Sept Nuits sur un cadavre. Algérie 1930. Roman colonial

In the Land of Rekba: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"

Chebrek, a Kabyle from the Djurdjura massif, gives the contract killer Yataghène the task of assassinating his father-in-law Nour Eddine, who had wounded his honor in two ways: he had taken back and sequestered Tozeur, his wife, because he had not yet paid the full dowry, and he had even slapped him in front of women.

Furious, Kamir, Nour Eddine's mother, calls upon her grandson Amokrane to avenge his father according to the tradition of the rekba. But Amokrane refuses to kill Chebrek. Since the Kabyles of the Djurdjura claim that if a murderer can step over the body of his victim seven times within the seven days following the crime, he makes it impossible for the dead man's family to avenge him, Kamir immediately has her son's corpse removed. She buries it in her tent and keeps it for seven days to then pursue her revenge.

Amokrane, revolted by the behavior of his sister Tozeur, who betrays her clan by clandestinely joining her husband Chebrek, ends up hiring Yataghène in turn to kill his brother-in-law.

Will Tozeur then turn against her own brother?

"Tozeur was ready to bend her knees before the barren pyramid of Lella Khedidja, this culminating point of the Djurdjura massif, which was becoming a monstrous deity. It seemed that it personified the rekba, the atrocious law of the Berber mountain. It was she who demanded blood, always blood, the blood of fathers and the blood of sons, as if she had set herself the task of draining the veins of the race to the very last drop."

Notes by Wolf Albes

Reprint of the original edition from October 1945 (Editions Francaise de Librairie, Algiers)