Please join Marine Cornuet and friends as we celebrate the publication of Anna Gréki’s Algeria, Capital: Algiers, a collection of poems written during Gréki's imprisonment as part of the Algerian liberation struggle.
Anna Gréki (1931-1966) was an Algerian poet of French descent. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle in Algiers, in 1957. Algeria, Capital: Algiers was first published in 1963 in a French and Arabic bilingual edition. Algeria, Capital: Algiers makes this work available to English readers for the first time.
Along with Gréki’s poetry Radhika Singh, a science fiction writer will read from a manuscript that, like Gréki's poems, offers thrilling visions of a liberated future and David Iaconangelo will read a translation of at least one long poem by Miguel Hernández referenced by Gréki.
November Sun
That morning the sun
Used its public crier
Voice
What does it say and want
In the thick of burst
Shadows
It screams that it has plenty of love
To give and plenty of blood
On its hands
It shouts from the roofs
Of Algiers the White of Algiers
The Red
The humid joy of the day
And the cheerful bitterness
Of life
Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.
"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life."
—André Naffis-Sahely
“‘Nothing happens here but everything burns.’ From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with ‘this world of vulnerable flesh.’ Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy ‘the war, this male ax,’ invoking the future with ‘a trust so total / I can almost touch it.’ Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to ‘transcribe with words what is done without them.’”
—Omar Berrada
"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics."
—Marilyn Hacker