This voice, often absent, physically inaudible, which each one felt welling up within himself, founded on an inner perception of the Fatherland, became materialized in an irrefutable way. Every Algerian, for his part, broadcast and transmitted the new language and the reality of the renewed nation. ...The radio receiver guaranteed this true lie. Every evening from nine o’clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen. At the end of the evening, not hearing the Voice, the listener would sometimes leave the needle on a jammed wavelength or one that simply produced static, and would announce that the Voice of the combatants was here. For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles. The war of the sound waves in the gourbi, re-enacts for the benefit of the citizen the armed clash of his people and colonialism. As a general rule, within this marvelous psychopathology, it is the Voice of Algeria which wins out. ...Very often, only the operator, his ear to the receiver, had the un-hoped for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians in the room would receive the echo through the privileged interpreter, who, at the end of the broadcast was literally besieged. Specific questions would be asked of this incarnated voice. ... [If something specific had not been heard], by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would be decided that the Voice had in fact spoken of those events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information, and that the preferred outcome had been relayed. <sup>64</sup>
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