Boualem Sansal: Features of an Algerian opposition path

Sansal was born in the cedar-clad mountains of Al-Wanshris, where the rocks seem to scratch the sky. He was not expected to enter the world of literature, but writing was his late destiny, as if it were a heavenly calling. At the age of fifty, he published his first novel, proving that great voices are not in a hurry to emerge.

In 1962, the day after Algeria’s independence, he was thirteen years old. He grew up in an atmosphere of democratic enthusiasm, but it was quickly overshadowed by features of creeping despotism. He witnessed the promises of the future shattered by the FLN’s internal conflicts and the dominance of the army. When Boumediene took power in 1965, everything changed radically.

A prominent official in the fight against corruption

In Algiers, Sansal embarked on an illustrious but challenging career. As an engineer and doctor of industrial economics, he worked his way through a system that combined technocrats and military personnel in an ambiguous landscape. His work in the Ministry of Industry, where he held a senior position until 2003, revealed to him the extent of corruption, nepotism and institutional lies.

He once said: “The Algerian military regime is a machine that crushes dreams, a thousand-headed hydra that lives off the blood of its people.”. These words sum up his frustration with the reality he experienced.

In this Kafkaesque world, Sansal witnessed fictitious infrastructure projects, and hidden and sometimes violent pressures to serve the interests of an elite rooted in the circles of power. During the 1990s, these scenes became the fuel for his growing political awareness. Thanks to the encouragement of his friend, the writer Rachid Mimouni, he turned to writing.

A novel of a bold departure

Sansal published his first novel “The right of the barbarians” in 1999, which received widespread acclaim. The novel combined politics and self-reflection, revealing the pain of a people whose memory was shattered after independence. Through which he attacked the soldiers who “They make history and desecrate it.”saying: «History is not history when criminals write it with ink and pass pens between them. “It’s just a record of their excuses.”.

The novel touched on the Polisario case for the first time, calling for its deportation from Algeria. This work brought him several awards, which strengthened his position on the literary scene.

Between censorship and memory: a literary battle for Algerian identity

His courageous stances, which the authorities considered “unacceptable,” caused the end of his career as a high-ranking official. He was suddenly and severely expelled, which prompted him to adopt writing as a means of resistance.

Over the years, Sansal has emerged as a ruthless critic of his country’s authoritarian deviations. writing “Mail sent, Algeria” (2006) was a message of anger directed at his countrymen, but faced censorship in Algeria. Through powerful prose, he called on his people to break the chains of collective forgetfulness imposed on them.

Mirror of ideologies

In a novel German village (Gallimard Publications, 2008), the author presents a bold comparison between Nazism, which symbolizes Algerian military authority, and extremist Islamism.

The “German village” is depicted here as Algeria. The novel tells the story of two brothers, the children of a former Nazi and an Algerian woman, who discover their father’s horrific past. In its precise sense, the writer reconsiders the founding myth of Algeria, by presenting a family narrative in which the father is depicted as “lowly.” Sansali literature presents a patriarchal vision that raises questions for new Algerian generations. Also through this perspective, Sansal denounces the army’s crimes during the Black Decade, as he says: “Totalitarian ideologies feed from the same soil: the blindness of the masses and the silence of consciences (…) I did not reduce the responsibility of my father, who was only a small cog in a huge machine. I did not consider that this blind machine would have worked even for a single second without the firm will of every man who served it.”

This illegitimate alliance between the army and Islam during the Algerian Civil War (1992-2002) would find widespread condemnation ten years later by Kamal Daoud in his articles, and then in 2024 in his novel Nymphs.

Dystopia to denounce military dictatorship

With a novel “2084: End of the World” (Gallimard Publications, 2015), writer Boualem Sansal delves into dystopian literature. This novel is a true literary masterpiece, as it describes a society in which religion turns into an absolute military dictatorship. The world of the novel is bleak and oppressive, but terrifyingly familiar. The novel paints a picture of a people reduced to mere puppets, deprived of any freedom of thought. Sansal explores how governance exploits religion to muzzle freedom, as a poignant metaphor for contemporary Algeria, which “offers humanity submission to holy ignorance as an answer to the essential violence of the void, pushes slavery into self-denial, even outright self-destruction, and rejects rebellion as a means of inventing a world that suits it, a world that keeps it safe.” “Less than the prevailing madness.”

The residents of this community (the Algerians) are described as “pilgrims who are allowed to move, not freely, but according to specific timetables, along designated routes that they cannot leave, interspersed with rest stops placed in the middle of nowhere (…) and listless soldiers take turns guarding the roads at points A strategy to monitor the passage of pilgrims, with the idea of ​​supervising them.

a novel “2084: End of the World” It is also a call to rebellion in Algeria. The novel won the Grand Prize for the Novel from the French Academy.

His position on the Sahara issue

Boualem Sansal never hid his sympathy for Morocco. He is known for his deep intellectual convictions about the Eastern Sahara and the cities of Tlemcen, Oran, and Mascara, which he described as “Moroccan before France colonized Algeria.” The writer also expressed his position on the issue of Western Sahara and the Polisario. He recently stated that the Algerian military regime’s support for the Polisario is “a manufactured tragedy aimed at diverting attention from internal injustice.”

He considered the Algerian army “a mafia that seizes the country’s wealth,” and described the Sahara as a “playing field for generals” who tamper with history to consolidate their power, saying: “The military regime invented the Polisario to destabilize Morocco.” Algeria wanted a communist regime in the region, and above all, it did not want the Algerians to compare themselves with Moroccans and say that there they live better and more freely.

These courageous stances earned Boualem Sansal fierce hostility from the Algerian authorities. He was arrested in Algiers on November 16, on serious charges related to “treason” and “harming national security.” This highlights the high price of his candor in a context where criticizing the regime is tantamount to an act of rebellion.

However, silence was never an option for this committed writer. Boualem Sansal is more than just a writer: he has become, against his will, a bulwark of resistance and a symbol of the struggle against the oppression of an irrational regime.