The alleged arrest of writer Boualem Sansal on Saturday, November 16, at Algiers airport, confirmed by the Algerian government agency APS, is causing international mobilization in the world of letters.
Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka, all Nobel Prize winners for literature, as well as Salman Rushdie, Peter Sloterdijk, Andreï Kourkov, Roberto Saviano, Giuliano da Empoli and Alaa el Aswany joined the call for solidarity launched in the newspaper The Point by the Prix Goncourt 2024, Kamel Daoud. Among the signatories are also Sylvain Tesson, Leïla Slimani, Elisabeth Badinter, Bernard-Henri Levy, Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Emilie Frèche, Caroline Fourest, Boris Cyrulnik and Joan Sfar
In this text addressed to the defenders of freedom, the Franco-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud evokes his “deep concern“. He believes that “This tragic news reflects an alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is nothing more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonment and the surveillance of the entire society..”
For Kamel Daoud, Boualem Sansal, 75 years old, “looks like an old biblical prophet, smiling. It provokes passions and friendships as much as the hatred of submissive and jealous people. He is free and amused by life. He continues with these words: “Sansal writes, he does not kill or imprison anyone. His innocence in the face of the dictatorship made him forget the reality of the Terror in Algeria for several years. He neglected to look at the pack waiting for him, he returned to visit his country that Saturday. He paid dearly for it.”
He recalls that Boualem Sansal has always been a critical voice.against oppression, injustice, Islamist totalitarianism“. He states that in Algeria writers, intellectuals, publishers and booksellers “live in fear of reprisals, accusations of espionage and arbitrary arrests, lawsuits and defamation and violent media attacks on their staff and loved ones” and adds that a “real editorial terrorism targets them”.
He ends by saying: “We cannot remain silent. Freedom, the right to culture and our lives, writers targeted by this terror, are at stake. I am launching an urgent appeal for international solidarity. Let us demand the immediate release of Boualem Sansal and all writers imprisoned for their ideass”.
Boualem Sansal's work evokes without taboo, and in a sometimes caustic style, the history of Algeria, memory, relations with France, and tirelessly denounces Islamism. Among his famous titles, The German's village (2008), censored in its country of origin, invokes the Shoah, the civil war in Algeria and the life of Algerians in the French suburbs.
In 2084, the end of the world (2015), he takes Orwellian accents to denounce the threat that religious radicalism poses to democracies, by imagining Islamism in power. Published in the prestigious Blanche de Gallimard collection, Boualem Sansal is accustomed to literary prizes in France: the French Academy awarded him its Grand Prix de la Francophonie, then its Grand Prix du roman for 2084, the end of the world.
His commitment and his warnings of Europe, and of France in particular, against the dangers of Islamism, have earned this claimed atheist strong enmities. And the support of right-wing and far-right intellectuals and media, applauding his shock declarations on a “Islamic order“who would try”to settle in France“.
In Algeria, threats have increased since he went to Israel to receive a literary prize in 2014. His positions sometimes attract accusations of Islamophobia, which he tirelessly defends. “I have never said anything against Islam that would justify this accusation” more, “what I have continued to denounce is the instrumentalization of Islam for political and social ends“, he explained to AFP in 2017.
Several French political leaders have expressed their concern since Thursday November 21, notably the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe who considered that the writer “embodies everything we cherish: the call to reason, freedom and humanism against censorship, corruption and Islamism“.
On the authors' side, signs of support poured in from all sides, from the Franco-Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, calling for “release“Boualem Sansal, to Frenchman Nicolas Mathieu.”Boualem Sansal and I are the polar opposites of each other“, wrote her compatriot Yasmina Khadra, also “criticism of the Algerian system“, in a press release to AFP. “However, his arrest annoys me. An intellectual's place is around a round table, around a debate of ideas, and not in prison“.
