Bread of the Ravens

A novelist's withering indictment of centuries of silence and marginalization of North Africa's indigenous people, magnified by the twin horrors of political repression and religious violence

Bread of the Ravens is the story of a nameless Amazigh journalist, who is imprisoned and tortured after publicly critiquing the violence and immiseration crushing his people are enduring. His bravery comes at the cost of his freedom and nearly his life.

Told through a series of dizzying fever dreams, fragmented and discontinuous, scarred by torture and historical trauma, the Amazigh novelist Aksil Azergui delivers a harrowing narrative of the state violence, religious intolerance and terror, and repression of the Amazigh people. Hamid Ouyachi's deft and visceral translation is razor-sharp in its specificity; it carries the reader into the journalist's altered reality, as he scrambles across unforgiving landscapes-real or imaginary, obsessed with writing the story of the Imazighen. Bread of the Ravens takes its place in a worldwide tradition of literature as means of resistance and a reclamation of language and identity.