Exile, memory, and healing in Algeria: Denis Martinez and La Fenetre du Vent.

Fearing assassination by religious extremists, Denis Martinez (b. 1941), the Algerian-born artist and former professor at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers, fled Algeria and immigrated to France in 1993. He left behind a well-established artistic career as the co-founder, in 1967, of the Algerian artistic movement known as Aouchem ('tattoo' in Arabic). For members of Aouchem, tattoos represented an emblematic and ancient precolonial art form. The name was fitting since the paramount goal of Aouchem was to liberate Algerian art from the domination of colonial influences and to advocate the use of motifs and subject matter drawn from Algeria's Berber, Arab, and Saharan African heritage. Members of Aouchem incorporated symbols from wall paintings, tattoos, jewelry, and ceramics in order to counter the demagogical and propagandistic social realism promoted by the postcolonial Algerian government. Despite Aouchem's disbandment after 1971, Martinez was inspired by the driving motivation behind the artistic movement, as he continued to promote the indigenization of contemporary Algerian art and to celebrate Algeria's cultural and historical heritage.

Martinez's exile in France compelled him to create works that grappled with the trauma of violence he had witnessed in Algeria and expressed his longing for his homeland. In particular, his portable installation and performance piece poetically titled La Fenetre du Vent (2002-2004), meaning the "Window of the Wind," addressed his own personal pain of exile and, in the process, offered a mechanism for healing himself and others (Fig. 1).

Martinez's La Fenetre du Vent intentionally rejected the confines of the gallery- or museum-based exhibition in favor of an outdoor installation/performance that combined painting with music and poetry. Martinez created La Fenetre du Vent in 2002 as a large portable canvas measuring 250cm high and 200cm wide (98 1/2" x 78 3/4") with a rectangular opening in the center resembling a glassless window. The intention of the window was for the public to stand in the opening behind the painting, thus becoming part of the canvas and participating in the process of artistic creation. This conformed to Martinez's goal of deconstructing the division between artist and audience and his intention that the La Fenetre du Vent be a forum for public expression. His color range included intense pulsating colors inspired by painted Berber house interiors and the bright fabric and ribbon trimmed and embroidered necklines and hemlines of Algerian Berber women's dresses and aprons (Fig. 2). These artistic forms inspired his motifs, as well as Tuareg divinatory geomancy and ephemeral sand drawings. The inclusion of a phrase written in Arabic script to the viewer's right side of the window suggested the importance of language and the spoken word in his work.

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The visual and performative qualities of La Fenetre du Vent represent the culmination of a lifetime of artistic production and social activism confronting the violence and brutality of Algeria's history. Throughout his artistic career, Martinez experienced first hand the anguish associated with colonization and war. During Algeria's struggle for colonial independence, Martinez, then a young art student at Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers, was declared a traitor by the Organisation de l'armee secrete, a militant underground French nationalist group, which staged random acts of violence in an attempt to prevent Algerian independence. Fearing assassination, Martinez fled to France for a year and continued to study art in Paris. After independence in 1962, more than a million immigrants of European descent fled Algeria for Europe. In contrast, Martinez returned to live in Algeria, opted for Algerian citizenship, and became a professor at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beauxarts in Algiers in 1963 (Saadi 2003:37).

Although Martinez is of Spanish ancestry, he told me that he considers himself a true Algerian and not a member of Algeria's pied noir community. (1) His everyday language mixes words in Arabic, Berber, French, and Spanish, reflecting his multiple identities and the cultural pluralism of Algeria. Martinez describes himself as a spiritual medium who connects cultures through his artistic creations. He views urban life as the origin of an artificial elite artistic practice, which he rejects in favor of what he refers to as popular culture, that is, utilitarian crafted forms often associated with rural life, such as hand-coiled and painted ceramics, silver jewelry, tattoos, carpets, wall murals, as well as the performing arts of poetry, music, and storytelling. These forms of artistic expression influenced the basis of the Aouchem movement.

