On this morning cracked with disappointments when blue has left the sea to invade the hill
in a uniformed chain tightening on the diminishing crowds. Midnight aborts the day leaving the
Casbah to its rubbish and fragments. I appeal to the memory of Algiers from its seaside
bars to the tanks of the occupation, I appeal to Hassiba to Djamila to Didouche and to Boudiaf
to the ancestors and to the amnesiacs to the rapists of dreams and to the perpetual traitors.
Seven Little Jasmine Monologues is a collection of poems…
by Algerian writer Samira Negrouche.
Detailing the hope and history around the Arab Spring.
While all the Arab world was rising, we knew it was boiling, we didn't know when it would
happen. But we knew that people needed to show itself [themselves], we couldn't just
wish for change and do nothing about it. It was about quiet countries with very long lasting
presidents. And now they were awakening.
Samira had experienced conflict long before the Arab Spring.
I was born in 1980, it was a year of huge rise. And then I grew up, all my 10 years
of being a teenager and then a young adult in a country who had to face terrorism. In
that period, we weren't allowed to live outside as young people. Like when we came back from
school or from university, we would never go back outside because we weren't allowed
and because it was dangerous. So growing in the midst of the danger in the midst also
of being referred as Algerians to be a nation or population of terrorists, has a deep effect
on you.
Through times of conflict, Samira says literature helps her to cope.
We write in times of emergency, it's always an emergency, especially when you live in
a country where protests and tragedies and problems and traumas are your daily life.
Stories are very important, they are very powerful. But poetry brings something different.
It dives into the language, it creates new language in the language itself. It is able,
in its blanks, in its silences in what is said and the way it is said to show you the
complexity of a situation. The craft of a poet is very powerful, but it's only the one
who reads this work that can take this power from it.
During the Arab Spring, Samira believes art helped people to connect.
I felt like we belonged to the same large history, although the details, the individual
or the specific history, of these countries weren’t quite the same. Friends, other artists,
other writers from those countries, that we were always in wait of something that would
move or something that would happen. And when it started to move towards a hope it was like
an invitation to believe in the possibility of a movement. It was a tribute for all of
us, on the south coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
I appeal to every drop spilled to every humiliation let the bay gush forth at last and let it
inhabit us let it open our senseless eyelids let Al Anka and the besieged diwans awaken
let the doorways of our houses open and let a new song arise. Let the TGV Express awaken,
let it bring back the breeze from Tanger and let it start a new route from Tunis to Alexandria
and from Beirut to Istanbul. Let a new day open and let Midnight be fragrant with jasmine.