A novelist's withering indictment of centuries of silence and marginalization of North Africa's indigenous people, magnified by the twin horrors of political repression and religious violence
Bread of the Ravens is the story of a nameless Amazigh journalist, who is imprisoned and tortured after publicly critiquing the violence and immiseration crushing his people are enduring. His bravery comes at the cost of his freedom and nearly his life.
Told through a series of dizzying fever dreams, fragmented and discontinuous, scarred by torture and historical trauma, the Amazigh novelist Aksil Azergui delivers a harrowing narrative of the state violence, religious intolerance and terror, and repression of the Amazigh people. Hamid Ouyachi's deft and visceral translation is razor-sharp in its specificity; it carries the reader into the journalist's altered reality, as he scrambles across unforgiving landscapes—real or imaginary, obsessed with writing the story of the Imazighen. Bread of the Ravens takes its place in a worldwide tradition of literature as means of resistance and a reclamation of language and identity.
Reviews
"Bread of the Ravens is a prayer for Tamazgha, that the Moroccan government was ravaging like a jackal. Contrary to the official claim that Tamazight is an oral culture, Aksil Azergui affirms it is a vibrant literary language that Hamid Ouyachi has rendered in powerful, poetic prose. Azergui's oneiric prison memoir from Morocco's Years of Lead presents Amazighitude and us with a small masterpiece."—miriam cooke, Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures, Duke University, and author of Hayati, My Life: A Novel
"Hamid Ouyachi's poetic translation—indeed, rewriting—of Aksil Azergui's Aghrum n Yihaqqarn brings out the innovative Amazigh novella's literary verve as well as its political defiance. The southeastern Moroccan landscape resounds in its natural beauty, hardscrabble livelihoods, imaginative wanderings, and decades of indigenous struggle against linguistic and religious authoritarianism."—Paul Silverstein, professor of anthropology, Reed College
About the Author
Aksil Azergui is a native of Tinejdad in Southeast Morocco. His most notable books in Tamazight include Is nsul nddr? (Are We Still Alive?, 2010), Iġd n tlelli (Ashes of Liberty, 2012), Imggura g Yimaziġn (The Last of the Imazighen, 2014), and an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, Asefru n Ilyun d Usikel n Ulis (2021).
Hamid Ouyachi, a native of the Goulmima region of Southeast Morocco and a native speaker of Tamazight, is a writer and translator. His works have appeared in Rusted Radishes, Tamazgha Studies Journal, and Words without Borders.
