Ameziane Kezzar is a Kabyle poet writer and philosopher. He was born in 1962 in Maraghna (Kabylia) and has lived in Paris (France) for several decades. He is known in the world of culture where he has written for several artists such as Idir, Cheikh Sidi Bémol, Zimu, Belaid Branis. He translated several poetic but also literary works from French into Kabyle, such as Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, Jaques Prévert and many other French writers and poets who constitute for him “La source” in the adaptation, also author of several works such as “La Fuite en avant”, and he also published “Aɣyul n Ǧengis”, a work which he adapted from French to Kabyle and other works. He also produced a double album entitled: Tiwizi, pagan songs from Kabylia: Dieux, hommes et lumières! (Gods, men and lights!)
His work brought together a team of performers and musicians to sing twenty-eight compositions drawn from the pagan ages of ancient Numidia. A real work of genealogical research on Kabyle music and sacred poetry in which big names among the most beautiful Kabyle voices participated, such as Idir, Ali Ideflawen, Djamel Kanoun, Lycia Nabet.
The poet writer Ameziane Kezzar arrives in Canada where his tour begins with three conference-debates, then in the United States of America with two other conference-debates:
– Québec-ville with FKQ: April 28 at 7 p.m. under the theme: Kabylia, Mediterranean perspective.
– Montreal with CAM: April 29 at 3 p.m. under the theme: Kabylia in Arab-Islamic space-time.
– Ottawa-Gatineau with ACAOH: April 30 at 2 p.m. under the theme: Idir, the universal, under the fingertips.
– New York at LaGuardia University: May 5 at 3 p.m. under the theme: “Destruction, denaturation and recovery by Islam of certain elements of ancient pagan culture: rites, festivals, poetry, songs and tales”.
– Maryland with the ACAA: May 6 at 4 p.m. under the theme: Translation and adaptation in contemporary Kabyle literature.
The North American tour is like the story of a trip where the author makes us see and feel the nuances and roughness of a Kabyle culture imprinted with a Mediterranean and influenced imagination. Where he writes «Outside the village, nothing interests us, except that the earth turns on an ox’s horn, that the sea is bottomless, that at night the dead return in the form of moths, that the serpent has seven stings, that the “universe is made of seven heavens, that he who drinks a mixture of water and honey will die, that the owl is the messenger of death, that the ogress devours the wicked children»