At the UW-Milwaukee planetarium for the last few weeks, views of the night sky were met with stories and sounds from African countries.
On Wednesday, Algeria was featured in the final event of an annual series called Under African Skies, which celebrates Black History Month. Guest speaker Mohamed Maache is an energy engineer and UWM teaching and research assistant. He played the guitar and sang in Arabic. Guests sat in the planetarium while Maache gave a presentation using slides projected on dome-shaped ceiling.
He explained the nuances of his native language.
"It's like people from the north trying to understand people from Alabama," Maache said. "That's the deal with our Arabs, we speak Arabic, but they don't understand us so it's not really Arabic. It's a mixture of different languages: there is French influence in it, there's Spanish influence in it and also the Indigenous language."
Maache recalled memories and stories from his childhood like seeing the animal skin carpet in his grandmother’s house and playing outside with friends. He says everyone is like family there.
"One of the things that really brings nostalgia is that every house in there is like your house," he said. "You can play soccer and when you get thirsty, you go to the closest house, drink water, and go carry on and resume playing soccer."
Maache also explained celebrations like Eid al-Fitr, which is a community feast at the end of Ramadan, and Algeria’s Independence Day on July 5.
Algeria gained independence from France in 1962. Maache told a story about how his grandmother kept his newborn father alive during the Algerian War.
"So what my grandma did, she took her baby uphill and she hid him there with plants. She left in the morning time, she put him in there and then she left him there for the whole day. She brought him after in the evening time and her kid survived. That's why I'm here today giving a presentation," Maache said.
Algeria is the largest country in Africa. Maache compares that to the Badger State. "It's as large as 14 Wisconsins, so that's how big Algeria is. Eighty percent of the surface is just a desert." Maache says the desert is the charm of Algeria.
Jean Creighton is the planetarium’s director. She says the desert’s dry air makes for the best stargazing.
"Water does two things: water absorbs a lot of light and makes twinkling worse, so it makes the air more unstable," Creighton says.
When the event transitioned to indoor stargazing, Creighton dimmed the lights to show guests a view of the night sky from the Sahara Desert. She explained that the perspective doesn’t drastically change because Algeria is close in latitude to Milwaukee. For Creighton, Under African Skies uses our shared sky as an umbrella to put cultural events under.
"No matter where you are in the world, you get to see the stars, and the vast majority of them are exactly the way they have been for tens of thousands of years. That's, I think, a connection that's really profound," Creighton said.
Creighton says together, people are part of a much larger cosmos.
