Who is Boualem Sansal, the Franco-Algerian author arrested in Algiers? | EUROtoday

TAll portraits, all interviews with Boualem Sansal evoke his voice. Deafened. Veiled. Sometimes nearly inaudible. Author of 1000’s of pages of novels and essays unreservedly denouncing the affect of Islamism, each at residence, in Algeria, but in addition in Europe, fierce critic of the Algerian regime, its compromise and its authoritarianism, Boualem Sansal speaks with a gentleness that disturbs and disarms those that know the dangers he runs.

Since the publication of his first novel in 1999, The Barbarian Oathan unprecedented cost in opposition to Algeria by the FLN and the Islamists, this nice admirer of Cervantes, 74 years previous at present, walks the literary scene together with his younger man’s silhouette, his eyes all the time somewhat shocked, his lengthy grey hair tied in a aged ponytail, Don Quixote armed with a staggering braveness that he by no means carried over his shoulder.

ALSO READ In Algeria, “the affair” Kamel Daoud finds the trial of the civil struggleAuthor of round twenty works translated all over the world, usually nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, his success on these shores of the Mediterranean is commensurate with the detestation he arouses in Algeria. France and Germany provided him exile, he refused out of hand. Born in Theniet El Had, within the Ouarsenis mountains, enthusiastic about arithmetic, he was a senior civil servant, earlier than being compelled to resign from his place as Director General of Industry below Orwellian circumstances.

Literature as a fight sport

“I lived, in my first life, in a very reassuring universe,” he confided to Point in 2024. “I taught, I did research in the laboratory, I nourished myself with mathematics. The dictatorship was invisible to me since I did not suffer from it, not directly. Then the civil war came and destroyed what the bureaucracy and the socialist economy had not yet destroyed. Then the horrible reality caught up with me. What to do? I hesitated for a long time, between fleeing and staying. I lived in this painful in-between, then I decided to stay and fight. » A scientist, he took up literature at the age of almost fifty, just as one would take up a combat sport.

“He believes in the demiurgic power of the word, in a kind of childish innocence, he plays a lot with words, as a storyteller, like the great Soviet dissidents,” praises Jean-François Colosimo, editor of his newest work. “From this point of view, Sansal is an Algerian author, of French expression, and of Slavic soul…”

ALSO READ Kamel Daoud, Boualem Sansal: the Algerian dictatorship unleashes the canines on its free spiritsJean-Christophe Rufin, who campaigned in 2015 to crown the author with the Grand Prix de l’Académie française, was usually shocked to see Sansal touring to France, the place he was additionally definitely a goal, with none safety. “He is a free man, disarmingly courageous even though he is attacked from all sides. I’ve never seen him be afraid. He went back and forth to Algeria as if the threat, basically, did not exist. »

Jean-Christophe Rufin proposes the election of Boualem Sansal among the Immortals

Treated as a harki or Mossad agent, constant scapegoat of the Algerian press, Sansal nevertheless faithfully returns, after each stay in France, each invitation abroad, to his home port of Boumerdès, about fifty kilometers from ‘Algiers. “He is the only writer in the Arab world to agree to go to the Jerusalem Book Fair, and he pays the price, condemned by many of his peers, the victim of slander and very virulent attacks,” laments his writer. historic, Jean Marie Laclavetine. “I requested him if he did not need to settle in France, he replied: ‘It’s less than me to depart, it is as much as them.’ »

To Discover



Kangaroo of the day

Answer

While his family members are, on the time of writing, nonetheless with out information of him since his arrest at Algiers airport on November 16, everyone seems to be pondering with anguish of the title of his newest novel: Live: the countdown. And to the work of Henry David Thoreau which has been Boualem Sansal’s bedside guide for therefore lengthy: Civil Disobedience.

At the following session of the French Academy, if the author will not be launched, Jean-Christophe Rufin will suggest his election, distinctive and speedy, among the many Immortals. No doubt a derisory distinction for a person who, for 25 years, has risked his life by smiling.