Boualem Sansal, dissident author and provocateur | EUROtoday

With his spicy humor and his style for provocation, the Franco-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal has lengthy attributed to the dearth of brilliance that the determine of the author has in his native nation the truth that he was left at liberty, regardless of the common press campaigns waged in opposition to him. “The postman from my villagehe told the World, asked me one day what I did with all the books I received. I told him, tiredly, that I was a writer. “Public writer”, replies the civil servant! He confirmed me a desk and informed me that I might come right here and write individuals’s letters for the administrations. »

His arrest, on November 16, at Algiers airport, and the order of detention in a penitentiary unit of a hospital within the Algerian capital (in opposition to which he appealed) belie the stable optimism which animates his books, the place behind the darkness there are at all times doable reconciliations on the horizon. So, in Abraham or the fifth covenant (Gallimard, 2020), the mission of future harmonization between religions is rising.

An writer of French expression and tradition, Sansal made it some extent to remain in Algeria, dwelling because the finish of his research within the college city of Boumerdès, 45 kilometers from Algiers, in a comparatively protected surroundings. . But this lifelong opponent of Islamism, this scientist whose newest novel, Live. The countdown (Gallimard, 240 pages, 19 euros), printed in January, depicts an Earth doomed to vanish right into a black gap, this man who believes “that there is nothing more to expect from religions”famous that even Boumerdès ended up protecting himself with mosques.

Write from Algeria

For him, writing about Algeria gave that means to a phrase that exile would solely have deafened. It was solely just lately that he considered settling in France, like his buddy the author and journalist Kamel Daoud, current Prix Goncourt for Houris (Gallimard, 416 pages, 23 euros). “In dictatorial systemsexplained Sansal to World in 2018, the individual is victim and actor at the same time. We are either committed actors, or actors through our silence, because silence equals approval. Algerian literature from the first years of independence was entirely built on allusions. A real administrative censorship was exercised, and, beyond that, there were killings, exclusions… Dreams of escape never came true, except by going abroad. » But “when we can tackle societal taboos, on the spot, it’s great”he hastened so as to add.

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