The black work of Boualem Sansal
Audio 03:38
Boualem Sansal is a novelist and author of ten titles, the most recent of which is "Abraham or the Fifth Alliance" (Gallimard, 2020).
Gallimard / C.
Helie
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
11 min
Since his first novel published two decades ago, the Algerian Boualem Sansal has built from book to book a work of radical dissent.
Anger and creativity are the hallmarks of this fiction which realistically testifies to the social, political, religious and economic drift in contemporary Algeria.
In his new novel titled Abraham or the Fifth Covenant, which just came out this fall, Sansal rewrites the Bible with its plot set in the contemporary Middle East.
Portrait of an epic storyteller imbued with Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Camus.
Publicity
"
I don't know why we feel invested with a word, that is to say that little by little we manage to make the difference between me Boualem Sansal who lives in Boumerdès and Boualem Sansal writer, who said things who have been listened to, approved or disapproved, who do not like.
Suddenly, we are in a debate.
We are more ourselves.
So we are continuing the debate.…
”.
So says Boualem Sansal, a leading figure in contemporary Algerian literature.
He is a writer invested and deeply committed to the fight against sectarianism and religious obscurantism, which threaten his country.
Sansal came to writing during the years of the Islamist fury that set Algeria on fire and blood, making his own the profession of faith of his colleague Tahar Djaout who said prophetically before being shot by the Islamists : "
If you speak, you die, you do not speak, you die.
So speak and die
”.
Braving death and censorship, Boualem Sansal writes.
He did not leave his country, unlike the thousands of Algerian intellectuals whom the tyranny of the military and religious fundamentalism have thrown on the roads of exile.
Anger and creativity
The man was 50 when his first novel,
Le Serment des barbares,
appeared in France
.
He had sent his manuscript by post to Gallimard editions, the only French publisher whose address he knew.
Against the backdrop of a double detective plot told in a dense and inventive language, Sansal gives a realistic account of the social, economic and religious drift of his country.
It is an indictment book against the rise of religious extremism in Algeria, but also against the political elite which collaborates with the Islamist monster in order to continue to profit as long as possible from its prebends and its trafficking. of all kinds to enrich themselves.
This first novel sets the tone for Boualem Sansal's black work.
Today this work is rich in a dozen novels and vitriolic pamphlets against Islamism and Algerian power.
Anger and creativity are the hallmarks of this writing of total dissent.
Ignored and even censored in Algeria, the work of the Algerian is regularly hailed by international critics for its subversive power which has earned him many prestigious awards.
A multi-award-winning author, Sansal notably received in 2011 the prestigious Peace Prize from German booksellers for his novel
Le village de l'Allemand
(Gallimard) which compared the massacres of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s to the misdeeds of Nazism.
A subject that is particularly controversial in Algeria, where the author again hit the headlines five years ago by publishing
2084: The end of the world
(Gallimard), an apocalyptic anticipation tale that is part of the Orwellian lineage. to imagine the fate of the world of tomorrow under the aegis of a barely disguised Islamist theocratism.
Back to the bible
The writer has just released a new opus this fall entitled
Abraham or the Fifth Alliance
.
An ambitious and scholarly book that rewrites the Bible, portraying the emergence of a new providential man, replica of the Patriarch Abraham of Genesis.
Why Abraham?
“Abraham or the fifth covenant”, by Boualem Sansal.
Gallimard
“
Whenever humanity really experiences extremely serious problems and against which it can do nothing, the solution is to bring out a God, a prophet, who will alleviate suffering
,” explains the author.
Abraham arrived at a time when the Middle East was the site of relentless imperial wars.
And blah, we bring up a legend based on a providential man who brings a new truth.
Me, I imagine that today we are in a somewhat similar situation.
We are only talking about world war, global warming which will destroy humanity, epidemics, famine.
There is this temptation to create a new utopia, a new legend.
"
Abraham
recounts an updated version of the Biblical Patriarch's Odyssey.
We are moving from the ancient world of 4000 years ago to the turbulent Middle East of 1916 and beyond.
Placing his plot in a geopolitical context deeply upset by the First World War and the entry on the scene of the Western powers anxious to establish their supremacy in the East on the ruins of the ending Ottoman Empire, the novelist imagined the reincarnation of Abraham renewing a new covenant with God, as the prophets of the three monotheisms had done before him.
The ambition of this modern avatar of the patriarch imagined by Sansal is to found a new utopia, the only one capable according to the protagonist of pacifying humanity.
Will he succeed in achieving his ambition?
This is the question which is at the heart of this parable on the power and the weaknesses of religious thought which unfolds in the pages of this new opus.
Camus, Mimouni and the civil war
Having entered literature late, Boualem Sansal had never thought of becoming a writer.
Born in colonial Algeria in 1949, into a modest family, he grew up in Algiers, in the Belcourt district, not far from the house where Albert Camus' family lived.
By the author's own admission, if he admired Camus a lot in his youth, it was because of his exploits on the football field and his numerous female conquests.
Admiration for his literary work will come later.
Boualem Sansal did scientific studies.
He is an engineer by training, doctor in economics, he was in turn a teacher at the university, a business manager, then a senior civil servant at the Algerian Ministry of Industry.
Before becoming the great novelist we know, the man was best known for his theoretical writings on economics and his treatise on turbojets.
“
But I've always read a lot
,” he likes to say.
A tireless reader of world literature, from Camus to Ionesco, including the Russians and Latin Americans, who have nourished his reflection on the world, could he remain without reacting as civil war and Islamist terror descended? about his country?
“
When the civil war arrived in 1991, our whole universe collapsed,
laments the novelist.
That was the click.
I felt the need to write, to bring my testimony as a high official, an executive, a petty bourgeois.
But literature is scary.
It is the anguish of the blank sheet.
The click was made, but it was not until a few more years that, on the advice of my friend Rachid Minouni, I began to write.
"
For two decades, Boualem Sansal has been writing to the delight of his loyal readers, whether they are in Paris, Berlin or even in Algiers or Constantine where his books are circulating, it seems, under the cloak, prospering despite the official censorship which affects a large part of his work.
It is described as "
impious
" by religious extremists and "
sumptuous
" by lovers of great literature.
Abraham or the fifth covenant
, by Boualem Sansal.
Editions Gallimard, 288 pages, 21 euros.
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