Lydia Hounat

Thesis title

Intergenerational Healing in the Isefra (Oral Poetry) of Kabyle Women in Algeria

Abstract

My research takes a practice-led approach to translating stories of Kabyle female identity and exploring their erasure. I focus on a Kabyle poetic form, Isefra, which is a type of oral poetry spoken in Kabyle-tongue, taqbaylit. My research also asks how does Isefra hold space for both trauma and healing in Kabyle communities, transcending through the generations, as well as the significance of voice as performance.

Many of the poems I study retell traumas sustained during the French Occupation of Algeria (1830 – 1962) and the Algerian Civil War (1991 – 2002). Initially, I set out to understand Isefra as a tool for expressing intergenerational trauma. Yet Isefra extends beyond articulating traumatic experiences. Isefra is also life-affirming. Poems are dedicated to many rites of passage throughout a Kabyle woman’s life; her wedding, her first menses, childbirth, to more seasonal celebrations such as the olive-picking in November, or the flow of the water springs in Kabylia — tafsut.

These stories act as an album of spoken memories to reacquaint future generations of Kabyle women with their origins; to reinforce their relationship with their culture where the community still sustains erasure and oppression from its colonial past. ‘Intergenerational healing’, therefore, may be much more encompassing in terms of what Isefra does for Kabyle people.

My research works from translation as a central pillar from which the practice and theory emerges. As my background is English-Kabyle, I also meditate on how my positionality acts as its own translation, i.e., how I navigate it within my family, writing on where it intersects or does not intersect with the research. I take an Autoethnographic approach using mixed-media artistic practices to documenting these tensions, as well as the kind of access it gives me within the community.