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A literary meeting around the theme “Medea through the voices of novelists” was organized on the sidelines of the National Cultural Festival of Comic Theater and brought together a group of writers who, each in their own way, spoke of their hometowns in their novels built around memories of youth, historical evocations, reminiscences of neighborhoods, walks in its alleys, its arcades, its shops, its men of culture, its homeless people, its mentally ill.
The writer and playwright Mohamed Bourahla, born in the city of Ksar El Boukhari, will evoke the places where he spent the happy days of his youth in a book entitled “El Khobz wel idam” (Bread and condiment) listing the memories embedded in his memory after having moved away from the city where he was born and grew up.
“When I remember Ksar El Boukhari, the song La bohème by Charles Aznavour comes to my mind and it is in my hometown where I acquired critical thinking and read all the classics of literature in both languages (Arabic and French), specifying at the same time that the short story El Khobz wal Idam is inspired by reality and is constructed in the form of an interior monologue.”
For his part, the journalist and writer Mohamed Kadik, will seize the pretext of the ramparts of the city of Médéa to evoke the resistance of the thousand-year-old city and ancient capital of the Beylik of Titteri against the forces of the colonial army which were pushed back by the army of the Emir Abdelkader under the leadership of his lieutenant Si El Berkani.
It was, he would say, only following the 3rd campaign launched in 1836 that the columns of the French army led by Marshal Clauzel, appointed to rehabilitate the honour of France, managed, after fierce battles, to overcome the resistance and enter the city.
Moving short story by the author Tayeb Ould Larouci, “Behind the Clouds”, an autobiographical short story in which he describes the vicissitudes of the life of a child who experienced the miseries of the family during the armed revolution which had no other horizon than the bare mountains of the steppe.
As a teenager, he discovered Birine, which he reached by bus between his mechta and the destination village, located “behind the clouds” his father told him, in order to continue his studies.
The memory of the city is one of those memories that are not lost, because it is there where the love of the land on which one was born is forged, it carries within it the sensations and thoughts that do not die and that survive time, this is the idea expressed by two authors who have, each in their own way, evoked the sidewalks “inhabited” by mentally ill people who have only the celestial vault as cover, but whose presence adds to the happiness of the environment.
The kiosk where you can find the book or magazine that you can’t find anywhere else, the tea merchant, the terraces on the boulevard, the arcades of the city center of Ksar El Boukhari, are all places that still inhabit the memory of the author Gaada Sliman in his work entitled “Tajaliat Sardiya” (Narrative Descriptions).
In her book Beît El Ispanya, the young author and teacher Sarah Khelifa will mention a neighbor of Spanish origin, from whom she has kept fragments of memories told about the house of this woman who lived in the city during colonization to serve as a framework for her book in order, she will say, to preserve such a heritage from oblivion.
As for the pedagogue Metidja Bachir, his contributions to the understanding of certain school phenomena including the losses and the use of punishment in schools which have been the subject of specialized studies both in schools in Ksar El Boukhari and elsewhere. The author will denounce the use of punishment of the child who is abused at home by parents, brothers, relatives, in the street and finally in his school, practices that are to be banned in the school system and in families.
As a reminder, the 14th edition of the National Cultural Festival of Comic Theater took place from June 30 to July 5 and saw the participation of seven troupes representing several cities in Algeria.