Writers Select: New & Inventive Algerian Voices
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Loading... - Khalil Brahimi
- 09 Aug 2022
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As part of our special “In Focus: Algeria” section, we asked a number of Algerian writers, translators, and scholars to put together a list of their highlights from Algerian literature.
If you were to choose 4-7 titles that would represent, to you, the most interesting books (perhaps experimental, challenging, or influential in some way) written by Algerian writers in the last 10 years, what would they be? And (perhaps more importantly) why?
AMAL BOUCHAREB
The strength of this poetry collection lies in its uniqueness in terms of celebrating the place (Algiers) and its history, at the expense of the discourse of the denial of identities that has spread within modern Arabic poetry. The collection’s merit becomes apparent through the way its poems are organized according to the geography of Algiers with all its beauty, mysteries, and meanderings.
رائØØ© الذئب / The Wolf’s Smell, by Samia Ben Driss (2015, Manshurat Mim).
This novel displays the commitment of the new generation of Algerian writers to the cause of memory by way of returning to the history of French colonialism and the marks it left on those generations that did not live through this historical period but inherited the wounds of that identity. With her strong feminine pen, Samia Ben Driss is able to approach this topic from a feminist angle that also marks her other writings where we find her disappear with the woman and her ability to contain the memory of the nation in its various representations.
القصائد التي اØترقت / The Poems That Were Burned by Jamal Saadawi (2014, Dar al-Hibr).
This poetic play is characterized by the bold critical discussion of a corrupt political system while the writer retains a highly aesthetic and artistic language. The playwright and poet Jamal Saadawi skillfully balances a poetic sentimental language with a committed political discourse that makes this publication one of the most important books issued in Algeria in the last ten years, in terms of the strength of the language and the depth of the message.
وادي الØناء / A River of Henna by Jamila Talbawi (2017, Manshurat Mim).
In this novel, Jamila Talbawi takes us deep into the Algerian desert, where we breathe serenity. In pleasant language and a soothing narrative, far away from the anxiety of the north, a pivotal feminist figure shows us the world through her lens, where Algeria rests in a valley of beauty and feminine energy that remains the beating heart of a nation of resistance. Despite all her wounds, she knows how to rest from the burdens and ambiguity of the present, with a craving for authenticity, of which the Algerian desert remains the most fortified reservoir.
Amal Bouchareb is an Algerian novelist, born in 1984 in Damascus, Syria. She worked as a professor in the Department of English and the Department of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure for more than six years before settling in Italy in 2014. She currently runs Arabesque magazine, the first magazine in Italy specialized in Arabic literature and arts and has published translations of more than twenty Italian poets and writers in Arabic. In 2021, a critical edition of her writings was published, entitled The Subaltern Speaks, by Dr. Ibrahim Boukhalfa. Her lastest release, In the Beginning Was the Word (2021), is the final installment of her Algiers trilogy, which she began in 2015 with Flutters of a Star and The Darkness of Darkness (2018). Read More...
