Algeria -

“It is said that a young man whose mother gave him one year to marry, carried his pamphlet and circulated among the men of his village, writing about the machinations of women in preparation for his marriage. So I caught him in her nets, and the effort of that year of research was lost.”

This is how the Algerian storyteller Siham Salihi concludes the story by saying, "Good is a woman and evil is a woman."

In her traditional Algerian dress, the storyteller Siham Salhi stands on the stage, saying in her Algerian dialect, "The tales called me to the orchard, I entered and asked for safety, in every tree a story, and I chose for you one of the fruits", raising the audience's enthusiasm when the "outskirts" tell her story.

Siham Salehi told Al Jazeera Net, "My grandmother is my first teacher in the art of storytelling. In an earlier time, there was no television and the grandmother was the source of our entertainment and education. We were eagerly waiting for the night so that we all slept on one bed under one cover to hear the rest of the grandmother's story."

Kawwal in Algeria

The late great playwright Abdelkader Alloula cried his stories on the stage one day, and struggled so that the issue would not stop with him, the issue of the story or what is known in Algeria as “the narrator” (the narrator), and this time the cry is feminist, and creativity is soft in the voice of the storyteller Siham Salehi.

The artist Siham Salhi tells stories from the Algerian "immaterial" heritage, narrates the folk tale, draws the breath of her audience who lives the stories with her, and this woman hardly attends an event without asking her to tell a story in her brilliant style.

Siham Salehi uses the art of storytelling to raise awareness of her rare disease (Al-Jazeera)

For the rest of the story

The watchers gather around her, following the details of the story she tells, in an art called in Algeria the art of "Qawalah" or "Hakawatia", which in recent decades has turned into something similar to the art of "One Man Show" (single-actor show).

Salehi adheres to her inclination to tell the classic story that she started more than 15 years ago, telling Al Jazeera Net, "Theatre is my passion, and the art of storytelling is my cause."

Salehi sees the art she presents as a sign of loyalty to her ancestors in the theater in her country and "to the stories of grandmothers, and loyalty to the happiness that lay in the simplest things."

Stories for children and others for adults, which the Algerian artist narrates to remind Algerians of characters they attached to in the month of Ramadan, such as the character "Joha".

Tales similar to "One Thousand and One Nights", like Scheherazade, sitting in front of the audience, taking it as "Shahryara" for her, and often standing on her crutch, which helps her on her leg, which has become powerless after her health condition developed due to a rare disease.

It has no decor. In the art of storytelling, the sayings are the stage’s decor, so they should not draw the attention of the non-narrative audience with their story, voice, movements, and facial expressions.

Siham Salehi, a state engineer in mining geology, dedicates her life today to art and to publicizing her disease, which is known as “muscular atrophy caused by a neurological disease.” She talks about dreams, saying, “My biggest dream is to run barefoot on the beach at sunset.”

"repartware"

Regarding the source of her narrative balance, Salhi says, "I quote from old Algerian and international tales, and add to them my own artistic skills. My mixing with the audience made me know the way to attract his attention."

Stories from the popular imagination, plots and verses from vernacular poetry and crosses, ends by Salehi with her famous sentence, saying, "My story is walking from valley to valley, and I told it to the good and the sons of the good.