Rachid Boujdra: Algeria always and forever

In recent years, some of them realized that the Algerian novelist Rachid Boujdra (1941) had become an acoustic phenomenon destined to ignite fireworks, fires, and debates in the pulpits and in the media. His name was associated with a series of verbal battles that he fought against some “love writers who sought the recognition of the West”, or when criticizing certain phenomena in society. In 2017, the owner of the “stubborn snail” appeared on a television channel, demanding the right to atheism. Soon, a campaign of blasphemy broke out against the old Marxist, before he came out to announce that he belongs to Islam as a civilizing and intellectual vehicle that shaped his conscience. “Islamic philosophy and sciences have formed great tributaries and a great civilization in human culture … and I am more Islamic than those Islamists who take religion as a vehicle. Deceive people and manipulate their minds for political purposes. On the subject of faith and religious beliefs, these are philosophical issues that can be discussed. My personal beliefs in this regard do not belong to anyone else, ”the day told us.

But freedom, the Algeria of resistance, the post-colonial era and the failure of the social liberation project, the liquidations in the ranks of the revolution, puritanism, the Islamist polarization of society, the blood of the tithe, freedom of thought and belief and atheism … all issues that formed the core of this novelist’s prolific work, whether in Arabic or French, From the early days of his “divorce” (1969), which had a different tone and boldness to confront the sexual and political taboo and the contradictions of the liberating revolution, giving rise to his new novel “La privation” (“Dar al-Saqi” – 2020), which goes back to Algeria seeking liberation from the yoke of colonialism through of violence and blood, Then he stays there, now, to imagine her lost on her way to the future. Between the two novels, there are many works, some of which are steeped in historical events and wounds that have subsequently healed, including the murders to which dozens of communist militants who joined the Algerian revolution were subjected and massacred by their comrades arms because of his Marxist views (the novels of “pillage”, “disintegration” and “Cactus trees”). Rachid Boujdra belongs to a generation that occupied the fictional and intellectual scene in Algeria, emerging from the yoke of colonialism, with a language that seeks to break taboos and taboos and prejudices towards an experimental, spiral writing style that does not adhere to a linear plot. . On the eve of the eighties, the owner of the “cactus tree”, which is popular in his country (not abroad), never tires of belonging to his community, without abandoning the critical tone that he made of his privacy to address issues and issues related to the right to freedom in the first place and the fight against colonialism in the first place. Inside or outside. He is the one who has always considered the hostility of France towards him, politically and not literally, for his lack of flirtation with the West for his many crimes in our lands, from Palestine to the countries of the so-called “Arab Spring”.

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