The short-lived Aouchem group--which, in addition to Martinez and his co-founder Choukri Mesli, included the Algerian artists Baya, Mohamed Ben Baghdad, and Mustapha Akmoun among others--showed their work in several exhibitions held between 1967 and 1971. A poster designed by Choukri Mesli to advertise a 1968 group exhibition (Fig. 3), featured geometric motifs associated with Berbers (also called Imazighen), the indigenous peoples of northern Africa, and signals a return to the roots of Algerian art, which the group claimed began millennia ago with the cave paintings of Tassili n'Ajjer. (2) The poster appropriated motifs from Amazigh tattoos, ceramics, and textiles to realize the group's goal of using indigenous motifs, or what they referred to as "magical signs" as the basis of contemporary Algerian art (Fig. 4). They perceived themselves as consciously reviving artistic forms crushed by the brutalities of colonialism and rejecting the propagandistic social realism and neo-Orientalist styles promoted by the postcolonial Algerian state. Mesli transformed Amazigh motifs into political symbols that celebrated Algeria's mythologized past, which for members of Aouchem meant communal living, social-democracy, and peace. According to the group's manifesto, "the sign is louder than the bomb." (3)

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As a founding member of Aouchem, Martinez borrows motifs and symbols from Amazigh art to promote his political and social convictions. An untitled ink drawing from 1974 (Fig. 5), an example of his earliest work, addressed the violence, death, and despair of Algeria's colonial war. It depicts the wild eyes, sunken cheeks, and half-open mouth of a man whose crazed expression seems wrung from witnessing, or indeed suffering, unspeakable atrocities. The man's agitated intensity is further expressed by the way in which graphic symbols fill every available space.

Martinez's emphasis on detail and his interest in intense facial expressions were initially drawn from his training at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts. As a student, Martinez studied with the Algerian miniature painter Mohamed Racim (1896-1974) and was inspired by the detailed line drawings common in Racim's oeuvre. Martinez was also influenced by the works of Etienne Dinet, a French painter who converted to Islam and lived in southern Algeria for the almost forty-five years between 1884 and his death in 1929 (Benjamin 2003:98-99). Dinet's paintings, devoted to the depiction of Berber and Bedouin life, were filled with ethnographically accurate costumes, dramatic gestures, and intensely emotional facial studies that he felt captured the spirit and soul of Algeria's rural population. More importantly, Martinez's ink drawing demonstrates his tendency to use art to address the brutality of violence through confrontation rather than avoidance (see Silverstein and Makdisi 2006:12-13 for a consideration of how nations deal with reconciliation after violent conflict).

Gradually Martinez's color palette progressed from sullen dark colors to a vibrant range, as he recognized the power of intense colors to depict war and violence. His oeuvre recounted the memory of aggression and at the same time promoted democracy and social equality. One of his first works to embrace the use of vibrant color was Fecondite ('fertility'), which was painted in 1976 after he observed Algerian workers repairing the road between Algiers and Blida (Fig. 6). He intended his canvas as a tribute to the labor of the working class, using, for example, the colors yellow and red to refer to oilskin cloth worn by the sunburned and weathered workers (Saadi 2003:22)

In Fecondite, Martinez portrayed a worker as a skinless mass of tendons and ligaments, referring to the referring to the brute force required to operate a pneumatic drill. Nevertheless, as a series of wavy horizontal lines cut across the canvas into the figure's midsection, the figure begins to merge with geometric patterns behind and a ceramic vessel below, suggesting the creation of culture and paying tribute to the brute force required to build a nation. Moreover, Martinez's use of bright yellow and red paint and the rawness of the man's body evoke a sense of hard work and struggle.

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In much of his work, Martinez uses bold color and hideous figures to assault the viewer into remembering Algeria's history of violence and also to express the fight against unjust authority. In addition, he includes motifs derived from Algeria's Kabyle Berbers. The Kabyles, who inhabit the mountainous region of northeastern Algeria, are descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa and, since the end of French colonization, have fought for linguistic rights and the official recognition of their culture in response to the Arabization and Islamization policies instituted by the postcolonial Algerian nationalist government. Martinez, like most Algerians, associates the Kabyles, along with other Amazigh groups such as the desert-dwelling Tuareg, with the spirit of resistance that is evident in their struggles against the Phoenicians and Romans and later the Arabs and the French. According to the majority of Algerians, France feared the Imazighen because they were rebels who never fully accepted colonization. The Imazighen, and the Kabyles in particular, represent a spirit of resistance not only to colonial powers but to social injustice, oppressive demagogues, and religious extremists.

