Hiziya, the heroine of the Algerian Bedouin poem of the same name, is spoken of almost a century and a half after the supposed year of her death.
The writer Waciny Laredj, who took up the story of the Algerian Romeo and Juliet in a novel, triggered a lively controversy. Waciny Laredj goes too far in the scenario he believes to be true. Whether he’s right or not, that’s also a writer’s job: to stimulate debate.
The novel is not finished yet, but its content already ruptures the passions between those who cling to history as passed down to us through oral tradition, particularly Bedouin poetry, and defenders of human rights, his imagination and his creative genius . Even if it means revisiting the legends.
The story is likely to have taken place in the Zibans, Biskra region during the first decades of French colonial presence in Algeria.
Hiziya came from the Dhaouaouda tribe and was the daughter of a wealthy nobleman, Ahmed Ben El Bey Bouakkaz.
She was of great beauty and had no shortage of suitors among the powerful of the region, but her choice fell on her cousin Saïd, whom her father took in after the death of her parents. Three months after their marriage, Hiziya dies at the age of 23 from an unknown illness.
The author of the poem was Hizya’s true lover
Saddened, Saïd withdraws from the community and ends his life as a hermit in the desert after trying to ask the poet Mohamed Benguitoune to compose a poem in honor of his beloved.
It is this poem that has allowed this love story to last through the ages. In the 20th century, the poem was taken up by many popular Bedouin-style singers, first by Khelifi Ahmed, then by Abdelhamid Ababsa, Rabah Driassa and others, making Hiziya a real myth.
In the village of Sidi Khaled, in the wilaya of Biskra, is the supposed tomb of Hiziya. His years of birth and death are given on the epitaph: 1855-1878.
For the local population, it actually existed and its story is faithfully told in Benguitoune’s poem. However, this is not the opinion of Wassini Laredj.
The author mentioned the content of his next novel in an interview with the government newspaper Annasr, published in Constantine.
Wassini believes he has the answer to the heroine’s cause of death, which remains a mystery to this day. According to him, Hiziya died of poisoning without specifying by whom and for what reasons. But this is just the beginning. He also argues that Saïd is a fictional character invented from scratch by the poet Benguitoune.
But many find it difficult to follow him when he says that Benguitoune was Hiziya’s true lover and that he only expressed his own sorrow with the famous poem.
Better yet, Wassini Laredj specifies that all this is not fiction intended to adorn his novel, but the result of his numerous conversations with the old men and women of the Sidi Khaled region, as well as his multiple readings and listenings to the poem in question. . With the publication of the novel, the controversy is likely to become even more lively.