The origins
Anyone attempting to summarize pre-19th-century Algerian literature in just a few lines will have to be humble, for several reasons. The first is that the country's history is dense, full of twists and turns and interplay of influences, and that the very notion of delimitation or frontier quickly becomes obsolete. The second is that the "literary thing", as we understand it today, does not necessarily find an echo in a large body of production made up of "treatises", be they on science, theology, legislation, politics... In this sense, even the notion of "poetry" risks being confusing for those who do not perfectly master Islam and its codes, the specific metrics of verses which, nevertheless, also know how to evoke themes as universal as love or eroticism. Finally, the importance of the oral tradition should not be underestimated, of which "el-Buqala" - short improvised or recited poems, originally used as divinatory practices - is only one of the best-known forms. The language barrier and the absence of translations leave us with only one option: to imagine the intellectual proliferation of the various towns that were in turn cultural centers: Tlemcen, Béjaïa, Constantine..
However, it is still possible to place a few landmarks that will be more familiar to us and which are quite significant from a historical point of view. Thus, it was in M'daourouch - in Numidia, then a Roman colony, and now in the north-east of present-day Algeria - that Apuleius was born around 125 CE, an author of Berber origin whom we hardly need to introduce, since L'Âne d'or and Les Métamorphoses still hold pride of place in our contemporary libraries. Two centuries later, in 354, another philosopher was born in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras): Augustine of Hippo, better known as Saint Augustine. The fact that he sometimes used expressions in Punic in his works demonstrates the importance of this language, at least in written form, which seems to have been much more widely used than Berber. Nevertheless, around the 10th century, the Arabic language gradually came to the fore, with the arrival of the Hilalians, whose story gave rise to an epic (or gesture) that has been translated into several versions throughout the Arab world. If memory and legends are passed on by word of mouth, people are also on the move, and we should mention at least three writers who did not linger in Algeria, but resided there all the same: Ibn Battûta (Tangier, 1304-Marrakech, c. 1368), whose journey (of twenty-nine years!) was the subject of a comic book published by Dupuis (script by Lotfi Akalay and drawing by Joël Alessandra); Ibn Khaldoun (Tunis, 1332-Le Caire, 1406), precursor of Arab historiography(Le Livre des exemples, Gallimard); and al-Maqqari, a historian born in Tlemcen around 1577 and who died in Cairo in 1632, who also played the role of globetrotter. At that time, following the Reconquista, Algeria was already a stake for European countries such as Portugal and Spain, but few accounts describe it as precisely and truly from the inside as that of Emmanuel d'Aranda (1602-1686), who was sold there as a slave(Les Captifs d'Alger, Jean-Paul Rocher éditeur). An unenviable fate he shared with the Parisian Jean-François Regnard (1655-1709), who preferred to translate his experience into a novel, La Provençale, a surprising decision given the man's reputation for travel writing (as far afield as Lapland!). But colonization was already on the horizon, and Théophile Gautier, who visited Algeria for the first time in 1845, deplored its impact on the "picturesque oriental" he had expected. His account, shorter than agreed with his publisher, can be found in his Œuvres complètes : Voyages (volume 6) published by Honoré Champion.
The question of identity
The capture of Algiers from 1830 onwards was bloody, but France's determination to establish its domination was to extend to the rest of the country. It was in these circumstances, in the Oran region, that the destiny of Abdelkader ibn Mulieddine (1808-1883), a warlord renowned for his fairness, took shape. When he was defeated and imprisoned in unsanitary conditions in France, his fate preoccupied even Victor Hugo, who intervened to put an end to this imposed exile. It was in Damascus that he was able to devote himself to writing, notably his philosophical treatise Rappel à l'intelligent. Avis à l'indifférent, which was translated and published in France in 1858. This publication was an exception, as throughout the 19th century, the colonists curbed the slightest attempt at indigenous creativity, expelling intellectuals, closing schools, monitoring pilgrims and... strolling singers. French-language education was introduced at the end of the century, but was largely boycotted by the local population. M'hamed Ben Rahal (1858-1928) - the first Algerian to obtain the baccalaureate and also the first author of a short story in French(La Vengeance du cheikh, 1891) - gained renown by advocating widespread education in both languages, to no avail.
