A Smear of Lineage / I Tried
‘This piece was written for the co-curation initiative with Manchester Poetry Library, seeking to introduce Imazighen and French poetry to the library’s shelves. A Smear of Lineage / I Tried explains the difficulty of the research process in recognising indigenous communities and translating oral traditions, in this case specifically the Kabyle people of Algeria. The corrosion of colonialism steals away from what we understand about fact, origin and context. I think the hunt to understand my heritage empirically through literature and archaeology is displaced by its historical ransacking; I can’t always write the core of what I’m saying if institutions perpetuating this violation have obscured my view through using derogatory language or appropriation. So in a homage to that process, I have digitally smeared the poetry, rendering the work illegible. This work is also about how giving recognition to Kabyle people is an endless mission, and it often feels that the work I do will never really be enough to contain the beauty and the intergenerational trauma that Kabyle people have and sustain — hence, ‘I tried’.’
Lydia Hounat is a British-Algerian (Kabyle) writer, photographer and translator from Manchester, England. She was previously a Writer-in-Residence for Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections’ Archives, and her work has appeared in HOBART, MAI Journal: Feminism & Visual Culture, and TOLKA. She co-curated the French and Imazighen poetry collections at Manchester Poetry Library, and is currently undertaking a PhD at Falmouth University and University Arts London. More of her work can be found at her website.
IS&T internships run for 4 months each consecutively, and in order to go some way towards redressing the balance in publishing, will for the foreseeable future come from the Black, Asian, Latinx and other ethnic minority communities; we will almost certainly expand our searches to include other disadvantaged groups as our programme develops. More details are below.
Details on how to submit to Lydia can be found here.