The Proverb and its Function in Abdellah Mohia's Play “Menttif akka wala seddaw uẓekka”

Until the nineteenth century, Kabyle literature was primarily oral, passed down through word of mouth and limited to various genres such as poetry, proverbs, riddles, tales, myths, and legends. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of the transition to writing in the Kabyle language through the transcription of oral literature. However, the true departure from orality occurred in the twentieth century with the emergence of an intellectual movement within the Kabyle community that started to write in Kabyle to develop it as a written language. These writers introduced new universal literary genres such as novels, short stories, and theater.

The transition to writing in a language long confined to orality was not without its challenges. Writers often drew upon the rich oral expressions of the Kabyle language to overcome the difficulties of expressing new ideas, which became a hallmark of the writing of that era. Mohia Abdellah (1950-2004), faced the particular challenge of promoting his language by translating and adapting universal theater texts. Nevertheless, his translations and adaptations found great success by leveraging the Kabyle language's rich lexicon, especially its proverbs, which contributed to elevating the status of the Kabyle language as a written medium. This article examines some of these Kabyle proverbs reinvested by the dramatist Mohia Abdellah in his play titled “Menttif akka wala seddaw uẓekka” (literally, “better this than being in the grave”), an adaptation of the Russian playwright Nicolai Erdman's work “The Suicide.” Through an intertextual approach, the article highlights the significance of proverbial expressions in Kabyle writing due to their exceptional ability to convey complex ideas from another world. To achieve this, the article initially defines the traditional functions of Kabyle proverbs and subsequently compares them with their counterparts in the source text to better appreciate Mohia's efforts in translating and adapting foreign texts.