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ALGERIAN JOURNEY
RUSSELL

the country, enclaves of resistance, the jazz beat threading our heads, tapped out in our tread, was easy armor against the lock-step of a mechanized land.

We didn't own the buildings constructed to frame our light, but at least the graffitti, cave drawings possessing the lifeless monuments of a doomed civilization not yet evacuated, were in the language of outlaw souls. They weren't in the oppressor's tongue. They weren't, as in Algiers, in French.

We hadn't won in America. But we were a long way from losing. The country's favorite adjectives for us were "deprived," "underprivileged" and "dispossessed." We could agree, happily-did agree, joyously. Particularly now, seeing halfway around the world what it meant to be "possessed." Like Algiers is possessed.

In the midst of this upheaval, the festival adds a new madness. But it is a fine madness, of the kind that may save us all. For every night, in the fifty or more festival centers in the heart of Algiers, Africa dances. Her heart beats: Tanzania, Ghana, Mauritania, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Libya, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Senegal. On and on and on. A full rhythm now. A joyous parade. An international strut. Luminous black life on the move, giving strength to her brothers and renewing the land.

I go to sleep to the echo of drum throbs and rise to the count of my own pulse extending the beat, keeping it with me, and me with it, striding tall through the day.

Through the several days I am here I find many things to keep: the sight of a mosque at the top of a street, vacant, cool gray in the white Algerian sun, reached only by reaching, by passing through two rows of tall black iron cooks, shepherd's staffs and/or stakes marking the road to peace.

Or against an ancient Arab materializes, slowly. He is Black. Robed in the dust of the street and furrowed by winds that know no cities, no home, he moves to the sound of cow bells and the hooves of the two rams drawn behind him. Deliberately oblivious, he is the moment, fixing it, all else blurred by his passage.

Images like these, and periods longer than a moment:
The "fantasia" we saw one afternoon, and my record of it, written then:
So. Finally. The first throbbing, strident, gripping, charged, REAL experience of the Arab spirit: his pride, his dignity, his triumph. 500 horsemen. drilling. A desert charge.

Their strength thunders at you-one with horses hooves, crack of

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