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Remember Me? An American-Educated Engineer Rediscovers His Berber Roots
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# : |
20681 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
4,436 Words |
| Author
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Rabah Seffal
After graduating in 1982 from Tulane University in New
Orleans, Rabah Seffal returned to Algeria, where he worked as
an engineer at an oil-pumping station at Hassi-Messoud in the
Sahara Desert and as a free-lance photographer until 1990. At
present he lives in New Orleans with his wife and daughter and
is working toward a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Tulane. |
Idle dinner-table conversation inspired the writing of this account of a personal journey of mine. Surrounded by educated people and that fabled southern hospitality, I sat comfortably full after a meal in one of the elegant mansions that neighbor New Orleans' Tulane University campus.
The wife of my engineering professor leaned forward to ask me about myself.
"So now, what kind of accent is that?" she asked.
"I'm a Berber, so I suppose it's a Berber accent," I answered.
"Really? Well. I thought that Berbers are people who live in the mountains and herd sheep."
With such a sketchy mental image, I am fairly sure she was surprised to find one of those sheepherders sitting at her dinner table or studying engineering with her husband. She probably went to bed that night concerned about Berbers or sheep, but the conversation had a lasting effect on me.
After that evening, I spend days asking myself who the Berbers, my people, really are. I found that I had no answer--my dinner companion wasn't the only one ignorant of Berber culture. Thousands of miles from my village in Algeria, I realized how little I knew about my people, their history, and their land. Almost every Berber at some point in his life has done farm work. Even I, an engineering student at a famous American university, used to herd sheep and goats a youth and had farmed after school and
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