The celebrated Kabyle singer Slimane Azem is known as a poet of exile due to his expatriation in France. His mastery of the mother tongue is inherited from both the Kabyle oral tradition and great poets such as Si Moh Oumhand. His repertoire tackles a variety of themes such as freedom, exile, culture and identity, in songs that celebrate peace and tolerance. His poems “Syadi L3uqal,” “Si Moh Yenna-d” and “A Yul-iw Utub” are calls for self salvation through reliance on both God and origins. Others such as “A Taqbaylit a Tigejdit” and “Ssut n Tsekrin” reconsider the status of women in Kabyle society, and “A Wid Ijebden Leqlam” vindicates the Kabyle identity. Though Azem is an engaged poet, his texts are devoid of provocative language, and this is what distinguishes him from many other Kabyle singers. This article aims to study Azem's transcendence of violent language in songs that convey revolt against entrenched social, cultural and political issues. In particular, it analyzes his work in reference to Paul Baltes's psychological implicit theory of wisdom, distills seven properties of wisdom. His principles are prominent in Azem's songs which venerate ancestral values of respect, peace and equality on all levels.

Writing about Kabyle literary history today is a difficult task, considering the very nature of this literature. It is fundamentally oral and did not take its first steps toward a written form until the mid-1940s. There is a considerable lack of works dedicated to Kabyle literature, and those that do exist have primarily focused on poetry, due to the characteristics inherent to this genre. Indeed, unlike prose, poetry includes temporal markers since it accompanies or relays easily identifiable historical events, whereas the narrative genres (legends, fables, and tales) are difficult to date, at least in the case of these last two. For this reason, undertaking more work in this area seems to be a matter of urgency. It is therefore necessary, as required by any work on literary history, to start with periodization; this consists of dividing the historical continuum into linear segments. This work should be based on the establishment of literary facts (e.g., authors, publication dates, etc.) as relevant elements, as well as on the socio-historical events that have marked literary production. By examining the textuality of some poetic works produced at different times by different Kabyle poets (e.g., Youcef Oukaci, Si Mohand Ou Mohand, Ben Mohammed, Idir, Matoub, Ferhat, etc.), I will attempt to propose a historical periodization that will account for the development of the theme of identity in Kabyle poetry.

Dans cet article, je propose une analyse de la voyelle initiale des noms en kabyle. Je proposerai dans cette contribution une représentation dans le cadre CVCV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004) qui montre que la phonologie peut rendre compte de l'alternance de l'initiale des noms sans recourir à la computation syntaxique. Je propose que la voyelle initiale instable qui caractérise l’état libre (EL) s'associe à son propre CV, et que le w- à l’état d'annexion (EA) est associé à un CV- initial. Je montrerai également pourquoi, devant #_CV à l’état d'annexion, si le mot est précédé d'un autre mot à finale consonantique, les glides w/j sont réalisés comme des voyelles pleines u/i. Cet article propose une analyse qui prend en compte cette alternance, contrôlée à la fois par le contexte droit (__CV vs __CC) et le contexte gauche (mot précédent à finale vocalique vs consonantique).