There’s a particularly thrilling passage in Fanon’s essay on the role of radio in the Algerian revolution. He’s been explaining how an instrument of colonial domination can become a weapon in the national liberation struggle. By the mid-1950s, the radio – once ‘a transmission belt of the colonialist power’ – had become such a potent resource for the FLN that after banning radio equipment the authorities started to ban batteries. This transformation of the object – a ‘precise technical instrument’ – was paralleled by a transformation of the political subject. The climax comes in an extended description of a crowd of villagers hoping to hear The Voice of Fighting Algeria while French military operators jam the signal. Broadcast from Cairo, this ‘choppy, broken voice’, Fanon tells us, ‘could hardly ever be heard from beginning to end’. But as is the rule with guerilla warfare, what starts off weakness ends as strength. By filling in the gaps, hazarding guesses, making interpretations of half-heard speech, the listeners became active participants in the revolutionary process.

It would be reckless to claim this as any precise analogy for poetry. But it surely constitutes a poetics. What Fanon calls the ‘phantom-like character’ of the insurgent broadcast is as good a phrase as any for the uncertain relationship between poetry and political struggle. Poetry seems to belong to the slippage, the dead air, the delay between broadcast and reception. It lives in the imperfect relay of language, the unstable interaction between fantasy and noise.

Anna Gréki, who joined the Algerian Communist Party as a teenager and became a combatant in the War of Independence, wrote about the radio in her first book, Algeria, Capital: Algiers (1963), recently translated into English for the first time by Marine Cornuet:

            The Aurés shivers

            Under the touch

            Of clandestine radio transmitters

            Freedom’s breath

            Propagating through electric waves

            Vibrates like the stormy fur of a feral feline

            Buzzed by bursts of oxygen

            And it finds its way to every chest

Although the alliteration here is a touch excessive (why not ‘wildcat’ for Gréki’s ‘fauve’?) we get a sense of the sheer physical excitement of the broadcast. Breathing it deeply, as necessary as oxygen, the subject’s chest swells. They stand a little taller. Even the Aurés mountains shiver when touched by the radio waves, like the stones Orpheus charmed with his lyre.

Born in Batna to French schoolteachers in 1931, Gréki was politicised by the Sétif massacres of 1945. She left Algeria to study at the Sorbonne, and continued her involvement in anticolonial activism. She joined the Union of Algerian Students, where she met Ahmed Inal, who became her partner. They returned to Algeria in 1954 to participate in the revolution. Inal was captured, tortured and eventually killed by the French in 1956. Gréki elegises him in a suite of poems in Algeria, Capital: Algiers, where he appears ‘Alive more than alive / In the heart of my memory and heart / Like a most secret body’.

Gréki herself was arrested the following year, spending eighteen months in prison camps before being exiled to Tunis. One of her contemporaries, Claudine Lacascade, recalls Gréki running seminars on Proust for her fellow inmates, insisting that it was more than ‘idle literature’. The poems in Algeria, Capital: Algiers were all written during this period, smuggled out of prison by Gréki’s comrade Nellie Porro. They were initially published in a dual French-Arabic edition, with translation into Arabic by Tahar Cheriaa. Cornuet’s translation follows the appearance of Souheila Haïmiche and Cristina Viti’s The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems (2020), which contains all the poems in Gréki’s posthumous Temps Forts (1966). This means readers in English now have access to what amounts to a Collected Poems. There are a couple of small differences worth noting. The 2020 volume contains a biographical introduction, useful notes and facing-page translations. Cornuet’s edition, meanwhile, follows the layout of the original French-Arabic printing in presenting the English text complete, followed by French at the back.

To my mind, Algeria, Capital: Algiers is Gréki’s most distilled and forceful work. The poems are youthful, sensuous and raging. While they’re often wracked with grief and longing, they also radiate defiance. When she hits her mark – as in ‘Reasons for Wrath’ – she can be lethal:

                                                            But who will heal me

            From this stubborn desire wherein I demand

            Blooms before the month of May who will see them

            These pathetic orchards whose naked earth

            Is barely burned My hunger for new flowers

            Is greater than my patience I’ve always known

            The right to speak is a comradely right

Part of the power of these lines comes from the unstable temporal dilation. Gréki writes in anticipation of a future (‘who will heal me’), makes a demand for the acceleration of the seasonal (‘Blooms before the month of May’), before a seeming disavowal (‘who will see them’). She then slips into a retrospective assertion of personal insight (‘I’ve always known’), which is then given as immutable truth: ‘The right to speak is a comradely right’.

