Description
Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Music. Translated by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Artwork by Julie Simon-Titecat. Hocine Tandjaoui's poetic memoir, CLAMOR, is a gripping testimonial to the transnational solidarities forged across the decolonizing world in the 1950s and 60s, from the rarely heard perspective of a child. Set against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest wars of decolonization, CLAMOR offers an account of the colonial soundscape and a dazzling poetic evocation of Tandjaoui's discovery of African-American music during his childhood in colonized Algeria. A gorgeously written and translated poetic text or "proème," CLAMOR reckons with the music that shaped Tandjaoui's childhood, the soundtrack of the Black liberation movements in the US, and the voices of artists of the African diaspora that rise above the din of war, becoming the soundbox and sounding board of decolonization in Algeria.
Presented bilingually in French and English.
"Although we are still far from a more complete picture, Anglophone readers can begin piecing together the exhilarating and terrifying human landscape that makes up Algeria then and now: before, during, and after French colonization. Hocine Tandjaoui's syncopated howl of childhood suffering, joy, and discovery—uttered, spat, and caressed out of the surrounding clamor—provides imaginative weight to life long lost but ever present. Besides making this brilliant text available, scholar-translators Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio also give us a textbook of translation and entry into a world too little known outside its immediate constituency."—Ammiel Alcalay
"Reading Tandjaoui's memoir immediately catapulted me back to my own childhood, safely in the north, but bright with the same pleasures brought by the green eye of the old radio set as focused delivery of news, i.e. of music & language, from further away than I, we, could ever think possible. And thus the world, once let in via the machine behind that eye, compressed, brought home, opens out again through loud-speakers & word-pores. A celebration. To write poetry in German is 'dichten,' echoing 'to condense,' & this autobiography in 'prose' is a poem, a condensation into word-music. An immense pleasure—here in true stereo channels: the original French & an excellent English translation."—Pierre Joris
Author Bio
Teresa Villa-Ignacio is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Stonehill College. Her research explores contemporary poetic and translational interventions in ethical philosophy, postcolonial liberation movements, and social justice activism. She is the co-editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford UP, 2016), and is completing a monograph entitled Translational Poethics: Postlyric French-American Communities Since World War II.
Author City: USA
Hocine Tandjaoui is from Biskra, Algeria. His first published poems appeared in 1968 in the Moroccan journal Souffles, for which he served as the Algiers correspondent. He is the author of the poetry collection Le temps de nous-mêmes précédé par L'attente de l'arche (Paris: Librairie Saint Germain des Près, 1974), and three novels, Les jours lents (Paris: Éditions Leo Scheer, 2003), La bande noire dans l'ombre (Paris: 108 Édition, 2016), and Ainsi que tous les hommes (Naples/Tunis/Skopje) (Paris: 108 Édition, 2020). As a fiction writer, Tandjaoui works with archival sources to recuperate and expand narratives of colonial experience that have been obfuscated by the ideology of global neoliberalism and its attendant historical discourses. This method also informs his semi-autobiographical prose poem Clameur (Paris: 108 Édition, 2017). A graduate of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Tandjaoui has worked for several decades in the field of sustainable development in Europe and North Africa. He lives in Paris.
Author City: PARIS FRA
Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her publications include Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization, an anthology-in-translation of the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas, and essays on Maghrebi literature, Beur and banlieue cultural production, and postcolonial theory. She is currently working on a monograph about the intersection of antiracism and Palestine solidarity movements in France, and researching the recuperation of minority discourses by the French far- and alt-right for a book tentatively titled The White Minority.
Author City: USA