In the aftermath of the First World War, the situation was no longer quite the same, not because relations had calmed down - there was certainly no longer any question of exterminating the "natives", as some members of parliament had demanded in their time, but the right to equality demanded by the Algerians gave rise to incessant debate and just as many reprisals - but because a new generation had been born. By intertwining roots, this new generation posed the fundamental question of identity, which Jean Amrouche (1906-1962), a writer of Berber origin, touched on when he spoke of "grafting" in 1937, a year after publishing Étoile secrète. It was also in this context that a literary movement was born, Algerianism, to which Jean Pomier, founder of the Association des écrivains algériens, gave his name, and which his friend Robert Randau, born in Mustapha in 1873 and author of the novel Les Colons (L'Harmattan), defined in his Anthologie de treize poètes africains (published in 1921). Several names are associated with this movement - Charles Courtin(La brousse qui mangea l'homme, Editions Atlantis), Lucienne Favre, Louis Bertrand(Le Sang des races, L'Harmattan), Paul Achard... - of which the collection Les Écrivains algérianistes et leurs modèles : une petite anthologie de la vie quotidienne des Français d'Algérie des années 1890 aux années 1930 published by Atelier Fol'fer éditeur in 2009 provides an overview. We shouldn't be surprised to find Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Emmanuel Roblès (1914-1995) in this anthology, for although Algerianism withered away after the Second World War, it gave rise to the "École d'Alger" to which these two writers are assimilated. This movement, initially pictorial, pursued a desire for conciliation, to which the author of L'Étranger, La Peste, Nocestried to respond... Thus, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 - at a time when the two countries were in the midst of war - he declared: "You are crowning a Frenchman from Algeria Nevertheless, he was unable to put an end to the controversy sparked by his award.
War and independence
Camus was friends with Emmanuel Roblès, with whom he frequented the circle of the famous bookseller-publisher Edmond Charlot. A playwright(La vérité est morte, Un château en novembre...) and novelist(Les Hauteurs de la ville, Ça s'appelle l'aurore...), Roblès also became director of the "Méditerranée" collection at Seuil from 1951, in which he welcomed several French-speaking Algerian authors. Mouloud Feraoun - born in Tizi Hibel in 1913 and who died in tragic circumstances in Algiers in 1962, leading to the posthumous publication of his Diary covering the war years - had La Terre et le Sang published in 1953, followed by Les chemins qui montent in 1957, two novels, still available, set in Kabylia and recounting the impossible return of those who had gone into exile in France. Mohammed Dib (1920-2003) also resigned himself to exile, initially working as a journalist for L'Alger républicain (where Camus had worked as an editor-reporter), a title close to the Communist Party, in which he hid nothing of the social movements that were sweeping Algeria in the early 1950s. After a brief foray into poetry with Été, published in a Geneva review in 1946, he turned to novels with La Grande Maison (Seuil, 1952), the first part of his Algeria trilogy, followed by L'Incendie (Seuil, 1954) and Le Métier à tisser (Seuil, 1957). In the meantime, he also published a collection of short stories with Gallimard - Au café (1955) - followed by an album of children's stories, Baba Fekrane. Mohammed Dib spent more than half his life in France, where he rubbed shoulders with many intellectuals and won several awards (Prix Fénéon, Grand Prix de la Francophonie 1994, Prix Mallarmé...) and, above all, was better received by critics. Indeed, his willingly committed prose, which in no way cleared colonization of its terrible consequences by evoking the misery of the native populations, upset many. From a literary point of view, however, it marked a turning point: orientalism had given way to ethnological interest (found, for example, in Jean Amrouche's Les Chants berbères de Kabylie in 1947), which in turn gave way to the crudest realism, a cousin of militancy and nationalist sentiment exacerbated by the conflict that became bogged down from 1954 to 1962.