Though many of the poems have specific dedications – to Inal, or Nellie, or her comrades in prison, ‘All My Sisters’ – Gréki, like the radio broadcaster of The Voice of Fighting Algeria, must have been uncertain of reaching those she wanted to address. The poems yearn for physical touch, returning again and again to the body and the senses. In a great image melding erotic intimacy with political struggle, she writes:

            Comrades the time will come when we’ll know how to read

            with lips on lips a smile

            As for me, I need mouths full of heat

            an elbow-to-elbow where we unite in sweat

            exasperated to be slightly afraid

Whether this elbow-to-elbow is side-by-side or face-to-face is the kind of ambiguity poetry was made for. In the final poem in the book she writes: ‘And a desire that would never leave seized me / For your voice – in between lips in between thighs / Between the shining hinge of joy and a cry’. That hinge, both painful and ecstatic, is where these poems reside.

Gréki writes from the position of what Brecht called ‘the torturable body’. The prospect of the guillotine, or of electric shocks and beatings, is always in her peripheral vision. One of her best poems, ‘Surfaces’, begins by recalling ‘the riled-up scars / Of our mismatched childhoods’, and continues:

            Surface of our faces so vulnerable

            With these secret cuts around the eyes

            At the corner of the mouth – Volubilis

            and diss bouqets – surface of our faces

I had to do some googling, but ‘Volubilis’ is a ruined ancient city in Morocco; it’s also Petrea volubilis, a purple vine flower. ‘Diss’ is the Berber name for a type of grass, Ampelodesmos mauritanicus. So in this metaphor, scars and bruises (‘meurtrissures secrètes’) become rooted in the native land, an emblem of what Mostafa Lecheraf called, in his preface to the original edition, Gréki’s ‘love of the martyred country’.

The poem ends with an aching declaration:

I love everything in the world that touches you

            And what touches you is the whole world

            The whole world that hugs me like my skin

            And that I feel pulsing underneath each word

This intensity of feeling is unbearable, hard to sustain. But there’s a terrific firmness to Cornuet’s versions, preserving the strength of the French line. Because there are almost no commas in Gréki’s originals, and so no dependent clauses, it’s the line that holds objects together, positions them in relation one after another. This allows us to move, here, from the grandeur of the whole world down to the flow of ink on the page.

Jean Amery once wrote that ‘Anyone who has been subjected to torture cannot feel at home in the world’. Gréki’s work itches with this knowledge, struggling to accept it even as she describes, almost offhandedly, ‘wounds that outlived their own tortured bodies’. The poems look to the future, ardent with the hope of transformation: ‘We will make you a human world’, she writes with determination both steely and gentle. This human world flashes through in quotidian detail: a street that smells like vanilla ice-cream, or the scent of fresh bread mingling with geraniums on the window-sill.

In a note published shortly after Fanon’s death Gréki remarked, approvingly, that he was ‘not interested in the distant future’. Gréki’s poetry exemplifies a similar kind of practical urgency. At one point, invoking again the radio transmitter, she writes: ‘The future speaks very poorly / like a flickering language’. The poet listens intently, tries to bring the future closer while carrying the voices of the lost and martyred with her.

From our vantage point, it’s impossible to read these poems – where the sky is ‘frothing with helicopters’, where a child ‘without bread or mother’ has ‘an air-filled belly’ – without thinking of Gaza. In his preface, Ammiel Alcalay quotes from the work of Refaat Alareer, killed in an airstrike in December 2023. For many decades it seems as if Gréki’s poems slipped between the cracks: too French to be Algerian, too Algerian to be French. But her work belongs to the wide expanse of activist poetry and the ongoing global struggle against colonialism.

Cornuet’s translation appears as part of The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Lost & Found, overseen by Alcalay for the past fifteen years. This vital series has had a transformative effect on the study and reception of twentieth century poetry. Prioritising archival work, graduate students at CUNY have unearthed new histories, driven by a sense of radical responsibility. The result is a broad front: Frank O’Hara rubbing shoulders with Gréki’s comrade Jean Senac, Diane Di Prima with Langston Hughes and Nancy Cunard. This proximity bridges the gap between political activism and aesthetic experiment, and tends to draw out the strengths in what otherwise might be divergent traditions.

As with most other universities in the United States, CUNY’s treatment of students protesting the genocide in Gaza has been disgraceful. Eight protesters from the CUNY encampment are still fighting felony charges following the NYPD’s clearance of the campus in April 2024. The transnational and multilingual approach of Lost & Found exemplifies the possibility of scholarship as an act of solidarity, and Marine Cornuet’s work here is one of its crowning achievements. Among the highlights of Algeria, Capital: Algiers is titled ‘Youth’, and addressed to Gréki’s friend Nellie Pollo. ‘No one knows how to be happy at twenty’, she writes. But she holds ‘the immortal armour of adolescence’. Gréki died during childbirth aged 35. Militant and beautiful, her poems deserve to be known much more widely.

Read on: Marc-André, ‘Algeria in the Archives’, NLR 149.