2023-05-14 06:00:14
Its concerts bring together an audience from both shores of the Mediterranean. The conviviality that emanates from it is due to the excellence of its musicians and its warm, bewitching voice, which sings of nostalgia, exile, ardour. At 50, after a family tragedy that could have brought her down, singer Souad Massi, muse of a peaceful dual culture, continues to express on stage the defense of women’s rights and freedoms.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
… If I hadn’t been born in Bab-El-Oued, the most popular and mixed district of Algiers, surrounded by women as fascinating as they are invisible.
Why “invisible”?
Because it was a society of men! Where the rules were made by men, for men, and for their sole benefit. The women, small inferior beings, were only there to serve them. Their fate was decided at birth, their sex condemned them to a reclusive destiny. No going out, no education, no freedom, no public life. They were caged birds.
Did you know that, little girl?
Oh yes ! And the prospect of one day becoming one of those hobbled birds terrified me. I spent all my time as a child with these women of my family and our neighbors, whom I found magnificent and talented. I listened to the conversations, I observed the looks. What struck me was the sadness and melancholy of these women. It seemed unfair to me. And this difference with the freedom of men was incomprehensible to me.
The system was, however, a thousand years old…
Yes, but the fact of having been raised, until I was 5 years old, by my paternal grandmother gave me very early, I believe, a maturity. She was modest, refined. And she invented poems that enchanted me. It was my Scheherazade. I loved her company, I learned a lot of things there, and I was revolted by the future that awaited me as a woman. So I became a real tomboy. Becoming a man seemed to me the only escape. A free man, since a free woman did not exist. A sporty, muscular man who could defend himself – I was doing three hours of sport a day, I was exhausted. A man to whom no one would dare to dictate his conduct.
Didn’t this rebellion worry your family?
No, because my mother knew how to transform my rage. She did not try to disguise reality. “It’s a fact, she told me, women are enslaved in our society, and I understand your anger. But don’t be complacent. Transcend it! Ask yourself what you can do to set us free. My mother was my go-to philosopher.
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