Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah

Ait Djafer's long poem Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah is an underground classic written during the French oppression of Algeria. On October 20, 1949, in the city of Algiers, Khouni Ahmed, a tubercular beggar, is walking along Rue Franklin Roosevelt. He hasn't eaten. He's holding his little daughter, Yasmina, 9, by the hand. A truck approaches. Suddenly, he pushes the child at the wheels. As she doesn't die, he pushes her a second time... Prosecuted two years later in criminal court, Ahmed is declared insane and committed to an asylum. As Jack Hirschman comments in his introduction, these events "inspired the writing, in the French language, of one of the most important poems of the 20th century, the Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah. Dedicated to 'those who have never been hungry,' the poem was written by a 22-year-old student, Ismael Ait Djafer. It was printed in a small pamphlet edition by the Democratic Union for a Free Algeria in 1951. Its circulation was largely local; but in 1954 Jean Paul Sartre published it in his Paris magazine, Les Temps Modernes; and in 1960, the year of Algerian independence from French colonial rule, it was published in book form by Pierre Jean Oswald Editions."

IsmaA?l AA¯t Djafer was born in 1929 in the Casbah of Algiers. ?Show More At 17 he was already writing and drawing for newspapers and magazines. He spent various periods of his life in exile in France, Germany and Sweden. After the overthrow of Ben Bella in 1965, Djafer went into permanent exile in Paris, where he died in 1995.

Jack Hirschman was born in New York City in 1933 and has lived since 1973 in San Francisco. He has published more than 25 translations of poetry from eight languages. Among his many volumes of poetry are Lyripol, The Bottom Line, Front Lines and Endless Threshold.