Boualem Sansal, 75 years old, recently naturalized French, always Algerian, sleeps in prison in Algiers. Boualem Sansal, engineer by training, business manager, senior civil servant in his first life, became a writer at the heart of the dark years of the Algerian civil war, taking up his pen to counter Islamism which insidiously took its place in mentalities, in the streets, right to the heart of the militarized regime – which thought it would contain them by serving them the soup of compromise – is accused of terrorism. Boualem Sansal, writer, is a prisoner of autocracy and Islamism, he is in the iron hands of resolutely hostile forces, who have decided, against a backdrop of eternal Franco-Algerian quarrel, to make the man of letters a scarecrow to impose a dead silence on everyone.
Atheist, inhabited by doubt, Boualem Sansal auscultates, Barbarian Oath has Live. The countdownpassing through The German Village Or 2084. The end of the worldthe heart, the soul and the intellect of man, tracks, with the precision of the scientist that he is, the cowardice, the fears, the contradictory forces which inhabit the West as well as the East, by offering a work commensurate with the chaos that has inhabited the world since Islamist totalitarianism set its claws there.
Boualem Sansal is being prosecuted for the crime of intelligence with liberty. Freedom of creation, freedom of imagination, but also freedom to criticize an authoritarian and militarized government, or rather all the authoritarian governments which have succeeded one another since the independence of Algeria and have spoiled any possibility of democracy, progress and of prosperity. Boualem Sansal was already the face of freedom, he must become its universal symbol.
A cabal orchestrated by the Algerian regime
At the same time, Kamel Daoud has been slandered since Algiers. The 2024 Goncourt Prize is the subject of a cabal orchestrated by the Algerian regime, which accuses it of having dared to recount the years of civil war despite the law on national reconciliation which muzzles any possibility of memory. What Kamel Daoud and Boualem Sansal are accused of is having escaped from the Algerian prison shaped by the FLN since 1962, having said “no” to generalized stupidity and not being anti-Semitic. And it is this critical spirit that makes them so suspect in the eyes of the major French media, of too much of the misguided left, of armchair intellectuals, of junk researchers who murmur “traitors” from editorials to debates. , taking up the narrative of a rogue state, failing to accept an image of the Muslim Arab other than that tailor-made by the Islamists.
A Muslim Arab who is necessarily virulently anti-Zionist, inevitably leftist, definitely a victim of the West, absolutely Muslim. Therein lies racism and neocolonialism: in this fixed figure of the Muslim Arab, which must be swept away in the name of free will. It is also proof of the victory of Islamist entryism over too large a part of the French political and media elite. This is not just distressing, it is a danger for democracy, as Sansal and Daoud keep repeating.
The two figures of free Algeria merge to form a response to the poisonous question of memory, to the expansion of Islamism, but also to the democratic crisis. They demonstrate through their undeniable storytelling talents the marvel that is liberal democracy. Liberal democracy which offers them salutary transgression, the expression of questioning, the fight against the ignorance which extinguishes men, making them permeable to prohibitions which freeze, to dogmas which break.
They are, Kamel Daoud and Boualem Sansal, the Enlightenment of today who illuminate, with the lantern of their intimate stories and their literary works, the Western world which has become blind through fear and compromise, the Eastern world which has become passive. by swallowing without any possibility of escape the anesthetic potion of obscurantism, which carries anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, rejection of democracy, anti-liberalism. They must be the pride of France, which has a duty of hospitality towards those who fight to ensure that a totalitarian ideology never comes to restrict a freedom so dearly acquired throughout history.
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