www.apollo-magazine.com/the-algerians-battling-to-save-the-casbah-from-crumbling/
Still I’ll rise, Like the Phœnix for its ashes, I’ll rise
I’ll rise
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
_Maya Angelou
The Casbah of Algiers is dying. The buildings are falling apart, like the Icebergs, breaking and melting down, out there in the Groenland, in the heights latitudes, helplessly; we know about that, that the principal cause is due to climate change, and CFCs, but what about The Casbah, an universal patrimony and a historical heritage?
_“ The Casbah of Algiers remains the largest old walled city or ‘citadel’ in North Africa, and was put on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites in 1992.”
In the past it was devastated by an earthquake in 1792, like Oran, but like The Phœnix rising from the ashes, Algiers was rebuilt and stood up proudly for 200 years, defying all the invaders and their destroy of its historical features. There were 384 Mosques and kutabs_medersas, ottoman styles buildings, hamams, and bazaars, with forts and quarters for the guards along the waterfront and on hilltops of Algiers.
Pompéi, was a tragedy, a city buried under the lava after the eruption of the Vesuvius Month, but still it was a natural disaster also, like the one we used to see in Hawaii, nowadays, and we sense that as we live the moment when it happens.
In Africa, The elephants knew long before the moment when it comes to die, the place where to go; a cemetery for elephants. It’s a discrete place and private way to die in dignity away from unsolicited eyes and predators.
It’s terrible, yet so painful to see an elegant and with such majesty dying.
Yet, there is another question that I always pondered about on the tittle in bought languages since I read the book_The Thorn Birds _(“ Les oiseaux se cachent pour mourir.)”_In French. In a poetic way The book’s title refers to a mythical bird that searches for thorn trees from the day it is hatched. When it finds the perfect thorn, it impales itself, and sings the most beautiful song ever heard as it dies.”
The Question is _(Est-ce que les oiseaux se cachent pour mourir ?) Do the birds also hide to die? Certainly, but they also are fallen dead from the sky with no scientific explanation.
the slag-heap, loosened by a slip
of rain-swollen mountain stream, suddenly
gave with a roar, taking a primary school,
crushing the children
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jun/22/poem-of-the-week-glacier-by-gillian-clarke
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Same things is happening to the Casbah, at any rain pouring, the walls collapse more and more, leaving death and anger among the inhabitants of the mourning city.
My last trip back home, It was by daylight, and from the plane hovering over the Groenland, at 30 thousand feet, it was pungent to see in-visu the bank of the Glassier falls lout apart, although you are at that altitude high, you still feel the fall and breakage in silence.
In the Newspaper, when back home, I read late on this article below
Iceland holds funeral for first glacier lost to climate change
The plaque, which is titled ‘A letter to the future’. Photograph: Jeremie Richard/AFP/Getty Images
Nation commemorates the once huge Okjokull glacier with plaque:
“Only You Know if we did it“
Yes, I know what you ment, guys out there in slushing ices, that you did, because I witnessed in person, although I was hovering over high sitting in my seat and holding my pain and my thought silently looking down to the Groenland, through the hublot.
As an example, if you want to know what I mean; the uniq specimen that will last for Eternity, and infinitely drifting in the sidereal space. More than 40 years ago, is the Satellite Voyager 1 that departed from Earth, in a journey to the Infinite limits of the Universe, with onboard of it, a message engraved on a disc in gold, that retraces the history of humanity on earth, like the hieroglyphs on the wall of the pyramid sand the Grotto paintings on rocks, but the missing phrase would be:
“Only You knows that we were the principal cause of the extinction of our own species”
As another example, In the Tassili N’ Haggar mountains, in the Sahara at the extreme south of Algeria, there rock-paintings (Rupestres Painting) from the Neolithic era, that witness the life of the people living in that age and there environmental habitat. Only painting figures and facts, sort of remaining data, that is still a mystery to decipher. Unlike the Hieroglyph, that we know a lot about the Pharaohs and the ancient Egypt, thanks to Champeleon Discovery during Napoleon Bonaparte Campaign of Egypt. Only we know, after the discovery of the oil underneath that the Sahara was a green landscape then,with interior sea, rivers and volcanic mountains and that let us suppose that the desert erosion factor there was due to a climate change and that caused the aridity of the Sahara aftermath
“And It’s painful to see in HDTV, a panoramic screen view the laments of a pachyderms kneeling down on the ground and lounging on the side accepting its fatal fate.”
I had a chance to wander through the vestiges of the Casbah of Algiers, I accompanied then my daughter to a visit to the shrine of the holy patron, Sidi Abderrahman, guardian of Citadel, and what I discovered along the labyrinths of its streets, and stairs, or what left of it, it’s only the facades that the lumbering posts support them from collapsing. It was like a decorative facades for spaghetti western movies of the 60s and the Hollywood studios, for urban battles in the aftermaths, like the Battle of Algiers movie.
It’s pungent, but revolting at the same time to attend to the fall of house that shelters a thousand years of intimate history. What Time erosion didn’t worn as it goes by, Stupidity and greed of human being finished the job by let it fall down, passively; indifferently. Acting exactly the same Like when It’s for no assisting to person who is in danger, or you call for un ambulance from the hospital that never comes, as it often happens out there in Algiers, long before the venue of the pandemic, and besides that being in The time of Corona _Cholera, Plague, there’s no love or compassion. Algiers had survived, so many diseases, earthquakes(1792), the Plague, like Oran in the book by Albert Camus, and so on, over the past centuries.
Both, The Casbah and The Goldfinch are endangered species ,either of them are disappearing on its own way.
The Casbah nurtured itself on the love of its dwellers, it breathes as they breathe and lives on the scents of Jasmin and fragrances of thousands nights and spices, its sounds with the crisp crease of the silky and white veils that the Algéroises, the Algerian women’s wear, and the stones stairs resounding with the little terra-cotta drums and windpipes (Zorna) on the roofs of the white houses downhill from the heights of the Citadel Of Seven Doors to the ramparts of waterfront. El Djaziras, El Djazaïr
I am afraid that, as the Casbah continues crumbling, comes a day when people commemorates the vestiges with a plaque like the one of the above but instead that says:
“A letter from the past_ Here was the Célèbre Casbah”
The Goldfinch, el Mackneen, in Algerian language is the symbol of freedom to Algerians, and especially for the people in Algiers and immortalized to posterity with a song written by a political prisoner during the battle of Algiers. The Goldfinch feeds itself on seeds that it extracted from a thorny whistle, and it gets hurt sometimes also, like The Thorn Birds and died. The inhabitants of Algiers price el Mackneen to the point that almost in every house there is a caged bird and the hobby extended the the whole country of Algeria, thanks, but no thanks to the fans of soccer clubs; it became an endangered bird, now protected by Law
That’s why I write, as everyone has a cause, and a reason why my blog hence is named.
“Only You know I did”
Mackneen, The Algerian Goldfinch 
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