Martinez's tribute to Amazigh culture can be seen in his series of seven paintings titled Seven Walls Revisited (1989), which mimic the wall murals painted by Kabyle women to adorn their house interiors. Until the building boom of the last few decades, Kabyles commonly lived in single-story flat-roofed houses. Women once decorated the interior walls of their homes with brightly painted, multicolored designs and sculpted geometric motifs associated with prosperity, protection, and female fertility (Figs. 2, 7). In addition, the walls featured niches for storage surrounded with painted triangles and diamond motifs. While few young women continue to practice this form of house decoration, an elderly woman named Tassadit Serrour, from the Kabyle village of Ait el Kaid, faithfully maintains the painted walls in her home (Figs. z, 7) that inspired Martinez's Wall Revisited Number 5 (1989; Fig. 8).

Martinez faithfully replicated certain aspects of Serrour's house interior, such as the border of triangles that line the wall, the painted vertical bands filled with colorful triangles, and the use of bright, primary colors. In the middle-right section of the painted wall, Serrour painted a flattened representation of a lizard, which Martinez enlarged and painted in the center of his canvas (Fig. 8). Martinez told me that Kabyles associate lizards with good luck and refrain from killing them; thus, the lizard became a ubiquitous symbol, which Martinez adopted as his personal totem. (4) Moreover, according to Martinez, the snake image and the arrow motifs, also seen in this painting, protect against evil and represent spiritual elevation and wisdom.

Martinez further modified the Kabyle original by inserting a human figure into his canvas, placing it inside the wall's storage niche. The figure of a tortured-looking man painted with vibrant colors, large bulging eyes, and arrows emerging from his nostrils and mouth was based on a photograph of a man with a bone-pierced nose whom Martinez described as a sorcerer from Borneo. Martinez interpreted the image as a self-portrait, intentionally portraying himself in the romanticized role of a sorcerer or magician who furiously speaks out against evil and violence and stands on the threshold between the known and the unknown (Saadi 2003:66).

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Instead of exhibiting in a museum or gallery in Algiers, Martinez chose to exhibit his series of seven canvases in an Amazigh cultural center located in the Kabyle village of Ait Hichem. The exhibition was visited by large groups of Kabyle women, who actively engaged with the artworks by discussing and analyzing the meanings of the motifs and symbols Martinez replicated from the original Kabyle wall murals (ibid., p. 93). Since Kabylia has become increasingly urbanized and fewer and fewer women practice wall painting, the social and cultural significance of this art form has been largely forgotten by the local population. Martinez intentionally valorized this dying art form by creating seven canvases, representing the mystical number seven, which has a sacred meaning in Islam. (5)

Martinez's valorization of a disappearing art form such as Kabyle wall murals, his choice to display his series of artworks in Kabylia, and his engagement of the local community were significant political gestures intended to pay respect to the Kabyle people. Out of respect for the Kabyle's well-developed cultural consciousness, he frequently visits local cultural associations that promote Amazigh issues, and these in turn profoundly influence his oeuvre.

La Fenetre du Vent owes its origins to one such visit to Kabylia. In 1986, Martinez visited a small community located in the hilltop village of Koukou, where he discovered that, until the last few decades, women had visited a small structure in the cemetery of Koukou to sing self-composed poems in front of a northward-facing glassless window, which they called taq n ubehri or "window of the wind." He discovered that Kabyle women in other villages sung similar improvised poetry. If they did not have an actual window, they would chant in a gully or another locale where they believed their words would be swept up by the wind. Kabyle women hoped their poems would cross the Mediterranean Sea and touch the ears of their husbands, brothers, and fathers who had immigrated to France. When women noticed a bird fly by the room or distinguished some other sign, they knew that the wind successfully carried their messages northward.

The region of Kabylia, one of the most densely populated areas of Algeria, contains the nation's largest Amazigh group, totaling four million and representing 20% of Algeria's population. Kabyle villages are situated on dramatic ridges overlooking fertile valleys, but overpopulation and poverty caused thousands of Kabyles to emigrate from Algeria to France from the late nineteenth century until the 1980s, when France began to limit immigration (Stone 1997:9). Kabyle men departed their natal villages to find work in France, leaving behind their wives and families. Limited daily communication existed between the Kabyle immigrant in France and his wife and children in Algeria. Telephone calls were expensive and, since many people did not know how to read and write, letters were rarely sent. Due to employment obligations and lack of financial means, men visited their wives and children only once every one or two years.

