Wouldn’t Kafka and Orwell also be a little Algerian? What is happening on the other side of the Mediterranean evokes “The Trial” as much as “1984”. Until yesterday evening, we had no news from the writer Boualem Sansal, 75 years old. The author of “2024” was arrested on November 16 in Algiers by national security. He would be accused of “intelligence with the enemy”.
The enemy? Morocco? France of course! This scapegoat neurotically designated by the military regime incapable of coming to terms with the past and shaping the future. He brandishes the hatred of our country like a substitute Algerian identity card.
In 1999, while a journalist at Le Figaro littéraire, I interviewed Boualem Sansal for his first novel, “The Oath of the Barbarians”. I was struck by the contrast between his thin voice and his vigorous words. He castigated both Islamism and Algerian power.
His younger brother, Kamel Daoud, also chose to write “like one puts on combat gear”. Since the release of his novel “Houris”, the Prix Goncourt has suffered a massive smear campaign orchestrated by Algiers, visibly in panic. This has increased in violence in recent days. Emmanuel Macron missed his dissolution but he is accused of having plotted against Algeria with the Goncourt jurors!
For Daoud and Sansal, freedom is not an abstract concept. They pay very dearly for theirs. The prosecutors on deck chairs here, who place targets on their heads, and the inspectors of finished works, who claim to be their defenders while using their names to settle Franco-French scores, should meditate on the last lines of the book by Boualem Sansal, “Living. The countdown”: “Ignorance is serenity and knowledge is endless pain.”
The imprisonment of this great writer is also, for us French, a pain.
France
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