In the same vein, Dib's friend and contemporary Kateb Yacine (1929-1989) took an interesting stylistic step with Nedjma (Seuil, 1956, now published by Points), drawing on the codes of the new novel (stream of consciousness, cyclical temporality...) to create a text that combined French with the rhythm of Algerian oral tradition. His work did not stop there, however, and from the 1970s onwards he turned to theater, refusing to write in French, preferring dialectal Arabic and then Amazigh, so that his plays would be intelligible even in Kabylia. His reflections led him to take part in, and to some extent symbolize, the debate that shook Algeria after independence in 1962: what place should be given to French, the language of the colonizer, alienation for some, "spoils of war" for others? Malek Haddad (1927-1978), a melancholy poet who never ceased to evoke the internal exile that had been imposed on him, was also involved in this complicated debate. He made this clear in a famous phrase, "L'école coloniale colonise l'âme", and in his novel Je t'offrirai une gazelle (Julliard, 1959): "Between Paris and Algiers, there aren't two thousand kilometers. There are four years of war. It's useless to ask questions. It's not travel, it's not tourism. Trains don't go away for the sake of going away." Finally, still in the midst of the war, a young woman of 21, born in 1936, caused a scandal by publishing La Soif (Thirst ) with Julliard under the pseudonym Assia Djebar. In this text, often compared to Françoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse, a narrator from a good family recounts her vague à l'âme, her turpitudes in love... but says nothing about the war shaking her country. Without disowning this first text, the author went on to enjoy a successful literary career, becoming the first North African woman to be elected to the Académie française in 2005, and focusing on Algerian women in her later works, particularly their struggle for independence(Les Enfants du nouveau monde, Points).
The post-independence era
At the time of independence, the melancholy and the vague à l'âme gave way to a certain disenchantment, permeated by the tug-of-war between Arabic and French speakers, and to which the coming terrorist threats will leave no respite. Although sometimes resorting to fantasy or allegory, this new generation continues to denounce the shortcomings of a society under construction: patriarchy, the weight of religion and corruption are all present in the work of these novelists. In the French language, we should mention Mourad Bourboune, born in Jijel in 1938, who settled in France after the 1965 coup d'état. While his novels - including Le Muezzin (1968) - are no longer available, his poetic prose was republished in 2002 by Bouchene: Le Pèlerinage païen et autres poèmes. Some works by Rachid Boudjedra, his younger by three years, are more readily available, notably La Répudiation (originally published by Denoël in 1969, reprinted by Gallimard in 1981), in which a young man tells his lover about the traditional society that shattered his mother's life, and his novels set during the war(Fascination, Les Figuiers de Barbarie, La Dépossession... published by Grasset). Also worth mentioning is Rachid Mimouni (1945-1995), published by Stock(Le Fleuve détourné, La Ceinture de l'ogresse, Une paix à vivre...), an author who, while indulging in surrealist escapism, was no less realistic about developments in his native country. Awarded the Prix de l'Amitié franco-arabe in 1990, he decided to leave Algeria for Morocco only after the assassination of his friend Tahar Djaout(Le Dernier Été de la raison, Seuil) in 1993. In Arabic, Abdelhamid Benhedouga (1925-1996) and Tahar Ouettar (1936-2010) are considered the founders of the modern novel. And of course there's Ahlam Mosteghanemi, born in Tunis in 1953 to an Algerian family in exile, who is the most widely-read writer in the Arab world, although she has been criticized for her use of the Arabic language, which she dared to use to tackle issues of the female condition. We can discover her in French with Les femmes ne meurent plus d'amour (Hachette) and Le Chaos des sens (Albin Michel).
Contemporary authors are following in the footsteps of their predecessors, portraying today's mortifying and disturbing reality, often with real success: Yasmina Khadra(Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, L'Attentat, La Dernière Nuit du raïs...) is said to be one of the most translated writers in the world, while Boualem Sansal was awarded - among others! - with the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française in 2015 for 2084, a breathtakingly clear-sighted book. The same year, Kamel Daoud was awarded the Goncourt for first novel for Meursault, contre-enquête. Barely ten years later, in 2024, he was honored with the Goncourt for Houris (Gallimard), a novel that evokes the consequences of civil war. Last but not least, Nina Bouraoui(Mes mauvaises pensées, La Voyeuse interdite...), born of a Breton mother and Algerian father, and Kaouther Adimi(Les Petits de décembre, Nos richesses...), born in 1986 in Algiers, carry the voice of women high.