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Martinez was moved by the ways in which Kabyle women creatively responded to their loved ones' absence; he believes that Kabyle poetry illustrates the spirit of the Amazigh culture to survive despite hardship and trauma. He told me that his memories of the village of Koukou resurfaced when he himself fled to France in 1993. (6) During the 1990s, Algeria plunged into violence and civil conflict. While in exile, Martinez experienced firsthand what it meant to be cut off from friends and family in Algeria, rarely receiving news of their welfare, worrying about loved ones. Martinez listened avidly to the radio for tidbits of news, sadly learning of the assassinations and imprisonments of friends and family. Although he desperately desired to return to Algeria, going home meant probable murder by religious extremists. (7)

Martinez, who currently lives in Marseille, began teaching at the Ecole superieure d'art at Aix-en-Provence in 1995, where he continues to teach today. He did not feel it was safe to visit Algeria until 2000. During his return, Martinez encountered one of his former students, a Kabyle from the village of Koukou who placed a small metal figure of a man in his hand, telling Martinez that it came from his home. This student triggered Martinez's memory of the glassless window, the problem of exile, and the difficulty of communication. His dark memories haunted him, inspiring him to create La Fenetre du Vent.

La Fenetre du Vent provided Martinez a medium in which to voice his personal anxieties concerning the pain of exile and the memory of violence from his homeland. He cut a rectangular opening in the canvas to create a window, allowing members of the public to stand in his place and to express their own rage at the violent history of Algeria (Fig. 9). He painted the canvas with groupings of parallel lines derived from the embroidery and ribbon trim that frames the necklines of Algerian women's dresses (Figs. 2, 10). Additionally, he mimicked the bold patterns found on plastic floor mats from Algerian homes that have replaced the hand-woven straw mats of the past. This expressive style was intended to illustrate the influence of consumerism on contemporary Algerian visual culture and to connect his painting to everyday life, since store-bought trim, which is used to adorn "traditional" Kabyle dresses, and plastic mats are modern innovations. He also painted dots grouped to form triangles, diamonds, and other shapes that replicate the forms used in Tuareg ephemeral sand paintings and geomancy, which he studied while visiting the Algerian Sahara.

The conceptual expressionism of La Fenetre du Vent was just as important as its visual impact. It was based on a therapeutic principle, in that participants could stand behind the window and freely express themselves in their own way. One goal of La Fenetre du Vent was to create an atmosphere in which the painting could live, breathe, and recreate the ceremonial spirit of popular arts. Martinez began each installation and performance of his artwork explaining the purpose of the window, then playing his flute before reciting the names of his friends who were killed in Algeria. Invited to approach the window one by one, people tended to be timid at first. Nevertheless, once they stood behind the painting's opening, they suddenly felt free from restraint, and the window became a performance stage for the uninhibited expression of emotion and personal narrative for some and a creative outlet and a performance opportunity for others.

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Each expression and performance of La Fenetre du Vent took on its own character and uniqueness. Martinez's intention was to create a communal ritual whereby the audience could engage in the performance and play out dual roles as spectator and actor, and participants, framed by the window, became momentary works of art. Martinez traveled with La Fenetre du Vent to eight French and Algerian venues from 2002 to 2004, including the town of Timimoun in southern Algeria, the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers, the Maison de la poesie in the French town of Saint-Martin d'Heres in France, the Association culturelle berbere in Paris, and Ait Yenni in Kayblia.

Each site had a symbolic significance for Martinez, and each performance featured music, dance, poetry, and song. To connect to the place that profoundly inspired his artistic and spiritual development, his first exhibition took place in the town of Timimoun in the Algerian Sahara (Fig. 1). According to Martinez, the vast Saharan landscape, being free of pretense and artifice, liberates him from the distractions of everyday life. The purity of the desert sand and the cleanness of its vast sky charges and energizes him. During the exhibition at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers, where he formerly taught, Martinez invited poets and artists, among whom were the Karkabous of Blida, a musical group of Sahelian ancestry who perform with large barrel drums and metal cymbals. The group created a procession that started somberly from the precise spot where Ahmed and Rabah Asselah--the director of the Ecole nationale superieure des Beauxart and his son--were assassinated in 1994 by religious extremists and continued to the central courtyard of the school, where La Fenetre du Vent was erected. The performance at the Maison de la poesie in the French town of Saint-Martin d'Heres was personally significant, because this was the first French venue to exhibit his work after his exile in the 1990s. However, Martinez told me that one of the most powerful performances of La Fenetre du Vent was at the Association culturelle berbere in Paris. (8)

