A Sunday afternoon, spring 2009. I am at the Zenith, a concert hall in Paris's Parc de la Villette. The venue is packed with people of all ages who have come to see Lounis Aït Menguellet, a Kabyle singer-songwriter celebrated in both France and Algeria. The amphitheater-style seating is sold out, and one of my friends comments that the dance floor is an ‘animation de dingue,’ a space teeming with people dancing and singing.

Many elderly and middle-aged women, as well as teenaged and young girls, wear a traditional Kabyle outfit: a mid-calf-length dress, embroidered across the bodice with loose sleeves gathered above the elbow; a headscarf, twisted back to form a knot with the hair at the nape of the neck; a futha, which is an intricately embroidered length of fabric tied at the waist and worn over the skirt; and finally, a separate, beaded scarf, tied at the waist. The last of these is worn only while dancing.

Many have come to the concert in tailored pants, jeans, skirts, blouses, t-shirts, sneakers, heels, but as they make their way to an open spot on the dance floor, they pull their beaded and sequined scarves from their purses and tie them around their hips, and by the time they find their spot to dance the scarves are already undulating, the beads and sequins shaking in double time to the music. It was a typical scene for a Kabyle concert in Paris or the banlieue.

But there was one major difference between this Aït Menguellet concert and other Kabyle concerts I had attended: Menguellet spoke to the audience entirely in Kabyle. Kabyle music in France is often sung in several languages (most commonly Kabyle, French, Arabic, Spanish, and English), but the stage banter is almost always spoken in French. Not so in the case of Aït Menguellet: when the audience had a particularly strong reaction, I would lean over to one of the friends with whom I had come to the concert—all of them bilingual in French and Kabyle—and ask them to translate for me. I tried to limit the number of times I asked, however, because I felt, both for myself and my friends, that my requests for translations were disruptive to the experience of the concert.