Idir

Biography

Idir (in Amazigh: ⵉⴷⵉⵔ, in Arabic: إدير), whose real name is Hamid Cheriet, was born in 1949 in Aït Lahcène, 35 km from Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria. He is an Algerian singer, songwriter, and musician who performs in the Kabyle language.

Idir was born in 1949 in the village of Aït Lahcène, in the Djurdjura Mountains of Kabylia. The son of a shepherd, he grew up in an environment where Berber poetry and culture held a central place, where the Kabyle language was spoken, and where local traditions nourished his musical imagination. From the outset, his world was marked by the voices of the women around him: “I was lucky enough to have a grandmother and a mother who were poets,” he would later say, sum...