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La Fenetre du Vent provided many of the Algerians living in Paris a medium whereby to express the pain of exile and their feeling of marginalization in France. For example, an elderly Kabyle woman recreated the poetry of longing she once sang through an open window to her immigrant husband, when she was a young woman left behind in Kabylia. One Algerian woman raised in France recounted how her mother, who was left behind in Algeria by her husband, yearned to return with him to France. Her in-laws preferred that she stay in Algeria, but she defied them one night by sneaking out of their house through a window with her two children, eventually joining her husband in France. For this woman the window bore particular significance, since it was through a window that her mother regretfully took her from her homeland and thus estranged her from her natal culture.

When the Amazigh activist and community organizer Hassen Metref planned to hold a festival of the spoken word in Ait Yenni, a set of several small villages in Kabylia, in 2004, Martinez decided that this would be the last place he would exhibit La Fenetre du Vent (Figs. 10-11). This location was particularly significant for Martinez, as Kabylia provided the initial impetus for the project and represents an egalitarian society where popular culture and communal ceremonies still thrive. The performance at Ait Yenni was particularly memorable and therapeutic, as people recounted the terrible tragedies they experienced in the face of Algeria's violence, turmoil, and conflict. La Fenetre du Vent became a healing agent. Once participants started speaking through the window, they often experienced such massive relief they could not stem the subsequent flow of emotion as they recounted their suffering and trauma during the violent conflicts of the 1990s in Algeria. For example, a woman sorrowfully spoke through the window about the sudden accidental death of her son during the violence of the 1990s--he was killed by crossfire during a gun battle in Algiers.

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But beyond the function of therapeutic release, each performance was a sensory and aesthetic feast, where people recited poetry, discussed art, chanted songs, and played musical instruments. Some participants read political declarations and some spoke about their exiled family members on the other side of the sea. Others took a light-hearted approach and used the venue to tell jokes or recount humorous stories. Some young people performed animated rap songs. One man pretended that the window was a mirror and, to the delight of the audience, pretended to shave himself. Blossoming young artists often used the opportunity of the presentation to speak about their work. An elderly Kabyle man sang humorous songs with strong moral proverbs. The common denominator was that in each venue, Martinez's installation allowed participants to express themselves openly without any fear of censorship and judgment, embodying the principles of democracy and social justice Martinez has promoted since the 1960s.

The performances of La Fenetre du Vent collectively constituted a transnational communal memorial to Algerians' memories of violence and injustices. La Fenetre du Vent was from the beginning conceived as an ephemeral creation and was never intended to be displayed as part of a permanent installation. Since its last performance in Kabylia, the actual canvas has been rolled up and stored there. However, all participants agreed to be filmed by the videographer Dominique Devigne, who has accumulated many hours of video which memorialize the performances that define the communal aesthetic character of La Fenetre du Vent.

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Martinez's endeavor represented an effort at reconciliation and healing by allowing individuals to publicly recount their experiences of violence and suffering, thus participating in a public communal healing that merged the painful recounting of the horrors of war with the joyful celebration of life. His creation of La Fenetre du Vent allowed him to create a ritual of healing by projecting his own personal pain of exile onto the political struggle of the Imazighen in Algeria. Amazigh arts and culture are rapidly changing due to economic, social, and political factors regardless of the fact that active Amazigh political movements in Algeria call for the official recognition of the Amazigh language and the acknowledgement of the contribution of the Imazighen to Algerian history and culture. Although he is not Amazigh, Martinez enjoys enormous approval from Imazighen living in France and Algeria, who recognize Martinez's art as a means of ensuring the survival of Amazigh culture into the future.

I witnessed the support received by Martinez firsthand when I traveled to Kabylia with him in July 2006. People in the village of Ait Lhacen invited Martinez to engage them in a communal art project to coincide with the region's annual festival of the spoken word. (9) Martinez decorated the tajma'at, a male communal meeting space located at the entrance of the village, with symbols derived from Kabyle painted pottery, textiles, and jewelry (Fig. 12). The act of painting the tajma'at was conceptually significant: Amazigh activists believe that the existence of a village-based communal venue for decision-making proves that democracy is an inherent feature of Kabyle society (see Goodman 2005:69-84 on the romanticization and idealization of the Kabyle village and the tajma'at).

