someone who works in a pizzeria kitchen. At one point, the worker puts some rai music on the cassette player, and they all engage in raucous dancing. It's a moment of very intense, and surprising, emotion in a film that is otherwise characterized for the most part by lassitude and waiting and frustrated searching. You can see a moment of the dancing, but without the music, at about 1:27 on the trailer below.

At another point, Kamal and Merzak (if I remember correctly) are talking and one of them recites a line or two of poetry. One says, that's Cheb Hasni. The other says, or maybe Rimbaud. Cheb Hasni is the much-beloved star of the rai sub-genre known as "love rai," who was assassinated in 1994 by the Armed Islamic Groups. (Probably. Although some say he was killed due to a dispute over money, by someone in the mafia-like syndicate of rai producers.)

At the end of the film, Kamal gets shot, as he and Zina drive away. We have no idea who did it or why and the violence comes out of the blue. Typical of life in Algeria, especially since the start of the civil war in 1992 and the unleashing of the shadowy forces of the pouvoir, the Algerian state, against the Islamist rebels. Kamal says to Zina (presumably he is badly wounded, although we can't see the wound), he hears Cheb Hasni. She calls him an idiot. The film ends.

There is much more to this film than the rai references, but given my interests, nay, obsession with rai, that's what I've discussed here. Again, I highly, highly recommend this film.