The man standing on the stage, as we discover him upon entering the small room of the Théâtre de la Bastille, in Paris, is trying hard to untangle a large ball of bolduc, this flat plastic ribbon whose main use is to tie up the gift packages. The task is not easy, and for good reason: it is indeed a big knot that will have to be pulled out of the tangled threads here. Nothing less than those of the colonization of Algeria by France, which the author and actor Salim Djaferi addresses through a fascinating linguistic investigation, rendered on stage in a clever cocktail of humor, charm and gravity.
It all started, he says, from the day he asked his mother, an Algerian immigrant to France, how to say “colonization” in Arabic. “Koulounization”, she replied. Obviously, Salim Djaferi was a little surprised. “Isn’t there an Arabic word for it?” », he was surprised. And he began his quest, on the tight thread of history between the two countries, the two shores of the Mediterranean. He first consulted the dictionary, which taught him that colonization is translated as “isti’ammar”which is a derivative of the verb “amaar”which would mean “to build”.
Except that, depending on the interlocutors he meets next, the verb “amaar” can have many other meanings: “to possess” and even “to possess without authorization”, “to order”, in the sense of both “to order” and “to put in order”, or “to fill”. “Afterwards, you can fill in whatever you want. You can fill a village if you want. But you have to empty it first. You empty and you fill: you replace, in fact”specifies the man, who proposes this interpretation.
Reflection on erasure
Salim Djaferi then discovered that another Arabic word existed to translate “colonization”. It was invented in 1963, a year after the independence of Algeria, by the translators of Wretched of the earth (Maspero, 1961), Frantz Fanon’s essay on the wars of liberation. Which translators refused the word “isti’ammar”, which they considered to be false. They proposed instead “istidammar”a derivative of the verb “dammar”which in Arabic means “to destroy”.
So the young actor unwinds his ball, from surprise to surprise, summoning on the set another language, plastic, this one: using polystyrene plates, he arranges small constructions that say confinement or destruction. Or stages, with a real-false spectator invited into the game, the differences in point of view using a sponge and a bottle. The question of what colonization does to language – or the opposite – arises, again, in this passage from “colonization” to “koulounization”, and in the various terms that have been used, from one side to the other. one era to another, to define the Algerian war: “Algerian events”, “war of national liberation” Or “Algerian revolution”.
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