Since 2004, Martinez has made the journey from Marseille to Kabylia each summer and views it as a sort of pilgrimage. While he idealizes the Kabyle village as a site of rich tradition and social equality, he also recognizes that poverty, emigration, and violence have profoundly transformed Kabylia. Colonial policies and the economic difficulties of the postcolonial Algerian nation resulted in the migration of large numbers of Kabyles to France. In addition, since the 1980s Kabylia has been the location of violent protests and widespread rioting against state repression of the Amazigh language and culture. Therefore, the people of Kabylia are extraordinarily receptive to Martinez's art, as he confronts the desolation of exile and memorializes Algeria's history of violent struggle. He also captures their self-proclaimed spirit of insubordination and their support of democracy. His communal art projects, such as La Fenetre du Vent, memorialize the rapidly disappearing arts of painted pottery, decorated house interiors, and woven carpets and provide a much needed mechanism for healing.

The issues of exile, memory, and healing can be best illustrated through an analysis of the large five-pointed star Martinez prominently painted on La Fenetre du Vent. The star, which he also painted on the entrance to Ait Lhacen in 2006, was based on a design Martinez noticed Tuareg men drawing on the sand during his visits to southern Algeria. The star, according to Martinez, portrays the path nomadic Tuareg people take through the desert. On La Fenetre du Vent, he painted boxlike designs at each corner to represent Tuareg camps. (10) The path overlaps itself and eventually ends where it began, serving as a metaphor for the history of Algerian art and the aesthetic philosophy of Aouchem. Despite the path one takes in life, one ends where one begins, always returning to one's source. Near the star on La Fenetre du Vent, Martinez wrote the words 'fin mashi" meaning in dialectical Arabic "where are you going?"--a question Martinez poses both to himself and to the Algerian people. Although Martinez's self-characterization as a sorcerer and a mystic may sound vaguely romantic, it is surprisingly accurate. Martinez is an intermediary with artistic powers of creativity that create a sense of continuity between the past and the present, bridging and connecting cultures, healing those suffering from haunting memories of violence and exile.

References cited

Benjamin, Roger. 2003. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goodman, Jane. 2005. Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Saadi, Nourredine. 2003. Denis Martinez, Peintre Algerien. Alger: Editions Barzakh.

Silverstein, Paul, and Ussama Makdisi. 2006. "Introduction: Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa." In Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, eds. Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, pp. 1-26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Stone, Martin. 1997. The Agony of Algeria. New York: Columbia University Press.

Notes

(1) Denis Martinez, interview by author, Marseille, May 30, 2006. This paper is based on interviews done with Martinez in Marseille in 2004 and 2006, as well as a visit with him to Kabylia (Algeria) in July 2006 for participation in an art installation and performance.

(2) The word Berber derives from the Greek and Latin word for "barbarian". Berbers themselves rarely use this word and typically use the name of their particular group, such as Ait Khabbash or Kabyle, to refer to themselves. Political activists have recently adopted the term Imazighen, which means "the free people;' Amazigh is its singular and adjectival form. While some scholars perceive the term Imazighen as politically charged and only use it to refer to contemporary political activists, I prefer to use Imazighen rather than the pejorative word "Berber."

(3) The Aouchem Manifesto was republished in 1996 in the journal Algerie Literature/Action no. 5, November.

(4) Denis Martinez, interview by author, Marseille, May 30, 2006.

(5) For example, heaven is believed to have seven levels; the Ka'aba is circled seven times in the annual pilgrimage to Mecca; North African women frequently wear seven bracelets in reference to the mystical agency of this number.

(6) Denis Martinez, interview by author, Marseille, May 30, 2006.

(7) For example, a few months after he fled Algeria, Martinez heard the shocking news that the director of the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers and his son, Ahmed and Rabah Asselah, had fallen victim to an assassination on the grounds of the school. Martinez certainly would have been the target of a similar act of violence.

(8) Denis Martinez, interview by author, Marseille, May 30, 2006.

(9) The week-long festival (called La Semaine des Raconte Arts) was held from July 8-14, 2006. Hassen Metref organizes the festival and holds it in a different Kabyle village near the city of Tizi Ouzou each year.

(10) Denis Martinez, interview by author, July 8-14, 2006.

CYNTHIA BECKER is assistant professor of African and African diaspora art history at Boston University and the author of Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity. [e-mail]